Jpalmer wrote:

A while ago I released "Hot".
There was a passage in "Hot" that only came about 50% of the
way to where I was hoping it to go:

                Ranma stared openly a moment. To call it a
        halter seemed so out of place, since 'halt' neither
        described its apparent function, nor was 'halt' any
        part of the message it screamed in Ranma's mind.
I was really hoping to plant a lot of images in the readers mind:

[snip]

Would anyone else like to take a stab at this?

How glorious the language of Angles, how rich, how diverse,
how random and how difficult.  This tongue of ours lives and
breathes, bringing with every new day the joy of language
discovered afresh, the wonderment of shared context being
sufficient to explain such introductions to our speech as...
gainax.

        ----    ----    ----

   Ranma stared openly a moment, his eye drawn by her
gainaxing. To call it a halter seemed so out of place, since
'halt' neither described its apparent function, nor was 'halt'
any part of the message it screamed in Ranma's male mind.

        ----    ----    ----

I actually think that the above passage is coarse, out of keeping
with the understated elegance of Palmer's prose... but the
imagery is more vivid, blatant, and gives a stronger context
for the "halt" sentence to work with.

How about this:

        ----    ----    ----

   Ranma stared openly a moment, his eye drawn by her motion.
To call it a halter seemed so out of place, since 'halt' neither
described its apparent function, nor was 'halt' any part of the
message it screamed in Ranma's male mind.

        ----    ----    ----

I like the sudden change in meaning of "motion" as one reads
further into the paragraph, but then, perhaps I'm feeling just a
bit too clever tonight.

I'm not too sure that this is an improvement, either.

For the record:  I greatly admire Palmer's works, and I very much
like "Hot" in particular.  I love its atmosphere, the evocation of
the oven-like heat of mid- to late-summer.  I also enjoyed Nabiki's
delightfully cat-like behaviour.

--
David Eddy -- Senior Consultant, Progress Software Melbourne
dje@progress.com
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Towers/8341