Is the following allowed under the ungrammatical exceptions in fiction?
I wrote the following:
Under the shelter of the inn, a barbecue was taking place, red coal glowing in the dark and tiny sparks fluttering around from time to time.
or should I change it to:
Under the shelter of the inn, a barbecue was taking place. The red coal glowed in the dark and tiny sparks fluttered around from time to time.
I know I can do this:
She was walking by the shore, her hair fluttering in the wind.
But I'm not very sure about the first example.
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I prefer the first of the two examples; the second seems choppy. It would read slightly better with “Red coals” in place of “The red coal”. (That is, coal should be plural in both examples, and there should be no article before it.) I might or might not add with or its to the first:
Under the shelter of the inn, a barbecue took place, with red coals glowing in the dark and tiny sparks fluttering about.
Under the shelter of the inn, a barbecue takes place; red coals glow in the dark, sparks flutter from time to time.
I suggest avoiding the past continuous tense (like “was taking place”) in narrative, and using either simple past (“took place”) or present (“takes place”). Past continuous seems stilted, verbose, misleading.
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It is not ungrammatical to use two absolute phrases connected by a conjunction (like "and"). Long sentences can be more difficult to read and tend to slow the pace of the narrative, but in this case a slower pace is appropriate, like a warm, lazy evening.
Taking jwpat7's suggestion about the tense of the main verb and the use of the plural "coals", I offer the following alternative:
Under the shelter of the inn, a barbecue welcomed the warm evening, red coals glowing in the dark and occasional tiny sparks fluttering into the air.
(Although this alternative is unlikely to fit the particular context of your writing, you are free to use any part of it without attribution.)
"welcomed the warm evening" might be too flowery (and "warm evening" might be redundant with previous or later text), but "welcomed" enhances the feel of safety brought by "shelter of the inn" and adds a small (likely appropriate) feel of community and "warm evening" seems to increase the relaxed feeling. Moving "from time to time" from the end of the sentence (and changing it to "occasional") allows "fluttering into the air" to be at the end; having the somewhat whimsical "fluttering" and breath sound of "air" at the end of the sentence (with its pause) seems to add a calm, relaxed feeling ("ah"), which also seems to fit the setting of a safe, relaxed environment. "into the air" is a relatively small change in meaning/tone from "around"; "around" emphasizes some degree of persistence while "into the air" seems to express more of a temporary rising.
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Context is important, and this question is hard to answer. But I'll try.
Sentence length is something that creates a rhythm in the text. For example, let's think of a situation where you have successively longer sentences, coming one after the other, and the reader has to parse them. Next, a short sentence appears.
My point is that whether you go with a longer, flowing sentence or two shorter ones is entirely dependent on the context. While I actually prefer combining these two sentences, I think your specific example of a unified sentence is a little clumsy. But perhaps it fits brilliantly with the text surrounding it; we don't know.
So if you want easy-to-parse description, something the reader will breeze through, go with the two short sentences. If you want a more flowing, immersive, artistic paragraph, go with the single sentence.
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