Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-36393004-20190221225024/@comment-35711173-20190222043830

L0CKED334,

It's better than my first drafts. Those always have big holes that the Workshop finds! I can see this as a back and forth with SpiritVoices and NoTimeCreepy. That could be interesting.

Still, I keep thinking it needs something more to pull me in. Where it loses it for me is the time after she's been praying and before he starts to turn into a tree. I would have expected some evil Druid magic to happen, blood magic, horse magic, something frightening.

Emma doesn't seem like a believer to me. You pretty well show her to have almost no experience in the fourth paragraph. A transformation like that is some pretty major magic. You'd expect her to have been practicing her spells for years to pull that off. Oh everyone thinks she's just some pseudo-pagan nut, but there should be some hints that she at least knows the real history of the area.

The dreams - it seems like Emma wants to have nothing to do with him, yet those dreams make it seem like she does. It's confusing.

I get no feel for the parents or the lives of the people. They seem blank. Is Emma just the weird girl who suddenly went Druid because going Goth is so out of fashion now? Does she have a mother and father who practice the dark arts? Does she live with a single Mom in a run down trailer at the edge of town? Is the whole family known as those evil sinner Campbells who practice dark arts and have been chased out of other towns?

A respectful suggestion: What if the Campbells are a line of druid priestess women who came to the colonies back in the 1600's to escape. Her mother and her grandmother and her grandmother's mother have all taught her for years, showing her the ancient secrets while in dark caves in the bowels of the Earth.

Emma stood out in that class in school because she knows too much about history from the Celtic period through the middle ages in Ireland/Scotland/Wales. (You pick). She also speaks fluent Gaelic and knows Ogham runes as well as English. She corrects the teacher, and when the teacher tries to re-assert his dominance she backs it up. This makes her stand out as something really different.

She curses the introduction of Christianity as a great step backwards. Women had it far better before Christianity, and can back it up. Compare the fate of Boadicea vs Joan of Ark. This is going to put her in direct conflict with Jeremy. This genuine and natural tension leads to drama and we know a showdown is coming. The tension grows worse when Emma continues using documented facts and all Jeremy has is "The Bible tells me so."

In rage, Jeremy seeks revenge, retribution and to control her. He does what men have done for millennia when they want to dominate women. He rapes her.

The spell casting comes after the rape.

In irony, Emma is now pregnant. She will have a daughter, she knows. It is always that way. Her mother went through it. Her father is now a medium sized birch tree. Her mother's father is a fully mature tree. The grove goes on and on.

Take what you like, throw the rest (or all) away. It's your story.