2024/07/14 - Strange24 - My Farseer - chap 1

[MyDude she/her]

Heyo everyone!

Thanks for all the feedback on the prologue. It helped me a lot and gave me things to work on. 

[Appol PhD they/he]

Overall: This chapter helps me understand C’s position better and there’s the workings of some good emotional character hooks with how he feels about his family. From context it seems like the funeral is for his mom, which if true could probably be stated outright, and this has a good opportunity to draw people connected to C together.

What I feel like this chapter is missing is an inciting incident and overall plot threads. When I ask myself why it’s important that the story starts here and what the rest of the story will be about, I’m not quite able to answer them. Or in another way, this feels more like a bunch of scenes telling us about C’s background than the start of his journey, if that makes sense. In my LBLs I mention that the character introductions don’t have a strong impact on me for this reason; it’s cool that C is being pushed back into proximity with family and old friends but without knowing the stakes of how they tie into the larger plot the investment isn’t there from my end.  

As I go:

Pg 1. This is a good start to an emotional character hook, and I think the first line pretty much conveys it all. The scene doesn’t really move throughout the rest of the page.

Pg 2. On the one hand I like the lack of exposition compared to the prologue, but on the other hand I think we need a bit more of an intro to F-K. We know they’re his mentor; what else stands out about them?

Pg 4. The main point I’m taking from this is that the highest farseer is coming, but I a bit more specificity as to why this is important. Like obviously it’s a big deal for an important person to show up, but I need more hints as to how this is kicking off the plot.

Pg 6-7. I’m still not getting a good feel for the plot/inciting incident. There’s a funeral and some ceremonies mentioned, but that alone isn’t momentous enough to kick off a whole story with the context we have.

Pg 10. I think the main thing I need from V’s character introduction is a tie-in to the plot to make his role feel necessary. Once I have a clearer picture of the plot I think a lot of these pieces fit together better.

Pg 12. Same comment as above. The father showing up is a promising character hook but without an idea of what it means for the larger plot it’s hard for me to get invested.

[Mandamon he/him]

Apologies for the late reply! I've been super busy the past couple weeks.

Pretty similar comments to @Ace of Hearts. The writing is pretty, and describes the characters well, but I'm not getting any sense of the plot as yet. There are some good glimpses of the world they live in, but some more clues on social interaction and technology would be nice as well.

Notes while reading

pg 3: at this point I'm still a little lost in the story. We've seen C react to some things, but I'm not sure what he's doing. He wants to see his mother and then is at therapy?

pg 5: the writing is very poetic, but I'm still not quite sure what's going on in the story...

pg 12: There was a lot of poetic description here, and some good portraits of the characters, but this felt like a bunch of slices in time. I'm not quite sure what was going on. Were they just waiting for his mother to arrive? I'm looking for the hook to get me into the story here, but I'm not seeing it.

[Silk she/her]

Sorry for my slow reply – I was traveling for most of August and absolutely swamped before and during the trip. I had a similar experience to Ace and Mandamon--it definitely felt like a collection of vignettes, not sure yet how they tie together plotwise.

Here are my comments:

 I like the opening description. Immediately though I’m wondering how much time has passed between this chapter and the prologue. This question is seemingly answered a few paragraphs later by referencing him as an adult, but later still he’s referred to as a “young student” so a bit more grounding here would be helpful.

 The things that kept me interested were mainly the thread about C not seeing his mother often enough and the low-key conflict with his uncle.

In the later few pages (p7 or so and onward) I started looking for the next thing to happen. My curiosity was peaked again around p10 or 11 when the reunion with V happened, and then again at the very end.

Though I was surprised to see the father mentioned at the end of the story (the mother has been mentioned so far but not the father) there was some good emotion here, some of the strongest parts of the chapter as far as I’m concerned.

Congrats on your second submission, in some ways it’s harder than the first!