10/19/2015 - supersoup - Awaken

[supersoup]

How's it going!
 

This is a short story that I hope to polish up and shop around to fantasy fiction magazines. What I'm looking for at the moment is less structural feedback (word choice, grammar, sentence structure, etc.) and more functional feedback (was it enjoyable, did it make sense, were the emotional beats effective, and word choice only if a poorly chosen word gave you pause and took you out of the narrative) because I plan to pass it by an editor before I start sending it out.
 

Thanks for your time! I hope you enjoy.

Mitch

[Mandamon]

Pg 1: I can make a guess at Aer and Traversal, but this is a really short story to introduce a magic system.  It feels like this is part of a larger story.

 

Pg 3: Was Ched a hallucination? That part was a little unclear.  I'm guessing he was, but then how did Portsef know where to go?

 

This was enjoyable, but my main concern with this story was that while you give some explanation of the Aer at the end, you have to devote a bit of story to doing so, and to explaining the poison at the beginning.

The arc of the story seems to be "Portsef gets away from the cops while not blacking out from poison."  Did the Aer and the action of Traversal actually add anything?  I like the magic as you describe it, but I felt like he could just have easily escaped through a hidden tunnel in the hideout or something.

[rohyu]

I like your first couple of lines. They did a great job grabbing my attention. It took me a second read-through to realize it, but I believe Ched was a hallucination. I thought it was cool once I realized it.

 

I'm not sure why the memorial statue was left in Ched's shack if it was important to Portsef. Without knowing the mourning rituals of the world, it is hard to me to interpret the customs. My best guess is that he had to leave the statue while fleeing the fight that killed Ched, but that makes me wonder how he had time to carve the inscription. My next guess is that in their world a memorial statue has to sit in the deceased's bedroom for a few days before it is taken elsewhere.

 

I'm also confused why Portsef didn't Traverse as soon as he got the statue.

 

Overall I enjoyed the story. It left me wanting to read more about Portsof and the world he lives in.

[supersoup]

Thanks for your feedback, to the both of you!

 

 

 

Pg 1: I can make a guess at Aer and Traversal, but this is a really short story to introduce a magic system.  It feels like this is part of a larger story.

 

Pg 3: Was Ched a hallucination? That part was a little unclear.  I'm guessing he was, but then how did Portsef know where to go?

 

This was enjoyable, but my main concern with this story was that while you give some explanation of the Aer at the end, you have to devote a bit of story to doing so, and to explaining the poison at the beginning.

The arc of the story seems to be "Portsef gets away from the cops while not blacking out from poison."  Did the Aer and the action of Traversal actually add anything?  I like the magic as you describe it, but I felt like he could just have easily escaped through a hidden tunnel in the hideout or something.

 

 

I started writing this story with the intent of exploring one of my characters for NaNoWriMo. Just to get into his head and his world for about fifteen minutes and see what happened. So in a way, it is a part of a larger story, but I'm not planning on carrying on right from the end of this one. In the writing, I found some stuff I had fun exploring, and realized it could become a standalone tale with a bit of trim and polish.

 

I don't know how to SPOILER tag anything here, so . . .

Ched is absolutely a hallucination. No comment to the second part.

 

I'm glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for reading.

And sure, he could have gotten away using a tunnel or some such, but where's the fun in that?

 

 

I like your first couple of lines. They did a great job grabbing my attention. It took me a second read-through to realize it, but I believe Ched was a hallucination. I thought it was cool once I realized it.

 

I'm not sure why the memorial statue was left in Ched's shack if it was important to Portsef. Without knowing the mourning rituals of the world, it is hard to me to interpret the customs. My best guess is that he had to leave the statue while fleeing the fight that killed Ched, but that makes me wonder how he had time to carve the inscription. My next guess is that in their world a memorial statue has to sit in the deceased's bedroom for a few days before it is taken elsewhere.

 

I'm also confused why Portsef didn't Traverse as soon as he got the statue.

 

Overall I enjoyed the story. It left me wanting to read more about Portsof and the world he lives in.

 

SPOILER . . .

Haha, I'm glad you caught it! I've had some fun conversations with friends and family reading this, notably my best friend saying "Of course he was a hallucination" and my wife giving me a blank look, followed by a "Wait, seriously?" I'm pretty satisfied with the split.

 

I like your speculation on the figurine!

 

Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for reading.

[Asmodemon]

I enjoyed the story, but while it started out strong it petered out at the end.

 

Hallucinations: The hallucinations worked pretty well, starting with the bugs and then with Ched. It was pretty clear to me that Ched was a hallucination, but that’s fine, I liked how that turned out. Made sense that Portsef would seek out his shanty house to hide in, since apparently he’d done that before, even if the poison was messing with his head so he’d kind of forgotten (until he saw the memorial) that Ched was already dead.

 

Accents: I’m not usually one for accents being written out like this, but it works for me here. Good job.

 

Traversal: Not too sure about this particular piece of magic. It actually makes his whole flight from the authorities pointless. There’s no reason, at least as far as I can see, why Portsef would wait to Traverse away until he was in Ched’s hideout. He could have done that before and save himself the trouble. To me this ending is a bit of a letdown.

[rdpulfer]

- I like the first line a lot.

 

- Watch out for overuse of "to be" verbs like was, were, had and been. Someone pointed this out in my own writing so I'm a little sensitive to it. It really cuts down the description, especially in the opening chapters.

 

- It's not just the accents but also the slang which seems to be throwing me. It's makes the world feel more lived in and real, but I also feel it could be dialed down just a bit.

 

- Overall, a good story. It kept my interest, even if the dialogue was a bit to follow. I really did want to know more in the end . . . I wonder if it could extrapolated just a little more. Otherwise, good work!  

[Shrike76]

I enjoyed the story, such as it was, but it felt a lot like a Chapter One, in that not a lot got resolved and it felt like it was directly a lead up to a larger story than a nicely-wrapped package. I do think that it has a lot of potential, and it can be a very functional short story with a bit of rearrangement.

Portsef was interesting, and so was the magic system which I thought was very cleanly defined. In a four-page section I feel like I have a good grasp on how the magic works and what its limits are. I didn't even mind the accents (which I usually strongly advise against) because it was specifically presented as an in-world thing and I understood the gist of the words, this is a good example of doing strange accents right in fiction.

 

Where the story lost me mostly was with the poison. Portsef knows that he's been poisoned, and even knows what it is, but the way it's presented had me scratching my head. the vomiting and the hallucinations are mostly okay, but here's some of my issues with it:

P1: "could bring the strongest man to the ground for as long as it fancied" - Is the poison sentient? Because it shouldn't fancy anything.

 - In the same paragraph. "It was impossible to shake once it claimed you, but luckily it could be held at bay for a time through willpower alone" - I can believe that this particular person can do it, but I don't think it's necessarily a feature of the poison that anyone can. Maybe focus on this person's struggle against it, rather than make it a global thing about the poison.

 - And to finish off the paragraph: "all who were poisoned with Sel's Venom succumbed to the torpor eventually"

All of this makes it seem like it's a particularly brutal poison, and one whose effects are made to seem permanent. but at the end, our protagonist is lying on a rooftop, slipping into unconsciousness from the poison, and plannign his next move after it wears off, but the earlier descriptions had led me to believe that this wasn't the sort of thing that was going to wear off. Or at least, not for a very long time, and he's here on a rooftop, exposed to the sun and the elements for who knows how long, and it left me underwhelmed.

 

I think the story could be made much stronger by presenting the information differently. In my opinion, if the story is about him finding a particular place (or person), we can know about that, and we can even know why Portsef wants it, and the story becomes about him getting there before the poison stops him cold. Seeing him attacked and about to fail at it at the last moment and then using the magic you've nicely planted earlier to pull the rug out from under his adversaries is also satisfying, and it would provide a better conclusion. We then know that he's going to get what he wanted after all, and in a very clever way by using himself as a decoy. Since in this version I didn't know what he was doing from the beginning, when he achieved his secret goal at the end I didn't care very much.

 

Lastly, I felt like you mentioning the hallucinations was a promise, that some of the things Portnef was going to be seeing weren't going to be real, but then it sort of gets dropped. The magic is presented as real, the fight is real, everything is real up until the end, and I felt a little let down.

Edited October 21, 2015 by Shrike76

[Robinski]

Sorry for the really, really late comments.

 

I enjoyed the story. Detail comments below, but it felt very much like the first chapter of a novel. I didn’t get any sense of closure at the end, the events didn’t really resonate in the way that a short story delivers an emotional character arc in a few thousand words. The story introduced several elements, but didn’t develop them, or that character either.

 

I think it has potential as an introduction, but I don’t really see the merits as a short story.

 

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“unraveled quite as planned” – I'm not sure you plan for things to unravel, which is negative, but rather to ‘play out’ or possibly ‘unwind’.

 

“The city guard was generally—thankfully—slow to respond to summons” – Awkward phrasing. Also, city guards always seem to be “sleepy and disorganized” (i.e. a bit crap), it’s almost a cliché now, I think.

 

“a Parliamentary member” – Don't see why this is capitalised, it’s not a name but a thing.

 

Since when did leeches have legs?

 

“for as long as it fancied” – Hmm, but the poison is not sentient. The length of the torpor must be determined by the subject’s physiology, surely.

 

“Those that did the poisoning” – ‘Those who had done the poisoning’, I think.

 

“though the voice was younger than he knew the guardsmen to be. Far younger” – Overcomplicated. No need to tell the reader the kids aren’t guardsmen. All we need to know is that it’s a child’s voice.

 

“who spoke with the most common accent among the slum people. It was a dialect that Portsef was intimately familiar with, so he decided to respond in kind” – Again, I find this overcomplicated and telling (not showing). For me, this doesn’t need to be explained so much.

 

“mister Sef” – Mister Sef – it’s his title. Just to repeat my earlier point about “them Parliamentary men” – if you’re going to capitalise parliamentary, then why not City Guard too?

 

I like the slum-speak. It’s disjointed, but still just about understandable, much better than the darn-right impenetrable pigeon spoken by Spook in Mistborn. I would say that it’s a bit inconsistent in places, where it starts to become too grammatical, I thought.

 

“Thin, worm-eaten blankets” – hyphenated.

 

I like the fungus lamp, but presuming this is a short story, I think “a staple in the slums because it was cheap and easy to maintain; sprinkle it with water once a month, taking care to use it only when necessary, and it would glow throughout the nights” – is irrelevant detail.

 

I'm a bit disoriented, I thought he went into the sleeping room, but when the guards come in they seem to confront him in the common room, but there’s no indication he has stood up and moved back there.

 

“pulled sharply backward through a wall of water” – I like this description of the magical transportation.