Jan 9 2012 – Asmodemon – Maiden of Thorns Chapter 8

[Asmodemon]

In this chapter we go back to Rosalin. I’ve gone back to edit the fourth chapter and removed the encounter on the plains at the end, it just didn’t work for me anymore.

[Aminar]

In this chapter we go back to Rosalin. I’ve gone back to edit the fourth chapter and removed the encounter on the plains at the end, it just didn’t work for me anymore.

I haven't read any of the earlier stuff. That colors this badly, in that I have no idea whats going on. That said, all in all this chapter does a decent job of catching my attention.

From what I've noticed you have great ideas, a solid character, good side characters and the like, but sloppy prose. You use words that are similar to close to each other, overuse pronouns, etc. This is all something that can be edited easily, and something that is both fine and normal in a rough draft. One of the reasons I took forever to start writing was because I'm super anal about my prose. I'll spend half an hour trying to find a why to word a sentence so that it doesn't start with the same word as the last one. It slows things down.

You need to be careful about pronouns and sentence subjects too. Occasionally they get confused. Your phrasing is occasionally awkward as well.

That said, I liked what I read. It's just an early draft.

Last thing, and this might be more personal preference than anything else, I hate the word AND. It gets overused. I find that quite often semicolons work better; splitting the sentence works well when qualifying a point where too many ands feels awkward. Sometimes its even necessary to just use two sentences instead too.

My 112,538 word work in progress averages 1.8 semicolons per page and 9 ands, but and is the second most used word in almost any document. The is the most common, and first person books will often have more uses of the word I. But and is used alot. Trying not to use it too much is important.

(To cget your word density go here, it is super handy. http://rainbow.arch.scriptmania.com/tools/word_counter.html)

[cjhuitt]

Of the plot lines so far, I've enjoyed Rosalin's the most, so I was happy to get back to her. I also enjoyed this chapter in general, so don't take my critique as all-bad. I just tend to concentrate on things that confuse me or make me stop and think "huh?", or areas I think could be improved.

Right off the bat, I think this might be improved by some stronger language in spots. As Aminar alluded to, a little wordsmithing might be appropriate. In the beginning, I thought things like "cold" was a little overused, especially in the third paragraph where tears were running down her cheeks. Something like frozen or frigid might be better than just "cold". I also noticed a few softening words, like "she was so cold and tired" instead of "she was cold and tired". Well, softening might not be the correct term, but extraneous in my opinion. Other ones I see often (though not necessarily in your piece, I'm just mentioning them) that are more softening are things like "nearly", "almost", and their ilk.

I was also confused by the reference to "the city" right at the beginning, as if this was a goal Rosalin had been working toward, but I didn't recall this goal from the previous chapter. Last I recall, Rosalin was looking for her own village again. I realize you said you've edited that chapter, so perhaps it's been changed already. I mention it just so you can be sure to introduce this as a goal somewhere before we come across it, either in the previous chapter or right at the beginning of this one.

"Above the closed gate three banners dangled." This sentence seemed backwards to me. For variety, it's not so bad, but it did catch my attention on parsing the sentence instead of immediately understanding what you are trying to say. It depends on how transparent you want your prose to be.

Right when Rosalin gets to the door, you have a couple of places where you refer to her opinions or thought processes directly that I think aren't needed. "She wondered if they'd attack her too" could just be "Would they attack her too?" Likewise, "enough space ... that she felt she could run" could just be "enough space ... to run".

A couple of dialog miscues or typos: "I'd hate to turn down anyone at the gate [...] I urge you to anyway." To what? "it never ain't been the problem." Was this phrasing intentional? "...seated on the dirt of the terraces that lined street." Something seems to be missing there.

As an aside from my criticism, I liked how you gave the guards two distinct voices.

When Rosalin entered the city, someone whistled. Was it at her? Something else? I didn't know why that was mentioned. What was it supposed to convey?

In the tavern, "a serving girl squealed at the sound of men laughing." Wouldn't it be more the men laughing at her reaction to something they did? Or does she really squeal when men laugh?

Most of the tavern part I read right through without any hiccups, so that went well. I did wonder if all of this would be needed in the end, or if some of it should maybe be trimmed, but I can't speak to that until I read the rest of the story.

At the end, Rosalin decides to go off into a darkish outhouse in order to investigate her wounds? Actually, it may have been in order to find water to splash on her face, but once there she does some investigating. When she started noticing all of the damage to her body, I was wondering why she was doing the investigating now. The very end of the chapter implied she was doing it for plot purposes, whereas I would have expected her to investigate her wounds -- at least the arm, and her side where she didn't really want to look -- at some point when she was clearly safe and had good sight-lines before she actually got to the city. I mean, if she was that worried about it, why walk half a day to the city, start looking for someone to tell her where her village is, and only then decide to investigate the wound? If you still want to have her not show injury in front of someone who reminds her of her sister, she can re-check the wound to see if it's getting any worse, or something like that.

Finally, with the description of the city and how everyone is packed in waiting for an invasion, I assume this is the same city as Dais. I'm sure I'll find out if it is or not, but that's what it feels like. I thought I'd let you know about this, so you can either chuckle to yourself, tap your fingertips together, and say, "it's working", or you can decide if you want to try and distinguish the cities some more if that's not what you want to have happen.