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[Strife26]

I couldn't sleep tonight, so I wrote the first chapter to a story I've been thinking about. It'd be appreciated if someone could give their impressions. About 1,100 words.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1: Masenak


      Names are a strange thing. I wasn’t much more than a 17 year old and terrified kid. Name of Masenak. No one’s used my Christian name since everything happened, and damn few used it before then. Even stranger, a few of my men had taken to calling me Lieutenant. Perhaps it fits, I already think of them as ‘my men,’ but this rank is just on the old BDU jacket I grabbed as we ran. Would I be Captain if I had grabbed one of his latter coats?

      I haven’t taken my mask off for a long time. Did it replace my first name? It’s a nice enough balaclava, sent over for Christmas. It’s cold enough outside to warrant it, and it’s prudent to keep blood out of my mouth. I lowered it to sip some water and eat a bit of food, then it went up again. I guess that it’s a comfort thing. I felt different with. Like the Masenak I had been faded and this Lieutenant Masenak is someone different. Guess that I’ve always been insane. Command sucks. Bloody paranoia. I always assumed that having thought out plans ahead of time would be a good thing. I didn’t even get everybody out of town.

         Reynolds shivered next to me. Poor kid. A year younger, and a bit taller. I’m the only one who had proper winter gear. I’d a sweatshirt underneath the jacket and my combat boots on my feet. He pulled the fur blanket, also mine, a bit tighter. “Don’t worry Reynolds. The sun is just coming up now. Our watch’ll be over then.”

      Adrenaline is a great thing, a lot like caffeine, really. Once it’s out though, it’s out. David Reynolds needed sleep, but with only four of us, we needed to keep watch. Sleeping unaware would be asking for more death. I hadn’t slept at all.

      David and I sat on the back of my pickup, looking across the deserted and snow-blown highway and watching the sun come up. Thank God (and damn him) that there wasn’t any wind. My eyes went down to my belt. My folding spade was lying open on the bed, in easy reach. My combat knife was at my right hip.

      I had three real knives total. My smallest and newest was another Christmas gift. A survival dagger, we had lashed it to a broomstick for a rough spear. My next was a bowie. Cheap and mass-produced, my first blade. Simmons had that knife, as he slept in the cab.

       Finally, my Combat knife. The knife that failed Gorman. It was my dad’s knife, he had back in the first Gulf War. It was a heavy handled design, the pommel had a hammer head and claw. Grip was reinforced with tape. The blade was pretty narrow, straight on one side, saw-toothed on the other.

      I had given that knife to Gorman pretty quickly. He should have been the leader, not me. He was the one who was the commander of our JROTC unit. I was the bloody info management coordinator. We were at my house, getting supplies together. Gorman had gone outside for something. I heard the yelling when I was upstairs. I got through the door on the top deck, and saw him trying to fight my neighbor off with that combat knife. I went through the eight inches of snow on my deck, moving as fast as I could. I should have gotten there in time.

      I fell down the stairs and into more snow. By the time I has gotten up, Jeff was over Gorman, tearing out his throat. Blood was everywhere. I had my entrenching tool in my hand, and I swung hard. It caught Jeff hard on the head and he went down. Jeff didn’t bleed much. Simmons was out with me by then, we got his jacket on Gorman’s throat and tried to put pressure on it. Kevin Gorman, probably the closest of my friends, bled out as I knelt in the snow.

      Jonah and I stood up, covered in blood. Simmons and Haung were out there with us by then. Haung was kneeling over Jeff. I practically screamed at him to get the fuck away. I carefully prodded Jeff with my booted foot. No movement. I leaned closer. My entrenching tool had smashed his skull open.

      The shock of loss hit me then. Kevin Gorman was dead. Killed at my own house. The others looked at me, expecting. I was in charge. I shouldn’t have let that happen. I needed to do something. Gorman moaned at our feet.

      I knelt down and looked at him. His eyes fluttered open. No pupils. Just a blank white stare. He moaned again and started moving. We all moved then. My feet propelled me backward, through the snow where Haung helped me get to me feet. I said one word to Reynolds, “Gun.”

      Reynolds handed me my .22 rifle. I looked at Gorman. “Gorman? Are you in there?”

      Gorman moaned and moved some more. He looked like he was trying to get up. “Gorman, don’t get up yet. Kevin, say something.”

      He didn’t and started to rise. I sighted down my rifle. A few feet wasn’t much of a shot. I fired. No report. I had never fired that particular .22 before, the one time I had tried, it hadn’t fired. My hand worked the bolt. I believed that that should have got it working. I sighted dead center of Gorman’s head. I shot Kevin Gorman dead, on my deck, during a cold January afternoon.

      I went through their pockets while Reynolds stood over me with the shotgun. I took each of their wallets and a set of cheap recruiter tags from Gorman. We wrapped the bodies in blankets from my basement and set them by the side of my house. There was no chance of burying them. I had lain a pet mouse to rest a few weeks earlier. One could get a few inches into the frost-held ground with hard work, but no more. I took a Sharpie and wrote everything I could about them on the brick wall nearby. Their names and addresses. How and when they died. We’d come back to bury them later. I found a small notepad in my house and wrote the same there, along with the area we left them.



      My knives were barely weapons. Good tools maybe, but nothing to depend on. My Army standard folding spade lay near me. A solid steel weapon I could trust.

In the East, the sun was almost up.

[Outcast Orange]

That's not how you paragraph.

Sorry, I can't read it right now.

[JoshuaFH]

I'm assuming this is from the perspective of someone writing in a diary/journal, although that seems to make it a bit awkward when he seems to be writing things as they happen.

If you intended a regular first-person perspective, might I suggest a bit more detail? It took me a second to realize what the main character was talking about, or where he was.

[sonerohi]

I'm not well versed in all this grammar and proper literature nonsense, so I'll just say that I liked reading it despite whatever 'flaws' the liberal arts people among us find.

[x2yzh9]

Judging from the story, it seems to be a zombie/apocalyptic setting?

If so yay for my brain powar.

[Aqizzar]

...despite whatever 'flaws' the liberal arts people among us find.

They're called flaws for a reason thank you very much.  But I don't have much nitpicking on technicalities.  There's some odd word choices, like "blithely", proofreading like a "my" that should be "me", and klunky bits like the word "hard" being used three times in as many sentences.  Also, please don't use parentheses in a narrative.  If you have something to say, integrate it into the sentence, with commas if you have to, don't just cram it in there like a thought bubble.

Stylistically, I have to agree that while first-person narrative isn't a problem in itself, the tense flops between past and present without much context.  First-person narratives are inherently past tense unless the guy is narrating his life inside his head, so making the whole thing a future recounting of past events would be less jarring.

Substantively, well... Hooray for the immortality of self-insertion fiction.  But I kid.  It's hard to comment on the story because there's really no story yet, just a flash-back scene within an ongoing scene.  One thing I would say is lay off the weapon porn, you can describe tools when they're appropriate to the situation.  The other is, you're definitely going to have to explain why the narrator is the one everyone suddenly looks to for leadership, when he was nothing like a leader before the leader died and everyone appears to silently agree that the leader died because the narrator didn't save him.  That's what you call a 'story angle' and it must be expanded on.

[Strife26]

I've fixed most of the problems mentioned. Thanks for reading. I challenged myself to write something everyday during my winter vacation. I've always had a tendency to switch tenses and overuse parenthetical.

It seems that indents get messed up if you copy a tab into a spoiler, so I just added some more spaces in.

[Outcast Orange]

It needs some \n in it.
Press enter every now and then.

[Willfor]

The reason people (Outcast Orange and I) prefer spaces to indents for internet reading (or spaces and indents) is because the screen is harsher on the eye than the page. On paper, the lack of spaces between paragraphs is forgiving as long as you have another way to demarcate it (indents). On the screen, at least when I'm reading, the paragraphs blur together until they are an unreadable slop unless there are spaces between them. Even when they are indented.

It's a pain to format twice (once for paper, and once for the internet), but making it easier for your readers to ... read is worth it in the long run. It makes replying much easier.

[sonerohi]

A quick aside to Willfor: In your signature, is that supposed to say sweaty, or did you mean sweety?

[Willfor]

It was supposed to be sweety, yes. I would change it, but I want a new signature anyway, and fixing something I want to switch with something else seems counterproductive.

[Strife26]

I wrote another first chapter (I don't particularly enjoy writing self-insert fiction). This one is actually about Strife.

Heroes and Strife: Breaking the Invasion

Part 1: Fair and Foul in Pfred

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

   Strife looked up at the sun. It was rare that a day could be so fair yet so foul. The walled city of Pfred was wounded, perhaps mortally. The city's living heart, the crown prince Eachann had been brutally killed the previous day, along with a sizable portion of the city's every decreasing soldiers. Strife had been there. Eachann had left the troops outside the walls, feeling confident after he had slain the Infernal army's champion in single combat. There had been hope then, they had pushed the Infernals back to their ships, then when they released their champion and counterattacked, Eachann has taken Strife advice and pulled back. Once the counter had lost momentum, they responded and crushed it. Eachann met and killed their “pain-giver.” Without him, the Infernals shouldn't have been able to marshal themselves.

   But they did. Strife had been in the city when it came, looking over the stores. He'd watched from the battlements as the invaders streamed from their camp by the sea. Strife had considered going out to coordinate the response, but decided that it wouldn't last, their morale would be destroyed after the death of Pain. In any case, the action should have resolved itself by then.

   The Infernal wave of troops met the defender's lines. It smashed them. One man, or demon, wore flashing armor. Strife saw that flashing figure wreck horrible destruction on the soldiers arrayed against him. The army of Pfred broke under the onslaught. Eachann had tried to get the army back to the safety of the city, but the new infernal champion was too much. Part of the army was stuck on one side of the river and slaughtered to the last man. The river ran blood over its banks. Damn these people's lack of tactics, even with the sacrifice of so many, the remainder barely got away from that flashing opponent.

   Somehow, the Infernal champion had separated Eachann from his army. Eachann had tried to avoid for a while, but eventually faced him in single combat below the walls of Pfred. Eachann's younger brother, Prince Alexander, had joined Strife on the wall top. He watched the combat, wide-eyed. The two armored warriors dueled with amazing ferocity. Strife wondered if he was either the Infernal or Eachann's equal. Eachann did not gain the upper hand.

   On the walls, Strife decided, damning this culture's petty honor, to get involved. He took Alexander's bow. It was a rude design, neither composite, recurved, or even long enough for full power. Strife still had more experience with it than anyone on the plane. He pulled back, sighted at the flashing warrior, and fired. The shot missed. Strife fired again, and again, to no effect.

   There was some black magic defending Eachann's opponent. Strife finished the quiver, and another from a conveniently nearby archer. Eachann eventually lost his spear and desperately charged with his sword. He was stabbed through the throat. With horror, Strife watched the Prince's body desecrated and dragged through the dust as he tried to console Alexander.

   They had burned Eachann's body in the local tradition. Pfred wavered without her Prince. Yet, for all of that, there was hope. The situation had changed. Eachann was a great warrior, but he, nor was anyone around, a good tactician. The armies had fought on the plains outside the city, Pfred had not gotten the advantage of her walls. This had been necessary, leaving an Infernal army to burn the country had not been an option for the soldiers, most of whom were farmers. Now, with most of them, Pfred and Infernal, dead, Strife was being allowed tactical command.


   Strife tried to prepare his city for combat. Alexander technically was as important as him, but the youth was clearly out of his depth. Strife assigned him to command of the wall-tops. The archers were glad for it, for Alexander was a skilled enough bowman. People around here were obsessed with their heroes. They fought as well as their champion.
   
        A report came in then. The Infernal who had killed Eachann had been the same Pain whom they had thought dead. Strife swore, “Damned El Cid ploy.”

   Strife realized something then. He was expected to be able to face this Pain. How would he stand against one able to slay armies?

[deadlycairn]

If you don't mind me asking, why did you call the city Pfred? And for that matter, how is it meant to be pronounced?

Still, looking good so far. More to come, I hope?

[Strife26]

There is a bit of convoluted reasoning for naming the city Pfred (actually there is one for every name in that particular story, except Strife's which he chose as a "fuck you" to a group of gods). The 'Pf' is a fairly common sound in German, I've been pronouncing it as "Fred" with a bit of soft p at the beginning.


Found a guide to the pf:
http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~joyce1/abinitio/pronounce/audio/pfund.wav

[deadlycairn]

Don't suppose I could be privy to this convoluted reasoning? I love me some good backstory