here it is

[JEM]

Well here is my first work to be published. It is kind of boring.
The Battered Ropes
“Heave! Ho! Heave! Ho!” the master of the ship yelled, “Heave! Ho!” A group of sailors pulled the rope when called upon to do so, but reluctantly. The ropes were old and battered. Few sailors thought that the ropes would hold up for their six month voyage to the Cape of Good Hope. The captain, whose budget was small, ‘tested’ the ropes with hired experts who were bribed to tell the captain that the ropes were fine.
“Heave! Ho! Heave! Ho!” the master’s voice echoed around the ship, “The anchor is being raised and we shall leave Lisbon momentarily.” The warm summer wind blew at these sailor’s backs.
“This will be the last time we will see Lisbon mates,” a pessimistic sailor said. “How can we sail to Africa if we only have this floating brig of rotting wood?”
Ignoring the words of this sailor, the captain yelled, “Lets begin our journey south.” With those words the crew began their journey.
The wind was at the stern of the caravel at the beginning of the journey. The first week made the voyage look easy: plenty of food, no storms and a good tailwind. The ropes didn’t get any worse either. The crew started to like their captain. He must have been doing something right if the conditions had remained this good.
As the sun rose one morning the men spotted land. “Land-ho!” shouted the sailor in the crow’s nest. The men knew they had many miles to go, but they didn’t care. They saw land for the first time in weeks.
The pessimistic sailor said in his soft voice, “This will be the last time we see land mates.”
The captain of this ship yelled at the pessimistic sailor, “Shut ye mouth before I make ye walk the plank. I trust me ship with me life.”
As the ship went further south, the moods of the men got worse. The pessimistic sailor told sad stories about other sailors who went to the Davy Jones locker. This pessimistic sailor was so certain that the ship would not make it back to port, he started writing a journal which he called his “Journey to Death”:
September 23, 1498, 12 degrees N, 18 degrees W,
T’day me Captain and I got in a big figt over the cndition of me ropes. I think that me ropes wont last another week... they are falling apart. They are impossible to mend at this poit. The captain belives with his salty sol that me ropes are stong and that the crew is on his side. How rong he is. I thik that the crew might mutiny in a cople of days and I, I will be their leader. Captain Daniel Baker. I like the sound of that name.
As Daniel Baker prepared for the mutiny, the ship continued its journey South. The weather got worse and worse. Waves pounded the ship like a boxer punching his opponent. Each wave made the ship more vulnerable. The wind was rocking the ship. Many sailors started praying as they felt the water spray onto the main deck. This lasted all through the night.
Early the next morning after the storm had subsided, the navigator shouted, “we have passed the equator. We are more then half way to our destination at the Cape of Good Hope.” The crew celebrated by drinking some extra rum.
As the ship went further south, storms now occurred every night delaying Daniel Baker’s plans. “This weather is as cursed as our captain. We must be destined for danger. The ropes are on the verge of ripping in half, but that is of no concern to our captain,” Daniel thought to himself, “I hope we have one fair night before we get to the Cape.”
Sadly for Daniel, this did not happen. Night after night the storms occurred. Each one a little more damaging than the previous night’s storm. All of them were gone by the morning. The ropes had turned to threads, but the captain still turned a blind eye to them. Even the inexperienced master of the ship was starting to notice. “We need to fix these ropes.”
“No we don’t need to fix those ropes. By my salty soul, we have more important things to do. We need to scrub the deck. The ropes are fine,” shouted the captain.
With that the crew went back to work resenting the captain for putting the ship’s crew in such a vulnerable position. The storms got worse and worse as the ship went further south. By the time the ship 3/4 of the way to the Cape of Good Hope, the ship was almost falling apart. “Yee landlubbers need to start fixing me vessel before I make ye walk the plank,” the captain shouted at his crew.
The more the captain yelled, the less his crew listened. Instead they started listening to Daniel Baker whose attitude resembled the condition of the ship, weak and torn apart. He knew this vessel was going to sink and there was nothing he could do about it.
His last journal entry read:
December 25, 1498, 28 degrees S, 18 degrees W,
Mery Christmas, my fot. How can one be mery on a floting prison. I don’t know what is keping this ship together. A miricl in itself. Me ropes are in such dispar that they fel lik giving up. I see the pain they are going through. In fact I feel the pain. Like everyone else on the ship, I am tired. I almost want to giv up, but I can’t. I will take over this ship if it kils me. I fel that I will be sucessful before we rech the Cape.
That night the ship got caught in a hurricane. It was so bad the navigator couldn’t use his astrolabe to find out where they were. To make matters worse the compass broke when it’s glass case shattered. The helmsman was steering the ship blindly.
The captain never was in a situation as bad as this. He locked himself in the captain’s quarters. “A prisoner on his own ship,” Daniel thought to himself as he braced for the next wave. Unaware to the captain, the crew was mutinying and decided that they could sail to the Cape of Good Hope without the help of their captain. The crew, led by Daniel Baker, stormed into the Captain’s quarters to find the captain already dead. The ship surgeon took a quick look and said that the captain had killed himself.
“Serves him right,”Daniel tells the men.
Just then the master of the ship ran below the main deck yelling in fear, “The ropes are tearing! The ropes are tearing!” The whole crew ran up onto the deck to see that one of the nine ropes had been reduced to spindles and was ripped in half.
“There is nothing we can do about that rope,” Daniel told his crew, “now we must make sure that none of the other ropes break.” Just as Daniel finished his sentence a giant wave hit the ship ripping three more ropes. Daniel looked down at the stormy sea and thought to himself, “I guess someday an old sailor will be telling stories of how our ship sunk to the ocean floor.”
The damaged ship continued sailing south through the night.
“Lets keep this ship afloat mateys,” yelled the inexperienced master. He didn’t realize that the crew was too weak to do so.
A scared sailor wept,“We feel like a drop of water in an endless sea. Is there anything we can ...” SNAP! Another rope broke, leaving only four unbroken ropes remaining.
A sailor then ran up from the bottom of the ship and said, “we are sinking.”
“I guess it is now to late to turn around,” Daniel thought.
“Quick report captain: we lost 2/3 of our crew, we have three ropes left, and we well be totally underwater in half an hour,” the master said.
As the ship continued to sink, two more ropes snapped in half.
Daniel’s last words were, “We will never see Lisbon or land again for only one more battered rope remains on this cursed ship destined for nowhere.” With these last utterances the last rope snapped and the ship sank. The only clue left of this ill-fated voyage south to the Cape of Good Hope was Daniel’s journal, “Journey to Death” which ironically floated ashore
to their ultimate destination in Capetown three months later.

This is being graded on the elements of fiction, five part storyline (expostion, etc.), and theme. Do you see all this? Can you figure out the theme? Do you see the irony? What is the ship a symbol for?

[Inwe Ringil]

It's great, sounds like something that really could have happened. I think I have the theme, be observent, and replace anything on the ship to keep it ship shape. Hmm....must be where they got that term. Irony great, I simple cannot do irony but I will some day.

[JEM]

Thanks! I was thinking of a differant theme while writing this. I tried to make the ship a symbol for something else. I won't say what it is yet because I want others to guess. :-) Nice line of consciencness.

To everybody except Inwe... PLEASE REVIEW THIS PIECE. BE HONEST! Thanks!

Joseph

[Imrahil1234]

4 / 5

I like it! I can see all the parts of the structure, but i can't really tell what the ship is to represent, but im sure if i read it when i was less tired i could maybe make a guess. I liked the way it gradually built up to the conclusion, which i thought was sort of sudden, but hey, can't drag it out in a short story. Good for a short story though were there isnt time to really develop the characters or parts of the plot.


You made me feel sad for the sailors, El Stupido Captain!!!!!!!!!!

BTW, Loved the pirate/sailor lingo, really added to it!

Im really tired now, long day so im going to bed ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

[Isis]

I'm going to have to come back and read this again to see what the ship is a symbol for, because I don't get it at the moment. Maybe it resembles some country in the world today?

As for the actual writing, I think you should try, at least in part, thinking in scenes. The show, don't tell rule goes big here. There were a few points - the storm, for instance, and some places where Baker and the Captain crossed paths - that could have been extended and described in more detail. Maybe giving a more accurate representation of the ship in the beginning...mention some smaller details, maybe how Baker views the ship, then get into the fact that the ropes are worthless and the whole thing is held together by spit and prayers. While you get the point across as you have it, the narrative doesn't have the life that it could have. You can do it, you just need to approach some parts of the story differently.

You could show a scene that's more pulled out and then do the sort of compact narrative that you have in the rest of the peice to tie your large scenes and patches of description together.

I really like the dialect and the diary entries. That definately gave the story flavor.

[JEM]

Thanks for the constructive feedback. I will try to a lot of that in the story. The ship is not meant to be a country in the world today. I think it would make sense for Egypt about 20 years ago, but that is not what this is about. Something much larger. I gave this story to my English teacher a week early to see what he would say. I should here back from him tomorrow if he understands the theme. The ropes also represent something connected with the ship. I hope I am not being overly symbolic.

[Vennila X Vana]

My god Joseph, you just kept at it until I reviewed this story. Well I hope you're happy.

The Good.

-It's not bad. Really, it isn't. It's not exactly my style or anything I would read if I didn't have to though.
-The story itself is a good one.
-I agree with everyone else, nice use of ship terminology and dialects of sailors.
-The symbolism could be very meaningful if one was to look that deep. It coould mean a lot of things to a lot of people and that's cool.

The Bad.

-More sentence variety. Almost all your sentences start with nouns, and they're like all the same length. Reading this aloud would be so monotonous.
-When you have something ironic or facetious in there you ruined it by over-explaining it, which insults the reader. I know you're better than that. Case in point: The captain, whose budget was small, ‘tested’ the ropes with hired experts who were bribed to tell the captain that the ropes were fine. What is this? Come on.
-More word variety. You used the word, "word" itself way too many times.
-Isis hit the nail on the head here. Show don't tell is exactly what I would say. It's like you're sitting in front of me and just elaborately telling me something that happened to you once. People can't relate to the nameless multitude of characters, and sometimes that can be good but it didn't work here I don't think. It was very...direct and that was demeaning. Like this paragraph:
That night the ship got caught in a hurricane. It was so bad the navigator couldn’t use his astrolabe to find out where they were. To make matters worse the compass broke when it’s glass case shattered. The helmsman was steering the ship blindly.
The captain never was in a situation as bad as this.
This is a storm! It's wild and crazy. You're telling me like we're sitting in front of a campfire and you're not very interested in this story at all. Maybe to fix that you should try more details?

The Ugly.
Oh yeah, 20 points of for asking me to read it so many times. [Just Kidding, Sorry it took so long!]

[JEM]

Vennila,

I am actually rewriting about a 1/4 of the story. I am even giving the ship a name Icarus. That should make the theme more clear.

About the second "bad" suggestion... I am changing 'tested' to "tested". Will that help?

I am going to rewrite this so the ship is more of a character. I think the ship might even be the main character.

I talked with my english teacher and he said my theme makes sense after I told him, but it is hard to get to. So I am rewriting this so it is more apparent.

I only asked you 3 times, oops 4. So do I qualify as your least favorite author?

[Vennila X Vana]

Hmm..Joyce Kilmer is pretty bad...but you are close. haha Just kidding. Actually Joseph, I liked it alot. I like the way you think, it's just really not my style. And I didn't dislike it so much as I think it needs work. But no one gets it right the first time, not even you. At least you didn't this time. Look guys, he's human!

[JEM]

That might be it. I am a science/math/reading geek/freak (depending on who you are talking to ) I don't like detail. For example, it took me three tries to get through Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow awake. Yet I can read anything by Dickens and not be bored in the least, weird. Going back to the topic, I will post a revised story tomorrow or sunday that is going to be much differant, but the same style.

I'm human? Is that an insult. Well, then your human too!

Once again thanks for revising my short story.