Page critique 11/3/22

Offer up your page (or query) for Nathan's critique on the blog.
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Nathan Bransford
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Joined: December 4th, 2009, 11:17 pm
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Page critique 11/3/22

Post by Nathan Bransford » October 31st, 2022, 4:05 pm

Below is the page up for critique on the blog on Thursday. Feel free to chime in with comments, create your own redline (please note the "font colour" button above the posting box, which looks like a drop of ink), and otherwise offer feedback. When offering your feedback, please please remember to be polite and constructive. In order to leave a comment you will need to register an account in the Forums, which should be self-explanatory.

I'll be back later with my own post on the blog and we'll literally be able to compare notes.

If you'd like to enter a page for a future Page Critique, please do so here.

TITLE: What I Did For Love
GENRE: Memoir

First ~250 words

CRAP

I’m three when I learn to shoot crap.
“Don’t you take the kid’s money,” my mother yells from the kitchen.
“If the kid’s gonna learn to gamble, the kids gonna learn to lose.”

Lesson Number One. I’m three when I learn don’t risk anything you’re not willing to lose. A tender father-daughter moment and not a camera in sight. I have his full attention and we’re shooting crap against the white brick of the fireplace. My father takes my three pennies when I lose. I’m three. Of course I lose. I lose a week's allowance. I don’t think I mind so much, because I really do have his attention and it’s his way of teaching me to count. His way of giving me an edge. One plus three is four, two plus two is four the hard way, one plus one is Snake Eyes. One and six? Craps. You lose.

My father was a photographer.

He could look right into you. There was no place to hide. His story: Fred is a teenager when he walks into a gypsy tearoom and reads the gypsy’s tea leaves. She puts him to work pronto in her gypsy storefront—this handsome kid from the Bronx, reading fortunes for the gadje. Gadje, that means Americans, and anyone who is not a gypsy, which technically, meant my father as well.

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