July 16 2012 – Asmodemon – Maiden of Thorns Chapter 16

[Asmodemon he/him]

In this chapter, Black Rose surveys the city as the attack on Overlook begins and two Shifters force her to move ahead of time.

[Mandamon he/him]

Two shifters? I remember that Hemlock is a shifter, but who is the other one? Is it Chelone? His description is counter to Hemlock and I don't believe he is referred to as a Shifter. Or is it the girl (who I assume is Rosen's familiar-ish sidekick). Was it ever stated what she was?

At any rate, it sounds like, from your summary sentence, that I should know who the two shifters are and I don't, which tells me some explanation is missing. I think the whole idea of who the shifters are is still pretty undefined in your story. From what I gather, they're pretty powerful and used to rule, but all I've seen Hemlock do is transform into an animal.

pg 8, was Black Rose inside or outside the city when she meets the sappers? I was unsure and had to read that section again. It sounds like she's standing on top of the city wall still.

Pg 9, I like that the same crew is coming back in the story, but I still don't really know anything about them aside from I like Amelanchier. If you've seen the newer Clone Wars TV series, I always think of Cad Bane (especially the voice) when Amel enters.

I guess the sappers are also fighting on the battlements?

You reference both saboteurs and sappers - which one (or both) are they and for who? You seem to infer that we know what they're up to by referring to them this way.

Also, I know sappers can do a lot of jobs, but for some reason I always think of them in demolitions and blowing things up, so them being on top of the wall threw me for a moment.

Overall, this is a good set up chapter. It feels like the plot is starting to get back on track, recovering from some of the slowness in the previous few chapters.

Some sentences are pretty long, and don't have the commas required to "shore them up," so they sound like run on sentences.

for example:

"Without waiting for a response Black Rose jumped off the wall, the sound of the gate opening taken precedence over her landing which cracked the stone plate which made up a part of the street."

Despite all the negatives, I do want to see where this story is going! I think the worldbuilding and characters are interesting and it makes me want to find out more about them.

[JamesW he/him]

Most of my comments are similar to Mandamons, but I haven't read the previous chapters so I'll keep the "Well I don't know who this is" to as little as I can.

The long sentences didn't bother me, I was engrossed in the story and got a great feel for the situation. The only time I got slightly mixed up was when she was on the battlements, but other then that the setting is great.

So much blood and bodyparts lay scattered about it impossible to tell how many defenders had fallenhere.

That might have been a typo or just an awkward sentence, but it threw me out of the story. The puddle of blood from innumerable defenders seems like it would be more then a puddle, a small thing but the contrast between "puddle" and innumerable fallen was a bit jarring.

I don't know much about what the shifters were capable of doing, other then well, shifting. It seems to me that if they are from an earlier era, as is black rose, that they might be allied to bring the world back under their control? Maybe a little back story for them would go a long way, hanging a lantern on the mystery if you will.

Were they older then even she was before she was imprisoned? If so then something like "The shifters, mysterious and ancient even in her time,...." might help with giving the reader the feeling of "Yes, these are ancient, yes they are mysterious, yes you will find out eventually" which could go a long way towards reader satisfaction.

Overall though your prose was excellent, I didn't notice it. Dialogue was well done and the world well realized.

JW

[Asmodemon he/him]

Thanks guys, I appreciate the comments (and I don’t think it’s negative at all).

Looking back I never explicitly stated that Amaryllis is a Shifter. I can see why the summary can be confusing because of it. In hindsight it would have been better to say “Hemlock and Amaryllis” instead of “two Shifters”.

You’re also both right in that I haven’t really gone into what Shifters are. It will become a little more important later on, with Amaryllis getting back into the action, so most of the explanations will follow in later chapters, though thinking about it I might also add some of that stuff when Black Rose first meets Hemlock.

Shifters are a subset of humans, an accidental creation of the cataclysmic event referred to as the Great Rot (which happened ages ago), which destroyed the continent of Neatherine. Shifters have the Paths running through their bodies which cause the following effects: Shifters live longer, they don’t suffer from the debilitating effects the Paths have on regular Pathfinders/Walkers, they can also travel through the Paths in the flesh. Instead of being limited to travelling them in spirit as Rosen did to reach Black Rose’s prison. Because the Paths are ever changing, reflecting the disposition of the user, the form of a Shifter can change into that which closely resembles his true nature, e.g. the wolf-like beast that Hemlock becomes.

Because they live long and can use the Paths at will, they are extremely powerful compared to regular people. Though in Hemlock’s case he prefers his bestial nature and isn’t as good a Pathfinder/Walker as some other Shifters and Amaryllis was bound by Rosen. In Black Rose’s time a number of Shifters held sway over the lands south of the Heartlands and were known as the Shifter Tyrants. However since Black Rose’s time the lands rose up against the Tyrants, forming the nation now known as the Alliance. They managed to defeat/kill the Tyrants and now actively condemns Shifters, hunting them whenever they appear on Alliance soil.

On page 8, Black Rose is on the walls at the time she meets the sappers, so yeah, they’re all on the battlements. It’s not until the end of the chapter that she leaves for the city. I’m going to look this section over to make sure this is clearer, including the part with the blood.

It’s true that sappers don’t usually go and fight and they weren’t supposed to here, but things went wrong while they infiltrated the gatehouse of the southern compass gate. A couple Alliance troops and citizen militia took a part of the gate mechanism which the sappers tried to get back. Thanks to both Hemlock’s and Black Rose’s interference they managed that.

[Mandamon he/him]

I like the explanation, but don't tell us here. Find a way to reveal that (or parts of that) backstory in the book. The fact that we're questioning after reading this far means not enough is hinted at yet.

Give us a few hints (maybe the the Paths run in their blood, or something like that) and then say, "This is a shifter." Then when another comes up, you make some reference to the Path running through them, and the reader says, "Oho! This is a Shifter--I know what that is," even if don't really know what their powers are or what they do.

Same thing with the Sappers. As I said, I like the crew, but it feels like their story is missing. They're just a cool band of people who have been plopped into the story. Have one of them mutter about how they got stuck in the city, and suddenly we can emphasis with them more. You may have done some of this and I'm not remembering. If so, that tells me the hint didn't stick out enough.

I think the main thing is to have that great backstory, and then give just enough hints that your readers can piece it together as they go through the book, so it feels like, at the end, they've discovered it for themselves.

Okay, enough pontificating for me...

P.S. Here's a fun thing: Go look up a superhero backstory on Wikipedia. That's what too much backstory at one time looks like. Don't do that. After the fifth time Captain Thingybob comes back to life to do Whatsit to Whositman, you just start laughing.

Okay, really enough now. Write more--I need to find out what happens to Black Rose!

[cjhuitt he/him]

One of the things I noticed while reading was how casually Black Rose mentions the source of the pull on the paths. My impression from the last time she tried to use the paths was that it was a disorienting amount of shifting -- if you'll allow me to reuse the word -- but I didn't recall a sense of stability or direction to it. I may not be remembering properly, of course, but if not, I would suggest a bit more explanation here about her experiments leading to that discovery, plus the direction of the source of the pull.

I felt like I should know the girl in the white dress (and in the above comments, you mention it's Amaryllis. As you note, you haven't stated in text that she is a shifter, but more importantly to me, I don't recall many (any) hints that she could do magic, so that feels like a bit of a reveal for me. More importantly, however, my mental map of characters places her firmly in the city, so I wasn't able to identify her myself. Of course, she doesn't take the time to properly identify herself to Black Rose, either. Now, it's possible that if I read the chapters more closely together, I might be able to piece together the hints to determine who she is, but as just reading the chapter, I wasn't able to. A beta reader or two, reading the whole thing at once, would probably give you better feedback on if the connection needs reinforced or not.

On a more general note of writing style, I found this representative sentence fragment: "The soles of her boots touched the wall clumsily...". I think, looking at this, I've figured out what has been a very mild, but present, annoyance throughout some of the chapters. The sentence describes a portion of a character doing something in a certain way, and I think it happens every so often in your writing. This is probably a personal preference thing, but to me, that gives too much agency to the portion or part of the person, rather than the person has a whole. To go with this example, if I stumble over a crack in a sidewalk, I don't think that my feet stumbled, I think that I did. Nor do I think the feet were clumsy; rather, I think that about myself as a whole. Further reflection leads me to wonder if those sentences are a natural part of your writing, or if you intentionally change to them in order to vary the otherwise similar sentences? Or for some other reason? I'll also quickly note that the sentence is an small example of showing instead of telling, so in this case it jumped out at me even more, since I feel the same effect could be had by saying she stumbled as she stepped onto the steady rock at the top of the wall (or some such).

Additionally, shortly after that you have a paragraph where the first sentence talks about the soil of the plain reforming normally when she stopped magicking it, and then follow it with the rest of the paragraph being about Black Rose getting shot by arrows. In fact, the next whole portion is about the arrow fighting. It seems like the first sentence should be on its own somewhere, or a part of the previous paragraph, or something.

Finally, at the end, we have Black Rose setting out on her own business again, instead of the war leadership stuff. I think that promises interesting plot possibilities that may be on their way.