Scholomancer 01182016 Chapters 60, 61, 62, 63 and Epilogue (4294 words) (L)

[rdpulfer]

Robert Renfield betrayed his Master Dracula and left him at the bottom of the ocean. One year later, the hunters of Westenra continue the search for Dracula, unaware of their development. Their lead agent, Stephanie Van Helsing, is suffering from mysterious visions and soon finds herself on the run after being framed for the death of a colleague. Tracking down Renfield, she is eventually brought before the Council, a group of monsters who opposed Dracula. Alongside the werewolf Bannister, the Bride of Frankenstein Evelyn and the mummy Rewer, Stephanie and Renfield find the Wisdom of Solomon responsible for triggering Stephanie's visions. 

 

After finding the scroll, they are attacked by rogue hunters sent by Stephanie's treacherous mentor Irving. Stephanie is forced to kill one of them to protect her allies. When more hunters arrive, Renfield provides a distraction while the others escape, planning to move the Wisdom of Solomon to a secure location. However, Stephanie is betrayed by Rewer - revealed to the be the Buyer - while the hunters catch up with Renfield, who escapes after learning of Rewer's treachery. Meanwhile, the captive Stephanie talks to Irving about the impending Scholomance and is apparently able to fool her captors into thinking she is having a vision. Though Irving discovers her ruse, Stephanie is able to escape, drugging Irving with the sedative meant for her. Meanwhile, Renfield and his allies plan to lure the hunters to the ceremony to stop the Scholomance.

 

The plan works, as Stephanie, Renfield and the hunters all converge as Rewer summons an army of golems to come his aid. Renfield self-detonates C4 near a golem to set out an explosion to stop Rewer, but not before he is caught in the blast range...

[Mandamon]

Notes first:

 

pg 1: "She had to stay focus if any of them had a chance of getting out of her alive."

--focused, here

 

pg 1: "It didn’t matter, not to the mission at end."

--??

 

pg 1: "It stood suspended twenty feet above all of them."

--There's a lot happening while the golem is poised above them.

 

pg 2: "Rewer smelled like roadkill roasting on a hot summer day."

--can she smell him from down on the ground, 20 feet away?  Or is he not on the golem?  Where is Rewer standing anyway?

 

pg 3: "Stephanie was done hearing listening to him."

--hearing listening

 

pg 3: "Rewer’s oil-stained lap."

--Is he sitting on the ground?

 

pg 5: "Then she punched him in the left shoulder."

--Really?  Punching a man with broken bones?  That's some sadism.

 

pg 6: "Renfield noticed the slightest curve to Evelyn’s lips as she faced Bannister, and he wondered if she might be looking at Bannister for another reason."

--Eh?  What's going on here?  I don't remember any attraction between these two.

 

pg 8: "Stephanie cut him off. “I’m sure our questions can wait until then.”"

--Is this Stephanie talking?  Or Sean?  It's in Sean's paragraph, but Stephanie cut him off.

 

pg 9: "not the final copy.”

--not the ONLY copy.

 

pg 12: "That’s in the past now.” Stephanie said."

--actually, I'm sort of on her father's side.  Renfield and Bannister are provable murderers.

 

pg 15:  Stephanie's father just sort of shows up in a phone call now that everything's past.  If he is actually the head of the company, why hasn't anyone contacted him?  Why hasn't he called?  He doesn't seem very good at responding to monster threats.

 

pg 17: "a couple members of the board got out"

--Those were the members of Quaris' board, correct?

 

pg 19: "see ya at the next session:

--which session is this?

"as he prepared to drift off to sleep. As he lingered off into sleep"

--repeated phrase

 

pg 21: "Serena,”

--Stephanie's sister, right?

 

Epilogue:  Not completely sure what I feel about this.  In one sense, it seems like the last half of the book was all a setup for this chapter.  In another it feels like it's just there to promo the next book.  

It does answer some of the questions raised in the last chapter, but it feels too pat.  How did Serena get created when Dracula is buried under the sea?  I don't have a good sense of the timing.  Both Serena and Stephen are, in essence, new characters introduced in the last three chapters of the book just to explain things.

 

 

Overall thoughts:

This has lots of potential, but needs a bit of work.

 

1) Irving and Jason - Neither character works for me as is.  Irving is not consistent in what he wants and his reasons for playing traitor.  Jason is just a jerk and Stephanie would never have started a relationship with him.

 

2) Plot - I've marked quite a few logical inconsistencies as I've read along.  I think the overall scope of the plot is ok (maybe with some tweaks on Serena's involvement popping up only in the epilogue), but often getting from one place to another has issues.

 

3) Relationships:  Stephanie and Renfield, Evelyn and Bannister (evidently), Stephanie and Jason, Irving and Rebecca.  Either the relationship doesn't seem like it's developed enough, or has serious problems.  I never really felt like Renfield and Stephanie clicked at all.

 

4) Blocking:  Fight scenes and people placement often have issues.

 

5) Copy editing - needs a good once-over to get all the typos, repeated phrases, and so on.

 

If you have any specific questions, let me know and I can provide more feedback.

[Asmodemon]

My overall feeling with the whole ending is that it is unsatisfying, you’ve started a lot of things through the story, but they either don’t go anywhere (relationships, vampires) or they do (ritual, Big Bad), but when the end comes it is (on the whole) unsatisfying. Tightening up the story will help, since the grammar and spelling issues detracted from the reading experience.

 

Golems: I was expecting some prehistoric monsters rising out of the ground when Rewer used his power, not golems. Certainly not fully readied and prepared golems with sigils on their heads – if Rewer was animating the ground I’d expect them to live and die solely on his command.

 

Bullet: One bullet is all it takes for the rocket to explode. This reads very much like an action-movie trope, especially since our heroine manages it with one bullet at the key time.

 

Rewer: The great mummy, who just a few chapters ago used the dead skin cells on a man’s face to kill him, falls so easily by fire. There was no real battle, he just stood (did he stand on the golem?) on his golem, got blown off his golem, and set on fire with a lighter. That’s a big anti-climax to me. Apparently the priests of old tried anything except set a dried out corpse on fire like kindling…

 

Blackmail: How quickly Stephanie resorts to blackmail to gain control of the company. Now, Sean is an cremhole and he deserves what he gets, but after everything that happened I wonder at how easily Stephanie uses Irving’s legacy to usurp control. Did she even consider weeding out all the bad seeds and gaining control that way? Speaking of Sean, he has no redeeming qualities and it’s a wonder he got in charge in the first place. Maybe you should reconsider his role.

 

Bannister/Evelyn: they seem to have a relationship, but it’s never really confirmed, and it never really goes anywhere.

 

Renfield/Stephanie: The same here, there are implications and groundwork that there may be something growing between the two of them, but it doesn’t go anywhere either. Neither really acknowledges it and just brushes it off, like it doesn’t matter. And so, in the grand scheme of the story, it doesn’t matter. And that’s a pity. Attraction between these enemies would bring an emotional tension to the story, especially combined with the fact that Stephanie is already in a relationship. But alas, aside from hints there is nothing.

 

Stephanie/Harker: Don’t believe these two should be a couple. Harker is nothing but an cremhole and frankly speaking not that competent. The relationship that is there is abusive and while that could be interesting, the story doesn’t really go there. I can’t think of many action-hero type heroines that, while kickass against monsters, are also in an abusive relationship. That is difficult to write though.

 

Father: This is the first time the father is in the story, so I have no real idea what this character is like. He can’t be a good guy, because Stephanie feels like she needs to blackmail her uncle in order to deal with her father, rather than joining her father in cleaning house of the bad seeds. Like most of Westenra he doesn’t believe in Stephanie, or in the things she says or does. Yet on the other hand he does go along with her plan (just like Harker did in the last submission). Why? It feels too easy. On the one hand you create conflict, but on the other it is resolved instantly because Stephanie gets her will anyway.

 

Serena: Ah, the so called dead sister. It doesn’t surprise me that she is alive, but I’m not sold on her being the secret mastermind all along. Or for her being part of the ceremony and everything else. She doesn’t have any presence in the story itself, or maybe I just missed them, so having her in the epilogue is to tease a sequel and nothing else. That feels cheap, in my opinion.

 

Irving: Still not a fan of him.

 

Vampires: The vampires were working for Rewer right? Since they were pretty denigrating to Dracula (and Serena calls Dracula her lord, so they couldn’t have worked for her) they must have, but you never go into why or how. Apparently they switched sides before Renfield sunk his master in a submarine, but how can that be? And they’re only there for one brief cameo, also a pity. If they worked for Rewer, why weren’t they present at the ritual?

[rdpulfer]

Thanks for the continued feedback, Mandamon and Asmodemon . . . believe me, I have a lot of notes to go through on the next few drafts, so I'll be reworking this novel for a while.

 

I'm definitely going to work on toning down the characters/relationships a bit so Jason seems like less a tool while Stephanie and Renfield advance only as far as slightly-less-than-uneasy allies. 

 

Here's some questions i still have for those that have read the whole thing:

 

Should I keep Irving as a POV character? I've heard he needs to be more consistent, but fixing that, is he still a worthwhile POV?

 

Should I keep Sean in the book at all? As it stands, he's simply a means of Stephanie gaining control of the company through blackmail, but right now he's way too incompetent and potentially dead weight narrative-wise. Would the story be stronger without him? 

[Mandamon]

Personally, I would keep Irving and get rid of Sean.  Sean's character could either be rolled in with Irving's or with Stephen's fairly easily to give a bit more intrigue to what Stephanie does.

[smgorden]

Due to the tone of the story, and having read the last two submission, I'm was ready to ride along this time. I figure most people will cover the line-by-line notes, so my comments will just be on the experience of the narrative and text as a whole in this submission.

 

It moves quick, which can be quite good for an ending where the reader is eager to see how everything wraps up. So I like the pace. Some noted there are moments that feel like tropes, but I'm good with that. If you want more tension, you could draw those moments out longer, but that's a personal call, I think. However, if you do keep it as-is, I'd just say to punch it up so no one is confused that you're crafting that moment intentionally. That way, the worst anyone can say is that it's campy, or some such. Lots of folks like campy, so that could work.

Regarding blocking: in any scene, there seems to be only about one note that describes the setting or where anybody is positioned with that setting. So I have a lot of floating faces that kind of move around depending on who's talking at the time. I don't know whether people are entering and exiting, or if everyone is standing very still, having their discussions. This could be an opportunity to expand your text in revision. 

Conclusion: I like it. Great job finishing your book! I can't wait to cross the finish line myself. 

[rdpulfer]

Thanks smgorden,

 

I'm glad you liked it so much. I'm definitely going to be doing a lot of revising and rewriting over the next few months, but I'm glad some of it worked for you. Blocking is definitely on the top of my list, along with smoothing over some of the more tropey elements.

 

Good luck on your finishing your own book!

[Robinski]

Well, it’s been quite a journey over the last 63 chapters, and I feel that I’ve ‘put the boot in’ on a regular and consistent basis – sorry! Before I go into this last submission, I want to make it clear that I have been entertained throughout, and only frustrated because of the clear potential for the story to be significantly improved in the second(?) draft.

 

I guess I wish I was reading that second draft, but I'm happy to have the opportunity to comment, and hope it has been helpful. Whatever the need for revisions in the edit, you’ve achieved a great thing, you got to the end of a novel and should be congratulated for it. Well done

 

Here we go then!!

 

Chapter 60

 

“She had to stay focused”

 

“getting out of her this alive”

 

“not to the mission at end” – awkward, not sure what sense you’re going for.

 

Stephanie is humming and hawing for some time and Rewer is just standing around transfixed? I wasn’t convinced by that.

 

“seconds before the rocket exploded” – seconds are quite long in a situation like this, I imagine the RPG would explode immediately.

 

“Stephanie felt the blast lift her off the ground” – Quite a distant expression – I thought “The blast lifted Stephanie off the ground.” – more immediate. Words like ‘felt’ and ‘seemed’ always have this distancing, slowing effect. I'm trying to teach myself to avoid them.

 

Why does she smell Rewer in this moment – is he suddenly closer? I thought it was odd timing, when she should be thinking about the blast.

 

“goo of oil leftover from the exploded golem” – again, immediacy. Cutting out words is a good mindset when going through an edit.

 

“Stephanie said as she produced her lighter in her hand pulling it out of her pocket. “So to speak.”” – where else would the lighter be? And the rest of the sentence adds nothing, in my view.

 

“was done hearing listening to him”

 

“She thumbed the lighter into a small flame appeared and let it the metallic lighter fall onto Rewer’s oil-stained lap.”

 

Is that it? I can’t believe Rewer dies so easily that I'm expecting him to resurface before the end. If not, then it seemed far too easy, there was no real combat, no struggle. I didn’t feel it with the golems, as they didn’t attack any protagonists, just ruffed up Renfield a bit. I think maybe I was expecting our heroes to be on the point of defeat, but somehow it never felt that way to me.

 

Chapter 61

 

“From the live life he had lived” then “was a pretty good bet” then repetition of “brimstone” within two lines – ugh.

 

“was an particularly unmistakable brand” – I think it’s unmistakable or it’s not. ‘Particularly’ is a 5-sylable word and just slows the whole thing down.

 

“His eyes shot open to see bright white light shining down on him with sea blue walls making up the room” – awkward phrasing – the writing really shows here.

 

“Until Bannister’s face glowered over him.” – not a complete sentence.

 

“Renfield looked down at the hospital bed encasing his body” – this is a weird image – I wouldn’t have thought twice if it was the sheets encasing his body.

 

“Three of my ribs sting” – How does he know it’s three – I'm pretty sure I couldn’t count how many of my ribs stung.

 

“That’s for the first time you almost died!” – I don’t buy this emotional reaction from Evelyn towards Renfield. For me, there has been no sign of any affection between them up to now, so this sudden, heartfelt faux-anger felt false to me. I fear something similar might arise at the end between Renfield and Stephanie. I know there have been ‘curious’ feelings/thoughts arising within them during the latter part of the story, and I always felt that cut off very quickly. If a person ‘fancies’ a person, they know about it pretty quickly for the most part, I would say.

 

Why is Renfield bothered about where he is – he doesn’t know who won the fight, does he? Stephanie could be dead for all he knows.

 

“Renfield pleaded” – very weak – be a man, ffs.

 

“Their lips grew closer as Renfield jerked the divider shut” – what just happened? And what is his hunger and the fly about? I know he eats insects, but there’s no way he can catch it, is there? And if he did, it’s not going to satisfy any kind of appetite.

 

Chapter 62

 

“Stephanie cut him off. “I’m sure our questions can wait until then.”” – So, she didn’t cut him off.

 

Her conversation with Sean seems confused to me, but mostly grammar-wise.

 

“someone came very close to replicating that experience” – I never felt that they did, due to the lack of threat in the ceremony, as mentioned earlier.

 

“So now that everyone’s one big, happy family,” Stephen said. “What now?” – Does he buy it? Judging from the vampires that attacked them in the park, I'm not sure that is quite the case – i.e. the refugee thing. Seems to me there are a bunch of vampires out there who won’t go along with this truce.

 

“how much she relied on Renfield” – Eh? Why? When? What exactly has he brought to the table, other than running away from stuff? I don’t see his value at all. I'm trying to think of something that he did that was special. One of the WE tips is to make your protagonist really good at something that comes into play to save the day, I don’t remember seeing what that was with Renfield.

 

“as her eyes swept around the empty conference room.” – weird ending to the chapter. I felt like the two parts of the sentence were reversed.

 

Chapter 63

 

“with the supposed monsters supposedly in this room” – they’re definitely in the room.

 

“not when Stephanie entered the room door”

 

“some other bodlily fluid.” Bannister scoffed. Stephanie wrinkled her nose. “Ewww. That’s gross.” “You’re embarrassing us,”” – Yes, that is all rather embarrassing. What’s the point? It doesn’t seem in character for Bannister.

 

 “Except on full moons.” Again, we know he’s very touchy about this when Renfield brings it up. Why would he bring it up himself?

 

“I’m working for the Man now,” Renfield said. “I’m respectable now” – I really think this has more snap without the word repetition.

 

“Evelyn looked to the door, and to the person who had just passed through it” – implies walked through the wooden door, as opposed to the doorway.

 

“As he lingered off into sleep” – not the right word, that implies not going to sleep.

 

“He dreamed of a past he had made peace with”

 

Who came into the room?? Or, wait, was Evelyn looking at Stephanie? But she had left already – this part is confusing.

 

Epilogue

 

“Irving wandered through the wilderness of not only Texas, but his mind as well.” – cheesy, with extra words at the end.

 

“It took him three hours to get to find reception”

 

“But you’re . . . you’re dead” – soap opera levels of cheese. “What . . . . what do you want” – This could be from an episode of Scooby-Doo.

 

“That’s something gratitude” – I’ve picked this one line out, but the epilogue is almost unreadable due to the number of typos and grammar-crashes.

 

I like that you finished up with this ‘sting’ featuring Irving, but Serena’s appearance felt weak to me. Considering that she is ‘playing the part’ of Dracula, she lacks any kind of menace. Imagine if Dracula himself had appeared at the end – that could have been really chilling. I'm not suggesting it, but trying to draw the comparison. Serena is what, an 18-year-old Goth girl?

[rdpulfer]

Thanks Robinski! The boot is very appreciated, and I do think the next time I submit a novel (well, after I finish another novel)  I'll submit a second draft instead of an error-ridden first draft.

 

Much of your comments are in keeping with the major re-writes I'm going to be doing over the next few months.

 

One though I did have was replacing Stephanie's visions with memory-like dreams of her and Serena, foreshadowing her eventual return and upping the threat level. I haven't decided to completely go down this route, but I was wondering what you thought of this - unless the visions were already effective.  

Edited January 25, 2016 by rdpulfer

[Robinski]

Yeah, I thought the visions were good. I suppose it would be a bit much for her to have visions and dreams of Serena (she did have one, or a recollection, at least). I wonder if there is a way to merge the two and still have the vision be effective, hmm, not sure about that. Maybe just recollections of Serena, or hints at her strange tendency towards the dark side and her attempts to hide it from her family? Not sure to be honest

[rdpulfer]

Well, thanks for the feedback regardless, Robinski! I appreciate it. I'll probably leave the visions alone for the most part then.