Friday Feedback - A Peek at a "Vomit Draft"

Welcome to Friday Feedback. Come on! Be brave. You know you want to... :)

If you do, you know the rules:

• Does the piece "hook" you enough to make you want to keep reading. If yes, why? If no, why not?

• What doesn't work for you (if something doesn't) and why?

• What does work for you, and why?

• If you want the same feedback, post 3 -5 paragraphs in the comments and I (and maybe some of my writer or reader friends) will chime in. 

If you want more rules than that, read HERE.

Today, I'm tossing up a piece of a vomit draft.

Sorry about the gross-out term, I learned it from my classy writer-friend James King (he really is way, gold-toe-socks classy, which is why it's funny that I learned it from him).

Btw, this is Jim's book (see what I did there? I dropped his name from James to Jim thereby showing off that he's my good friend): 



It won the second Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. It's not YA, but you can read it. There's a grouchy old guy who kidnaps his 15-yr old granddaughter for a road trip (read to see why), so you'll relate to it, even if you're still a YA. It's an excellent read. So, yeah, go buy that book, out in paperback now.

Anyway, according to the ever-reliable and eloquent Urban Dictionary, Jim didn't make the term up. A vomit draft is, "A very rough draft; Not much thought given to the full essay/article/story, the purpose is just to finish it, not judging what is being put into it. Just do a vomit draft, just get it done."

Yep. That's about right. In fact, the piece I'm putting up today is something I began a few months ago on a whim (triggered by combining some cool articles I had read) and am only about 30 pages in. Since this is the current opening, and I never allow myself to revise those till the end (*coughs*), it really is unedited. Whether this stays at all, whether it changes, or whether I even ever finish this particular manuscript, totally remains to be seen.  So far, it's narrated by a 16 year old kid named Kyle, who lives in Brooklyn, NY. The working title in my computer is Jumper, though I guarantee that will not stay the name.

So, give me some feedback, and then post yours.

Happy Friday, all.

1.     Jane Doe

The girl sits on my bed in my t-shirt and a pair of my plaid pajama pants – both way too big  – and stares at the floor. Her long brown hair, still damp, hangs over her vacant face. She's pretty much been doing that since she got here.I watch her from my bedroom door, unable to shake the way she looked when Dad first walked in with her, hair and clothes coated in a layer of grey-white dust as if she climbed in through a chimney."I'll be right back," I say, but she doesn't answer. She's showered now, her clothes in the wash, except for the wings that hang from the back of my desk chair. Yeah, you heard me. Wings. The white costume kind, like little kids pull from a dress-up box, or wear for a play at church.  "Okay, then," I try again, but I seem to be talking to a ghost. I leave her there, wordless, head back to the washer to move her stuff into the dryer. As I pass through the living room, I hear Dad, still on the phone in his office, talking in hushed voices.Dad's regular voice is anything but hushed. The whole world has been hushed for days now, the city blanketed in eerie quiet. Even, here, in the Heights, everything has changed. I stop and stare out a north-facing window. Nearly a week since the towers collapsed, and the burnt smell still clings to the wind, wafting across the East River, dragging its endless cloud of foggy ash.- gae