ACharles78- Incarni 2

[ACharles78]

Hey guys, I heard all your discrepancies about the first chapter in the Incarni. I will make the edit, but I just hope you will recognize that the story is moving forward and that I promise it gets better. Although I know that thats not and excuse. Beginnings are my weakest points, even though I have wrote many a novel. I want you to tell me everything and I hope you give me your complete opinion (as I'm sure you will). If your wandering about Adalir and Albertus's relationship, you'll learn it as the novel goes on. But anyway, that's all you need to know. I wish you well, peace

[ACharles78]

I forgot to mention the date, it's 1/9/12

[Sprouts]

Don't take the critiques so roughly, the fact that you're making progress on writing a book is a magnificent feat in and of itself.

[katherinewessman]

This is my first critique, so I'd love to know how helpful this is. Well, here it goes...

The thing I enjoyed most about the story is the characters. I felt like you did a good job of conveying each character's personality and motivations. I felt like I had a good distinct picture of who each person was, even the more minor characters. This drew me into the story the most, and was my favorite part.

The part I had the most trouble with was following the more technical parts. I didn't really understand what the philosopher's stone was, although I definitely got the idea that it was controversial. I also didn't understand the part about being faerie/teething, etc. I wasn't sure what exactly was going on with the nymph, in particular, although she was an interesting character to listen to. It was probably because I had trouble understanding, but I also felt sometimes like it was going a little too fast for me to keep up with. I wanted to have a little bit more space to understand what happened before going on to the next big thing.

I did feel like I got a good visual picture of what was going on, even if I didn't understand the specifics of it. The world was interesting to me, even if I didn't completely understand the details.

[Aminar]

I just finished chapter one. I'll be doing chapter two later if I find significant differences.

I'll start this by saying that the first section may have contained some of the information I feel I'm missing.

Now The good things.

Creativity. You have it in spades. That means, in short, that you can write. Writing is all about ideas. Dialogue. Your dialogue blows mine out of the water. It's good, it flows. The characters have their own voices.

The bad is going to be long, but none of it is unfixable by any means.

First off, you need to pay attention to the clarity of your work. There were a few dozen points where I couldn't tell who was doing what, you didn't make that clear. A quick runthrough making sure each sentences subject is clear will help a ton. You had a couple times where certain words were used too many times in a section, or were used to start sentences three or four times in a row. Try to avoid that as much as possible.

From there, I felt like I was missing a lot of information about the world and characters, both physical and lorewise. I was in a white box, in a strange world with faeries that suddenly grow beaks while being attractive. The characters weren't described quickly enough for my taste. In the birdbeak fairy's case, the beak, being the oddest part about her, should be the first thing described. Basically, you need more physical description worked into your writing. Set the scene before you start the dialogue. When a character comes onto the scene work in just a couple quick physical descriptors right away. I've heard three things. Fit those in for every character. Yes it'll slow down the stories motion, but as a writer your perceptions of this are skewed. Readers read faster than we type.

The last big thing. Some of your sentences are really awkward. You were obviously having trouble finding a way to get what you wanted on the paper. In my experience that's when you make the description two sentences, not one. Adding a sentence gives you breathing room.

Now for my biggest suggestion. Read your stuff out loud. With inflection and voices. It helps you notice where things are off. You would be amazed how much a good readaloud can help editing.

Also, you may want to think about renaming some of your characters. Most of their names were very pretty, but they were awkward and hard to keep straight. Having two main characters with similar sounding A names gets awkward. Cerstanthany is way too long. Give her an easy nickname or change it to something pronounceable and memorable. It's very pretty, but it is just too big and awkward for a novel.

In summation, I like whats going on a lot. Your just not providing enough information for me to build a good picture. Part of this may be from missing the first section. I don't know. What I do know is that I feel like I'm being too harsh. Keep writing. Don't let me get you down. We all have a ton of learning to do on the subject. This group is all about helping with that learning.

Lastly, the way I critique these is to convert them to .mobi files and use my Kindle's ereader program to read them. If you have a smartphone or tablet with the kindle program you'll be able to see my exact notes if you would like.

Edited January 10, 2012 by Aminar

[ACharles78]

Hey guys,

@Storm,

Thanks for the kind words. This got me inspired again. I appreciate it (been going through some hard writer times lately with getting more rejection letters from recent publishers.) But I do find hope in this story, so thanks! I needed to hear that.

@Katherinewessman,

I'm glad my story kicked off your first critique. Welcome to the family i guess! I'm completely delighted to here my characters are doing their jobs. That's my most important aspect when I write, is to know the characters first.

about the clarity, I might need to check to see which parts are clear and unclear in the next edit. If you're confused about something that's a red light to me. Because the philosopher stone is a big aspect of this story it should be explained earlier on in terms people can understand better. Just heard from other critiques that I was a little too complicated/wordy with the explanation. So thank you.

I'm new to world building so your views on that inspire me to do better in the edit. Thank you for your critique.

@Aminar,

Thanks for the compliments on dialogue and creativity, and for starting your critique with the good first. That reminds me, I need to do that in my own critiques (I don't think I did mention good in my others and I apologize to any of those who I have critiqued, again, I'm new at this!). But anyway, I'll actually reply by saying your critique is very soundly and logically structured, so thanks Aminar. Your critiques should be this site's blueprint.

I'll check for overused words and sentence clarity. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

My attention with descriptions was to make each race distinctive. I guess I'll just explain it here (and fill it in my novel more clearly later) the Faeries of the world have distinct wings and tails and use external magic, while Nymphs have more human features unless they beast wheel or transform (but you'll see that later) and use internal magic (both of course is explained later, but yadda yadda). Anyway, the beak I just wanted to describe as Cerstanthany's race of Faerie's distinctive feature. They are from a tropical region of Dominion Earth. And human men and women do court Faerie men and women so its nothing unnatural to find such differences attractive to each race because its been going on for such a long time. I must not have explained this nor been descriptive enough to make that clear. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

Thanks for the heads up about sentence structure but I'll add it to one of many later priorities of the revisions.

Its funny about the read aloud because I do do this. There must be certain parts I'm not grasping but I'll save it for the revision. Once I revise another 4 or 5 times I'll reread again. But thank you for reminding me (I might have forgotten to do it in the parts you read).

I did not realize the importance of too many sounding names until I heard the writing excuses post about it. I've got WAY too many A names. Albertus and Adalir are already too many, because I get them confused sometimes even when I write. Who knows, maybe it's because my name is Austin, which was not conscious but a subconscious flub up. But at this point, Albertus and Adalir at least have names that mean too much in the context of the story and I don't know if I can change them. But there are others I will certainly change. Cerstanthany is long but my characters often give people nicknames so I'll just do this as a quick fix.

You're not too harsh. Believe, I've been ripped to shreds before. Your words are a very informative mirror against my own story. I thank you again for everything you said. You don't know how much its helped me.

And I actually just bought a kindle for my mother (which I bum from her all the time) so that might actually happen. Thanks for telling me about that.

Thanks all to your words so far, hope to hear more from more of you soon!

[KateJ]

Couple specific sentences that are confusing:

"Before she could answer Albertus, there was the stranger.

She was closer now. Much closer. So close Adalir could make out the face beneath. It was the eyes. She couldn’t see them, and it scared her." - I can't picture this. Where is the stranger? Does anyone else see her?

“Albertus… The whole thing at Blue Lilies… is there anything you suspect could have triggered such a thing?” - Didn't they trigger the "thing" on purpose to see if Adalir could use fairy magic?

is Gadstis supposed to creep me out? Right now I'm thinking Adalir has no common sense at all. Is this a character trait for her? So far she's put herself into really dangerous situations several times and she doesn't seem to realize it.

There are a lot of nice hints of worldbuilding, the stuff with seasons. I think the scene with the gift book needs a little bit of work - it doesn't quite flow right - but at the same time it does a great job of signaling to the reader "this world and ours are connected, and in fairly modern times". This is the kind of world building I love to see. Give me hints and glimpses and don't pound me over the head with "look! Weird stuff!" - you do great here. It's a real strength.

What happened to the pet creature from chapter 1? In fact it vaguely felt like something was missing between the last chapter and the start of this one.

Most of the time your language and grammar are really excellent. A few times there are mistakes that draw me out - "your" for "you're", "it's" when you mean "its". Don't interrupt writing your story to go back and fix these but if you're at all rusty on certain grammar rules, you might want to peruse a book or two. When she's in her vision and the spirits are all saying "I'am" - I had trouble reading this right, I'm not really sure how it's supposed to sound.

Now the harshest criticism.... this is an interesting premise, but in these chapters I got dangerously close to not caring about Adalir. I think it was the abusive stupid foster family. I've seen it done a hundred times in fiction and it's kind of old. If it's not a major plot point (like they know she's got powers and hate her; but then why adopt her?) then my suggestion is make her like her foster family. Make them like her, and treat her well. Make her not fit in for other reasons - like they love her but they don't quite understand how book-smart she is, or her foster mother despairs of teaching her to bake cakes or something.

This is just a suggestion. Feel free to totally ignore it. But if the story is going to turn into a "teenage girl with weird powers goes off and has adventures" story, then giving her a happy home life might actually make her more angsty and conflicted.

[Yados]

hey, i got booted from the email list and missed this chapter. could you send it to me?

[email protected]

[ACharles78]

Sure thing. Happy to oblige.

[ACharles78]

@KateJ,

Thank you as always for your critiques Katej. It was my intent to have the foster family not really care for Adalir for reasons Albertus will expound on later. But for the mean time, this was meant to build sympathy and not unsympathetic attributes for Adalir. I'd like to hear more of your opinion on this in the upcoming chapters. I know the foster family thing has been done quite often but you'll see later, I promise, and I don't say that just to ride off your complaint. Trust me I'm making note of it. But Adalir's true lineage is hopefully, my twist in the genre of similar stories like this. If you are feeling its gonna be one of those stories already at this level then maybe I should consider changing it to prepare you for just such a twist later so that you don't put the book down and say, 'been there, done that.'

If you feel this story is girl gets weird powers and goes off on adventures I'm glad to tell you its not that. I'm not going to spoil anything but Adalir gains a power in which she never truly realizes has a benefit until midway through the book when things get hairy in the plot. But, this is your first impression of all my readings so no further comment. If you had bought my book I wouldn't be there to explain it so I will make note of this. But as always, thank you Katej. I'm always glad when you critique.

And @Yados, I just sent the email. Tell me if you didn't get it or not since you're email is wonky or something. Anyway, thank you all. You've been very helpful

[cjhuitt]

Don't take the critiques so roughly, the fact that you're making progress on writing a book is a magnificent feat in and of itself.

I just wanted to reiterate this (and I want to remember it for my own benefit as well).

In addition, right at the beginning I wanted to say I thought the reference to a third horn was wonderful.

Creativity. You have it in spades.

I think this comes through also, but I wonder if you need a bit more work at how it is being expressed in the story. My main concern with a lot of this is that there are many parts in the story where you reference things that haven't been explained yet. A few of these can be nice, especially if some of them can be inferred from context. The number I recall reading, however, just overwhelmed me and left me so confused that I hardly knew which way was up.

First off, you need to pay attention to the clarity of your work. There were a few dozen points where I couldn't tell who was doing what, you didn't make that clear.

From there, I felt like I was missing a lot of information about the world and characters, both physical and lorewise. I was in a white box, in a strange world with faeries that suddenly grow beaks while being attractive. The characters weren't described quickly enough for my taste.

These things as well. I'll point out some confusing places later in this critique. As for the description, I struggle with this also, because you might feel like your POV character wouldn't remark on the description, so it shouldn't be in that part of the story. However, especially at the beginning, clarity needs stressed over some other considerations.

“Albertus… The whole thing at Blue Lilies… is there anything you suspect could have triggered such a thing?” - Didn't they trigger the "thing" on purpose to see if Adalir could use fairy magic?

I thought this as well.

Now the harshest criticism.... this is an interesting premise, but in these chapters I got dangerously close to not caring about Adalir.

I was feeling something similar to this also. My feeling was that it was at least partly due to me not being able to get a handle on Adalir's character. For instance, in the first submission she's naive enough to not even realize she might menstruate. In this submission, she recognizes the byplay between Albertus and Cerstanthany, and even jokes with Albertus about his taste in women. She's knowledgeable about a lot, but often doesn't act on that knowledge. She appears observant about nearly everything except anything that might keep her from getting into troubles.

If you feel this story is girl gets weird powers and goes off on adventures I'm glad to tell you its not that. I'm not going to spoil anything but Adalir gains a power in which she never truly realizes has a benefit until midway through the book when things get hairy in the plot.

I hope this doesn't sound bad, but this is exactly what I expected from the story by now... both what you thought I might feel, and also the eventual twist you mention. It's almost a given in stories like this that the person gaining a power doesn't understand how it would even be useful until about halfway in, when they start realizing all the places they might be able to use those powers to solve some problems.

Well, enough of my direct responses to other comments.

I have a couple of technical comments about this. First of all, I have problems with POV. Is this supposed to be third-limited or omniscient? I felt like it was supposed to be third limited, and if that is correct, this section doesn't establish the POV very well. Penny is the first one doing anything, and the first one named. Adalir's actions are only described for paragraphs, which means it could be Penny's POV until about paragraph nine. Also in chapter 2, which seems to be more in Adalir's POV, there is a part ("Although this was meant to be half hearted, it only deepened her longing") that refers to the intentions or feelings of both Albertus and Adalir, which is a POV error unless this is in omniscient. On the other hand, if it is in Omniscient, you probably need to do more to establish it earlier.

The second technical critique is your commas. All throughout this piece there were places I thought commas were missing, usually in dialog where phrases ran together. On the other hand, I saw a lot of commas where I didn't expect them. This was primarily where you had a sentence leading into dialog, and would put a comma to break the sentence and the dialog. In those cases, the sentence can just end in a period and the dialog stay on its own.

From the beginning, then. Right at the beginning, I didn't understand why Penny bought the muffins for Adalir. It might help to have a reminder of her birthday. The banter about converting to meat was confusing -- is Adalir a vegetarian? And who is Cruso, and why do we care about his taste for poultry?

We also don't really know who Fay is (although I think she had a brief mention in the last submission), and we don't know why she has such power over Adalir either. Not at the mention early in the submission.

The reference to the woman in black implies that we should know about this woman already. I don't, and many odd things are explained about her. The way the information about her is woven into the story was a little jarring also.

Phrases that threw me off near the beginning: "teacher's angel", "even more cranked", and "chiplings".

The books mentioned reinforce the relation to (our) earth, but they are all ones we know. It might be more interesting to have a couple that sound almost right, but not completely, just to show that there might be more dimensions that could be reached (if there are).

The part where Albertus and Gustav appear is all sorts of confusing, both in who is speaking and doing what, and the implication that they had been waiting for Albertus to reappear. I also didn't know why Gustav might be cleaning plates while delivering food. It seems like it might disconcert people to have the same person doing both things at once.

The reference to a "half man cafe" was confusing also. Along with that, I was really confused by the reference to his "half breed" sons and their sonnets. Are there particular sonnets that only half breed people use? Also, when Gustav feeds the deserts to them, something about the phrasing made me thing of feeding livestock, not sons held in any sort of esteem. Also, one of them can just tear hair off? Not only that, but he licks the hair after he tears it off?

When Cerst disappears into the bar, does she really disappear? Or is that a metaphor for leaving back into the bar area? I just don't know at this point in the story.

Confusing: "Adalir asked, taking her attention away from her."

At the start of chapter 2, it is written as if we had seen Adalir make a prediction earlier about the party, which I don't' recall at all. In fact, this is the first reference to a party I recall. Plus, the description is confusing about how it relates to Adalir, since I'm apparently having problems remembering that it is her birthday with all the other things that are going on.

I had thought Adalir was an orphan, but there were multiple references to a parental relationship in this chapter. One was a reference to Adalir's two drunken parents, and another was of Fay teaching her daughter not to answer the door after dark. On the other hand, there was also a reference to Adalir's missing parents. How does having a guardian related to all of these other relationships?

The bit about lights running her ragged isn't foreshadowed enough, in my opinion. The previous stuff uses light as a description, but I didn't see any actual connection to light until now. I would have thought it would start kicking in before this part, where she can suddenly manipulate lights. Also, I don't know if Adalir would connect her blowing out the light with the fact that she's still a novice. It seems like she shouldn't know what is expected based on the rest of the story.

I really didn't understand why Adalir would think about the woman in black, of whom she was quite scared, and then decide to answer the door. I mean, why not? She was only really scared of who might be on the other side.

Finally, something simple to fix. At one point you use "rouse" when I think you mean "ruse."

[ACharles78]

@cjhuitt

Thanks cjhuitt. You always have very well thought out critiques. Your critique will help me big time with revisions. Mainly, the little things I didn't even think of the first time through. I appreciate you taking the time to read and critique.