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Reading Excuses - 2/20/17 - aeromancer - North Legend (V, G?) (4917)


aeromancer

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This is a one-shot I wrote based off a story line I wanted to incorporate into my unpublished novel Scissors & Bows. It's kind of rough, but I'm scared of running another edit over it because that might throw it over the 5k count. And, as promised, there are wolves in it. Cuddly wolves, because wolves are by definition cuddly. But, for all my talk of wolves, this isn't really a story about wolves. North Legend is the tale of a North Legend, about someone searching for a lost friend. I'd like comments on everything you can throw at me, but especially impressions. Gore is someone having half a dozen bones broken, I'm not sure how to handle that tag, so better safe than sorry.

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Ah, another use of the 'G'. At least its not just me!

Overall

I think the quality of writing here is better than in Scissors and Bows, by quite a bit. There is still the tendency to heavily weight with fight scenes and to have exposition continue for too long, but you're getting better. I thought the end was really intriguing but had a hard time trying to mentally connect it with the rest. The story itself could use a more defined arc, but that's more about tweaking the front and back than the actual meat. With some edits, this could be a really nice piece!

As I go

- page one: the bar was close to snapping- it took me three reads to figure out you didn't mean the bar table was going to snap in half

- page two: I feel like we're bouncing between authorial viewpoint and A's on this page

- redundancy on 'single' on page two paragraph with 'the bartender' start

- The tattoo was a signature of the Black Ice, a ruthless band of mountain bandits. This is really telly/infordumpy 

- the chatting and back and forth is getting a bit tiresome by page seven

- page ten: the dialogue is trying now. So much info. I'm not going to retain it all

- page twelve: better here, with the wolf retribution and archery

- end of page 13: so are we in omniscient then? I thought limited but maybe not?

- page fourteen: That A can tell they are lying would be better understood as broadcasted tells, and not described away

- page 17: “It’s immune to my powers, and its This chapter seems out of place and I'm confused as to how it ties into the previous

- I really like the end, but I'm blurry as to the promise it is keeping. I think it needs to perhaps be just a little more clearly spelled out. Not a lot, just a little

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14 hours ago, kaisa said:

I think the quality of writing here is better than in Scissors and Bows, by quite a bit. There is still the tendency to heavily weight with fight scenes and to have exposition continue for too long, but you're getting better. I thought the end was really intriguing but had a hard time trying to mentally connect it with the rest. The story itself could use a more defined arc, but that's more about tweaking the front and back than the actual meat. With some edits, this could be a really nice piece!

Yeah, I know I empathized the fights scenes too much. The story's not really about that so much as the legend. I am glad to hear that I'm improving, especially considering that the some characters from North Legend are also from Scissors & Bows, I've just swapped all the names. The reason for inconsistent narration, by the way, is because this was pieced from three separate word docs. I've been working on this for a while, and I made a lot of false starts, so I ended up mashing them together and writing the rest. I thought I did a good job, but it's hard for me to spot inconsistencies when I've been working on it for about a week straight. Thanks.

7 hours ago, Ernei said:

How does the bartender know that it's not the guy A. is looking for? Seems to have come from out of nowhere.

...

Also, if K. is a Shaman and other people living there know it, then why wasn't he asked to track Black Ice already? I get the impression that he's the one doing all the hard work here, and A. is there just to be sword. And I mean, he could have always asked the locals to help him, why wait for her? And even he wanted to wait for her so much, then why didn't they take some other men with them now?

 This could be explained a bit more clearly. K isn't just a shaman, he's the Shaman. He's responsible to guard the North (or will be, once his mother retires) and he has certain restrictions. One of them is a non-interference policy. He can't really change the mountains to a large degree, such as wiping out a huge menace like the Black Ice. Thinking about it now, I can rewrite him to have a more passive role, which I probably should do.

7 hours ago, Ernei said:

They have katana? O.o But the setting doesn't seem to be Japan-based in any way.

The girl has a katana because she fights using iaijitsu. I've never view sword types as a cultural restriction. I mean, zwiehanders show up all over the place, and everyone seems to love using bastard swords despite the fact that ninety percent of people have no idea what they are. Bastard sword is just another word for hand-and-a-half or longsword. It's all the same sword, it was just widely known as the bastard sword up until the 1900s, if memory serves correct. The larger world that North Legend takes place in using everything from epees to falchions to executioner's swords and, yes, katanas and bastard swords.

I like swords, if you couldn't tell.

7 hours ago, Ernei said:

Talking to oneself? Exposition through monologue, is this even a thing? O.o

I hope so? Please? As a person I'd rather talk to myself than internal monologue, so I assumed the same for K.

 

7 hours ago, Ernei said:

The ending is... odd. I don't feel satisfied. It could do for a prologue, or for a supplement, but as a one-shot it doesn't work.

(It was intended to be a supplement) Can I ask why you felt that way, and what I could do to fix that?

 

7 hours ago, Ernei said:

Overall

Was alright, I guess. I like some of your ideas - shamanism the most - but this needs a thorough revision to smooth. I hope my notes help :) 

Thank you. Shamanism is actually my most complex system, and I'm glad I was able to make it work it this short story.

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20 minutes ago, Ernei said:

If it's a supplement, then it's fine ;) The problem here is that the ending is open and it foreshadows more adventures/bigger threat. I mean, A. didn't find the person she was looking for, and the last part with the bard is quite clearly introducing a new hero. I don't think you could fix that without rewriting a large part of the story, and dropping most of the foreshadowing-the-next-adventure elements

This is my punishment for trying to be subtle. While A didn't find the person she was looking for, K did and the bard isn't introducing a new hero. What I was trying to do was this: The girl in the start/end italics is actually the nameless girl that J is looking for. I thought I tipped enough clues that way, but apparently not. Chronologically, that happens first, the girl goes to the north to seek legends and to become one. Later on, J follows her to the north and helps her eradicate the last of the Black Ice. The Black Ice unleash the chaemira to attempt to stop them, so J and the girl decide to sacrifice themselves to freeze it under the frozen lake. K, realizes this, and subtly hints that A should stop looking for J without tipping her off that J is dead. The 'legend' told at the last italics was a representation of the tale that J & the girl went through, even though the girl heard it before the story happened, meaning that she actually became a legend.

That was my thought process, anyway.

Edited by aeromancer
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Like @kaisa and @Ernei, I thought the writing was better here, but nothing in the story really caught my interest.

 

21 hours ago, aeromancer said:

This is my punishment for trying to be subtle.

I also didn't catch this at all. The end of the story just felt sort of unfinished, and I wasn't sure what the italicized parts had to do with the rest of the story.

Notes as I read:
 

pg 1: "pulse of the bar"
--I think you mean bar=tavern here, but based on this and that it's close to snapping, you could be referring to a physical bar, especially since you use it that way a page or so later.

pg 2: "silence a room full of men double her twenty-three years into silence"
--redundancy

pg 2: "She stuck out like a sore thumb, except it was squarely jammed into their metaphorical eyes. Getting a thumb jammed into your eye hurt, Ariane knew from too much experience."
--eh...this is a bit of a stretch in the metaphor department.

pg 2: the narrative is wandering here. I don't yet have a good hook to the story.

pg 3: Not sure why A. goes directly to punching when a guy asked her to buy him a drink.

pg 4: "Get up, and you’ll die.”
--yeah...this seems extreme. I mean the guy was probably a jerk, but at this point he only asked if she would buy him a drink. I would think the first step would be to say "no."

pg 5: still not really hooked on anything. I don't have an attachment to any of the characters yet.

pg 6: “They’ve been preying on the North for decades at this point.” 
--so did she know the guy was a member of The Black Ice before she tried to kill him?

pg 10: “But, this means that I’m alpha. Deal?”
--note sure why A is obsessed with this. Aren't the wolves a pack on their own? Why do they need a new alpha?

pg 12: “You feeling this is too easy?”
--Yes. There's not a lot of tension because they're getting over every obstacle easily.

pg 12: "But you reached for your weapons first."
--have to agree with the goons here. Random people walked into their cave. They are right to be surprised and hostile.

pg 14: still don't get much tension from this. A takes out the group too easily.

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On 2/22/2017 at 1:58 PM, Mandamon said:

pg 3: Not sure why A. goes directly to punching when a guy asked her to buy him a drink.

pg 4: "Get up, and you’ll die.”
--yeah...this seems extreme. I mean the guy was probably a jerk, but at this point he only asked if she would buy him a drink. I would think the first step would be to say "no."

pg 6: “They’ve been preying on the North for decades at this point.” 
--so did she know the guy was a member of The Black Ice before she tried to kill him?

pg 12: "But you reached for your weapons first."
--have to agree with the goons here. Random people walked into their cave. They are right to be surprised and hostile.

Yeah, A knew beforehand, she spotted the guy's skin paint. But you are right she punched first and asked question later. So did K, for the most part. K's rationale is more of an excuse than anything else. Both A and K are like that, it's part of their character. Due to their Shamanistic abilities, they have an innate connection to the North. One of the checks built into the Shaman system is that when you draw power from somewhere, it slightly affects your personality and that gets multiplied the more power you draw and the more frequent you draw on it. In the case of these two, they draw power from the North, which (as mentioned several times) is unforgiving. It's not even 'once a murderous bandit, always a murderous bandit', they simply are punishing someone who did something wrong. It's not necessarily morally right or morally wrong (but I wouldn't mind discussing that), it's part of their personality to do that.

On 2/22/2017 at 1:58 PM, Mandamon said:

pg 14: still don't get much tension from this. A takes out the group too easily.

 There isn't really supposed to be tension here. This isn't really necessary to the point, it's a consequence of previous actions (part of the Black Ice surviving the previous assault) and, well, someone needed to kill them because I don't like loose ends. *shrug* Worldbuilding note here, I've developed all the characters in an unwritten novel (alpha readers welcome) and A's skills are enough to defeat them all. Maybe I'll just cut it out.

Thanks for the comments.

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Hello, I'm new. Longtime lurker, first time poster, and all that. I enjoyed this story!

That said...

I'm not sure quite what you're looking for in this crit, so I'm just going to generalize instead of go page-by-page...

Catching some grammar issues... but it looks like most of them have been caught by the others here.

It's not my area of expertise, but the "alpha" wolf theory is pretty well debunked by now. It was coined back in the '40s (based on a study of captive unrelated wolves), gained prominence in the '70s and perpetuated by werewolf fiction. Pack leaders fighting for dominance and maintaining their position by force just isn't really a thing.

Here are some links:
http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/01/11/the-alpha-wolfe-is-an-outdated-myth
http://io9.gizmodo.com/why-everything-you-know-about-wolf-packs-is-wrong-502754629
http://www.wolf.org/wolf-info/basic-wolf-info/in-depth-resources/scientific-publications/
http://www.cracked.com/article_22767_5-ridiculous-myths-about-animals-you-probably-believe.html
http://www.sketchyscience.com/2014/08/the-alpha-myth-real-science-of-wolf.html

Even if all you're doing is including the nomenclature, it throws a pall over your work for those of us who know it's based on outdated science.

Plot-wise, my hey-wait-a-minute takeaway is: If they were taken down that easily by just two people, why in all the world were the Ice people left to fester for so long? Your standard fighty Northmen couldn't rustle up/hire a tracker over the course of the decades before the protagonists arrive? I am also slightly annoyed we didn't get any resolution with the whole finding-J-and-the-girl thing.

I was slightly confused by the bard framing story. It didn't seem to have much relevance to the meat of the story.

Contrariwise, I enjoyed the focus on the fighting. You did a very good job with all the fight scenes. The moves were clean and believable, and the combos seemed to logically follow one another.

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stares at the alpha wolf mistake...

Wow. I feel out-nerded. Good job, industrialistDragon, you've impressed me. Have an upvote.

So, the 'bard framing' was a subtle plot device that I intended to use to add an extra layer to the story, and instead just added more text. I'm working on it.

45 minutes ago, industrialistDragon said:

Plot-wise, my hey-wait-a-minute takeaway is: If they were taken down that easily by just two people, why in all the world were the Ice people left to fester for so long? Your standard fighty Northmen couldn't rustle up/hire a tracker over the course of the decades before the protagonists arrive? I am also slightly annoyed we didn't get any resolution with the whole finding-J-and-the-girl thing.

Tracking's difficult on a snowy mountain, unless you are a wolf. The North is only snowy mountains. Also, these two people (A&K) are protagonists. A's a trained spec-op, and K can cause hypothermia by looking at people. (plus, K can't do it by himself because of reasons. He explains why.) So, your standard fighty Northmen cannot rustle up a tracker and clean the gang out, despite the fact that they've probably tried.

There was, in fact, a resolution, and by that I mean there was supposed to be a resolution, and I messed it up. Long story short, J finds the girl, they sacrifice themselves to kill the chaemira, are frozen in a lake, cryogenics is pseudo-science*, so barring insane magical powers, they are dead. 

*Clarification: Mainstream cryogenics may or may not be a pseudo-science, but the way it does work doesn't involve freezing people in a tube of water like a popsicle. You freeze someone in water for any decent amount of time, they're dead.

Edited by aeromancer
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16 minutes ago, aeromancer said:

Wow. I feel out-nerded. Good job, industrialistDragon, you've impressed me. Have an upvote.

Lol, is 'thank you' or 'i'm sorry' more appropriate? either way, the alpha trope is so well-ingrained into the collective popculture psyche, you basically have to go looking specifically for it to find the refutations. I lucked into it some years ago through the sort of internet-rabbithole that has you start at shopping for underwear and ending up at how-to-train-your-goldfish videos. 

21 minutes ago, aeromancer said:

Tracking's difficult on a snowy mountain, unless you are a wolf. The North is only snowy mountains. Also, these two people (A&K) are protagonists. A's a trained spec-op, and K can cause hypothermia by looking at people. (plus, K can't do it by himself because of reasons. He explains why.) So, your standard fighty Northmen cannot rustle up a tracker and clean the gang out, despite the fact that they've probably tried.


You might need to make these issues more clear, hammer on them a little more, or somehow otherwise show that this is only easy because your protagonists have special training (standard TVTropes warning: it WILL devour your time the way my school loan consumes my paycheck. be warned!)

28 minutes ago, aeromancer said:

There was, in fact, a resolution, and by that I mean there was supposed to be a resolution, and I messed it up. Long story short, J finds the girl, they sacrifice themselves to kill the chaemira, are frozen in a lake, cryogenics is pseudo-science*, so barring insane magical powers, they are dead. 

Aha. That makes a lot of sense. I think I sort of see it, but yes, it could be clearer. 

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17 minutes ago, industrialistDragon said:

You might need to make these issues more clear, hammer on them a little more, or somehow otherwise show that this is only easy because your protagonists have special training (standard TVTropes warning: it WILL devour your time the way my school loan consumes my paycheck. be warned!)

Well,I tried lampshading that when A & K have a discussion about how easy it was, and K responds along the lines of 'well, we're special protagonists'. Also, I am way too far gone for that kind of warning, but thank you anyway.

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Interested to read something new from you, and nice to have a short among the ongoing my projects. On we go. 
- Hmm, a story set in an inn; gotta say that's really overdone. I got 'hell' from 'someone' for having an in my novel Waifs and Strays. Okay, I had 3 inns, but still...
- "The bard idly plucked a string" - on what?
- "Almost too short to tell" - curious about what a short legend might look like, but I must say the framing story hasn't bowled me over. I don't get much sense of place.
- "I can handle it." - What's your audience? This line is kind of pat, meh, like the sort of line someone would use if they were trying to appear experienced, but were not. 
- Names. Ari is non-committal, but Jackson sounds modern. I have no indication yet of genre or sett my which, for a short, is an issue I think.
- "Ariane hadn’t expected it to silence a room full of men double her twenty-three years into silence" - this doesn't tell me anything about her aura, just the effect it had, so I'm none the wiser, and actually more disbelieving than anything.
- "She stuck out like a sore thumb" - why? This is getting quit annoying.
- "drained the glass in a single gulp" - Do you drink yourself? I ask because people mostly buy drink because they like the taste, the effect and to take up time. I feel here that she wants to pass the time. Draining a drink in one gulp is a huge cliché, imho, and not convincing or interesting when I'm trying I got to get a handle on a character I don't know. 
- "It wouldn’t get her drunk, but it might set the bar on edge enough for some idiot to throw a punch at her" - It might not get her drunk, but it will affect her judgement. In the real world, I feel this is naïve. And why would her taking a drink make someone punch her? I just don't understand. If she's drinkin', she ain't fightin'.
- "Ariane forced herself to wait six months without hearing from him before she acted. She tapped the usual sources, and Jackson had made no effort to cover his tracks when he left to the north. That worried her, more than anything. If Jackson wasn’t being careful…" - This is the first paragraph that I found properly convincing.
- "shot a lightning jab into the man’s solar plexus" - Why, he hadn't done anything?
- "I’ve got too few time" - Too little time.
- Change of PoV in a short, why? Having said that, I felt little for Ari - generic tough with no personality. Maybe K will be better. 
- A thought strikes me here. Why on earth would the hard tell this story? There's nothing by heroic or amazing about it, nothing remotely legendary. He would never get away with this and keep an audience rapt.
- I'm reading about all these people and their aims, but you haven't made me care about any of them.
- "The Kase siblings" - who is this, our PoVs? I think you need to introduce it much sooner. And the appearance of the wolves is not given proper place, I don't think. Curse at best. It could feel special. 
- "special forces" - this is a modern term. Feels out of place to me. 
- "chǽmira" - I felt this came out of nowhere. You might build a legend out if two people going up against a huge unbeatable beast - that would be something to centre the story around. All this skirmishing with bandits is very un-legendary to me. It must happen ever week of the year in some parts.
- "challenged the beast to a duel, after which, nothing was heard from" - something off here. I feel like the spirit of it is 'challenged the beast to a duel, about which nothing further was heard'.
- I don't get the ending. So she's not the same girl, but just resembles her? Pretty poor reason to go off and risk death. And I feel like the story is set up to be the telling of a legend and it's not, so I feel cheated.
Overall, the issues I had were (1) I never had any interest in the characters, who I'm afraid I found dull; (2) There was no threat or jeopardy; and (3) There was no legend suggested by the title and the opening.
Sorry to not have much positive.
<R>
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  • 2 weeks later...

Here I go, catching up on my late posts. :) Hopefully you still find this helpful.

On February 21, 2017 at 4:36 PM, aeromancer said:

The 'legend' told at the last italics was a representation of the tale that J & the girl went through, even though the girl heard it before the story happened, meaning that she actually became a legend.

So I got this much from your ending. Some of your other details didn't come through, but it was pretty clear (to me) that the girl asking for the legend was actually the one in the legend itself.

Overall, I thought this is a fun piece. You have a much stronger voice here than I remember from your previous submissions, so nice job. I like the magic of the shaman being one with the mountain — it was engaging and interesting, a sort of more “natural” magic.

Here are my main suggestions:

First, focus the plot and give it more of an arc. From the way you set things up at the beginning, I was expecting Ari’s quest to find Jack to last a lot longer. Then she and her brother have a brief fight with mercenaries that doesn’t even seem like a challenge, and at the end, they find out Jack and his apprentice are probably dead. There’s a nice reveal at the end with the girl in the inn, but the middle felt too easy and the resolution too quick. 

Second, settle on Ari’s character a bit more. Sometimes she acts like a grumpy middle-aged woman, and other times she acts like she’s ten. Her brother treats her like she’s ten, which makes it all more confusing.

Specifics:

which was defiantly one reason the room wasn’t happy.
Not sure what you mean here. Also I think you mean "definitely" instead of "defiantly"? (Isn't autocorrect nice??)

Ari stepped inside with a single smooth motion and shot a lightning jab into the man’s solar plexus with the tip of her elbow.
Why? She's very on edge here. I saw your explanation above -- that the magic makes them unusually intense -- but I didn't get the impression from your story that A uses any magic, and I never saw hints that the magic was affecting her brother in this way. But this early in the story, I think all you'd need was to hint that she was suspicious of him for a reason other than maybe being hit on, before she starts smashing bones. 

The tattoo was a signature of the Black Ice
We know this from what the patron says in the previous line. Maybe describe it instead?

"that you weren’t supposed to figure out that man had those tattoos"
This seems obvious - not sure why he needs to say it.

"I should be able to keep her under wraps while she’s still here."
I thought he was the one who caused trouble. And why would offering to cover up for his sister make the bartender feel better? 

"and silent. Much like yourself."
She doesn't seem silent.

The Kase siblings had always had a natural affinity with wolves.
Tell-y: this is you speaking, not Ari's POV!

“Even with your techniques, you are only slightly stronger than most humans, and you’d freeze now if it weren’t for the symbols Mother placed inside us.”
Again, coming across as tell-y. Re-word?

“Where are we heading, by the way?” / “Ah.” Khel nodded. “The alpha told me that his pack had run into a nest of Black Ice. Well, told is a bit strong, but that’s the sense he conveyed. He’s taking us to them now. It’s another hour or so.”
This seems out of order. Where were they heading before the wolves met up with them?

The alpha sat up, and bent his head low.
When did they stop running?

You spent three years undergoing intense special forces training after being one of the Empire’s best mercenaries."
Tell-y, again. (You know what I mean by tell-y, right?)

“You feeling this is too easy?”
As a reader, I’m feeling it’s too easy.

Slowly Khel opened his eyes. He was the cavern. And Khel remembered.
I like this kind of magic, the kind that feels natural.

"It’s immune to my powers, and its armor can’t be pierced by simple swords."
Tell-y, again. I believe Khel would think about this, but his thoughts would be more complicated than simply stating to himself what he already knows.

 

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On 2/24/2017 at 1:05 PM, Robinski said:
Sorry to not have much positive.
<R>

Forgiven. Critiques are almost as good as compliments. As Edison once (may have) said, 'I have not failed, I've just found 10,000 ways not to invent a lightbulb'. (Probably false to some degree, the real number is closer to 1,000 I think.) I prefer to think of a critique as things telling me what not to do, meaning I can only make less mistakes in the future. So, thank you.

3 hours ago, Hobbit said:

So I got this much from your ending. Some of your other details didn't come through, but it was pretty clear (to me) that the girl asking for the legend was actually the one in the legend itself.

Yes!  I'm very happy about this, though the fact that most people missed it means I've got my work cut out from me. Still, at least I'm on the right track. So, shamanism is a system I've kicked around for a while (and under a lot of different names) and it's been developed a lot. It's the most subtle system I've got. North Legend is part of a larger world. Thanks for the feedback.

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