You have good strong opening. Unfortunately, it is in a prologue that you’d be better off dropping out of the story. You give too much away. If the reader doesn’t immediately buy your conspiracy story then he can bail before things heat up. The essence of suspense is wondering what’s going to happen next. You’re better off starting with the reader in the dark (i.e. Chapter one) and only giving him enough light to keep him wondering what’s at the end of the tunnel.
The other problem is the multi-viewpoint nature of the story. It’s hard to do that well because you’re forcing the reader to jump from character to character so they never get to settle into any one skin. After a couple of jumps, they’re free to put the story down. In multi-viewpoint stores there has to be a very strong line of commonality – something stronger than just the plot. It would be better to stick with one viewpoint for a couple of chapters before you make any jumps, and when you do jump make sure you jump on a real cliffhanger for the first viewpoint. You want the reader to feel pushed to read the second viewpoint to get back to what happened to the first viewpoint.
It’s very dangerous for me to do grammar, but I think that when you have a compound subject (i.e. Nisha, Ruchi, Shruti and I) that it’s ‘I’ rather than ‘me’. Microsoft Word doesn’t complain with either and I can’t find the reference in Harbrace so use your own judgment.
I think the first paragraph needs some conjunctions like ‘and’ to vary the structure. Additionally, the idea of tables waiting to be stained is a little fuzzy as well as a passive sentence. Are there spills on the way to stain the table? I thought for a moment that someone was going to paint them with wood stain. It’s not a bad description, it’s just easy to misinterpret.
I really like the dialogue and the sequel (thought portion) that follows.
“She was wearing a burnt orange sharara – something of a mix between flared pants and a divided skirt with a dazzling fuchsia shirt that ended just below her butt.”
I keep reading the above sentence, and the rhyme between skirt and shirt is distracting. Yes, I’m picky, but you might look for another word for shirt like blouse.
“Ruchi, Nisha and I stood sipping our drinks slowly.”
So, here it’s ‘I’, and doesn’t match the earlier usage.
“Did the stomach piercing pain a lot?”
Dialogue can have awkward phrases in it since people say weird things, but should ‘pain’ be ‘hurt’ or is this just part of the dialect?
“With that, our Cold war ended. Our fights only required a moment of truth to dissolve… one of the many things I loved about our friendship.”
You might consider just ripping this sentence out. First, I’m not sure you want to throw cold water on the conflict at this point. If anything, you want to light a fire underneath it.
‘“I don’t think he is one,” I said’
It looks like your missing a preposition — ‘the’.
The story is good, but it’s a little loose. In a short story you want the plot to go from A to B to C where A is the introduction of the problem, B is the conflict and C is the resolution. It all should flow cause to effect because you don’t have a lot of time for sub-plots. It looks like you have a plot and sub-plot going on. You’ve linked them, but you should strengthen that link to give one main story line. The hero has a problem; the hero confronts the problem, the hero changes or the world changes. Something about Shruti’s wedding must solve the hero’s problem with Karan or something about Karan must solve the problem with Shruti getting married. Right now, they seem to follow their own paths to resolution.
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I love the hook in the opening paragraph. It sounded like the narrator was having a marvelous time. Then I hit the sour mood. If the narrator loved the quiet beauty of Vienna, why was she in such a sour mood all the time? It’s what Lajos Egri in “The Art of Dramatic Writing” calls jumping action. You skipped from one mood to another without explanation or foreshadowing. From the rest of the story you should probably rewrite the beginning to indicate how dreadful Vienna is, and how much the narrator hates it. Then the transformation under the willow will have a bigger impact. I like this story, but stories are about how people change. It’s clear that this experience changes the narrator, but the nature of the change is not at all clear. I enjoyed the description though. (Extra thought -- try putting the first paragraph last.)
First, you have too many ‘when’s in the opening paragraph. It puts too much distance between the reader and the events. I would try taking them all out and see if you can construct a more engaging sentence without them. I like the content, but when you say, she ruled the house you should show her ruling the house instead. That means taking the father’s dialogue out and putting in dialogue for his new bride. There’s a bit of a skip where you jump from talking about the bride to talking about the father. The father’s murder is too much of a surprise. Simple cruelty or ostentation does not equate to a proclivity for murder. You have to show her in all her cruelty and murderous intent before the murder. Let the girl catch her torturing something or someone. It’s a pain, but in fiction cause and effect rule.
First a technical note, in modern dialogue it’s always best to keep the pronoun first. (i.e. he said, she said, never said he.) There’s also a balance between scene and sequel. A scene is the part where something happens. The sequel is where people think about what’s happening. If you mix the two in-line you slow everything down and make it jumpy. You might want to take the viewpoint of the “she” in the story and have her hear and react to his trembling voice after he speaks rather than telling the reader that it trembles. It’s not death that forms a dramatic element, but how people react to death. The wicked thing is that people often say one thing and think the opposite. That’s when things get interesting.
Lovecraft was a master, but his style is extremely difficult to imitate successfully. The reason for this is that when you read him you remember the oblique way he approached his horrors, but what you don’t remember unless you’re really paying attention is the detail of his descriptions. He nearly always started off with a very vivid description of something, some-place, or someone. That’s how he draws you in. Therefore, to start with I would chop off the first two paragraphs and begin with the second “Picture any coffee shop…” Next, if you let the reader picture any coffee shop you’ve already lost them. Make them see only the one you want them to see. Additionally, present tense is more attention getting than past tense. I know you wanted to convey this as if it was a dream, but dreams are always direct and present. If you hold the break in reality until after the scene in the coffee shop then the impact will be more intense for the reader, and they’ll have more empathy with the narrator.
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