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Feb 6 - Yados - The Mortal Coil Chapter 2


Yados

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Okay! Second Chapter. There are probably a few typos as this is a much rougher draft than I submitted last time.

Summary:

Coil is the son of immortals. Well, dead immortals. Well, probably dead immortals. Less 'probably dead' is his sister, Rae, who has just died of plague. This was very much in the modern fashion as The Land, previous inhabited by immortal humans from across the Endless Sea, is currently inhabited by mortal humans from across the Endless Sea. No one knows the reason for this, but few are happy about it.

In the wake of the previously stated tragedy, Coil is called upon by visitors. Both of these encounters were unsettling, but they also both got in the way of Coil's grief-forged goals. First he will lay his sister to rest beyond the Sight. Next, he will kill Death. That the two have a history only makes it personal and will be fleshed out at a later date.

Now all he has to do is get out of the Watches without being seen.

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Again I really liked this. I'm getting the sense this gets darker as time goes on; your world is very grey, but I love what's going on. The hostile plantlife is especially cool.

I'm hoping(for accessibility purposes) that you keep the romance plot fairly tame. Taken too far and you pinhole yourself to a small crowd. Not saying cut it, but keep it mostly clean.

Admittedly I try to avoid romance plots as a whole, although I'm not sure I can avoid one in this upcoming project.

I found the hound thing hard to get my head around... It might have been my roomate playing Skyrim while I read it though.

Edited by Aminar
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Thanks for the comments. I suppose the book gets darker. I didn't really think of it as a dark story when setting out, but I suppose it's become that way. It'll probably get more morbid before it gets less. Strange how that works out.

I don't plan for the book to have a large romantic focus, nor do I plan to get explicit if it does. This chapter was more about establishing Coil's sexuality and the relationships/weight of the things he's leaving behind.

I was worried about this stage of the story just being in vacuum and my original beginning shifted from the prologue to Coil's eventual destination, but I think easing into the worldbuilding and adding in some character moments, even with minor characters, helps give things some weight.

And the dog thing is because I've just sort of... nuked horses? I was making a fantasy world and decided I would allow myself one thing that I would never have to write about. Like, one sort of general background thing I wasn't going to make myself touch. And it was horses. I really didn't want to do horses. I don't know or like horses. I didn't particularly want to research them. So everyone rides around big dogs in this world and it'll be awesome.

My token explanation for the big dogs is that, because of all the motile plant life, herbivores are big and aggressive. Like mammalian giants. Like mammoths and those huge sloth-beasts you see in the museum. Also some really cool dear/elk monstrosities. I don't know where cows fit in, but really intimidating herbivores. Which means that the apex predators, stuff like wolves and mountain lions and bears, are similarly huge to prey upon the big herbivores.

And I guess the big wolves got domesticated into more traditional dog breeds? But huge?

Yes. See? Look at that scientific answer. This is some hard fantasy going on here. Yes sir.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I thought the first few paragraphs didn't quite work. I think I can see what you're going for, with the litany of pains, but I wasn't really feeling it until I got to the paragraph about it not being spring. I wonder if you started out with Coil cataloguing the pain, and used each item of pain to show a part about what he's doing, if it might not work better. Something like starting with his feet where one was numb as snow had worked it's way in while he trudged through the snow. Rubbing at his hip, where the unaccustomed weight of the sword rested. The snot, not quite freezing. The lashes of his pack, weighted down. Then his arms, clutching a bundle tight against his chest, that he refused to think of as painful.

I'm loving the part about the plants and winter being their dormant time, however. The mood and scene you set with the paragraph on the grass is very good, and the trees add their own bit to the setting.

You describe Sight's End as it "spanned the convex length of all five Watches". This part confused me, as I tried to figure out what you were describing. Part of it was because I wasn't quite clear what a Watch was, although by reading a few paragraphs more I'm starting to think it's the area watched over by one of the large stone guardians. I also don't recall what significance Vern is, if it had even been mentioned yet. I wonder if having another paragraph describing the overall setup here might help.

It wasn’t Sarindale’s fault that it had all withered and died the one time they strayed from his sight, was it?

The "it" here is too vague for me, since there is no specific precedent. I imagine you might be trying to keep part of the whole problem a mystery, to keep the reader going, but you may want to reconsider here, or reword the sentence somehow.

Something similar happened when Coil first saw Im: "Well, it would be harder than that after all." The immediate previous clause was Im moving ashes with a stick, so right at first I thought something was going to be harder than moving ashes with a stick, but that clearly didn't fit. I think you are trying to say that leaving wasn't going to be as easy as he had hoped, but I don't read it that way.

You refer to Im as "bundled and mailed", which made me think of wrapping something up and putting it in a mailbox to ship somewhere. A minor tweak to phrasing out to help. Just don't mention he had been posted to the watchtower.

I thought the initial description and interaction with Im was awkward, and not as in it conveyed the awkwardness well, but that the text became more difficult to read there. I think a lot of that is from how it is initially set up. For instance, right after Im is described, their fast friendship is mentioned. That sets the basis for what I thought both the scene was going to be, and of how I thought Coil viewed him. I think this made the later hints and revelations more disconcerting than they ought to be. Also, Coil thinking that his smile was always irritating was a really odd contrast to the statement of friendship, but it could work if developed -- either an irritation born out of friendship, or the friendship really being based on being the only two of an age, instead of the fastness Coil thought. Again, once we know a bit more behind it, the description kind of makes sense, but on a fresh read, I was having problems reconciling everything.

One of those items to reconcile was my expectations regarding the scene, after how it was presented. Right at first, I thought two things might happen. A) I expected Im to figure out what Coil was up to, somehow, if they were really fast friends. That would lead to the obvious offer to help, and is kind of what happened. B ) the other option was that Im may or may not figure it out, but would stand his ground and Coil would be forced to fight him. This expectation is reinforced by Im needing to be told what Coil is doing, and by his initial reaction -- dismissing the notion, plus having a hard voice and annoyance in his eyes.

So I was set in my expectation, and ready for you to twist it slightly, which appeared to be happening. Im realizes Coil was going to permanently leave without him, and starts protesting and making plans to join him (so it appears to twist back to option a). Then the commander rode up, and I'm suddenly certain that it is going to be option b, with the twist that Im is forced to fight Coil due to the presence of his sergeant.

So, conflict. Great, conflict is what makes stories move, and I'm all ready for a fight. Only, then it doesn't happen. The sergeant just rides on out, and the other person suddenly dispenses wisdom and aid, and off they go with no fight.

No fight?

I'm taking a little time to explain how my expectations built up (and exaggerating them slightly) so you can see how it might be misleading, and take whatever steps you think need to be done to resolve that part of the chapter.

Also, with Coil asking Im what he would do had Fen been the one to die made me equate Fen and Rae in age as well, so I was surprised to find Fen acting older and with a lot more knowledge of what was going on, both in the watch and between Coil and Im. She may or may not be older; I don't think the text actually says, but I feel as if she's older, and that was a little jarring as well.

I did like the world building and personality of Fen otherwise, however. It was another good point to the story, and another promise of conflict in the future.

Finally, I thought the end of the chapter dragged on a little long. You set up that they need to be quick, and where they can find supplies. I'd find a way to cut it off there, with perhaps the line about saying goodbye -- we can imagine the rest of the action. Also, unless there is no place to show it later or there is another reason to be quick with confirmation of the relationship between Coil and Im, you might want to wait a bit to reveal it. I'm not sure if it's the right answer or not, but right now you've got me attached to Coil, while I don't feel anything much for Im (other than a slight annoyance that he didn't follow my invisible script for his behavior earlier in the chapter), so the relationship between them feels like just another data point, or something as background to be gotten out of the way. Looking back, I can see how it informs their actions, but I didn't feel it through the chapter, so it feels kind of... flat, or something.

I don't know, and I'm probably not at my most comprehensible right now, so I'll just leave it there and hope you can pull some useful information out of all these ramblings.

Edited by cjhuitt
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  • 2 weeks later...

I wanted to come back to this topic and this chapter because I just read the summary you sent with chapter 3, which says (in part):

Getting out of the Watches is a trickier thing than expected because Coil's ill-defined romantic partner, Irn, is on guard. Upon realizing the gravity of the situation, he insists to come along with Coil to his vigil. Coil, knowing the costs, denies him. They are interrupted by Irn's sister, the witchy and severe Fen. Somehow, she knows all about Coil's trouble and sends Irn off on a false task. Coil is free to leave everything he has ever known.

This wasn't exactly what I remembered; especially Fen sending Im on a false task, leaving Coil free to leave. Now that it is written that way, I can recall the end of chapter 2, and with this awareness understand what happened at the end of the chapter. However, it wasn't what I had understood to be happening the first (and second) time I read that chapter. I thought you might want to be aware of this, since it may both make it easier to understand my critique of the end of that chapter, and also so that you might give some thought as to if that sequence could be more clearly conveyed.

(Of course, there may always be some readers who end up not catching on to things like that, and though I don't like to think of myself as one of them, I have had similar misinterpretations in the past -- one most notably when discussing a book in one of my college literature classes.)

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