Frenzy

Spoiler

Target Pokemon: Carvanha
Target Rank: Medium (10-20k)
Character Count: 10,067
Notes: I know this is short, but I didn't want to stuff any more material into it- it felt like it would mess up the pacing.

The cool, salty breeze blowing off the surface of the sea caught Rose’s thick mane of hair and blew it backwards, tangling it into a thick, loose nest of blonde hair. She smiled and briefly closed her eyes, enjoying the wind as it gently buffeted her face. Brushing her hair out later was going to be a real chore, but at the moment she couldn’t bring herself to care about that. A glance down at the ocean, however, quickly wiped the smile from her face.

The water was dark, dark blue, almost black, and choppy with waves, some of them frosted with white foam. The sea was quite a bit rougher today than had been predicted, so the boat that should be cutting smoothly through the water was stuttering a bit when it hit the larger swells, and the captain looked slightly uneasy. She walked from the nose of the ship back to the wheel where he was steering, lips pressed together worriedly.

“I don’t like the look of that,” she commented, inclining her head towards a cluster of storm clouds darkening on the horizon as her fingers tightened around the rail to keep her from being blown backwards by a particularly violent gust of wind.

“Neither do I,” he said, a grimace appearing on a face that had been turned leathery by years of salt and wind. “You want we should turn around?”

She turned around, even though she knew she’d see nothing behind them but open sea- they’d left the coastline behind days ago. At this point, the voyage back would be longer than proceeding ahead, and she would still be right where she’d been a week ago, no progress made. It would undoubtedly be safer, too, but her eye twitched to think of just giving up and turning back.

“No,” she said firmly. “Keep going.”

He shot her a doubtful sideways glance, but didn’t object, pushing the throttle down and accelerating the medium-sized speedboat across the tops of the waves. Rose had to grab onto the railing with both handles at the sudden bouncing motion, knuckles white, and her stomach lurched. She didn’t throw up, but it was a close thing. Instead, she swallowed her nausea back down and stared down over the side at the black waves.

The boat motored towards the storm at high speed, and the sea only got rougher. Rose resisted going belowdecks to avoid seasickness, but the idea was getting more tempting by the moment as the temperature, which had been positively balmy in the morning, continued to drop, and the wind whipped mist off the surface of the water and lashed at her face. The boat lurched and rocked sickeningly as the waves grew larger, and she may have made a very undignified whimpering noise.

Then the boat flew over a wave bigger than the rest, slammed hard into water, and… stopped. The engine stuttered and died, and the captain swore viciously. He reached for a toolbox stowed under the dashboard, but another wave smashed into the boat’s starboard side and he had to grab onto the wheel to avoid being tossed overboards.

“Right,” he stated matter-of-factly. “Time to bunker down belowdecks and wait out the storm. We ain’t moving till the motor is fixed and the motor ain’t getting fixed till the storm is through, alright?”

Rose nodded mutely, for once lost for words, and followed him belowdecks.

The next three hours were hell, huddled helplessly in the cramped cabin while it lurched sickeningly from side to side. Even the captain, with years of seafaring experience under his belt, looked ill at the largest waves, and Rose thought she must look even worse. After all, this was her first time on a voyage this long.

She resolved then and there that if she survived this affair, she would never step onto a boat again.

After what seemed like forever, the relentless motion began to subside, and Rose started to feel slightly more confident that the boat would not capsize. Finally, they were just swaying gently from side to side, the waves back down to a more manageable size. She exchanged a glance with the captain and they silently agreed to check on conditions above decks.

He emerged first and she followed after him, looking around. Everything that had been exposed on the deck was either gone or soaked, but the boat itself (aside from the still nonfunctional motor) was still in working order, and Rose huffed a sigh of relief that they wouldn’t be stranded in the middle of the ocean.

She glanced over the side of the ship and smiled when she saw that the only waves left were small and dark with no whitecaps, as they’d been before the storm struck.

“Looks like everything’s settled down nicely,” the captain said, wearing a distinct look of pride in his ship. “Time to fix ‘er up and get going again, then.”

He moved to the back of the ship and started down the swim ladder to access the motor.

There was a splashing sound a few seconds later, and for a moment she thought he'd slipped and fallen into the water.

Then he screamed. She bolted for the back of the ship, heart racing, wondering if maybe he’d gotten caught in the propeller or…

She reached the back of the boat and almost vomited. There was a dark spot spreading across the surface of the water like oil, red on bright turquoise blue, dotted with scraps of clothing and rapidly-sinking tools.

One wrench, she realized in numb horror, still had a hand attached to it. Her hand flew to her mouth, but not soon enough; she vomited over the side of the ship, sickened, staring down into the water.

Dark red eyes stared back, shining cruelly above dirty white teeth, and she realized belatedly that there were no waves. The water was calm and smooth.

There were no waves. There were fins.

Sharp, glossy, black fins, almost as sharp as the fangs underneath them, shining in the weak sunlight filtering through the water. She scrambled backwards, away from the back of the ship, just seconds before one of the fish threw itself forward to snap at where her foot had been. It took a chunk of thick plastic with it instead, carving a crater into the swim platform.

She practically dove back into the main body of the boat, heart thudding in her ears and breath gasping roughly in and out of her lungs, almost hyperventilating.

Carvanha. A whole school of them. They… they’d eaten the captain. She felt like retching again, but didn’t want to risk getting too close to the sides again. There was blood in the water, now, and the size of the ravenous herd would only grow. She was safe for the moment, but only for the moment. She couldn’t just stay in a dead boat with only enough food for a middling-length journey forever.

The sun was beaming down hot and angry, and she came to the sudden realization that she was going to die here. It hit her like a punch to the gut, the knowledge that she’d never see foreign shores or have children or fall in love and get married or…


...or anything, really, beyond sitting on this boat and dying, because if the Carvanha didn’t get her then eventually the hunger would, or the heat, or the thirst. She chewed on her lower lip, distressed, bit down too hard and tasted blood. Usually blood didn’t bother her, but this time it made her dizzy, sending her sitting down hard on the wooden deck. The image of the crimson stain bleeding into water was still fresh and painful on her mind.

She sat there for an indeterminable amount of time, head swimming and breath coming too fast and hard, staring at nothing, before she found new determination somewhere inside her chest.

She wasn’t going to die yet. Not yet. There was still so much she wanted to do.

She forced herself to her feet and started shuffling through the supplies the captain had lovingly stowed beneath the floorboards. There was a radio, but when she flipped it on, she only got static. Maybe the storm had wrecked it, more likely it had been nonfunctional before that. Then, after searching around for a while, she found what she was looking for. Flares. It took some fiddling before she could work how how they functioned; by the time she did, she looked up to see the sky fading to purple.

Perfect.

She popped the top off and sent a light spiraling up into the darkening sky, looking brilliantly white, like a star that had fallen from the sky. She smiled watching it, tears in her eyes. She was going to make it.

Then the boat lurched violently and she was almost catapulted over the edge, fingers scrabbling frantically for purchase on a railing, the wheel, anything. She caught the rim of the windshield, barely, and pulled herself back from her precarious position hanging half off the edge of the boat. In the light of the flare she could see teeth, more than there had been before, and her first thought was Sharpedo.

In the distance, she saw lights, too bright and close together to be a cluster of stars on the horizon. A ship, she thought, and was caught between hope and despair. Then the ship lurched again, and she dropped to her hands and knees to avoid being thrown overboard.

The light from her flare had faded, and she fumbled around for the other one in the darkness, fingers eventually closing around the old plastic. She took it on both hands, releasing her grip on the railing to do so. She twisted off the cap, took the tab in one hand.

Something slammed into the port side, sending the ship rocking onto a sixty-degree angle, and Rose went flying, a shriek being torn from her throat. She was over the water, and she could see hungry red eyes and far too many teeth gleaming beneath her, and then one hand snagged onto the railing bordering the boat, leaving her dangling helplessly outside of the boat, her toes about a foot above the water. She reached up with her other hand, praying she could crawl back into the boat, that the other ship hadn’t moved on, that the second flare hadn’t been thrown overboard...

Then sharp, sharp teeth closed around her ankle, and her grip loosened in shock as she screamed in pain and terror.

She was underwater in less than a minute and she couldn’t breathe and everything was pain and blood and-

-and the feeding frenzy was over as quickly as it had begun, the water cloudy with blood, a few bones and a diamond hair pin drifting slowly to the bottom of the ocean.

 

*shnaggu*

THERE SHALL BE NO UNCLAIMED STORIES ENTERING 2017. C;

 

wanted to format this with the ~hopefully~ most useful stuff at the beginning of this grade ^^

Grammar & Stylistic Mechanics:

In the beginning three paragraphs of your story, we have examples of three recurring habits in your writing. These trends are't necessarily wrong, but they bog down my reading of the story to the point that I had to keep re-reading it to get the gist of what you meant. I wanna preface this by saying that your writing is quite advanced, and by delving into these more nuanced-quirks-that-aren't-necessarily-wrong, your writing can only get stronger.

1. Verbosity / Redundancy

When we use the same words within the same sentence or within the same vicinity, we risk canceling out the meaning of that word. It's like saying, "reader. listen. you don't know this pink i'm talking about. it's pink to the pink, SUPER PINK. PINKER THAN PINKBERRY." okay I am the worst at examples But basically, the point is that words lose power when they can no longer stand on their own a single time, when the text reiterates the same sensation to the reader. And not only that - reiterating words or ideas verbatim slows down our processing of what it is we're reading. Effectively, stating the above as, "caught Rose's hair and blew it backwards, tangling it into a thick, loose nest" might cast a more powerful image.

2. Sentence Variety

This one goes back a little bit to what I pointed out in my grade for The Forge. The problem isn't necessarily that the sentence goes on for too long - it's that it's constructed in such a way that by the time I reach the end of the sentence, I just don't get the impact I think you hoped to deliver. Above, I changed the style to indicate every time you entered a new phrase within one sentence; without the quotation bit, which is still the same sentence, we have five different phrases going on. das kind of a lot. We get the overall idea - it's stormy and scary and Rose is afraid, but by the time we reach the end, it's a little breathless.

The sentence construction also hinders this one a bit as well. If I'm reading this correctly, the meaning is this: the experienced captain looks bad. Rose looks even worse because she acknowledges what that means. I think, for example, that that realization could have been better expressed if the sentence ended at "waves" and "Rose looked even worse" stood on its own.

3. Tense Stuff

The text vacillates a bit between the present tense and also the past tense. You want to definitely stay in one or the other for consistency / not jostling your reader. As for the quotations above, the tense style stops the reading from being as fluid as it could be. It takes three / four words to say what could be said in one or two: "a faced that leathered" or "the boat that should cut smoothly... stuttered."

TO POLISH ALL OF THE ABOVE:

This level of editing takes a lot more effort than pure proofreading. It requires you to comb through your story, carefully monitoring what is being written. However, if you are up to the challenge, I think your writing will leap to the next level. Overall, your writing is beautiful, but you have to control it. Here are ways that might help:

1. Re-read your stuff, out loud: this is so important. Reading your text out loud will not only help you catch the small errors, but it'll also help you feel when your writing is becoming verbose. You'll naturally catch phrases that don't make sense or that repeat what has already been said. 100% this one is a must-have helper.

2. Balance out the word and sentence order. If my reading of your reading is correct, you spend a lot of time, for example, on the opening section of this story. That sheer amount of cognitive concentration can actually hinder your writing because you end up fine-tuning it just a little bit too much, so that there's just one too many adjectives or one too many extra phrases that end up convoluting the text. By spreading those sentences throughout and balancing these with the shorter sentences, you'll actually make the writing a lot smoother! which brings me to the next point:

3. Work hard with your writing but don't think about it too hard - let it flow! To explain, the text became super smooth by the middle, when the blood began. I could tell that you entered this state of euphoria with your writing where you were having a lot more fun compared to the super concentrated stuff going on in the beginning - it really shows. The sentence syntax naturally balances out and the tension is there because I felt like you stopped worrying about crafting this exact depiction of what Rose felt on that boat. By entering that state more, or coming back to edit stuff within that state, I think you'll surely reach a new height!

Description:

YES YES YES, DAS WHAT I'M TALKIN 'BOUT. That's when you started flowing in the text - and see how the first sentence is a lot shorter and clear? That helped you elucidate on what she saw with the most profound sense of horror. Absolutely excellent. Keep that going; keep having fun, and don't worry about needing to describe every little detail. All of the above being said, I hope you know that you did a wondrous job of describing the state of events, and overall terror, in this story. I got a clear picture in my mind of what everything looked like, definitely a joy to read!

OOOH YES

The Story:

AHHHH this is a bit of a classic, eh? There's a lady on a boat and then a storm and then WAPOW, MAN-EATING FISH. We don't know why she's there or who else is on that ship with them, but hey, it's fun! We also don't have any twists here to keep us on our feet so we kinda know how this is all going to end. For this story in particular, I would have liked to see a bit of a secondary plot regarding Rose. Her life flashes before her eyes and she thinks about things she would have liked to do, but by that point we don't have as much of a connection to her as readers because we don't know anything about why she's on the ship. By adding in those details, no matter how small, we make the audience care a lot more about her plight and her struggle for bloody survival. I know you were worried about more stuff messing up the pacing, but for future stories, I think creatively doing that while keeping the pace is part of writing an exciting story. A neat way to do this, in this case: pointing out at the beginning why she's there, and then taking that singular idea and sprinkling reminders of it through the story, especially at moments of her death.

As this was, it was a fun and bloody read!

Outcome:

Carvanha Captured! I went in on this grade a little more than necessary in the hopes that this would be helpful for you. All in all, this was a crunchy and dark read that you executed well! I respect you a ton and am excited to see where you keep on going with your stories! Enjoy your FLESH-EATIN' FISH, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!!