Would anyone like to beta read a (fairly clean but not edited) 1st draft and tell me where it all goes wrong/suggest how it can be streamlined and simplified? I know it's overly complex and trying to be too clever, but how to fix it? I have no idea where to start! It's a YA mystery/fantasy (75K words). Let me know if you've got time to have a quick pretending-to-be-a-reader read. Happy to swap along similar lines.
Here's the first page:
Coffee or the colour of words. Liss couldn’t decide which one was her biggest problem. She considered the open-sided van parked on the pavement, with its shiny levers and dials, and the alluring smell of freshly ground beans. All the evidence pointed to it being a coffee stall. Only, when Liss squinted at the chalkboard menu she could detect a mustard tinge to its aura. Mustard words always meant a lie. But determining the exact shade of mustard and, with it, the exact shade of lie? Well, that wasn’t going to happen unless Liss’s headache went away, and that wasn’t going to happen without coffee.
The mustard aura could be caffeine withdrawal messing with Liss’s senses, she supposed. After all, no one else seemed to have noticed something was wrong with the coffee van. A steady stream of neon-lit commuters handed over their money and left with steaming cardboard cups. No one was angrily demanding their coin back. No one was keeling over dead in the street. And, when she tried to think about it rationally, she couldn’t see how the word coffee could be a lie. So she stood behind a dock worker in dirty overalls and waited for the queue to painfully edge forwards.
“Black,” she said. “Like my soul.”
“Whatever.”
The barista only half-filled the cup and moved on to serve two bleary-eyed girls without taking Liss’s money. She opened her mouth to complain but then noticed the tattoo on the man’s arm. Respect, it said in curling letters. The word’s aura was dark crimson shot through with black, which spoke of greed and violence but definitely not respect. She briefly spotted the edge of a black handprint showing above his collar. Since when did members of the notorious Thirteen Ghosts open coffee stalls by the river?
Slowly stirring in two, then three, then four sugars, Liss watched the barista out of the corner of her eye. He passed the two girls their drinks. Judging from the way they held them, the cups were neither hot nor filled with liquid. One of the girls palmed him ten ridian, making it either the world’s most expensive cup of coffee or, more likely, not coffee at all. That would explain the lying sign. The girls pushed past Liss and she picked up the characteristic smell of warm Jimsyn Flower. Unripe tomatoes and vinegar. The mystery of the not-really-coffee van was solved.
“You a fly?” the barista said. “Piss off already.”
Here's the first page:
Coffee or the colour of words. Liss couldn’t decide which one was her biggest problem. She considered the open-sided van parked on the pavement, with its shiny levers and dials, and the alluring smell of freshly ground beans. All the evidence pointed to it being a coffee stall. Only, when Liss squinted at the chalkboard menu she could detect a mustard tinge to its aura. Mustard words always meant a lie. But determining the exact shade of mustard and, with it, the exact shade of lie? Well, that wasn’t going to happen unless Liss’s headache went away, and that wasn’t going to happen without coffee.
The mustard aura could be caffeine withdrawal messing with Liss’s senses, she supposed. After all, no one else seemed to have noticed something was wrong with the coffee van. A steady stream of neon-lit commuters handed over their money and left with steaming cardboard cups. No one was angrily demanding their coin back. No one was keeling over dead in the street. And, when she tried to think about it rationally, she couldn’t see how the word coffee could be a lie. So she stood behind a dock worker in dirty overalls and waited for the queue to painfully edge forwards.
“Black,” she said. “Like my soul.”
“Whatever.”
The barista only half-filled the cup and moved on to serve two bleary-eyed girls without taking Liss’s money. She opened her mouth to complain but then noticed the tattoo on the man’s arm. Respect, it said in curling letters. The word’s aura was dark crimson shot through with black, which spoke of greed and violence but definitely not respect. She briefly spotted the edge of a black handprint showing above his collar. Since when did members of the notorious Thirteen Ghosts open coffee stalls by the river?
Slowly stirring in two, then three, then four sugars, Liss watched the barista out of the corner of her eye. He passed the two girls their drinks. Judging from the way they held them, the cups were neither hot nor filled with liquid. One of the girls palmed him ten ridian, making it either the world’s most expensive cup of coffee or, more likely, not coffee at all. That would explain the lying sign. The girls pushed past Liss and she picked up the characteristic smell of warm Jimsyn Flower. Unripe tomatoes and vinegar. The mystery of the not-really-coffee van was solved.
“You a fly?” the barista said. “Piss off already.”
