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No. 67076
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TL;DR: Wordiness, hit and miss with the dialogue punctuation (and the thoughts too), unnecessary pauses between dependent and independent clauses, some very weird but consistent spacing issues between words and punctuations (extra spaces, missing spaces, misplaced spaces), inconsistent spaces between paragraphs and many other less systemic and/serious errors. As far as the story is concerned, with three chapters I can fully and completely say I can’t muster myself to care about this Michael of yours, who up to now hasn’t really brought up anything to bear except perhaps being the cause of all these problems. This needs a solution, and soon.
Welcome back, hope the results of what you see here are worth your time, so let’s gets started shall we? As matter of course, if there has been too long a lull between the times I have reviewed your work, I reread the whole text and make an evaluation of it as a whole. Here is what came out.
As always, let us begin with your writing and well, the results aren’t pretty:
Random spacing issues, random spacing issues everywhere
Let us start with something simple, yet inexplicable as far as I’m concerned:
>…them ,they…
>She focused.Through the nose…
>…seat and…
These segments all have the same problem: a space either missing, it’s superfluous or, somehow, both. These three are merely the tip of the iceberg in a twelve-thousand word document which you are suddenly moving about and, surprise, space are place incorrectly (or missing all together) so this needs to be corrected as soon as possible. If there is any doubt, please select this / ,/, eliminate the forward slashes and search your document, you will find this error three times just from this kind, with the others spread out through it. Does this ruin the text? Certainly not, but while reading a story you should make sure nothing can make the reader stop to say “wait, what was that I read” unless it’s something important to the plot. Incorrectly placed spaces certainly do not fit into any of these descriptions.
Cutting sentences, repeating the same things and other demonds
There is something I dislike and I will admit I dislike it very much: useless words and unnecessary separations or repetitions. Granted, their usage in a story can add effect quite nicely (who doesn’t like those evocative phrases and dramatic negations?) and it’s not like you aren’t using them to your advantage at all:
>They hurtled across the wide open expanse of sky intent on reaching that distant point, for them that was all that mattered in the world; it was their purpose in life. But they failed.
>Whatever it was, it was intent on murder. Her murder.
However they are quite difficult to do correctly and at times it just makes for a jittery paragraph to begin with. As far as I am concerned:
>She once again flew around behind where the bright object that seemed so intent on hitting her, should have been, but instead she saw a bright flash in the corner of her eye, followed by a sound of an explosion. The force of which, was strong enough to take the breath out of her.
>Confused, Michael looked up to see the Colonel grinning. Which to Michael seemed to be one of the most unnatural things that he had ever seen.
> Colonel Ambler met the gaze of each face as he walked into the dark room. Each face belonged to a man that he could trust, which was a rare thing. The faces stared back, patiently awaiting orders.
Don’t work, simply because you are going for: a.) wordiness in attempt for something I can’t discern right now, b.) cutting the sentence in the middle for no good reason, c.) repeating over a fact so constantly it loses any symbolism or importance it might have had. These problems might not seem related, but they all go down to a single question: sentence structure and message. Now let us see the problem in each case and how do they work with this:
>She once again flew around behind where the bright object that seemed so intent on hitting her, should have been, but instead she saw a bright flash in the corner of her eye, followed by a sound of an explosion. The force of which, was strong enough to take the breath out of her.
Let us begin with the fact the first sentence is oddly constructed, with the fact that she is first flying behind the object, then seems like the object is not there, but then the object was there except that now it exploded. Of course, reading it you get the actual message (she tried to fly behind the object but then it exploded) but that doesn’t meant that a reader will see the message from simply reading and perhaps will have to actually stop, read again, and then continue the story. If this was a onetime thing (where the expressions or sentences don’t make sense because they are using too many words) it wouldn’t be a problem but this is something which periodically rears up its ugly head and I’m left wondering where what went, not good if you are a writer. However, if we manage to fix the first sentence so it’s clearer, we are still with a second sentence that is no good seeing how it’s a dependent clause. Do me a favor and isolate that sentence and now tell me who is the subject in that sentence (aka, tell me who is the sentence talking about without thinking about anything else), if you can do so easily then good, you are a better reader than my poor self because I don’t have a clue what are you talking about in that sentence and that doesn’t bode well when a person is reading. As I see it, these two sentences are talking about the same thing, not just the same idea but rather the same sentence to begin with, and you separated it with a period at some point to keep it from growing too long. If you didn’t do this, the idea of this sentence is still too vague to matter and you shouldn’t have sentences in this manner. The issue is that this sort of thing is widespread, just look at the next sentence:
>Confused, Michael looked up to see the Colonel grinning. Which to Michael seemed to be one of the most unnatural things that he had ever seen.
How exactly the second one is an independent sentence is beyond me, what was the most unnatural thing? Don’t say the colonel grinning. What element in that sentence, only that sentence, is the more natural thing? The only thing on that sentence is Michael, there is no it, there is not he, there not even a pointer toward what object Michael finds unnatural. You can’t have this sort of separation as it provides no impact from the pause (it’s seventeen words long…) and its grammatically incorrect. But this also deal with another issue which is more clearly shown by the next sentence:
> Colonel Ambler met the gaze of each face as he walked into the dark room. Each face belonged to a man that he could trust, which was a rare thing. The faces stared back, patiently awaiting orders.
Now, I can understand the faces are important; they truly are, because it shows that as far as the Colonel is concerned these aren’t human beings, they are things which he knows he can trust to do his bidding and carry out the job. However, what exactly have you gained by repeating the word face? unless I am missing something, nothing, nothing at all, not even the reiteration of the point because they aren’t even used within the same context but rather used to introduce new concept with each sentence. Why? In general, unless you absolutely can’t prevent it, you should only use each word once in each paragraph and, if you can help it, in each page (needlessly to say, repeating the same word in the same sentence without a good reason is beyond no). So now, reworded using the things I described above:
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