20180507 - Journey to the Top of the Nether - Part 6 - 5382 words - Mandamon

[Mandamon he/him]

Slightly long, but this finishes up this section. I'm excited to see what you think!

Previously, the group rode in the balloon until their fuel ran out, and then anchored the beetle to the wall. They climbed for a few days, but the beetle hit a snag. They met another crew climbing up the wall, and started climbing together. After an accident that took one of each of the crews, the four remaining climbed through the cloud layer to find a giant waterfall forming the clouds. Above the clouds, they discovered a great waterfall, climbed below it until they crossed the vertical river, then began climbing upward again until they began to see strange white lights inside the wall.

Looking for all comments as usual... Thanks!
 

[industrialistDragon]

 

Not a whole lot to comment on this time. Pace was a little slow, but I enjoyed it all the same.  FInally finding something up on the Nether is very gratifying 

 

As I go:

I am having a little trouble picturing the grove and the houses on the sides of the wall. i think I could do with a little more description of places and things in this section.  She is training to be a naturalist after all.

 

"dominate female" --  dominant?

 

It seems a little odd that everyone's so unflappable and accepting of strange deformed flightless aliens from below the unpassable cloud sea, especially if these are just average farmers. I feel like it's a bit odd that everyone's just like "oh, hi new creatures I've never even conceived of existing before. Would you care to stay for dinner? I hope you eat food and not, like, our house or something. Wouldn't that be a bother!" 

[Mandamon he/him]

14 hours ago, industrialistDragon said:

It seems a little odd that everyone's so unflappable and accepting of strange deformed flightless aliens

Lol--good catch. I'll add in some more surprise.

14 hours ago, industrialistDragon said:

I am having a little trouble picturing the grove and the houses on the sides of the wall.

I'll expand on this...

Thanks, @industrialistDragon!

Edited May 9, 2018 by Mandamon

[Paracosmic_nomenclator]

As I go:

-"It was the majus who finally figured out what they were. [P] I munched through my small lunch of wafers and jerky." small thing, but given that sentence, I expected the next paragraph to be the majus' solution.

-"So what that means is that these little things are alive" Hmmm... so because they're using healing notes, E thinks they have to be alive? That seems shaky to me, like the reasoning back in the mid 19th century that life existed in space, because asteroids contained carbon, and as far as we knew back then, carbon was only existed in conjunction with life.

-"green and blue and purple shoots growing up from the surface of the Nether crystal like grass." Cool.

-"Their roots were a mass of light, reaching out in a great spider web of white beneath the surface of the wall." I love this sentence. The imagery is really vivid.

-"I peeled the rind and bit into the ridged blue fruit inside." Whoa, yikes! You're just going to eat fruit that's growing out of immutable crystal because it looks like something you're familiar with? I mean, ideally you'd have a little rodent or something to test-eat it, but at the very least, I'd trick W into eating some and then wait a little while. I suppose N is young, and probably wouldn't consider any of this, but maybe have M or E react with alarm to her eating the fruit.

-"he raised a small flailing thing to his pointy teeth." I like the biological distinctions you draw between the species.

-"I was staring at a face peeking out from behind a toka tree." Whaaaaaat?

-"thankful the Nether let us all communicate with each other." Huh. Is this a Symphony thing? It makes sense if I'm correct that the Nether is an artificially created hub for sentient species to meet each other. 

-"Grumv Vugm Mugv" I like the proper names of this species.

-"a long white berry, so it pulled the insides out like a popsicle." This sentence confuses me. Is it like a banana but you can pull the entire skin off at once?

-"big hairy creature with a mass of eyes and a beak at the front, and at least eight long black legs coming out from its bulbous body. [...] What a good boy!" Haha, pet spider! Awesome!

 

Overall:

Very exciting stuff! I'm excited to see the climb team make first contact with this city. Avi is cool, and I'm excited to see where their character goes. I'm super wary of W right now, like 80% sure he's going to cause a diplomatic incident, either intentionally or accidentally. I eagerly await the next part!

[Mandamon he/him]

Thanks @Paracosmic_nomenclator!

14 hours ago, Paracosmic_nomenclator said:

so because they're using healing notes, E thinks they have to be alive

Ah--good catch. I'm missing some explanation here. Basically they have a biological signature. I'll clarify.

14 hours ago, Paracosmic_nomenclator said:

because it looks like something you're familiar with

Hmm...They recognized the tree and the fruit as something familiar, but I can see your point. I think I need to up everyone's caution in this section.

14 hours ago, Paracosmic_nomenclator said:

thankful the Nether let us all communicate with each other.

It's a Nether thing, not a Symphony thing, but you're on the right track. I tried to gloss over this so I didn't have to do a lot of explanation. You've got the idea, so it may be working?

14 hours ago, Paracosmic_nomenclator said:

This sentence confuses me. Is it like a banana but you can pull the entire skin off at once?

I was thinking more like if you cut the top off a pepper and pull out the inner core. I'll clarify.

 

Great  catches--glad you're enjoying the story!

[Robinski he/him]

Heya, comments with LBLs by email. Headlines:

- I'm disoriented. I don't know if they're moving on the flat or still climbing vertically. Things like earth and people reaching out make me struggle to orient myself.

- "using some of the sturdier plants to climb" - I don't believe this. That thing must way tons, not to mention there are four humarnoids on it.

- If they are going vertically up the wall, but they are sitting on the beetle, gravity will constantly be pulling them backwards. The physical strain must be tremendous. This doesn't seem to be dealt with at all.

- "picking one of the purple globes that hung sideways on the tree" - But no, it has to hang down, because gravity... Except the tree will grow up, because, gravity... The description of things relative to others things is really disorienting. Everything should be relative to gravity, I think. Am I really on the only one hugely confused by all of this?

- "We all passed our ropes forward" - I'm still struggling to understand the blocking; who is where and how are they attached to the wall.

- "...their loping pace up the platform" - Arrrrrgghghh. A platform, by definition (I believe), is flat. Ergo, imho, you can't go up a platform.

Apart from the orientation problems, I enjoyed this just fine. The discovery was a nice surprise, and handled well, I thought. There is a fair amount of world-building and orientation going on here, but it does not slow things down too badly. Also, there is still a promise of tension, because Wal's motivations are still somewhat shrouded and suspicious, and there is still the matter of how they get down.

[Mandamon he/him]

Just read through the LBLs - thanks a bunch, @Robinski!

Good catches on the orientation. I was writing pretty fast by this point, so it seems like I haven't got the orientation down (pardon the pun). At least that's a fairly easy fix.

I hadn't heard of "Hooray Henry" before. Good piece of cultural difference!

[Robinski he/him]

2 hours ago, Mandamon said:

I haven't got the orientation down (pardon the pun).

LOL  - love a good pun.

[kais]

Overall

Generally, I liked it! Nice to meet a new species! I thought it was generally missing a larger sense of wonder, and I'd like to see more emoting (haha, funny, coming from me), especially from our protagonist (same comment as @industrialistDragon). But it kept the narrative moving and helped build the world, and I am very interested to see what the ceiling of the N is made of!

As I go

- page one: I finally had a writer friend point out why short snippets of thoughts in italics always seem so jarring--they're distancing. It actually helps keep the reader in the narrative if short internal monologues (like you have on page one) are just written out, not specifically italicized. 

- page 2: they're roots? If the Net is a moving planet...

- page five: +1 for reference to green wood

- page five: faces!!

- page seven: I think I'd like a lot more wonder at meeting this new species. This is a huge discovery, right? Shouldn't everyone be elated? Maybe flabbergasted? Our teen, especially, I'd expect to emote more

- page 12: assuming female-ness based upon the word 'husband' seems strange since mom's species marries multiple males, right?  Although I guess that sort of makes sense since there aren't multiple women in the relationships

- page 12: +1 for nonbinary character

- page 14: isn't our protag familiar with nonbinary genders? You have them as canon species in the world, right? I thought HandD was one from your last book? I also think the 'there were a lot of differences...' sentence could be expanded to some good worldbuilding and explaining why our protag is asking a fairly invasive question (which can be excused by her youth, but I still have questions)

 

- 

[Mandamon he/him]

Thanks @kais!

3 hours ago, kais said:

I'd like to see more emoting (haha, funny, coming from me)

Yep--the bane of my first drafts...

3 hours ago, kais said:

I finally had a writer friend point out why short snippets of thoughts in italics always seem so jarring--they're distancing

Interesting. I've been using them as a way to connect to the character better. I'll have to look at this.

 

3 hours ago, kais said:

they're roots? If the Net is a moving planet...

It's not ;-)

3 hours ago, kais said:

I think I'd like a lot more wonder at meeting this new species.

Yeah, I think this was the big miss for this submission.

3 hours ago, kais said:

assuming female-ness based upon the word 'husband' seems strange

 

3 hours ago, kais said:

isn't our protag familiar with nonbinary genders?

All this stuff was mainly put in to help the reader (potentially a young reader) start learning about this. It is a bit of a maid and butler, but I thought it would be better to spell it out. in this case.

Oh,and the Et. do tend to form groups of 2 females and 2 males.

[kais]

On 5/13/2018 at 7:11 PM, Mandamon said:

start learning about this.

Start learning about the world? I assume not start learning about nonbinary genders? Not that I'm opposed, but my three year old has a better understanding of nonbinary genders than I do. It's a lot more talked about in younger generations. 

[Mandamon he/him]

4 minutes ago, kais said:

Start learning about the world? I assume not start learning about nonbinary genders?

Yes, more learning that nonbinary exists in this world, rather than that nonbinary exists.

[Robinski he/him]

On 18/05/2018 at 9:03 PM, kais said:

my three year old has a better understanding of nonbinary genders than I do.

[kais]

On 5/20/2018 at 1:20 AM, Robinski said:

Two weeks ago:

Kid: *playing with toy people*

Me: Oh! Who is that?

Kid: *says some name I don't quite hear*

Me: So.... are they a boy, a girl, or a nonbinary person?

Kid: Nonbinary person

Me: What's their name?

Kid: MOMMY!

Me: *dies*

 

More recently we have learned that all toy people with short hair and hats are nonbinary to her, and I think that's just about perfect. 

 

[Mandamon he/him]

8 hours ago, kais said:

More recently we have learned that all toy people with short hair and hats are nonbinary to her, and I think that's just about perfect.

Lol!