Lilly

Lilly said:
Shuddering sensation raced up Alinna’s arms and along her scalp. Her L’inar nerve lines forced her skin up into narrow bands and ridges along her neck and hairline, and down her back under her flight suit as her excitement turned quickly into concern and fear. She was going down, her small ship hurtling toward the ground at an ever increasing rate. Caught in the downdraft of an out-of-control human airjet, her tiny spy ship was as doomed as the human craft that had crashed to the ground in front of her moments ago.


You have reaction before action here, and that's sort of backwards. See what I mean? She's got this physical reaction, and then we find why-- she's crashing. The problem with this is that it makes her come across as a sort of unthinking physical being, reacting automatically without any sense of the stimulus.

I would say try and rewrite this with the action as the driver of the paragraph-- in the first sentence, maybe. I get the idea from the end that maybe you were already narrating a battle or something, as apparently another craft had already crashed, so it could be you're doing this in a linear, action-first narrative and I'm just seeing the reaction part. But I can only see what's here, and what I'm seeing is that the time sequence, the cause-effect, the stimulus-response is messed up. Think about the topic (first) sentence as the action, and try that. Let's just see it reversed:

She was going down, her small ship hurtling toward the ground at an ever increasing rate. Caught in the downdraft of an out-of-control human airjet, her tiny spy ship was as doomed as the human craft that had crashed to the ground in front of her moments ago. Shuddering sensation raced up Alinna’s arms and along her scalp. Her L’inar nerve lines forced her skin up into narrow bands and ridges along her neck and hairline, and down her back under her flight suit as her excitement turned quickly into concern and fear.

See what you think. Action before reaction-- put us in the person, and she's going to experience the action before she reacts. Don't be outside watching the person react. If we're in her, we perceive the action/event, and then feel her reaction.

Shuddering sensation raced up Alinna’s arms and along her scalp. Her L’inar nerve lines forced her skin up into narrow bands and ridges along her neck and hairline, and down her back under her flight suit as her excitement turned quickly into concern and fear.

Too much here-- choose which sentence you want to keep, and trim. What is really important? The nerve lines (tells us she's more than human), flight suit. Fear. What else?

The event-- the spy ship plunging to the ground-- should inspire fear and dread in the reader. You don't need to pound home the sensations of the character. There's nothing wrong with a little perception from the character, but don't overdo. The real impressive thing is to make the READER feel the thrills and chills. So if you're going to really get descriptive, describe the event/action in a way that makes the reader react. Don't spend too much time describing how the character feels-- let the reader feel it. Narrate the action more than the perception. This is a terrific action moment, so exploit it.

A