20160704 - WayneLigon - The Lioness - 3036

[Wayne Ligon]

First-time submission: complete short story at 3036 words. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I'd love to hear back from you with comments, critique, etc.

[Alfa]

 I really, really liked it.

I like it very much how you handled the in-world perspective: you explained what was going on without beeing too descriptive (a short story never, ever should contain an essay on magic theory if it's not the main point of it); and I fealt like I was part of that culture.

As for critics: For my taste, the wizard fealt a bit weak; his intent was unclear, for me it wasn't even clear he had one or was randomly passing by. I like his personality, the hidden dry humor,

[Mandamon]

Welcome to Writing Reading Excuses!

A very nice submission.  There was a good overall arc to the story, and I didn't see much of anything in the way of grammar or awkward sentences.  I'll agree with Alfa
that the wizard was a little weak.  He provided impetus to the story, but didn't have a lot of reason for being there.  I would imagine a wizard so young isn't looking for
an apprentice yet.

Chisa also doesn't seem very surprised to be told she's a wizard, though I think she is aware of it from how she haggles with the spice merchant.  Still, if she hasn't
even seen a wizard for years, wouldn't she be a little more unsure about what they are and what they can do?

Thanks for submitting!

Notes as I read:

pg 1: "hence the name"
-unnecessary

pg 3: "Old Temple ruins"
--The capitalization here makes me think the Old Temple is a place rather than a district, so should it be "the ruins of the Old Temple?"

pg 3: "Da and Mam watch over us"
--The first time through I didn't catch that this meant they were gone.  I thought this was meant literally.

pg 4: "Slivers of coin changed hands, and the man went away wondering why he'd traded so much for so little while Chisa allowed herself a tight smile."
--good foreshadowing

pg 6: "She made notes in what used to be Mam’s ledger book, and was now hers: what was paid ..."
--Here it sounds like Chisa's running the restaurant herself.  I was confused until I looked back (pg 3) to see that you said Da and Mam had evidently died previously.  I
thought they were still around.

pg 9: "It limped, but still stalked and pounced the first man."
--was starting to wonder how the lion would get around on three legs.

pg 10: "On its intact foot, though, the lion now showed claws."
--cool

pg 11: "He didn’t ask how she knew his name. Wizards knew secret things or they were
very poor wizards"
--also cool.

Edited July 6, 2016 by Mandamon

[Robinski]

Hey Wayne, welcome to Reading Excuses! Great to read something from a new voice around these parts.

Finally, thanks to prompting by others, I'm trying to apply Mary Robinette Kowal’s ABCD approach (or is it someone else’s and she just promotes it?) Anyway, it goes like this, in case you are not familiar: (A) Awesome; (B) Boring; (C) Confusing; (D) Disbelief; (G) Grammar/typo? (An appendix to the ABCD).

Detailed comments as I read below the line, but overall, I enjoyed this story a good deal. I express my reservations over the girl’s age. I don’t see a good reason for her to be so young. For me, it was pretty much unbelievable that should could have survived in business in such a place at the age of twelve, with nothing but younger siblings for security in numbers (presuming that the guardsmen cannot be there every night, as seemed to be the case.

So, good job, I thought the story read smoothly, with some nice flourishes and a sound setting. I thought you established the characters pretty well, they were enjoyable if not entirely engaging. I felt that it was the dialogue that held my attention rather than the characters themselves.

Nice work. Thanks for sharing and again, welcome to Reading Excuses!!

<R>

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(C) – “Chisa's smallest brother, Pala” – Does this mean her youngest brother, or is he older but smaller? I think saying ‘smallest’ introduces confusion.

(D) – “tossed him slivers of copper” – Ouch, sounds dangerous!

(C) – “brown as a board” – I don’t really get this description. Are all boards brown then?

(C) – “or muck out dog pens” – What do they use dogs for around here? Seems a slightly odd phrase without some kind of context.

(A) – “and servants when the spells failed” – I like the immediate introduction of the fact that spells are not flawless and magic has a downside.

(A) – “All around him the crowd broke and flowed, never quite touching him, their eyes never looking right at him. It was bad luck. Everyone knew that, but here she was, looking.” – I really like this passage, it conveys good background about wizardry in a compact and elegant form.

(C) – “but the look on her face told him what he needed to know” – But it doesn’t tell the reader. I'm not really clear and what to take from this section about parents and children.

(A~D) – “Mam had literally built the restaurant with her bare hands, and Chisa was determined to keep it.” – This is a good strong character motivation, but we also see her somewhat hankering after being a wizard (or maybe I'm reading too much into that). These elements might be contradictory, or I might be over-thinking it.

(C/D) – “Probably to complain about the poor fare and how he is not going to pay,” – Why would he think this? I was not aware of him being served, but why would she jump to this conclusion? I see no basis for her reaction.

(B/D) – “turning the chair and straddling it” – Cliché, unnecessary and seems out of character for her. Why has she gone from being reverential to the wizard to being suspicious/antagonistic and now presumptuous and over-familiar? Does she treat all guests in the ‘restaurant’ like this, sitting down at their tables?

(A/D) – The verbal byplay between the two at the table is very good. I was convinced. It had some nice flourished, especially those of the wizard. This said, I am struggling with Chisa’s dialogue to the extent that her repartee seems more sophisticated than that of a twelve year-old.

(G) – “and smiled against again before he resumed slurping his noodles”

(D) – “Iskir was not called The Thieves' City by outsiders for no reason.” – This is rather familiar. Have you read Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar books? Absolutely splendid stuff, and there’s Robert Lynn Asprin’s Thieves’ World, set in the city of Sanctuary (i.e. from the law). It just seems like a very familiar setting / idea.

(D) – “After Da and Mam passed” – I'm not convinced this was all that clear to begin with. I formed the impression that her parents were still around. It just reinforces the problem that I have believing a 12 year-old has the capacity to do what Chisa does, apparently.

(A) – “Her bribes were paid up, and she'd kept her head down, angered no-one” – I do like this line, it paints a colourful picture of the setting.

(C) – “Not a dozen cranes could move it.” – Given the level of technology I presume for this setting, I must admit I thought this referred to the birds!! I know that cranes of the lifting variety existed in the olden times (Egypt and all that), but still, that was my first impression.

(D) – “thundering under its tons of weight” – This phrase is rather crude and awkward. I don’t like this wording at all.

(G) – “to lie still against the cooper’s garden wall”

(G) – “and so it looked back to Chisa. Chisa took a long slow breath” – Awkward repetition of her name twice together.

(D) – “the great lion's tail thrashed, smashing a chair into a wicker ruin” – Nice phrase, but it’s a massive beast, how does it only smash one chair, and not demolish the whole dining room?

[neongrey]

p.1 

'somehow always' is kind of an awkward phrase, stacking modifiers ilke that. I think just 'always' would flow better there.

I think that semicolon in the first paragraph might be best as a sentence break.

p.2

The simile is framed a bit strangely here 'flowing around him like a river around'; in re meaning it works, but that around is repetitive that close together.

'brown as a board' I think is an odd comparison if only because wooden boards could be any number of different shades, and I'm not entirely sure how deep a shade you're intending by this.

This desire is not all that nameless-- it might be that she's not willing to articulate it but it's pretty clear what that desire is; I might consider another descriptor?

p.4

"Unfortunately, wizardry is almost useless..." this sentence feels kind of clunky-- part of it, I think, is that it's an out-of-place appendation to the prior statement; you know how people will say you can tell a lie by a person giving too much detail? That's kind of what this sentence feels like here to me. It's volunteering too much, beyond what is natural. If this story is going where I expect it is, that part is intentional. The other part of why I think this is stumbling here for me is that the phrasing is just sort of off. It's that starting 'unfortunately' and I think the 'have' after attempts which are doing the damage here. I think if you remove both you'll get a much more fluid sentence.

I think changing the 'cannot' to 'can't' too in Chisa's response would work better too? It's more in the register she's using.

p.5

As this conversation continues, I'm not all that sure I buy Chisa as 12; her vernacular is a bit more in the realm of 'jaded adult'. Bitter sarcasm is not something that generally kicks in young, at least not in phrasing-- even young with too many responsibilities.

'started to' lay into him feels a bit odd-- contextually I feel like 'was about to' is more what's actually happening here?

And that's it for specific callouts that I have straight through to the end. 

I am very much a sucker for this sort of setting, and you quite deftly create a picture of the place in loose strokes; you're not working in a lot of space and you do a lot with it. 

If I have two issues, they're thus:

- Chisa's voice, particularly in dialogue, does not come off as 12. Ordinarily I'd suggest just massaging the number rather than dialogue rework here but there are points when you're hitting, like, late 20s, early 30s in feel. In specific, I'd ease off on sarcasm, use more contractions, and swap out some of that bitterness I'm getting for more active generalized anger. In combination this should reduce the formality of her phrasing and generally dial her back emotionally more towards 'forced into way too much due to recent tragedy, but managing to deal' and away from 'a long, lousy life has been grinding away for decades'

- This does not feel like a complete short so much. The events that occurred wrapped up but as it is the story is more or less just relating an incident that occured, sliced out of a larger narrative. I think as a complete chapter it's fine but I don't particularly feel that it stands alone all that well. I think you're almost there but I think you need some sort of general complication in the outline and worked in.

A possible third:

- The wizard's actual purpose here might be a little too oblique; I'm fairly sure I've worked out his exact intention in being here in the story and i am comfortably in a state of 'is it just paranoia' about the later events... actually, no, it's not too oblique, on second thought. Gracefully done, I should say.

Edited July 6, 2016 by neongrey

[Wayne Ligon]

11 hours ago, Robinski said:

“turning the chair and straddling it”

The idea I was trying to get across here is that Chisa is trying to behave like her Mam, who I see as a pretty bold and brassy adult, so she's trying to establish dominance over what she's pretty sure is a snotty patron who thinks he can throw his weight around because he's a wizard and she's young. I could just come out and SAY that but I was trying to get it across with her attitude. Obviously I need to work on that part.

She's fascinated by him and a little envious but not reverent - in the beginning she's not concerned with meeting his eyes even though it's 'known' to cause 'bad luck'. I've dithered over expanding on that but it feels extraneous.

Almost nobody calls over the manager to ooh and ahh over the service or food; it's almost always to complain. 

Chisa being 12 is an artifact of this story originally being written for a young person's anthology. I can certainly see the point. I'm thinking of putting in something about the other inhabitants of the Free Quarter looking after her and her brothers because they are simply that good at cooking, and that buys you a lot of goodwill. 

 

A huge amount of thanks to everyone that has commented. This is exactly the sort of critique and commentary I've been looking for. I only hope I can do as well when I put down my thoughts about other people's work.

[Wayne Ligon]

7 minutes ago, neongrey said:

"Unfortunately, wizardry is almost useless..."

Good Point. I think Badad is mixing a lot of lies with a little truth here - I have vague ideas about this setting and part of it is that wizardry is completely intuitive. You can't actually teach it to anyone, you can just point them in the right direction and hope they don't kill themselves with it, which most still wind up doing.

[Alfa]

I assume, that the part with the age could be solved if we just assume that a year in this particular world lasts, say, 1.5 years on Earth... if it is Wayne Ligon's INTENT, of course.

[rdpulfer]

- If the lion statue is almost featureless, how do they know it is in fact a lion? It might need more description.

- I really like your description, in particular how the wizard bobbed along in the crowd like a cork. 

- The dialogue feels a little too long in certain spaces - mostly from the wizard, but even from the main character. It needs to be broken up more, I think.

- It also feels like the attempted robbery comes out of nowhere - it might need to be foreshadowed earlier. 

- I think you have some description. It just feels like the story and execution need to be ironed out. 

 

[kais]

Welcome to Reading Excuses!

Overall

In general I liked the story, but it moved fast in some places. I'm unconvinced of the child's age by her dialogue. Even noting the hard circumstances of her life, she probably wouldn't talk like that. I recommend reading Homecoming (A Tillerman novel) for a very strong voice example of a young girl left with nothing but the care of her younger siblings. I'd also love to see Chisa react more to being a wizard, and some more development of the wizard himself.
 

As I go

- the wizard turns to ask Chisa a question, but her eyes tell him what he needs to know. This is a POV switch, and it threw me from the narrative a little

- 'Probably to complain about the poor fare and how he is not going to pay' is pretty adult reasoning and wording for a child of twelve. More convincing would be 'Was he going to skip out on paying? He'd better not complain about her noodle soup!'

- Her sense of responsibility, especially to making sure not too many peppers go into the soup when there is a wizard that wants to talk to her, also doesn't fall in line for 12. I'd expect her to shuck responsibility, even if she was a very responsible child, because there is a real live wizard in her family's restaurant and he wants to talk to her!

- "Oh, and I have such a free live..." also too old of dialogue for a 12 year old

- the awakening of the lion was just a little fast. I'd like to see her think about it more, work for it just a little more before it happens. It'd be nice to have a greater sense of wonder about it

- POV shift again when you name Badad the first time

- The deal with the wizard is struck too easily. Is the guy just wandering around aimlessly, or did he come to find an apprentice? Giving him just a bit of backstory would make the ending make more sense

[krystalynn03]

Hey, welcome to the board,

I enjoyed your submission. I didn't do LBL's--seems you've got plenty to pick through already. I enjoyed that the story felt very whole, very complete, like it had a really natural progression to it. There was enough world-building that I felt like I was in a fantasy setting, but nothing that hit a cliche button or a TL;DR button. Good job!

I liked that I could feel Chisa's character well adn that you let minor characters stay minor (siblings). I liked the imagery for the wizard, though I do think he needs a little work, some tweaking somehow as others have mentioned.

There were a few things that pushed me out of the story because they didn't feel credible:

• Chisa's age: she felt more like 14 year old or so--also it'd be more believable that she's running the place by herself if she were older than 12; on the other hand, if running the shop were a little more challenging for her, it might add a little more oomph to her choice to pursue wizardry. I like the light-hearted, quick pace of the story as is, but if Chisa were having more of a struggle with acting as an adult so young, it might make the wizarding feel more integral to the story progression
• The bandits did feel convenient--I like rdpulfer's mention that some foreshadowing would make it feel a little more natural.

Thanks for submitting!