Ten Shun!
We had only two submissions this week, ‘Soft Targets’ by Wendell G, an excerpt from a military thriller, and an untitled piece by Angela Shapow.
To read the originals, you can go here:
For Wendell -
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18hVqWGaF7wV7eNQjUxqltMPX-dtwwzwF/view?usp=sharing
For Angela -
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1seaq4cg4dfBKH6g3W5ij6E7JJa9ZT9Dxso8C29Yn-QU/edit?usp=sharing
I enjoyed ‘Soft Targets’. It was straightforward and to the point, and unfolded crisply and engagingly. It was good more for what it did not do rather than for what it did do, ie, we knew where we were, what was happening, who the central character was and what his job was. It was a scene, straightforward enough, but very easy to read and an excellent primer for popular fiction. The mix of internal narrative, external narrative and observation was nicely balanced. I guess the question is whether Wendell can sustain interest in the text when there aren’t bombs going off - which is always the challenge for a writer, the quiet spaces rather than the big explosions.
Angela’s piece was quite different - all about small details. This piece is set in Iceland, which immediately has me interested because I don’t know anything about Iceland except that it has volcanoes and smells of rotten eggs ( or it did when I last went there).
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