trappedslider
Legend
Updated the OP to reflect the current changes, sicne I added a few more paragraphs.
Writing again
That reads better. I re-read both your shorter revision and the original post. On the original post, you've got 2 sentences (next to last paragraph I think), about her thinking about what direction to go next to get off the roof. They don't affect the story or give us more about her than we already knew, especially the last of the two. A good example of text that can be removed, and probably should.
trappedslider
Legend
Do you mean this bit: "she looked around to see which neighboring roof would be easiest to get to. Nikora decided to go the building on her left once she saw that she would be able to climb down a drain to the alley below" ?
So I should dump the looking around and just have her go down the building on the left?
Yup.
I'd say cut both. Nothing happens because of her looking or choosing. Unless you make it relevant later. Therefore, they are unnecessary. We know she got the loot and that she's moving to the next scene.
If you had to keep one (or a variant of it), I'd do:
she looked around to find a way down to the street, and leapt to a smaller building and climbed down the drain.
This shows she has some parkour skills, like I think you intend, but is shorter. Cuts out things the reader doesn't need to know (like where the other building is, as she's presumably never coming back here). You could tweak my version so it ends more poetically with her "even the alley forgetting she'd been there." or some such. That doesn't add anything either, though, other than ambiance.
Just giving a way to look at the advice of "Remove Unnecessary Words." It's easier to read somebody else's work and say, "don't need that" than it is my own
trappedslider
Legend
I added some more, I feel that the dialogue during the offer/counter offer could be punched up but i'm not sure how....she doesn't really care how much she gets, but she also doesn't want to get screwed over. I've gone with the standard fantasy money of platinum>gold>sliver>copper
I've only got a short moment this morning, so I'll come back with more ideas later. But here's the quick stuff.
In the beginning, you have her "Slowly standing up," Adverbs are bad, kind of. Mainly because they hint that you could use a stronger verb. Try "Rising to her feet,"
I see "Her eyes" are up to their old tricks. namely, that phrasing (or her cold eyes) pops up a few too many times. Usually, you want to avoid word or phrase repetition.
Finn sounds very formal at first. Maybe less formal and more banter about the money being offered like "You're taking food from my third wife."
Also, the amounts are really small. Granted, we have no idea what a Gold is worth, but we do know what small numbers are. It sounds like we're haggling over $2.02 vs. $2.12 Because the numeric values are so small, it sounds petty. Try it using just silver. I'll give you 25. I want 50. Best I can do is 33. Bigger numbers shows us greater variance from the high bid and low bid. Making us wonder what she'll accept.
Is this a short story or book (been awhile, so I can't remember). Thus far, this feels like establishing the character, rather than setting stakes or the inciting incident. So I have no idea what the story is about still, other than Nikora is the main character and she's a thief. Now imagine if Finn balks at the items. He recognizes something, and won't touch any of it. Now, or story is about what she stole and who wants it back and what reason for it being special. Stakes go up, and people are intrigued by it.
Keep working at it. And don't be afraid to move forward. I finished a draft of chapter 4 last night. Beta readers have rough drafts of 1-3 already, so I can see if the opening pages hook them. You can always go back and fine tune the details.
I gotta go.
trappedslider
Legend
I'm going for a novella at this point, I also rewrote her waking up in her room, along with I think the changes you suggested. I haven't yet let anyone on my FB read what I've written yet.
EDIT: I got reminded of this http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ from my pintrest
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Ah, Hemingway....Haven't tried it, but it reminds me of other stuff I want you to know (apologies if you already do). Let me core dump on a bunch of general info stuff that might be useful for you:
automated editing can be helpful, not perfect, but good for what computers are good at.
I use ProWriting Aid. $40/year. Finds passive voice, adverbs, repeated sentence starts, over-used words and phrases and more.
AutoCrit and Grammarly are $40/month. I assume they find roughly the same thing, cost 12 times more...
If you plan to sell to magazine or publisher, be wary of posting online (anywhere public). That counts as publishing, and means you can't sell them First Rights (the right to be first to publish it). For feedback from wider audience, look at Writing.Com (WDC) which has tools for this, OR use Google Docs and send Comment-only links out to beta-readers. I've got a blog article I wrote on how to manage Beta-Readers with gDocs. WDCis a community of writers, posting and critiquing each other's work. It's useful when you don't have a stable of betas you can rely on. Somevbody from ENworld pointed me there when I posted about starting to write, again.
Publishers aren't taking Novellas (15K-60K words) usually. They do make good Self-publishing products for that reason. Or break them up into chapters and post on your blog to build a following. Then self-publish them or collate and release a collection book when you're successful and have a book deal or three.
trappedslider
Legend
I've already self published what I thought was a Novella based on page count, but I missed up when I forgot to take in the page number changes due to formatting for the kindle, so it was off by like 6 or 7 pages lol (still made a total of 100$ off it woot woot). Hemingway is only 20 dollars and as for WDC, I'm already a member there but had totally forgotten about it. As for the Gdocs...That's a good idea. Which I just now did lol. https://tinyurl.com/yakhl6ho
Yeah, word count is the metric of professionals for that reason. If you do see somebody talking page count, 300 words per page is the translation, even though, most people know it's fuzzier than that. And agent or publisher or magazine will go by word count.
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