ecohansen

Good for making food. Eels are like songbirds.

Since L3 is an unstable Lagrange point, wouldn't any small perturbation in one of the moons' orbits would cause the 180-degree alignment to disappear? Is there a force maintaining the arrangement of the moons?

One question about the eclipse. On earth, with one moon, lunar eclipses occur when the earth is between the sun and the moon, and thus the moon is in the earth's shadow. On your world, this type of eclipse would also occur. But it seems like there's the possibility of a second type of eclipse, when one of the moons falls in the shadow of the other moon. Is there a difference in the effect on magic when a moon is in the planet's shadow as against being in the other moon's shadow?

Personally, I mostly read F/SF for the worlds--I usually want as much exposition as I can get. So I'd put in a strong plug for keeping chapter 4. As for guessing what happens during an eclipse, I can see it going a couple ways. One is that the Guardians simply lose the power of whatever moon is in eclipse. However, it seems that they've already harvested and stored a set amount of power during the ritual. If that is the case, then they become the only available source of that moon's power for the duration of the eclipse. So, if the disorder/aggression moon is in eclipse, there is only order in the world, and, for example, predators are unable to kill prey, and therefore starve, unless a Guardian gives them a bit of disorder to allow them to feed. I can also see their magic going haywire: if 50% of their stored power is ae and 50% is iu, but the external environment is now 100%iu and 0% ae, then there is greater osmotic pressure for ae to leave them than iu. Therefore, whenever they attempt to do something with iu, only ae will come out until they are back in equilibrium with their environment. Since their internal balance no longer matches the external balance, I could even see an involuntary explosive discharge of whatever energy is now in abundance.

Ah! I just noticed that, despite your specific request, no one has offered you cookies yet. Have as many as you want. They're fresh, and at the perfect temperature: body temperature. Unfortunately, they're a bit pointy....

I'm in for May 2, if possible.

Woohoo! Care to share the tweet so we can learn from success?

Old people would like to soak in a pool of either. Tadpoles are like bicycles.

For both you and aeromancer, I felt that this week's submission was substantially better than last week's. I'm impressed: personally I always tend to start things well and end them poorly, so I can only admire people who gather strength as they go. --and crud, looks like I'm getting called away. More later.

I'll disagree with King a bit. I enjoyed this submission a good bit more than the last one To me, it showcased more of your strengths. I like the magic system: it's simple and clear, and has strong inbuilt limitations. You have to reduce your power to zero before you can get more, and you get a fairly fixed amount with each ritual. 'Hard' magic systems usually reduce the fun and mystery of reading about magic, since they're thoroughly thought-out and logical. However, you keep happens at the height of the ritual a mystery, so that the magic remains mysterious and, well, magical. Well done. I feel like you and I have similar strengths and weaknesses. I'm usually pretty proud of my worlds, but I always struggle with dialogue. Right now, I'm not very drawn in by your dialogue. Even though Moon and Salane are obviously feeling different emotions, they somehow sound similar to me. As an exercise, you might want to try writing long conversation without any speaker tags, and focus on making each speaker sound different enough that you're sure readers will always know who's talking. If you have a favorite movie or play, read the screenplay to see how a real pro manages dialogue. Those things have helped me a bit, although my dialogue definitely still has a long way to go.

Yep, lovecraft would have felt right at home at a Trump rally, given his views on immigration. Still, my word but could the man write. On a similar note, when I was living in China Jack London was by far the most-read English-language author. Chinese bookshops were filled with books by Jack London. And yet, London was virulently anti-Chinese: The Unparalleled Invsion is an entirely non-ironic story about engineering a virus that kills every Chinese-descended person on earth. And yet none of his Chinese fans that I talked to knew this...

Very interesting. I'll be fascinated to know where the plot goes next. Since we're still in the early parts of your plot, I'll just do line notes for now. Your mastery of English is excellent. line notes: The list keeps growing, as it seems: The list keeps growing, it seems. That bloody bird: In the UK, "bloody" is a fairly strong curse, somewhere between "damnation" and "storming." In the context of sipping tea and buttering croissants, it seemed maybe a bit strong. Robinski is our resident Scotsman, so I'll defer to his judgment on this, though. Grumpy stream of people walking around her: I love this line. "Stream of grumpy people" would be more common, but attaching the adjective to "stream" instead of "people" makes it seem as if the crowd is a single grumpy beast that is surrounding her. It's the sort of effect we native speakers would spend 10 minutes trying to achieve. down the mismatched streets and into flaking buildings. a very, very good line. perhaps because this was the only one that said “Open” and had no cashier behind the register. A liquor store would never be left unattended, so you're definitely telling us that the cashier was incapacitated or murdered. Why does Kaya walk on? “No. Veil’s right. I better check it out first.” Here, and later when he calls her "little one," Mus seems to act like Kaya's parent-figure. That might or might not be what you intended, but he seems very fatherly to me. The bittersweet lullaby of the city:a once-good phrase that is a bit of a cliche now. It calls up a lot of noir films and hardbitten detective novels. For me, I only expect this metaphor when the narrator is speaking entirely in film-noir style. “How do you think we should do this, Mus?” He sniffed the edge of the license thoughtfully and said “Why don’t we do standard procedure?" If something is standard procedure, you usually don't have to consider thoughtfully before you decide to do it. "I was wrong before –this isn’t what got him in trouble.” In my experience, people usually don't change their mind this easily once they've taken a position. Either Veil is very intellectually honest, and takes pride in constantly re-evaluating his positions, or else he's very flaky, and just doesn't care about positions he took in the past. edit: derp. I forgot about the anti-cussin' screen on this site. The two reference curses were intended as d--- and f---.

Homologous but differentiated foliage indicates that two plant lineages have split from each other; fighting before marriage indicates that two people should split from each other. Water is like wood.

Placing art in a picture frame informs people that it is indisputably Art. Confronting a stick with a soulcaster will inform you that it is undeniably a Stick. Pinto beans are like eccentric French botanists.

Thanks everyone. Robinski, I definitely need to think about footnotes rather than direct links. However, I don't have much to say in the footnotes except "yep, this really happened, check out the link." I just re-read Nabokov's Pale Fire, and after seeing the marvels that can be done with footnotes, I hate to use them ineffectually. But I agree that the asterisks are probably too distracting. Spieles, great suggestion n making JQA's monologue a dialogue. Mandamon, As for making the threat more credible, I'm currently experimenting with revealing much more of the Evil Plot during JQA's infodump. One problem is that the Evil Plot hinges on Isaac Newton and Cotton Mather, and bringing them in early seems too much like name-dropping and trivia instead of plot. Rdpulfer, consider it done! The Washington intro is substantially re-written now. All in all, it looks like I just have to work on the plotting, the characterization, the worldbuilding, the dialogue, the narration, the concept, and the gimmicks! That shouldn't take long, should it?

Rh is rhesus factor. It's another thing you have to worry about with transfusions. What about antibodies and leucocytes and stuff? They're part of blood, so theoretically they should be easy to soulcast. Could you treat the Purelake plage by Soulcasting people's blood so that it included antibodies against the plague virus?

Since a couple people have caught on the "green" bit, I might just hop in and say that I quite like it when aspects of worlds aren't explained immediately. The unexplained green/post dichotomy is a mystery that keeps me reading. However, my only experience with editors in similar circumstances says that they usually don't like this sort of thing. But if it were up to me, I'd say keep it!

You know, Princess Bride is one of the few times when I prefer the movie to the book (Shawshank Redemption is another one). William Goldman wrote the book and the script simultaneously iirc, and the book doesn't have much that isn't also in the movie. And the movie is just so, so good... I'm sure that this post will get me boiled alive, but yea, like unto Galileo I must speak the truth as I see it.

Thank you both. Spieles, thanks for the edit to the first line. I'll definitely make the change. As for the first paragraph, it was fighting me for some reason. I think I spent most of an hour juggling the sentences back and forth when I first started the story. I don't think I tried the arrangement you recommended though--it looks like it'll work! Sweetmeat: I actually think of organ meat whenever I see this phrase. But Anne Royall used it as written. I'm not sure whether to keep it in to disorient with language drift, or cut it out. Spieles and Kaisa, oof, looks like I'll definitely have to work on my George Washington reveal. Even the wooden teeth bit is sketchy, since, y'know, his teeth were actually hippopotamus ivory. But I like the line and the image... As for the stuff around John Quincy's infodump of plot: yep, those several paragraphs are horrible. I wasn't sure how much should be revealed at this point, and after wrestling for longer than I should I just dumped in a rough guess of what should go there. That section will be the main focus of my next edit. Kaisa, Yep, Laskarina Bouboulina is one of my favorite historical personages ever. The Wikipedia page I linked to doesn't mention her "man in every port" reputation, but it's a huge part of her myth. Quotes: I'm planning to keep the narration more-or-less modern, but I definitely need to put a lot of work into making the actual dialogue that I write more historically accurate. On the other hand, I don't quite want to get it perfect: I'm hoping that some degree of herky-jerky pastiche-iness will add to the strangeness of the story. But that's definitely not my problem yet. I don't suppose anyone has found a resource where I could automatedly check my writing against an 1820s dictionary, and make sure I'm not using anachronistic words?

“Wings were the best. The Elder Gods had taught her that when they’d made her eat her own wings.” I agree that this is a very, very good line. Very good suspense as we wonder about the lasting effects of the dream and the missing wing. Scale was a bit confusing on the first read-through of the first four pages. There are swords, there are cannons, there are whole planets, there is an entire galaxy--it's hard to focus on all these scales at the same time. I would love to learn more about the Straaxi and their motivations--I'm sure that's coming in part two. For me, battles are only engaging when I'm invested in a character or a cause. We were learning about both by the end of the reading, but it might help if you moved a bit more characterization and world-building to the front.

yay!

Since you asked about world-building, there are three places where I caught. The first two wound up being good science, but the order in which facts were presented was distracting or sent me a-googling. For the last one, i might actually have a useful suggestion. the glacier-cut hills gave way to the moonlit Lake of the Ozarks. Here's a running commentary of my internal dialogue starting at this line: “Since I know that the Ozarks themselves have not experienced glaciation, I'll take a time out to look this up. Ah, it looks like the Lake of the Ozarks was right at the southern edge of the Nebraskan and Kansan glaciations. So I guess the hills were north of the lake, and the group was travelling south. Unless maybe the coldness in the air reflects a new super-powerful ice age, and the ozarks are being cut by glaciers as the story takes place? But nah, the Rex placed temperate flowers on their sacrifice's corpse, so it must not be a new ice age. Oops, wait,there's talk about insulation and migrating south, so I guess it is a full ice age. But can glaciers form that fast, even in an ice age? And did Ellen and Oz start in the Ozarks, travel north to the lake, and then travel south again to get to the Ozarks trading post?”--This is what I was thinking about instead of plot. If there are in fact glaciers in the Ozarks during the story, maybe "glacier strewn" instead of "glacier cut". A map might ultimately be handy, too. Corn. Running commentary again: “Ah, so corn is a dietary staple. Do they nixtamalize it to make hominy or masa? If not, how do they avoid goiter? Ah, now they're eating crickets. Are crickets high in niacin? Ooo, looks like they're super high in niacin. Looks like crickets and corn is a pretty balanced and sustainable diet! Sweet!” Crassula ovata: A bit of an odd choice for a frozen world, since it is native to semitropical Africa. If you want it for its CAM photosynthesis, you might consider the temperate genera Isoetes or Sedum, which would be much more robust.

You know the drill. All criticisms greatly appreciated. Sorry again for the lateness.

Granted. It's Sunday forever now. All of the religious groups that maintain a Sunday sabbath can never work again without violating their faith. Millions of faithful die of starvation, and whole faiths and ethnic groups disappear from the face of the world. You are responsible for the worst genocide in human history. The name "Hitler" is almost forgotten: from now on, it is "Argel" that is synonymous with unreasoning evil. All of that is just a logical consequence of your boon. Your bane is that you now sneeze whenever you see a bunny. I wish that for a time-travel vacation in which I can scuba-dive with the pre-Cambrian Ediacarans.

My first thoughts were Amelie or Miss Rumphius, but both were only mildly cranky at the start instead of fully misanthropic. I doubt this one's right either, but how about Jean d'Arc? She wasn't snarky, but she was misanthropic, and she was commanded to help her country by invisible angels.