Diving scene, 700 words

[jastius]

Hadn't ever to had never
Slithered serpentining around the neck of the sphinx hissing air.
Capture the last jellied eel sliding on a wet China platter with greased chopsticks while wearing oven mitts....
I managed... New sentence start at "I managed..."..
Few to none... (And is adding few chances with no chances... While "To" implies a descending series or set of possibilities from the larger few ending at the nil value, none.)..
Bounced softly.. Or even rebounded then gently landed .. Or relanded, think of the astronauts on the moon.

I like the Howard story part. Could emphasize the sarcasm a bit more.

 

[Kerrybuchanan]

Thank you, both Thaddeus and Jastius. Sharp claws are good.

 

[David Doherty-Jebb]

I can't really help you with the technical diving stuff, I'm afraid, but from a reader's POV it's quite compelling and exciting.
One thing I would say, and I'm somewhat echoing @Phyrebrat, is the immediacy of the scene is muted. Think about it: she's about to drown and we do get that, but you really need to drive home the urgency. You need to have readers holding their breath while your protagonist struggles!
As I've said before, you need to work on sentence length, which will help toward setting up this kind of mood. You obviously have a love of language, but you cram too many clauses into the same sentence. This slows down pace in two ways: too many words; and too much information.
Hope this helps.
David x

 

[jastius]

Actually it gets kind of spacey when you are short on air underwater... But you are in a lot of pain as you cramp while your oxygen deprived muscles still try to work.

(Was stood on by a bully and trapped on the bottom of a lake under a boat. Remember how the air and water stank, the pressure blowing the lake water into my ears which deafened me for a few hours. Couldn't hear myself scream at them when I was finally up. Pain.. That lobby too much swimming feeling like you are sodden with water through and through. Losing that last gasping bubble of air escaping from you and you try and capture it in your hands and bring it back into your burning lungs. Just so very tired like pneumonia and the worst kind of flu combined. Until you literally can not fight anymore. You feel so far away from the surface even though you're only a few feet away from the surface. Brown yellowing of the blue white sunlight. Feeling closed in until your entire world dwindles down I to the couple of cubic inches you can still see. Can only hear your heart beat.. Faster and faster.. Until it starts to slow.you feel the water forcing itself down you. It consumes you. Freezes you.
Rage gave me strength. Utter fury took over when i had nothing left. When i felt my brain dying. Let me reach once more. Let me tumble over a bully over twice my weight. And gave meek little me a surge of sudden viciousness that had me biting their feet.
I surfaced coughing and hacking.. Crying eyes streaming. Throat raw.

I heard them whine that I had bitten them when my ears finally popped back to hearing with a great slam of sound. You were drowning me! I screamed at them.
"You weren't in any danger!" They insisted.. "We learned artificial respiration at the school. We just needed to drown someone to practice on...."
But anyways the first time I truly grokked the phrase, "rage against the dying of the light" from the popular poem.. Made into pop culture about that time with its emergence in the Rodney Dangerfield movie Back To School... Hope it helps you a bit, Kerry)

 

[Kerrybuchanan]

That sounds terrible Jastius. The closest I ever came to drowning was in my youth, surfing, but that's much more violent and confusing because you don't know which way is up. I drew on that experience for the scene where my MC wrestles with a Nile* crocodile.

*Phone keeps autocorrecting to Nice crocodile!

 

[mgilmour]

A few thoughts for you....
1. I really liked the sequence, I felt like I was introduced to a seen that seemed interesting.
2. "I thanked the god of archaeologists that my dive hadn’t been any deeper or I would have been in serious trouble." I didn't like this sentence as it completely diffused the tension. So the character wasn't in trouble?
3. I'm not an expert in diving but wouldn't the suit just fill with water as soon as the character took off the helmet? I don't believe that there is anyway for a deep sea diver to use a quick release either.
4. The last paragraph has the word "struggled" and "struggle" in it. You may want to select another one.
5. Are there any waves or is the sea dead calm? If there are waves then the noise of splashing really isn't that much of a problem.

I hope that this helps you out.....not meaning to be too critical.

 

[Kerrybuchanan]

Thank you Michael, and never worry about being too critical. I have thick skin and can't improve without criticism.

 

[Avid Scifi Fan]

If your having too much trouble with the cumbersome diving suit (and associated technical details), you could always replace it with more conventional scuba gear. you just have to sabotage it in a slightly different way (still can use cut lines, he gave her a mostly empty tank, a bad regulator, etc.).

 

[Ray McCarthy]

conventional scuba gear.

Not very steam punky for Miss Peabody.

 

[Kerrybuchanan]

Not very steam punky for Miss Peabody.

Yes, I thought she needed the cumbersome diving suit to fit the steam-punk genre, although I am open to suggestions because this is the first steam punk I have attempted!

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I think stick with it and fiddle with details.