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krystalynn03

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Everything posted by krystalynn03

  1. Off topic here: but I did it. I submitted! I wrote a short story for a children's magazine, and I just submitted it. Needed to tell somebody!
  2. Hey Chuck, I agree with you about visual medium. Another thought I had while reading was that I felt like I was reading a screenplay more than a narrative. I think your DND thing can be used as a framing device; it just has to be implemented differently. Please keep working and submitting! (Also, hi @Mandamon!)
  3. Hey, Thanks for subbing. I liked some of the things you were doing, but it felt like I was being yanked back and forth way too much. I didn't realize the narrator was being unreliable at first, so rather than being amused at the cynical voice, I was taking it seriously. When I saw that you were splicing DND narration with more and more 'real life' narration, I was just annoyed as a reader. It's a pity. I saw that word 'Undergloom' in the first paragraph and that name felt so good in my head that I decided to give the writing a chance. Then you introduced a bunch of real characters all at once with less attention and care than the made-up DND characters. I have no idea how many people were in that scene, and I've got no one to root for. I'm curious enough about where you're going with the homo-others to want to peek at where you're taking this plot, but if you don't tidy up your narrative voice, I'll check out soon. Tell a clear story first--worry about wit later. Work on that, and I'd keep reading.
  4. Hey there <R>, I had today off for holiday, and reading subs in the warmth of bed late into the morning was great. Interestingly, I had easier time getting into this chapter than chapter one. Q &M had that textured, real feeling for me at the beginning that I really enjoy in characters. I like their tense relationship. It teases and hooks me. What didn't work for me was the middle chunk after they got into the car. There was so much description about the town and economics and history lost my attention through the middle third. I tuned back in for the ending of the chapter, but because I was skimming at that point to see if anything relevant to the characters' development, I lost the details of what exactly was going on. Anyway, quick thoughts, but those are the impressions that stuck with me hours later. /k
  5. Hey there @Mandamon, It's good to see a submission from you! I gave your chapter a quick read and have a few thoughts. Yes, I'm interested in the characters and problems. I would definitely read the next chapter. There were some moments that felt a little bumbling--a first or second draft type wording stuff--but overall, it worked well. I felt like some of the sentences were a little repetitious, like you were spelling out things the reader could infer just fine. I'm not going to go through and LBL it because I think you'll work them out naturally through revision work. I felt a little weird with the setting, having read some of your other work. Like, I felt like I needed something in the protag's background building to suggest that this is sci-fi/fantasy. Except for the weird dimming and the mysterious reason he won't go outside (which could be fantastic or normal), I'm not feeling the genre well, so that jarred me a little while trying to settle into what kind of world I'm in so I could start hypothesizing and wondering about what the problem could be. Hope you sub more!
  6. Aw! No kidding! I would have checked it out a lot sooner if I had known...
  7. @Mandamon Did I miss the announcement or something? When did this go up on Amazon?
  8. Hey @rdpulfer, I know I'm late to the game, but I just wanted to let you know I reread the polished up version, and I liked it just as much as the first time, and a lot of things that tripped me up then didn't trip me this time. I really buy the MC as a real person and love the setting and the colorful but not overwhelming side characters. My interest dropped a little on the last few pages, but I think that's mostly because I knew what the pay-off was. I didn't have that problem at all the first time.
  9. <R>...you're still the bomb-diggity. I'm really more embarrassed that you felt the need to apologize at all.
  10. @Mandamon You are the absolute bomb-diggity for not only reading the same basic chapter 3 times, but for giving useful feedback each go around. I'm emailing you digital cookies--though I i understand you should probably not eat them... @Ernei Thanks for jumping in despite not having the 16 chapters before. You gave me really good insight, even though the story's not to your taste. I don't think you're a middle grade reader...so I'm not terribly surprised by that. I know the inserted words bothered you and I respect, but I'm a bilingual teacher, so believe me, I see a plethora of language coping skills by students transitioning at all levels into English. Throwing out words from native tongue sounds like something you purposefully avoid, but in a culture where two language have been purposefully allowed to mix over the course of decades, it's not really a big deal. (Best sentence I've heard: One little boy say to another this year : "Tomorrow te va a salir CHEST HAIR!") Spanglish FTW. Also, thanks for letting me know about the sheep--that whole section is not actually about the sheep. It's set up for later and won't be apparent what I was setting up until later. It wasn't long enough that you quit reading, so I guess it wasn't too long. Thank you so much taking time to read and give me useful feedback. Oh good. I think I got this knocked into a better shape. If I recall, the last iteration didn't strike you so well, but I think I've got the arc headed in the right direction at last. Thank you so much!
  11. Feedback Stuff: What worked for you? What didn't? Resist the urge to go after typos--it's really late and I don't have time to have my friend comb though the draft for lices, eh, I mean splices! (See what I did there?)
  12. Hi there, TKWade! First and foremost, I want to thank you for being brave enough to join a group like this and submit. It's not easy to do and releasing something you've worked hard on into the hands of strangers and waiting to see what they do or don't do with it isn't as it seems. I'm going to give you some good stuff and some not so good stuff, and you can decide what you do from there. First, I want to praise you for having a strong sense of grammar and vocabulary. You want to fill your text with imagery and give your readers pictures from your mind and that's good. You've put thought and work into world-building and it shows. However, there are some pretty glaring 'newbie' flaws that you can stop that will instantly take you to the next level. Firstly, kill the expanded setting description; even when experienced writers start a book out with a sweeping battle scene, they're playing 50/50 with me as to whether or not I'll bother getting past the initial, enormous crisis to see what the real plot is. When readers open a book, we want a hook. This particular piece of writing by you doesn't give me anything in the first page to latch onto and care about. Readers care about people, not crumbling cities. I see you introduce some characters down the way--but I don't want to sift through all the words at the beginning to get there and see if I care about those people or not. I did read a sentence--a part of one--that I liked a lot: "Ash covered everything." If you started the setting out like that, it would have pulled me in harder. I'd want to know what was causing the ash: volcano eruption, atomic bomb fallout--what? Sometimes simple is more evocative than big. Keep writing and submitting--don't get too bogged down revising and editing. Just work on having fun and getting good story and good characters onto the page. Thanks for sharing!
  13. I would call this an adverbial participle phrase and it's working parenthetically--meaning you can take it out and the sentence still stands. Therefore, those commas aren't splicing. Splicing is when you take two independent clauses and try to glue them together with a weak little comma. Putting "in line" at the front of sentence without "dripping" makes it: In line my phone rings. Putting the phrase "in line" at the beginning is an odd construction, but it's purposeful--meant to contribute to the tight, quick narrative voice she's using. (I assume!)
  14. Hey there Hobbit, This had a really different feel, being a different genre and a different voice from other submission. I liked the quick tempo and the very modern style. It matched subject matter well. There were a few places where a turn of dialogue was a little much--where it grew a little tired for me, but overall I enjoyed reading it. I didn't feel like it was 3k long, which is a good thing. I think digging into the characters a little deeper, developing them a little clearer so that there's more of a suggestion of who they are beyond the principal matter of to or not to love would make those conversation points resolve themselves and the overall thing would tighten up a bit and add more poignancy. I see what you're hinting at behind the scenes, though I do rather like that MC is completely oblivious. I don't get the tea at the end, though. I know Dragon was drinking it and all, but there wasn't enough evidence to push me to draw any kind of interesting conclusion. If there's something there for me to synthesize, I missed it. Overall, I liked it and thanks for sharing!
  15. I think I'd like to submit. I want to see if the changes I've made are working before committing too hard to what I've done...
  16. I look forward to reading your post! I hope I can learn something new from what you shared!
  17. Hey Hobbit, I'm struggling with this sub for the same reason I struggled with the prologue. I just can't get a quick enough grasp on the protag to feel really grounded. There's not enough suspense, nothing at risk yet, for me to really invest in, so I'm not really interest in 4 or 5 pages of a meeting to discuss legalities and politics. The content's just not framed right for a book beginning. I'd like to have some reason, some something of Aurem to snag onto before getting into a sequence like this. His introduction as a character is all focused on some scumbag who isn't even present. Tropes don't bother me. There's a reason tropes are tropes. However, I do need something as a reader to latch onto if I'm going to sign up for a ride through any novel. I do like your ability to go deep third person and hope you channel it better. Have you thought of doing a character study like @Robinski? It really ramped his style!
  18. I know I'm super late to the party, but I hung onto your submission for when I was done with other priorities, and it looks like you've already been handed a handful of stuff to look at. I'll just say I have to second everyone who had trouble finding something to hang onto. I don't know anything about Elias so it made it hard to invest in anything following. I am glad you've joined the group and I'm going to move on to see your other subs now. It seems the first couple subs are always the 'roughest'--opening a book seems a lot harder than continuing a story once you've got it in your readers' minds.
  19. I actually went online and read what the ending was to see if it was worth getting back in digital line to wait for the book all over again...and wasn't sold. Since I didn't care enough about either of the two protags I didn't care about their well, how things end up. I think the final twist sounds good, but the journey getting their didn't sell me. Again, this being an audio book I might have had a different feel if I'd been controlling the pacing of the book with my eyes rather than relying on a static pacing as given by a reader.
  20. So much yes to this! At first glance when the show was on Nickelodeon back in the day, I thought Zuko was a whiny teenager and it was a major turn-off, but when I watched the show and saw what he became as a character, I was sold. I can't decide whether I like him or Iroh best. They had the most fulfilling arc, imho. I guess the technique I learn from this is...it's okay to start with an unlikeable character? I don't know--in fiction that seems harder to do than a cartoon because in fiction you spend so much more time in a characters head and you don't bounce around like a cartoon. I don't think I would enjoy an entire novel of just Zuko, you know?
  21. I just read/abandoned this book as well, so it's especially interesting to hear someone else's thoughts. When the book opens up, the world-building and character intros and imagery drew me in hard, and I really enjoyed it. However, the relentlessly wandering POV killed the book for me. I got as far as one of the character's finding out who her opponent was (note I can't even remember said protagonist's name after listening to 2/3 of the book) and realized my library license was up and decided not to get in line to recheck it out (audio loan). I think Morgenstern's level of imagery is something that I can appreciate passively as I read, but I certainly wouldn't want to try to emulate it. I get why it's popular, but the characters didn't sell me hard enough. They were interesting, but like you pointed out, the narrative jumped around so much that I never got invested. It does give interesting perspective on the whole POV jump thing!
  22. This is fascinating. What prompted you to try this? Was it your own idea or did you read about it somewhere? @Coop
  23. Sometimes I read a book and want to talk about the book like a writer would. I don't have (m)any real life friends who think that way, although I do have many who do love to read. They just don't think about books the way writers do. I thought it would be fun to start a thread where we discuss published books from the point of view of writers--things we learned from analysis or things we notice that made them satisfying reads. I'm thinking technique, not content. For example, I watched a cartoon series you've probably heard of: Avatar the Last Airbender. I got into it years after the popularity came and went, but once I started watching, I just couldn't stop. I totally binge-watched it. Later, I wondered what it was about it that made me unable to stop, so I rewatched some, reread summaries of the episodes, and took notes on what the story did to analyze all its pieces. What I found out from doing this was that the setting changed nonstop. No episodes stayed in one place for very long until the season finales and even those bounced around the city or whatever. When I compared this to my own writing, i realized that a lot of sequences that I thought 'dragged' were successions of scenes all using the same setting. Upon rewrite, I consciously changed that, and it worked. It made the whole thing move faster. I have more examples similar to this, but I'll just share this one to kick off the thread. So what about you guys? Have you read/watched something and learned something from the technique you saw that you applied or could apply to your own craft?
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