6/12/2023- Reading Excuses- Cathy Lim- The Slayer's Magic- sub 1- Chapter 1- 3,043 words

[Cathy Lim]

Hello Everyone,

 

Here is the first chapter of my COMPLETE REWRITE of Book One. I decided the voice was too young in my original manuscript so I’m completely rewriting it. This has already had a few eyes on it, plus a friend did some line editing for me. Hopefully this is a much cleaner story for you then Book Two. What I’m looking for in feedback is anything the rest of us overlooked. Are there things we didn’t see? I’m hoping you all will find what we’ve missed. (or hopefully we haven’t missed anything!) Anyways, enjoy the new version of Book One, my brother is amazed at how it’s a completely different book!

 

As always, thanks for the help!

 

Cathy

 

[Appol PhD they/he]

Glad to read your work again! It was kinda awkward being the only one submitting for multiple weeks in a row haha.

Overall: This chapter does a good job overall of establishing setting and character dynamics. I care about R being left out because she doesn’t know if she has magic or what magic she can use, and I like that the library is this centralizing institution. Though on the library, I do think we could get some background into why it’s so important. The way it’s talked about here feels closer to a university than a library in the sense that I’m used to thinking about.

I think my other comment is that I don’t get a strong narrative hook here, since we know R wants to figure out her ancestry and discover her magic but the end of the chapter doesn’t directly relate to that as of now. But the book also seems to have a slice of life atmosphere so maybe that’s fine.

As I go:

Pg 1. First paragraph tells me that R is angry, but not a ton else. What’s special about this scene that is important enough to start the book with?

Pg 2. The note does a good job setting up a lot of character/setting dynamics. I think what I need to know is why this is such a momentous rejection to R.

Pg 3. The exposition about R’s adoption making her magic unknown is good, and honestly makes a lot of what I’ve read from book 2 make a lot more sense.

Pg 5-6. Do they get into this whole thing about the ancestors every dinner? Feels like they should have worked something out.

Pg 7. I’d recommend describing the painting first before going into its background

Pg 8. It’s hard to win me over with a dream sequence since nothing’s “real” so there’s less of an impact. If the book is important that can stay, but I don’t think there needs to be a pagelong scene.

Pg 10. R’s reaction is good here since it tells me that her mom’s actions aren’t supposed to make sense right now, and I think it could be sprinkled into the conversation as it’s happening.

[Silk she/her]

p1 the narration so far (in the first 1-2 pages) feels almost omniscient – we’re not too far into R’s head, I know it’s her POV mostly by virtue of the fact that until y shows up she’s the only one on the page. That said, I’m still getting a pretty good idea of R’s emotions from the way she’s acting, so that’s not necessarily an issue. Just depends on what you're going for.

p2 I’m not sure if “coming out” has the same meaning that we use today, but the phrase struck me as way more modern than the rest of the letter.

P3 So is R being scorned by other people because she doesn’t know who her ancestors are, or because they don’t have whatever bloodline confers power/status in this world, or both?

“Have to be done by the time I’m eighteen” is this a social restriction or a limitation of the magic?

P4 “…students or travelling researchers.” If I were reading this wholly fresh I don’t think it would have registered as a problem at all, but I did want to note reading the second book that I did not realize the only people allowed to work with students etc. were travelling researchers – I didn’t realize it was that restricted.

As a general note, this definitely reads as a different kind of library than we think of today since it’s clearly much more restricted than a public institution. So, from t his so far I would expect to learn more about the Library and why it’s so rarified, but I’m perfectly willing to let that happen as the manuscript goes on.

P7 “…and mucking out chickens” chicken coops?

I’m having a hard time following the family situation here. R is adopted and doesn’t know who her ancestors are, but knows (?) she doesn’t come from the magic bloodlines and neither does her (adoptive?) mother. Her ancestors could be anyone because she’s adopted, but she and her brother have different fathers and she knows who both of them are.

P9 “came this morning to deliver the news” seems repetitive – it echoes what J already said, but also, wouldn’t they have had this part of the conversation already?

“The ground seemed to be shifting beneath her…” as an endcap to a chapter it works well, but it feels almost like an overreaction based on what we’ve learned? I think because I really don’t understand how this affects R. What does it actually mean to her that her mother is leaving? What changes? How will she react?

Overall: I am fairly bought in and sympathetic to R and her struggles (though see above re: having some trouble tracking the familial stuff, so nice work there. What I don’t have yet is a sense of progression. The scene at the end of the chapter seems to building towards an inciting incident, but I would say we don’t actually have one yet – because we don’t really know what’s changed for R or how that’s going to drive her and the story forward. Obviously the fact that her mother is leaving is a change, but I don’t know what that means for her. Does it significantly change her day to day? Does it mean she has do something differently? What about the fact that the library is looking for students? (Obviously coloured by my knowledge of book 2, but you’ve signposted the importance of this at a couple places in this chapter as well). Not that I think you need to immediately action every piece of info R gets in the first chapter, but by the end of it I’m looking for some sense of what the changes to her surroundings will drive her to actually do.

[Mandamon he/him]

Very nice rewrite! I was sucked into this, but to have the same concerns as the others, mainly that there are a few confusing aspects of the adoption vs. family, and the narrative is more slice of life. I don't think that's a big issue though, especially for a YA book. With a little more explanation of why the event at the end are so important, I think this will work nicely. Right now I'm definitely drawn in, and want to find out more about what R's deal is, and why her mother is so afraid.

Maybe even a couple mentions of worldbuilding facts through the first chapter, or an epigraph at the beginning that gives a little more info?

Note wile reading:

pg 1: I like that we get right in the magic on the first page.

pg 3: This is a lot better than the previous version I read! However watch your comma usage. There are a lot of sentences where there's a breath, but no comma. There are also some sentences that should have a period instead of a comma.

pg 4: Nice! We immediately get tension and conflict, and a reason for R to change and grow.

pg 6: "were both of Ancestor blood"
--might need a little unpacking here, since you've noted R is adopted, but now she and her brother have different fathers.

pg 9: "The book had been right there- the record of where she came from!"
--might need some more reaction or explanation here. She seems unsurprised that she might learn new information from a dream. Is this something that can happen in this world?

pg 10: "Who knows what he’ll bring in… and from where.”
--Is this C speaking? Unclear.

pg 11: Good first chapter! Nice expectations, and the questions draw me in and make me want to read the next one.

[Cathy Lim]

On 6/15/2023 at 7:23 AM, Ace of Hearts said:

Glad to read your work again! It was kinda awkward being the only one submitting for multiple weeks in a row haha.

I'm glad I could help! I'm working my way through all your chapters so I can be up to speed, but it's been a busy week, so be patient. 

After all the revision I've done after multiple heavy critiques I was really hoping this chapter was good. As Z would say- oh well. 

[Cathy Lim]

On 6/15/2023 at 3:12 PM, Silk said:

I’m not sure if “coming out” has the same meaning that we use today, but the phrase struck me as way more modern than the rest of the letter.

This is why I wanted to run it past you all. Every other eye I've had on this is 50+ years. We all knew what I meant. I'll have to think of a better way to say it. 

 

On 6/15/2023 at 3:12 PM, Silk said:

I’m having a hard time following the family situation here. R is adopted and doesn’t know who her ancestors are, but knows (?) she doesn’t come from the magic bloodlines and neither does her (adoptive?) mother. Her ancestors could be anyone because she’s adopted, but she and her brother have different fathers and she knows who both of them are.

Ok- please, please help me with this because I've written and rewritten the family dynamic so that people can understand. You say you would like it to be more in R's head, but she would not, absolutely would not in her head think of her adoptive father as her 'adopted father'. She would never say it that way. To do so would put distance between her and her adoptive parents. She was adopted as a baby therefore her adoptive parents are her parents. I do not know how to make it clear that it's her adoptive father when I'm in her head and she would never think that way. J what would have been her half brother if she had actually been born to her parents. He's her mother's from a previous marriage. So they have the same mother (birth and adopted) but not the same father. I have worked and worked to make this as clear as I possibly can but it's obviously still not coming through. How would you handle this to make it clear that we have a very complicated family structure going on here. (I have thought of forgoing the obligatory fantasy map for a family tree in an attempt to help with this.) Oh- and to complicate it more we're about to meet the man her mother is presently dating and his sons. Weheee! 

[Cathy Lim]

6 hours ago, Mandamon said:

epigraph at the beginning that gives a little more info?

Not sure what you mean by an epigraph here. 

 

6 hours ago, Mandamon said:

Good first chapter! Nice expectations, and the questions draw me in and make me want to read the next one.

Thanks! I've put more hours into this than I probably have time for at this point. I was really hoping it was a lot closer to being finished. At this point I'm feeling like I don't know how to do a narrative hook at all. I thought this was a lot better. sigh. 

[Silk she/her]

1 hour ago, Cathy Lim said:

You say you would like it to be more in R's head

FWIW, the comment I made about the narration feeling like limited omniscient jumped out at me the most in the first scene between R and Y, before we start getting into the family stuff, and I was thinking mostly of emotional signposting when I made the comment: we can infer that R is angry from her actions, but we're not seeing a lot of her thoughts directly. We're getting enough of R's emotions from the way she's acting that I'm not sure this is a problem that needs to be solved, but it's a bit unusual to see omniscient POV right now, so I thought it was worth noting.

1 hour ago, Cathy Lim said:

he would not, absolutely would not in her head think of her adoptive father as her 'adopted father'.

as a reader I'm completely on-side with this, and I don't think it's what I stumbled on. It was explicit early on that she was adopted, so I was just fine with her calling her parents her parents. But then I kept stumbling onto things that seemed contradictory or least were clearly not fully explained.

I think what caused me to stumble are two things. First, I think the focus on ancestry and bloodlines is presented in a way that is confusing R's own heritage a bit. The first time I encountered a hitch was p5: "Her brother had magic from his father, but her mother was O, like her." The second half of this sentence reads very much like R inherited her lack of magic from her mother, especially when juxtaposed with the first clause that points to her brother clearly inheriting his magic from his father. It was the first thing that made me stop and wonder whether I'd read right that she'd been adopted. But there are a couple of spots like this, I think, the one that @Mandamon quoted above also being one of them, that are worth massaging.

I wonder if the solution might be in part to keep foregrounding the uncertainty about R's own ancestry. Instead of R being non-magical like her mother, everyone assumes that she is non-magical like her mother because she can't prove otherwise. Maybe at certain points in the text she wonders or regrets again that she can't know what her own capabilities are, wonders if she really is O like everyone says, wishes she knew what ancestors to ask for powers, wonders if [that weird thing that happened recently] is her magic happening at last and will give her a clue, or whatever is appropriate for your magic system. R spending some thought on the lost parts of her heritage seems in keeping with her character and the story and would be a way to remind us that she is adopted without constantly reiterating it explicitly. If you're worried about putting distance between R and her parents, one way to handle that might be to have R always think explicitly of her birth/biological parents when thinking her lost heritage, versus just her parents, without the qualifier, for her adoptive parents. That way you'd be separating the question of what her bloodline is from the question of who her family is, which I think would help.

The other thing I stumbled in was just that we're getting a lot of information! It's a fairly complex family dynamic - I had to read the explanatory paragraph you posted a couple of times to wrap my head around it, and in Ch1 we're getting it all quite quickly. Is there any way to simplify - do we need to know that R and J are half-siblings in the first chapter, for example, or can that wait until the second chapter when we're a little more settled in the narrative? And/or, don't be afraid to be explicit when the right moment does arrive. This could be another plain statement like you did with R being adopted in the first place or maybe there's a character moment where you illustrate that R's brother and her dad have a dynamic that is different than R's own dynamic with her dad.

1 hour ago, Cathy Lim said:

Oh- and to complicate it more we're about to meet the man her mother is presently dating and his sons.

Okay - in that case it is probably worth signposting this in some way before it happens too, not necessarily explicitly just yet, but something that helps to gear us up for "R's mother and father are not actually a couple," or "are actually poly" or whatever the dynamic is. It seems there is a lot of nuance here that will seem contradictory if we're not properly primed for it.

1 hour ago, Cathy Lim said:

At this point I'm feeling like I don't know how to do a narrative hook at all.

I wouldn't lose too much sleep over this. I feel like this chapter is most of the way there, and you've already got the setup in place to take it those last few steps. If you're okay to get prescriptive suggestions as feedback (uh, aside from the several I just made... sorry?), and obviously I don't know the story nearly as well as you do so take it or leave it, but the thing that immediately occurred to me was:

Spoiler

R realizes that this is her chance to get an 'in' with the Library and decides to apply, despite the fact that she's too young/her mother is leaving and this creates a roadblock somehow/her family doesn't approve of family research/whatever complicating factor you want to throw in here.

For what it's worth, I'm an iterative--and messy--drafter myself, so making a whole bunch of changes and then going back and finding more stuff that needs to be changed is pretty normal as far as I'm concerned! Ask the old hands here how many drafts of mine they've had to read to get something ready to publish, I bet they've all lost count

Edited June 17, 2023 by Silk

[Cathy Lim]

1 hour ago, Silk said:

R realizes that this is her chance to get an 'in' with the Library and decides to apply, despite the fact that she's too young/her mother is leaving and this creates a roadblock somehow/her family doesn't approve of family research/whatever complicating factor you want to throw in here.

This is actually what happens in chapter two. pretty much word for word. 

[Cathy Lim]

1 hour ago, Silk said:

what it's worth, I'm an iterative--and messy--drafter myself

Except this isn't a first draft, or even a third draft. I chucked the entire manuscript of book one, started over, stressed about making the first two chapters prove that I could actually write something worthwhile, had a friend go through it and critiqued it pretty much line by line three times, and then I had someone line edit it. It should be better than this. 

[Silk she/her]

7 hours ago, Cathy Lim said:

This is actually what happens in chapter two. pretty much word for word. 

Ah, this makes sense! might be worth considering moving this up. Or giving R another action to take in the first chapter that will carry us through to this one in the second.

7 hours ago, Cathy Lim said:

Except this isn't a first draft, or even a third draft.

I think you do have something worthwhile! It seems like everyone is engaged and wants to read more, and we're just talking about finessing. Revisions, maybe especially rewrites in my experience, often lead to cascading changes. There's nothing wrong with getting the final draft to where it needs to be in layers.

[Cathy Lim]

6 hours ago, Silk said:

I think you do have something worthwhile!

Thanks! And thank you for the feedback. I like your ideas for how to get across the family dynamic. I will ponder and process it so I can see how best to incorporate your suggestions. Sorry for getting frustrated. I really need your feedback! I want this book to be the best I can possibly make it, and I it requires a village to do that! 

[Mandamon he/him]

21 hours ago, Cathy Lim said:

Not sure what you mean by an epigraph here. 

 

Thanks! I've put more hours into this than I probably have time for at this point. I was really hoping it was a lot closer to being finished. At this point I'm feeling like I don't know how to do a narrative hook at all. I thought this was a lot better. sigh. 

Epigraphs are the little snippets that come before the chapter starts. It's a good way to sneak in worldbuilding.

[Silk she/her]

4 hours ago, Cathy Lim said:

it requires a village to do that! 

It always does! No worries, we all get frustrated. I'm in a similar spot of frustration with my current MS, honestly...

Epigraphs can be a fun way to do tone and worldbuilding for sure.