John Evans jevans@alum.mit.edu Review of M.E.T.A. 1, Chapter 1, Scene 7 "Plot Twists and Gore" Well, Platypus made a lot of good comments in his review. I particularly agree with how Drake is suddenly in a John Woo movie. I was fairly sure he had a gun, yeah, but...Also, the thing with the ball being rolled out... I just didn't get that, somehow. ^_^; It was supposed to be some thing from action movies, maybe? I think that should definitely have been developed and explained more. Where is this ball? What kind of ball is it? Where is it rolling? Why is it distracting these guys? And so on. The plot twist...I disagree with Platypus that it was a bad thing. See, plot twists can be good. You have to make sure they fit in with established continuity, sure, but that doesn't mean you necessarily have to be afraid of them. Anyway, Robbie playing Drake for a fool is okay, in my view. As long as we think about this carefully. Is the whole scheme of Tanner's with kidnapping kids, is that all just to set up Drake? I don't think so. Why didn't the Outfit just send a hitman to take out Drake? That's a good question. Maybe it's not that they wanted him dead; maybe it was more like, "Let's send Drake against Tanner and see who kills who off". The Outfit wins either way. Right? Or this could all be a different setup. Like, how does Hack know they were set up? Maybe he's wrong. Incidentally, who were the goons menacing Hack? They were Tanner's goons, right? Did they tell Hack about Robbie? How would they know? It raises a lot of questions, but as long as we keep them all in mind, things should work out... As always, all the comments I make are mostly intended to get you thinking about areas in your writing that can be improved. Blindly following my advice probably won't help you very much...Think about what I'm saying and why I'm saying, and what other possibilities there are for things you could write. One more thing: A bit about writing horror or gruesome scenes. What you usually want to do is try and trick the reader into thinking about this gory scene. > Facing right in front of him was the person formerly known as Carl the bartender. The poor guy looked >like swiss cheese stain with blood. Some of the bullets even went threw him and smashed some bottles. This is...kinda lame, actually. "like Swiss cheese stained with blood"? It sounds, I dunno, kinda silly. ^_^; I would say something like, "Carl slumped on the bar. Blood stained his torn shirt, blood matted his hair, blood spread out over the bar and dripped onto the floor with a soft, rhythmic plopping sound." Y'know, something like that. ^_^; See, it's *obvious* that he's been shot to hell, right? M.E.T.A. 1, Scene 7 Review http://www.chaoseed.com/btr/meta/ 9/11/00