20160718 - Alfa - Demiurge - Chapter 1 (About Smiths, Clerics and Regents) (V, S)

[Alfa]

Hello reading excuses!

this is my first submission and my first serious attempt to write in english.

The Demiurge story will be set in a SF/Fantasy-Universe with strong emphasis on SF. The plot is about... well, basically read the chapter, I think it's written condensed enough to see some basic plotlines. The style is somehow experimental and I didn't write much in it before - I hope you'll like it, if not, please let me know. Please also let me know if I used some words wrong; English is not native and not exactly intuitive to me.

Important note: my clock was wrong, so the date in the email was incorrectly typed as 20160807

[Mandamon]

Welcome to reading Excuses!

There were some inconsistencies in this, but more early on.  The writing got better as the story progresses.  Very good job in writing something not in your native tongue!

As to plot, this seems...compressed.  Almost to the point where it's more a list of things that happened rather than a story.  The characters come across as sketches, and I would like to know more about them rather than just a list of events.  I felt like I didn't know enough about the religion to know how things worked,  This would probably work well as a prologue, to set up the universe, before starting years in the future, with whoever the main character is (I didn't see one here...)

On timelines, there were months, periods, centi and deca periods.   Not sure what the relationship is.  I thought periods = years, but reading farther I wasn't sure.

 

Notes as I read:
pg 1: "almost nameless"
either it is or it isn't nameless

pg 1: hang -> hung

pg 1: "face hid behind a duster"
--I think a duster is a jacket?

pg 1: "he didn’t lose a word"
--didn't say a word

pg 1: "medicaments"
--medicine?  medication?

pg 1: "Neither had asked the other’s name."
--in three months?  Surely they needed something to call each other besides "hey you?"

pg 2: Before, you say there are millions of Centas, but on the next
page it seems this particular one is key to the war effort.  Can't they just get another of the millions of Centas?

pg 2: “That plan’s to risky”,
--too

pg 3: "cask of a stomach'
--not sure what this means

[Robinski]

Hey Alfa, great to read something by a new voice on the forum.

I code all my detailed comments according to MRK’s espoused ABCD method. (A) = Awesome; (B) = Boring; (C) = Confusing; and (D) = Disbelief (-inducing). Now also including their nerdy classmate who nobody spoke to in high school, (G) which is for Grammar/typo, an essential adjunct to the ABCDs!

The detailed stuff is below however, overall, I'm sorry to say that I am really struggling with this. There are soooo many people and places and titles and things and facts, and they all seem to have complicated relationships and duties and positions. None of it is explained and it comes so fast that it’s impossible to understand any of it.

The most important thing though, is that none of these people is really given any character, I don’t get to spend enough time with any of them to know them, to understand what they want or if they are intelligent, admirable, noble, brave – I don’t know anything about any of them. The only reason I read is to meet interesting people and watch them struggle and overcome obstacles to reach their goals (or not). Nothing in this first chapter suggests that there is anything for me in this story.

<R>

---------------------------------------------

(G) – “the engine sank in the waves” and I guess you meant the passenger compartment was upside down? I didn’t that ‘head down’ made that entirely clear.

(G) – I would say the Centa “suffered a head wound by a piece of broken metal...” or some wording like that. The metal is in her head, or sticking out of her head. ‘Against’ implies it has not penetrated.

(G) – “who hung in her chair”

(G) – “face hidden behind a duster, eyes silvery like the stars.”

(G) – “he didn’t say a word.”

(G) – “Equally silent, he brought her to his vehicle...” – It’s not clear here whether you mean the initia (although I presume you do), because the last name mentioned is the centa.

(G) – “the star triangle of the holy church...” In the first instance, you capitalised ‘Holy Church’. It’s just a matter of consistency. For me, you could capitalise ‘holy church’ or not, just sticking to the same convention. When it comes to capitalisation in general, I believe that a lot of it that you see in fiction is completely unnecessary. If you refer to ‘the Initia’, why is this any different from referring to ‘the Table’ or ‘the Sky’? I don’t think it is. If you are using it to distinguish a particular person by a title that belongs to them, then it absolutely should be capitalised, as in the Initia Morgenstern (for example). Sorry to rant here. We’ve debated this issue here before – all in an amiable way, of course!!

(C) – On the ‘star triangle’ above, this sounds distinctly like the Star of David. Was that your intention? If not, I'm struggling to picture what a star triangle looks like.

(G) – “deserted since for hundreds of periods (years?)”

(G) – “sold it to other people like him” – this sort of sounds like other weapon-smiths, but presumably they would make their own.

(G) – “went with the man to on his expeditions”

(G) – “He taught here her where to find” – typo.

(B/G) – “with a merchant ship in the ceremonial deep-blue robe of the late Centa Veora with carefully forged papers and pregnant” – Firstly, the phasing sounds like the ship is wearing the robe. Secondly, this is my first style point, which I’ve sort of been saving up so far. The style of the narrative is very dry. Things happen and are conveyed, but there is no emotion, that’s fair enough for the omnipotent viewpoint of the narrative, but it runs the risk of making the characters un-engaging. That might not be important in itself if these characters are not ‘stars’ of the story, but readers might end up putting the book down before getting to the interesting characters.

(D) – “Neither spoke of the unborn child. Neither spoke the other’s name.” I struggle to believe this. She was there for four months and I've heard no cultural reason why they would not exchange names. Also, this absence of emotion, of feeling, reinforces the sterile tone and I reach the point of not caring to know any more about these apparently heartless people.

(G) – “of poorness poverty and hard work”

(G) – “pride, more pride and even more pride” – I find that kind of phrasing off-putting. It’s very writer-ly, by which I mean mannered. A wise man once said something like the reader does not want to see the writer’s skill, but just wants to be entertained. This, for me, is very much the writing showing.

(B) – I cannot make head nor tail of the first paragraph on Page 2. There are so many names and terms that I haven’t heard before, and throwing them all together just makes me switch off.

(B/C/D) – “Everybody knew what she was talking about” – Everybody but me. I feel more and more and I read on that I'm listening to a TV show that I’ve missed the first 5 seasons of. Imagine trying to make sense of Games of Thrones by starting at Season 6. It sounds like there is a rich history here, and now we are seeing interesting sounding characters, but there are too many to keep straight and I have no idea what they are talking about, other than a few snippets.

[Robinski]

4 minutes ago, Mandamon said:

Almost to the point where it's more a list of things that happened rather than a story.

Yup, I had that very thought - well put.

Edited July 18, 2016 by Robinski

[kais]

Welcome welcome!

Overall

The writing improved as the narrative went on, although I'm confused more than anything. There is so much information and no character development that I'm not invested in the story. Reading above it seems that others have made the same comments. I'd suggest for a first chapter flushing out the first part with the crashed ship and the woman getting pregnant. Stick it in her POV, avoid the info dumps and take us through the first few months. Let us learn about her religion and why she is sleeping with a man without exchanging names. It's interesting, and would be a decent hook if it were expanded.

You did a stellar job with the English. There are general grammar flubs, but nothing horrible. Well done!

As I go thoughts

- I'm not certain how something can be 'almost-nameless'. It either has a name or it doesn't. Maybe the name has been forgotten, but it still has one then, it's just lost to time.

- the first three chapters would pass better as Initia's POV, and not an author info dump

- Same with the 'he was a weapon smith' paragraph. This is an info-dump. I'd prefer the woman come to this conclusion through assessing what the man is wearing instead of being told

- So, wait. Her ship crashes, the man rescues her, he takes her into the jungle to...gather things? They have sex for a few months without exchanging names and then she leaves, pregnant. This is a very confusing relationship, and one that isn't reading too terribly healthy at the moment.

- page 2, second paragraph. Too many names and titles. My mind is reeling.

- A 30 year old is not a 'girl'. If people are referring to her as such this says a lot about their character, so make sure that is what you want conveyed

- Page two, second to last paragraph: to - to get somewhere, two - a number, too - as in, too much, too many

[Eagle of the Forest Path]

In general, I agree with the previous assessments that there's a lot of information to deal with and not a whole lot of character development.
You can still get really good stories with this - look at Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series, for example - but the current fashions in fiction writing tend to shy away from this and put the focus on character, as this is more interesting to most readers.

I liked how you use metric system prefixes for religious titles and time division. (From the use of 'local months' on page 1 I'm assuming that periods are mostly used when speaking interplanetary?)

As for detailed stuff, I only want to mention one thing (well... maybe one-and-a-half) since most of it has already been said.

At the bottom of page 2: "get a second Giassa some dozens of times."
"A second" means a single event, if it happened again after that it would be "a third Giassa" and so on. This doesn't work with the "dozens of times" you say it will happen. You could say "we'll have another dozen Giassas" or "we'll repeat Giassa some dozens of times" or something similar.
"not to say" implies that it's not likely to happen, what I believe you're looking for here is "not to mention". (that's the and-a-half)

As for the "almost nameless" planet, while technically that's not possible, IMO this can be justified with "descriptive liberty", because it's a pretty cool phrase.

[neongrey]

I'm not gonna call out general grammar here; just mind your subject/verb agreement, your tenses, and your comma placement. You're out on the first two, and on the latter you've got issues both with not placing them correctly and using them to splice independent clauses together in sentences.

p.1

Your opening sentence is pretty muddled in terms of meaning; I see a lot of fixation on 'almost nameless' which could be made to work, but the front half of the sentence can't carry the weight of a phrase that sacrifices meaning for a vague sense of poetry.  'all often-used routes' is a mouthful of unnatural syntax, and centering 'a space-ship crashed' in the middle robs immediacy from the sentence; we're diving right in already disconnected from the action. Your second sentence is a lot more effective, at least halfway; you're evoking images decently, right up until you drop hard from conjuring images into clinical numbers and distances. The dissonance here is not pleasant.

'got a broken piece of metal' is pretty weak phrasing, even for as distant as you're holding your POV-- is this limited or omniscient? Another verb here would help though I think general rework on the sentence might do better. Piece of metal is pretty vague.

'assistant of the Centa' is not super natural phrasing in English; it's a pretty awkward passive-voice construction. You'd want to look at things like 'Centa's assistant' or similar.

'didn't lose a word'? I'm not certain what you're meaning by this.

'eyes of the Centa' is another of those passive-voice constructions you'll want to look out for. in general, if you see yourself writing in the form 'x of the y', it should usually be 'the y's x'.

"Centas across the galaxy, everybody would" you're gonna want a semicolon instead of a comma there.

It's spelled Faithful.

p.2 

The first two paragraphs: yikes. You're cramming a ton of information into a very small space. I would ask myself how many of these names the reader needs to know right away and start paring down from there.

Commas go inside the quotation marks; you need punctuation at the end of sentences before going into dialogue, and the first letters of new sentences should be capitalized in dialogue. I would actually recommend reading this; despite the framing device, it's a pretty good overview of both how you attribute and punctuate dialogue, and also why you do it that way.

'merchant lady' is a phrase that sours me right from the get-go. Merchant is not a term that needs a gender attached and we've established earlier in the sentence that she's a she; it comes off condescending to phrase it in this manner.

Comma splice at the end of Regent Zayfa first line; you'll want to swap the comma after Ascoldiusi for a semicolon.

'blessings on our weapons will expire' is an incredibly video gamey phrasing; this is where I would stop reading entirely. Evoking buff maintenance in an MMO is never a good move in narrative.

A lot of this dialogue seems to be people explaning to each other things they already know, and the ways in which you're introducing the characters feels awkward. You're giving one-two lines of description each but they don't have very distinct voices.

'a second Giassa some dozens of times' is not a construction that makes sense.

p. 3

'raid of the pagans' is not grammatically correct here; you want 'by' rather than 'of', or simply 'pagan raid' would both be correct.

'nobody lived on giassa anymore...' etc is a sentence that is really clunky. You'll want a semiclolon rather than a comma, and the part after the em-dash just makes me want to go all wikipedia and say 'citation needed'. 'some said' is not really a meaningful phrase. who's saying this? why are they saying it? is this something the reader needs to know? is it something the reader will want to know?

'by the superstition of the people' is, again, pretty awkward. you've got passive voice with the 'superstition of the people' and then it's extra passive voice by 'pronounced [...] by the superstition'. The sentence is tying itself in knots to frame what it's trying to convey as circuitously as possible.

'Pilgrimmed' is not a word.

'Celrya XIII'... this sentence runs on and on and on, and is loaded with comma splices. Of note: 'was competent for a centa'? Is it generally expected that they be incompetent?

'With this Celrya blonde they at least had' this sentence just does not work at all, grammatically speaking.

p.4

No unique comments but phrasing is out throughout.

 

Overall: I would say 80% of your problem is grammatical; it's a severe problem throughout. This goes a bit deeper than just subject/verb agreement and more into severe syntax issues. Basically you're not assembling sentences in ways that scan to habitual speakers of English, which hinders people being able to understand what's going on at all. All I can really suggest on this is to read in English more, and look at the ways sentences are constructed.

Omniscient POV isn't used super often anymore in English either and it's as a rule very difficult to work effectively; I notice upon scanning upwards that people are having trouble recognizing its usage here; I'd ascribe that to the awkward syntax. That said I think if you managed to get the sentences parsing more naturally I think we'd have a decent, if chilly, intro section here.

I think you've got interesting seeds under here but right now this is not particularly readable.

[rdpulfer]

- It feels like there is a lot going on in the first passage, and towards the end, it feels like a lot of summary. I'm not sure if this tactic will grab the reader or not, mostly because it feels very generic at the start.

- I love the first line of the second passage.

- A lot of the dialogue feels very "maid-and-butler" - it's showing the plot, not the character.

- Overall, this feels like a lot of summarizing to me. However, I am interested to know more about the characters and the direction of the story, but I feel we get so little of each in this opening, and telling more than anything else.

[AuthorityHellas16]

A really interesting concept, and an interesting start to the story. Can't wait to read more. 

• I like that, at least from my perspective, there were things that were not immediately explained. Stringing a reader along as you worldbuild (or in this case universe-build) is a good way to build tension. I'm left asking questions like what's the grea importance of the Centa?
• I'd try and avoid the lists. One thing that I think works (and you've done a lot of it) is introduce people by their contributions, like dialogue or reactions. 
• I like the alternate time periods. A nice touch for an alien environment
• I'm not a fan of the rapid-fire timeskip montage after Celyra was invested. Do you need this information, or could you make a clean cut to the future?

Overall interested to see where you go in this new universe!