"As it turned out, Tuesday morning’s breakfast buffet at the Sugar Maple B&B was far more deadly than usual, though it took quite a while for anyone to notice."
I'm still waffling about the first bit and keep taking it out then putting it back in. They're unnecessary words. So they should go. But I like the tone and voice they suggest.
Obviously I tend toward verbosity.
6 comments:
But how appropriate to be waffling!
I do love a good pun. And occasionally even a bad one. ;-)
I tend to get so spare that nobody call tell wtf is going on, but I guess the question is, whose point of view is that?
'As it turned out' strikes me as unnecessary, except it does a good job implying a preexisting expectation. That is, the narrator thought that the buffet was going to be less dangerous than usual, but as it turned out, it was more. Which I like, because it adds a layer of conflict.
Not sure about 'Tuesday morning,' as opposed to just 'the breakfast buffet'; Tuesday is probably not important, and breakfast buffet implies morning.
That said, pick up the pace! Better to write 100 sloppy sentences than a single perfect one. At least for a novel. What're we, _poets_?
As the kids say: embrace the suck.
Don't you just love playing around with sentences like this?! I could do it for hours. so much more fun than, say, cooking or cleaning. ;)
Barrie, esp. cleaning up after a sick child who has yet to master running to the toilet at appropriate moments. Shudder.
Bingol, thank you for the notes, and I agree about the pace! This is the first sentence that has interested me in quite a while - 4 months of solid nausea apparently sapped some of my creativity - but I suddenly heard a voice that was sort of funny and interesting to me so I started playing around with it in the middle of the night. (sap/syrup/waffle, that one was a bit of a stretch)
I couldn't get much further than one sentence without pen/paper/laptop because that's about the extent of my memory these days. Especially in the middle of the night. See above, re: sick child. It's funny, though, because I'd just decided that my next project was going to be something other than a mystery but that sentence sure sounds like the beginning of a cozy.
--so not a poet
Sometimes I think that you can either be a good parent or a good writer. Then I realize, no; _I_ can either be a good parent or a good writer.
But it's a killer. I only have one kid, and I think I lost three years of writing.
That does look a bit cozy, but those're pretty easy to turn into something a bit darker. The place where women's fiction overlaps literary thriller seems to be selling pretty well, too.
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