(I took time to read your response then go ahead and re-read the piece, so hopefully this will be clear. :) )
It's not that I want to see the characters fleshed out so much as—you have these interactions between Evangeline and the other people in the tattoo shop. Mark, I'm fine with—it's characters like Frank who seem to have been inserted almost to give comic relief and don't really 'gel' with the rest of the story. I don't think you need to flesh them out so much as think of what purpose they're serving. Are they a major part of the story? If they're not, then why do they get so much dialog? If this is Evangeline's story, then the crux of this first section should be on the interaction between her and Mark—and we don't need one-liners from Frank to cement that.
Regarding the Death and Jakob bits—perhaps I should have been clearer in what did vs. did not work for me in the story. I think that as it stands right now, the short, choppy bits you have that are Death/Jakob are clearly detracting from the story and are not doing what you intend them to do. They are what threw me out of the story the most and what ultimately made me go, "This has potential but isn't working as a cohesive whole yet." Yes, they're supposed to be short and jarring—I understood that their being short and choppy was deliberate, that this is something you are doing—but again, instead of working and making the reader go, "Wow, this is weird and uncomfortable and I want to know more about what's going on", they, to me, took me out of the story without doing anything to add to it. If the passages that were from Jakob's point of view had been more developed—less ambiguous (which I feel was likely also deliberate—my apologies if I'm wrong)—if they set it up and made it clear that he's someone the reader should be interested in, by virtue of making him interesting—less dark and mysterious and more fully realized and human—then they might work. It's similar to what I told icaruslived about some of his work—you know these characters inside and out. You know what their motivations are, the way they are. You know everything about them. You created them. The trouble is getting that onto the page—showing your reader why they should care, while maintaining the balance between showing and telling. When I read this first section, what I get is that Jakob is some dark, brooding, childish asshole—and as much as I want to go, "OK, what's the story with the tattoos?", I ultimately find myself going, "Does it really matter what the story with the tattoos is when he's really not a character I'm otherwise interested in?"
That's the difficulty of writing. If you can nail that, you'll manage the hook within the first 10K words, no problem—because people will be interested by the characters as well as by the central 'mystery' of the plot. You've got a plot that is interesting, and I want to see where you're going with it. My main "beef", so to speak, is that things don't hang together well, yet—but that's something that can be fixed with judicious editing.
no subject
It's not that I want to see the characters fleshed out so much as—you have these interactions between Evangeline and the other people in the tattoo shop. Mark, I'm fine with—it's characters like Frank who seem to have been inserted almost to give comic relief and don't really 'gel' with the rest of the story. I don't think you need to flesh them out so much as think of what purpose they're serving. Are they a major part of the story? If they're not, then why do they get so much dialog? If this is Evangeline's story, then the crux of this first section should be on the interaction between her and Mark—and we don't need one-liners from Frank to cement that.
Regarding the Death and Jakob bits—perhaps I should have been clearer in what did vs. did not work for me in the story. I think that as it stands right now, the short, choppy bits you have that are Death/Jakob are clearly detracting from the story and are not doing what you intend them to do. They are what threw me out of the story the most and what ultimately made me go, "This has potential but isn't working as a cohesive whole yet." Yes, they're supposed to be short and jarring—I understood that their being short and choppy was deliberate, that this is something you are doing—but again, instead of working and making the reader go, "Wow, this is weird and uncomfortable and I want to know more about what's going on", they, to me, took me out of the story without doing anything to add to it. If the passages that were from Jakob's point of view had been more developed—less ambiguous (which I feel was likely also deliberate—my apologies if I'm wrong)—if they set it up and made it clear that he's someone the reader should be interested in, by virtue of making him interesting—less dark and mysterious and more fully realized and human—then they might work. It's similar to what I told
That's the difficulty of writing. If you can nail that, you'll manage the hook within the first 10K words, no problem—because people will be interested by the characters as well as by the central 'mystery' of the plot. You've got a plot that is interesting, and I want to see where you're going with it. My main "beef", so to speak, is that things don't hang together well, yet—but that's something that can be fixed with judicious editing.