 
You dropped your review request in my forum about three weeks ago. Sorry for taking so long to get to it. I'm going to start working through my backlog (once again) with this chapter of yours. I've also read Chapter Two and will treat them both together, as my comments relate not to specific points along the path, but to the way you are approaching your characters and the story you are weaving around them.
Some folks write little verses and poems for fun and play; some even write a short story or two for the sheer pleasure of the writing, with no real intentions of taking them anywhere. I'd say it's safe to assume, however, that people don't turn out multiple chapters of a novel just for the heck of it. So I'm going to assume you have aspirations for this, which is to say, publishing it. I'm giving it a 3.0 which, if you've read the intro to my site, suggests that you still have work ahead of you if your goal is to appeal to an editor. I could be wrong, of courser; you have an engaging style, you handle dialogue, action and description with a bit more flair than what's called for to simply be functional. But I think you are making some serious omissions at the outset, in the way you imagine your characters and what it is you see them doing, omissions that will most likely prevent you from getting the kind of reading you want.
I think you've got a story cooking here, but I made it to the end of chapter two and still have no idea what it might be. Chapter Three might be a brilliant work of mesmerizing genius, but if you can't engage your reader by the end of the second chapter to the extent that they at least have a sense of what's driving the main character, what she wants and what's in her way, no one's going to hang in long enough to get to the good stuff. And that's the problem. You need the "good stuff" from the first paragraph. Which is to say, we need to know exactly what direction your story is taking at the outset. We don't need to know everything, of course; part of the fun is uncovering the direction. But unless each new thing we encounter—whether a conversation, a description, an activity or an internal impression—feeds directly back into that main stream of your narrative arc, there will be ho direction for us to uncover. Without that structural necessity, we'll quickly come to the realization that information that comes to us may not mean much. And then you will lose us. For me, that point came with the conclusion of the second chapter. For an editor with hundreds of query letters and hopeful submissions to wade through, I think that moment would have come much earlier.
I referred earlier to the idea of a narrative arc. That's the kind of broad concept that can mean pretty much whatever you need it to mean in the moment, but when it is missing, the lack ia immediately apparent. Basically, it means that a story, chapter, scene, even a paragraph, begins at one point, moves through a particular terrain, and arrives at a different place, whether geographic, psychological, emotional or even spiritual. Mostly it's about problems and solving them, conflicts and avoid or triumphing over them, or insight gained. This last needn't be restricted to your characters. Your reader can participate in this arc as they slowly gain a clearer perception of what's going on and what's at stake. But however it's crafted, it provides direction and an energy field that propels your characters and causes plots to gather around them.
You've neglected to do this. I don't doubt that Crystal has desires, goals, issues to be confronted, obstacles to be overcome and adversaries to out-maneuver; but you've neglected to put any of it in your text. Instead, you nibble at the idea of problems, but those problems aren't at the core of how you envision her, and so they never really take shape as plot points, and there's nothing, really, for her to do, other than to stumble around bumping into life as it randomly comes at her.
You have a decent idea at the beginning—Crystal is persuaded by her friend, June, to take a bite of the forbidden fruit, as it were, and clearly, this presents a reach for her, a willingness to step outside of her carefully defined boundaries, and brings with it the kind of risk such behavior threatens. Ah... but WHEW, everything works out all right. Rule #1: things that work out all right aren't plots. Plots are things that don't work out, and have to be dealt with. She gets separated from June, gets accosted by a drunk who clearly has nefarious designs on her person. Wow, she might really be in trouble. But no, a white knight, albeit masked, appears out of nowhere and dispatches the assailant. Meanwhile she's in the midst of an environment that is utterly alien and completely outside her experience, yet she remains totally apart from her surroundings, and so does your story. You suggest that she takes June up on her invitation initially to spite her fiance, but then she makes certain that she remains untouched, both physically and emotionally.
Okay... an argument can be made that that is just her nature. But then, why write about her? Someone who dabbles with the idea of risky behavior, but changes her mind when things get rough and tough might be prudent and sensible, but they're not the kind of character who presents opportunities to write about. As you've discovered. Meanwhile, the really interesting character, June, vanishes almost immediately and while we'd clearly have preferred to follow her wherever her lusty, adventurous passion took her, we only get to sample the aftermath: a hoarse voice and an obvious hangover.
Meanwhile, Crystal encounters the mysterious stranger again, now sans mask, and, hey, maybe some sparks will fly now. But no. He offers her a ride home, she accepts, and they part company. No sparks. No tension, other than the internal monologue running through her head, which is nothing more than you, the author, stepping in and doing your characters' work for them, since you've neglected to engineer real tension into their actual lives. Note this passage, as he arrives at her destination after transporting her back to her home:
“Did I scare you?” he asked.
Yes, she thought. “No,” she said.
“Ready?”
“Uh huh.”
Following her directions, he rode away from the Place de Negres at a gallop, but when they reached the Garden District he eased the horse into a trot. When they finally reached the gates of Oak Alley and he handed her down off the horse, she felt relieved to not have to be so close to the handsome stranger. The feel of his chest beneath her hands seemed seared to her fingers, even with coat and shirt covering his bare skin from her own flesh. She’d felt too close for comfort riding with him, but she also felt an unsettling need to be next to him again. For a moment she wondered if he was feeling the same things, then, realizing she was staring, she quickly broke the silence that lengthened between them.
“Thank you very much, for everything; I don’t know what I would have done without you.” She smiled warmly at him, hoping he would see how grateful she was.
“No problem,” he said, nonchalant.
An awkward silence again filled the air.
Note her rich internal life, full of passion, issues, confusion and genuine emotional responses. Note the boring, bland encounter she has with him in the real world. Thinking about passion is a poor substitute for actual passion, both for your characters and your readers. In addition, if you engineer all that internal monologue into your character's actual personna, giving her real things to say that reflect how she's actually feeling, you begin to delegate the responsibility of telling the reader what they need to know away from your authorial intrusions (which is what such internal monologues always amount to) to real, three-dimensional interactions between believable characters. But that would mean letting her contradictions out of their cage. That's the romance formula, and while I'm not certain that your intent is to produce an historical romance according to the strict definition of the genre, one convention that always works is tension, sexual and otherwise, between the hero and the heroine. Conflict. Usually it's a silly conflict resulting from mere misunderstands that could be reconciled with a real conversation, but that's because most romance writers don't know how to write. You do, so you don't get to use that excuse.
Chapter two embodies all that is missing in your approach. You start with an endlessly long dream, which, by definition, means nothing is happening except, once again, in Crystal's rich internal world. Dreams and flashbacks are guaranteed ways to suck the life out of your story since whatever is at stake in the real-time present action is put on hold while you get the supplemental material out of the way. It's a serious red flag for you that the most passionate encounter in your first two chapters is the dream, and it points the way to how you need to reconsider your approach. There is undeniable tension in your dream sequence, but what's needed is a situation in the real world that packs that same punch. Once the dream is over, we get paragraph after paragraph of the sisters twittering about dresses and the upcoming ball, which may, or may not, be significant: by this time we're not sure that things that happen have any relevance other than that they are things that happen. Can't do that to your story, or your readers. Everything that happens needs to be there for a purpose, needs to further your plot and clarify who your characters are by showing them in the process of dealing with the problems that arise.
First, however, you need to figure out what those problems are; then you need to put them at the center of the story. That way, your characters will have something to do that readers will find engaging. Nothing captures a reader's attention like a character struggling to solve a problem. |
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