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Dec 3 - Syme - A King's Death Prologue + Chapter 1 (V)


Syme

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Hi Syme,

I’m new to the forum too and this is actually my first critique here. If you want me to clarify anything, please just ask.

Prologue

Just listened to the latest WE podcast today on beginnings and they made a very interesting point about setting up a scene with dialogue. I want to point out first that I actually really love the dialogue you have in the opening scene but it is a bit disorienting, especially since there are so many foreign names. I think this dialogue has a place, I just don’t know if its place is at the very beginning.

That said, Dan made a good point that sometimes you want itto come across disorienting (I think they mentioned ‘Ender’s Game’ and Dan’s own ‘Hollow City’) so it’s good for you to know if that’s the effect you’re going for.

I questioned Lysandros being at the front of the line. I understand that he would want to lead his men into battle, but isn’t the King usually protected at the back of the line and often not even involved in the actually hand-to-hand fighting? If it’s essential to have him on the front line, you may need to justify that. I don’t know, see what other people think.Maybe I’m to only one that needs that kind of justification. J

Also, can I say I really love the names you’ve come up with.Lysandros. That’s such a great name for a King.

Here’s a bit of a continuity confusion: in the beginningdialogue, you mention that the Yacatu are better organized than the Sarkis, butas Lysandros is going into battle he says the Yacatu lines are disorganized.You actually mention a few times how ill-coordinated the Yacatu are, so maybewhen you were saying they were better organized before, it was in reference tosomething else??

I really love the detail you’re giving, it immediately sets the tone that this is an epic fantasy and I (the reader) have just been thrown into what’s looking to be an epic battle.

I got thrown off not knowing what the peltast and Lykanides were, even a minor description would be helpful.

I also think you need to explain what or who the hoplites are, earlier on. The first time I get a rough idea of what they are is when the army is in full retreat.

I’m getting the impression that Lysandros’ death/defeat (cuz at this point I don’t actually know for sure that he is dead) is crucial. The dialogue earlier on did help me get into his head a bit, helped me empathize with him (I liked him, kinda sad he’s likely dead now). I lost that a little bit during the battle because I was getting a lot of what was happening to him/around him, but not really how he was internally reacting/feeling about anyof it. And since this is the first time I’ve met Lysandros, I need to know why his death/defeat should matter to me (a caveat is that you may spend the entire book revealing this, I just want to point out that it is now a promise you will need to fulfill).

Chapter 1

I understand that Leontas already knew the King was dead but I would like to know what everyone else thought of that. Did everyone else know too? There doesn't seem to be a noticeable reaction.

I liked the comparison of the treatment of slaves as a way to differentiate between the two cultures (although I would like to know what the difference between a helot and slave is – if you answer that later then don’t worry about it.)

I could use a little clarification around what Sarkis is in relation to Thereos. Are they both kingdoms? Provinces? (I know you call them city states but what does that really mean? Is Lysandros the King of the whole lot or just the King of Sarkis? Again,something that you might explain later and if so…I would recommend sooner rather than later because I think it’s setting the scene and trying to sort it out is taking away from the issue at hand, which is: who is Leontas and what is he up to?)

I liked Leontas’ commentary as he observes the proceedings.He’s a nice choice for a POV and seems like just the person to follow around and find out what’s really going on.

I had a little trouble believing that each of the 10 000 men present at the council would get to speak. That would take forever!

Whew! That was a lot of information for a short prologue and a chapter but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I did feel a bit like I’d been thrown into the deep end but if anything it made me so curious, I’d have to keep reading just to get my questions answered. The story intrigues me,there’s a lot of juicy politics in this that could get so interesting.

I think this could be the start to a really fantastic story,it might just need a bit more fleshing out. Also, I really like your prose, I think that the way you’ve written it is excellent, so well done. I’m in the process of writing my first novel too so I know how daunting this can be, but I think you’re off to a great start.

Cheers,

Hal

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Welcome to Reading Excuses!

Forst off, understand that I enjoyed reading your work- the prose was nice and quick and made for an enjoyable read.

Now for some critique...

As to the general setting, it is painfully obvious that your world is based off ancient Greece. They have Greek sounding names, fight in a phalanx, live in city states that are all part of some overarching country... Also, Sarkis is clearly Sparta- they enslave helots, they're known as feirce fighters and cruel people people etc. And Thereos is clearly Athens- they're Sarkis's rivals, they have a sort of democracy, they have a strong fleet...

It isn't a bad thing to base your setting off an ancient culture, but when it's so obvious it pulls you out of the story and makes you keep looking for the ways it's similar to said culture.

Now for some more secific things:

The fight with the muscular barbarian- I was rather confused here- the barbarian hits Lysandros's shield with a wooden sword and shards of obsidian go flying? And then after he's stabbed he raises his sword to strile again- isn't his sword shattered.

Call to retreat- I find it unlikely that Lysandros's yell to retreat would pass quickly enough through 2000 men for them to retreat in an prderly fashion. You might want to have him blow a horn or something...

A King's Death- Because of your book's tital, I foresaw Lysandros's death from the moment you called him a king- you might want to change what your book is called unless his death wasn't meant to be surprising.

That's all I can think of for now, and though it may seem a bit harsh- we challenge each others' work like this all the time- so don't worry about it and keep writing. (I'm only saying this because I became convinced I was a terrible writer after my frst critique before I read through some other critiques and realized everybody was critiqued terribly)

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(I'm only saying this because I became convinced I was a terrible writer after my frst critique before I read through some other critiques and realized everybody was critiqued terribly)

Hope we didn't traumatize you too much, Trizee! I looked back and realized I was the second one to critique you...

Anyway, on to dashing new dreams... ;)

Prologue:

as Trizee said, I'm guessing the prologue includes the named Death of the King, but I'm left not really knowing how it's relevant. As Halcyon said, there are a lot of names and places flying around, and it was only looking back through a second time that I realized Lysantos was king of Sarkis, not Thereos. I assume they are all together to throw back the Yacatu.

There's also a lot of names starting with the same letter (for example, "L") and it gets confusing as to who is who.

Some subtle grammar things: your paragraps are not indented--don't know if this is from moving to pdf. Also, thoughts are usually italicised, not underlined.

Chapter 1

I have to say, I got bored about halfway through the first chapter. There's lots of politicking going on, but still no real punch for the story. I get that the Yacatu are invading, and all these nation-states need to work together instead of fighting?

Technically it's well written, but I had trouble caring for any of the characters. Most of it is not, in fact, about the enemy which is destroying them, but instead about another nation-state. The Thereos people describe the Sarkians as evil, but then talk about negotiating with them. We already know they are fighting together, from the prologue. Why are they debating this now that they are already committed?

This book is putting me in mind of the Illiad. However, the Illiad only takes place in the final battle at the very walls of the city they are attacking. The Illiad is all about heroic characters fighting other heroic characters (on their side and the other side). Any war planning to start attacking Troy must have come far before the first word of the story.

Now that's obviously several thousand years away from our current writing style, but some things still hold. I would suggest you want to start this story with introductions of the characters and why we care about them, not what they think about international politics. Put the debating about what to do either before your story happens, or after you have established what the story is about and why we care about one nation over another (or better, one character over another)

I think this story has promise, and I think your writing style is firm, but you need to draw me in with the first chapter (or first page) so that I will be willing to get this book over the hundreds of others in my reading list.

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@Halycon

Thanks so much for this very detailed citique.

I realize that I'm throwing readers into the deep end here, but I think it's necessary to keep the pace of the story quick. As a reader, I always hate it when authors break POV to infodump or take ages explaining things before getting on with the story.

However, in reading your critique and in a fashion seeing the story with fresh eyes, I realize that there are some things which could be made clearer like what peltasts and hoplites are. My setting is heavily based on ancient

Greece and some of the terms used in my novel are taken directly from ancient Greece (like hoplite, peltast or helot), but a lot of readers may not be familiar with them, so I guess I need to drop a line or two of explanation here and there.

Lysandros being in the front line makes sense given the setting.

Thanks for pointing out the bit about organisation, I now realize this is confusing. The Yacatu army as a whole is organized in the sense that their troops can move quickly and with good coordination because they are united under a single leader, whereas the Daeolians have several different leaders and coordination is difficult.

@Trizee

You're right of course that Daeolia is based on ancient Greece, Thereos is based on Athens and Sarkis on Sparta. It's supposed to be obvious, but I don't think that's a bad thing.

As for the command to retreat, I don't think it's unrealistic that a well trained army could perform such a manoeuvre in a relatively organized fashion. The fact that they're in a tightly packed phalanx also makes coordination easier.

Even though I disagree with most of your criticism, I'm still grateful for your critique and I'll take what you wrote under consideration.

@Mandamon

You're right about the paragraphs, that's my bad. As for the underlining, I think it's standard practice to use underlining in manuscripts to indicate italics because underlining is easier to see.

You're right that there are some somewhat similar names, it's an issue I've considered myself, but I'm not quite sure if it really needs fixing.

I think the questions you have about chapter 1 are actually all answered within the text. What I'll take away from that is that I'll need to make some things more explicit so as to not confuse readers too much.

I'll also look to include more character building early on.

Thank you for your critique.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I really liked the action part from the prologue. You conveyed the setting really well, including the phalanx formation and how men fought in it. I wasn't bothered by the obvious greek setting - it felt comfortable for me to have a known setting.

Now, the dialogue part in the prologue didn't really work for me. I needed to go back a couple of times to check who was whom - probably due to the fact that there are too many names here (whether locations or character names). The first paragraph felt a bit too info-dumpy for me (sounded like Lysandros was stating something everyone knew just for my benefit).

I can see why the king would be in the front line (even though experienced officers should be on the rear lines to acquire some perspective). What troubled me was the order to retreat. The strength of a phalanx is to maintain a straight shield wall for your enemies to break themselves into. As such, phalanxes are not able to change direction and that's their weakness. Asking a phalanx to withdraw can't be done in an orderly fashion, so really Lysandros was asking for a rout when he signaled the withdrawal. Why were no reserves kept to help with the second army they knew was coming?

Now, I would ask as I do in every prologue submitted here : does the prologue need to be there for the story to work? Given what I've seen so far from your story, you could do without (this is what Dan would call an Ice Monster Prologue intended to give the reader some action early on).

For chapter I, again I found the speeches to be too directed at exposition. I know people in those times liked big monologues, but for today's audience, this is hard to stomach. As the others said, I didn't really get much from the character's POV here besides the fact that he's a politician accustomed to manipulating crowds.

I haven't checked, but I think 10 000 people is a very large number for an assembly inside a city.

The two parts were well written and quite enjoyable to read.

Note : underlining is an old convention (it was designed to help typesetters work with manuscripts typed on paper). With word processors, it isn't necessary anymore and is now considered bad form.

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Thank you for your feedback, akoebel.

I'm no longer entirely happy with the opening scene, either. I think I tried a bit too hard there to keep things short and move along quickly.

I'm currently contemplating several options on how to change the beginning. One is to keep things mostly as they are, but add a scene or two at the start to ease the reader into the story and to have a bit more time to establish Lysandros as a character. The second option is to completely scrap the prologue and start with what is now chapter 2, followed by what is now chapter 1. And the last option I'm considering is to start the whole story a few months earlier at the start of the war against the Yacatu. This would give me plenty of space to set up Lysandros as a fully fleshed out character and would make his failure and his death more surprising and give it a stronger emotional impact.

For the moment, however, I'll just keep writing on and I'll go back to fix the beginning later.

As for the whole retreat part, I'm not entirely sure myself how realistic that is. My research hasn't really turned up much on that topic, so I just used my imagination and my best judgement. The reason they didn't keep any reserves is that the war had already been going quite badly and this attack was basically an all-in move; they were gambling that the other Yacatu army would not arrive in time. Besides, they were already stretched quite thin and didn't have enough hoplites to keep any sort of reserve.

My research indicates that 10k at an assembly is not unreasonable. The assembly in classical Athens routinely had somewhere around 6k people attending.

Not sure on the whole underlining vs italics. I've looked into this some more and found conflicting information on this. Seems like some people say you should still underline, others say that underlining is outdated and yet others say that either is fine.

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I had some of the concerns with the prologue expressed here, especially regarding the similarity to Greek culture and the terminology. For the first, when something is this obviously based on Greek history I would usually expect to either have the actual Greek names (at which point I'd start to think of it as an alternate history, or possibly historical retelling), or to factor strongly into the world building and history of the story, with that to be revealed later. Since it isn't the former, I would assume the later and withhold judgement for a while until that could be clarified, though it initially makes be a little dubious.

For the terminology, I've been working on noticing how other (published) authors introduce things like this (as well as handle description), and have basically found that what seems overboard to me while writing is actually sparse relative to some of the published works. Of course, it needs to be inserted in the correct place, and polished, etc., but right now I'd recommend filling in the broad strokes for most of the terms. Especially in the first couple of chapters of a SF&F novel, I expect to get little tidbits of background info scattered in with the text, to better help me understand the story.

As for what happens in the prologue, I'd suggest either looking at cutting it, or expanding it just slightly. If you take the second option, I would suggest getting a little deeper into Lysandros' head to show his thoughts and emotions throughout. Especially in the beginning, he should be frustrated both at the course of the war so far, and also that he has to convince the others to do what he sees as obviously correct. (This might also give you an opportunity to directly contrast this need with the savage's commands-from-on-high advantage.) Once he gets his way, of course, then he can turn to worrying about if they have waited too late anyway, possibly as he presses forward with his men the next morning.

On the phalanx organization and retreat, what you say makes sense, but so do the critiques to me. I can go with the king being in front (especially if we get a bit of thought detailing why he feels he has to be there), but during the course of battle, they almost certainly have to have some way of communicating beyond just one man shouting orders.

In my limited knowledge, phalanxes also seem to work best with other units supporting them, such as bowmen. Of course, bowmen may not exact fit the historical feel you are going for, but you might also want to have Lysandros lament how their structure also makes it so they can't rely on each other to support when needed.

On to the first chapter. I agree with the others that it takes some of the tension and loses it --it unfortunately reminds me of a long meeting at work with a few too many people present. I'm not positive how to solve this, especially in the context of your story, but one possibility would be to focus more on Leontas' goals and his anticipation in achieving at least one of them, if things go as he plans during the assembly. This would allow you to add a touch of tension to the proceedings, plus possibly gloss over a bit more of the speeches while still giving us the information in them (by Leontas summarizing them with editorial comment).

Perhaps another option would be to trim a lot of the beginning, and have it start right before Leontas is to give his own comments. It would still show a touch of the proceedings, but the text could quickly summarize the debate occurring and move right into his introduced change. This depends on how much attention you want to draw to Lysandros' death, though.

Finally, on the italics debate, I personally find italics easier to read in a setting like this, but I know and understand the underlining tradition as well, so it's no more than a hiccup to what I'm reading. If I were to vote, however, I'd vote for avoiding the hiccups.

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Thanks a lot for your comments, I'll take them under advisement.

I'm not quite sure what you meant by this:

For the first, when something is this obviously based on Greek history I would usually expect to either have the actual Greek names (at which point I'd start to think of it as an alternate history, or possibly historical retelling), or to factor strongly into the world building and history of the story, with that to be revealed later.

In particular, I didn't quite understand the bolded part. Could you elaborate on that?

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In particular, I didn't quite understand the bolded part. Could you elaborate on that?

The best I think I can do is give examples. One would be Katherine Kerr's Daggerspell/Darkspell series -- all of it, really -- which has strong Celtic signs in the setting throughout, and in the end there is a good reason why it seems so much like the Celtic culture we know. Another, slightly less so, is Jim Butcher's Furies of Calderon series, that has a very strong Roman/Latin vibe, and we eventually find out that (very minor spoiler) the people populating the world had originally come from the Roman Empire.

In possibly redundant explanation, with the incredibly strong parallels to Greek history that I know, I would expect there to be a reason embedded into the worldbuilding for that similarity to be there. A slightly distorted mirror version of our world, for example, or something like that.

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I don't have an explicit reason in my worldbuilding for why there is something resembling ancient Greek culture. There's a few reasons why I don't simply use actual ancient Greece and insert some magical elements. First of all, the geography is different. Not only is Daeolia geographically different from Greece, the continent surrounding Daeolia is not Europe, but is actually based on the Americas. Secondly, the history of Daeolia is different from the history of real world Greece. And lastly, the religion and mythology also differ.

I find that this combination of real world aspects and new ideas gives me a setting that is unique, but also strongly grounded in reality.

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I don't have an explicit reason in my worldbuilding for why there is something resembling ancient Greek culture. There's a few reasons why I don't simply use actual ancient Greece and insert some magical elements. First of all, the geography is different. Not only is Daeolia geographically different from Greece, the continent surrounding Daeolia is not Europe, but is actually based on the Americas. Secondly, the history of Daeolia is different from the history of real world Greece. And lastly, the religion and mythology also differ.

I find that this combination of real world aspects and new ideas gives me a setting that is unique, but also strongly grounded in reality.

This is fine, and I hope that's part of what excites you about the story. Either way, I wouldn't worry about it too much at this point in time; I was just giving you my own reactions to a piece like this. I know this isn't alternate history, exactly, but it feels kind of that way to me, and I'll admit up front that I'm not generally a reader of alternate history either, so it might just be my own preferences speaking.

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