02-25-2016, 08:22 PM
Dale: I'll keep it capped still -- it just looks better to me than font change, bold, italic, underline, or no-change, and I'd like to keep certain choices constant.
I've hammered out that measure of life thing, which I agree does steal away sense, but I've kept the "potter's field", since here I hearken to the term's usual origin. The thing describing the bell should be more definite now.
No way is this a run-on (and if you ignore punctuation, then of course this is a run-on, but so would about 70% of all sentences in this world, I think). The two big halves are properly connected by em dash, and the second half's two independent clauses are smoothed by parallelism and comma splice. This is just long -- painfully so, sure, but that's where the lines come in. Nevertheless, I've broken up the long sentence, but only 'cause I don't think the em dash does it any justice, and yes, I do agree there's a great haze over this whole work.
Anyways, here's a new draft, with the changes growing as you move down. I'm still not sure how to duly clarify the safety-coffin image -- it's supposed to be in a sort of limbo between metaphor and reality (the speaker doing something like ringing that bell, but never daring to clarify what it is), but I don't know if that even makes any sense! And the ending's a bit off, I think -- I mean, I hope the whole sentiment is a good deal clearer, but it just....the whole coffin image doesn't feel crystallized right. Oh well, slow progress is still progress: here it is.
I've hammered out that measure of life thing, which I agree does steal away sense, but I've kept the "potter's field", since here I hearken to the term's usual origin. The thing describing the bell should be more definite now.
No way is this a run-on (and if you ignore punctuation, then of course this is a run-on, but so would about 70% of all sentences in this world, I think). The two big halves are properly connected by em dash, and the second half's two independent clauses are smoothed by parallelism and comma splice. This is just long -- painfully so, sure, but that's where the lines come in. Nevertheless, I've broken up the long sentence, but only 'cause I don't think the em dash does it any justice, and yes, I do agree there's a great haze over this whole work.
Anyways, here's a new draft, with the changes growing as you move down. I'm still not sure how to duly clarify the safety-coffin image -- it's supposed to be in a sort of limbo between metaphor and reality (the speaker doing something like ringing that bell, but never daring to clarify what it is), but I don't know if that even makes any sense! And the ending's a bit off, I think -- I mean, I hope the whole sentiment is a good deal clearer, but it just....the whole coffin image doesn't feel crystallized right. Oh well, slow progress is still progress: here it is.