Shrike76

I can see how dialogue might be a problem. And even if you have friends who speak English and you practice with them, it might not have the same ring as it would if spoken by a native speaker. TV shows and movies aren't very far off the mark. They're perfectly fine. You can also spend time listening to unscripted words like some podcasts to get a feel for how native English speakers use the language.

That's a tough choice that only you can answer for yourself. I know a few people personally who write in English even though it isn't their native language (they're in a situation almost exactly like what you describe), and they do fairly well. Probably better than they would in their native language. Writing in English definitely gives you access to a broader market, but some prefer their native language because they love it and want to contribute to its culture even if it means making less money. As far as markets are concerned, there is a growing one for translated English works. People are seeing that works from different countries have vastly different flavours and bring something new to the reader that native works don't always provide. If you can tell a good enough story in your native language, making money in English translation isn't out of the question. And you don't have to wait for a translation offer. Nothing stops you from writing in your language and having someone else create an English translation for you. My recommendation: First learn to tell a good story. Take as much time as you need, but do that first. You can work on your native or foreign language skills at the same time, or at a later date. Writing in English isn't a guarantee of success, but writing a boring story in any language is a guarantee of failure.

That sounds like something I'd love to read!

Yep, that's one of the parts that hurts - deciding which part of the story you're telling and dropping the rest. There are certainly interesting stories to tell on the colony, on the generational ship before that, and on Earth before they even leave, but the key is "in late, out early". If the story you really want to tell right now is what happens to the colony and the colonists when an alien arrives, then you should start there. That doesn't mean that you can't reference things that came before, after all these people did have lives before the colony (some of them anyways), and it doesn't mean you can't tell those other interesting parts later in a prequel or an unrelated story. I've only got these short sections to go on, but they did feel like separate stories to me. (As an example: If you've seen Aliens, that movie would not have been improved by 10-15 minutes of showing us what Newt's life was like before Ripley and the marines arrived. Although I'm sure the specifics of how the colony worked and how she survived before would have made a fascinating story, it wasn't necessary to the movie)

These two chapters feel extremely slow. I get that Theavis is groggy and that it'll take a while to recover, but the first chapter seemed to dwell on his poor mental state and I had to greatly fight the urge to skip ahead a line or a paragraph. I was not always successful. My feeling is that these two chapters could very easily be condensed into one, using about half the words. I won't list every paragraph where I got bored, but I will state where I was thrown out of the story by certain elements: P5: Norlord fainting dead away from exhaustion. There isn't enough leading up to this. the reader should be able to see that she's exhausted long before she collapses from it. P6: I don't think it's important that Theavis has 28 teeth, and I don't see why he would decide to count them at all. P8: I don't know how big Theavis, and I don't care how thirsty he is, 20 gallons is not something a human can consume without dying. That's half a bathtub. P10: I didn't know McTuggard had more than 2 legs before this. P12: "Theavis was starting to tire of McTuggard's ambiguity and accent" - Me too. Overall: - Tired and confused or not, Theavis is very blase about the whole waking-up-with-no-memory-surrounded-by-bizarre-looking-strangers-wielding-magic thing. - We get a lot of names of characters and their species. It's a lot to retain, since it's not clear how important the distinctions will be. - Theavis ambles through this, and does nothing except have stuff revealed to him. I would have liked to see him actually attempt something. Anything, really.

Okay. As prologues go, I think the first is the one most likely to work, because it appears to directly relate to the story in question but gives us very different information than what we will get from the rest of the book. In short, it does what a prologue is supposed to do. The second and third potential prologues, happening more or less in the same moment in time from 2 POVs, I think works least well as a prologue because they're too interesting, which is probably going to need more explanation. The second and third introduce interesting characters, with interesting problems. You have the social and technological aspects of a generational ship centuries into a voyage (and one person who doesn't want the voyage to end), and you bring up the genetic changes as well. There's a lot going on here that would make the reader interested, but then you would skip decades into the future when all of those little things you've made us interested in become irrelevant, more or less. if you aren't going to follow through later on all of those interesting tidbits, then I would suggest that they need to be wrapped up and resolved within the prologue itself. Still, I like what you've done with the exercises. You've explored a few different options, which was the point, to see what effect they had.

This one's tough to critique, because you've got a lot going on, but let me see what I can do. 1) I'm going on the assumption that the fourth section is the actual beginning of your story, and that the rest is exploratory rather than an actual lead-in to the story. If that's not the intention, I apologize but it was what I gathered from the structure of the writing exercises. If the story starts when the people born on the planet are hitting twenty, then we don't really need any of the initial three sections. 2) Section one hints at an alien life-form but what they're doing confuses me, and falls pretty flat. They keep noticing specific things about what I presume is a spaceship, but they're noticing things for reasons I don't understand. It feels like you're describing what you would have seen if you were an observer, and then transcribing that clumsily into an alien lingo (Why would they even notice hull markings at all?). What I'd be more interested in is what the alien life form is actually doing, hinting at me that what is there might be a spaceship, even if I miss most of it in translation. I think what's happening is happening after the colony settles, but I only got that after rereading this section, and after reading the rest of the pieces. And since I missed that part, I didn't get a sense of a threat. 3) In my opinion, this is the most interesting of the three, but you don't carry the ball in the direction I expected. We get a sense of time passing, of lost generations when the ship traveled, and a low-level Processor who DOES NOT WANT to go from space to planet. What I was hoping for was for him to attempt to sabotage the landing or the data, but the fact that a colony exists a generation later is proof that what he wanted didn't matter at all, so it's kind of a waste of a POV. I'm not sure at all what promise you had in mind when you drafted this, but I don't think it was the sabotage I saw/wanted/expected. 4) Section three was basically just an extension of section two in a different POV, and didn't tell me much, aside from a better sense of the hierarchy, and that the other worlds the found were ravaged by the alien life in the first section (which I didn't catch the first time in the first section because it wasn't obvious to me that that's what was happening. One thing that struck me as off was the genetic drift you spoke of. They mention it as a concern and decide to stop traveling through space partly because of it, but why would the genetic drift stop on the planet? Whether in space on a ship or in space on a surface, they're going to diverge from human stock on Earth because the selective pressures are going to be different. If there's something specific they're going to do to curb it on the surface, then it should have been mentioned, otherwise it's bad science. 5) In the opening chapter, you have a woman who has a parasite controlling her actions. This is an interesting premise, but it has a few issues. Firstly, I don't get a sense of the fear or desperation I would expect of someone who has no real control over their body and is the host to a sentient parasite. Secondly, if your POV character is someone who doesn't have control over their own actions, then you have a very boring narrator for your story. I don't even get a sense that she's trying to find alternate ways to communicate that she has a parasite. She tried telling someone once, and it didn't work, so now she's just going around? Lastly, if the parasite is capable of making its thoughts/wants/needs known to its host, I would like to know more about what it is actually doing and why. If it has control over the host, then it doesn't matter if the host knows what it's doing. I assume that the gee-whiz moment is supposed to be a) that there's a parasite: but you deliver that very early and I found it boring for the reasons mentioned above, or that the other woman is a parasite and the parasites are working together for something, but that was expected so it didn't register as special at first.

If you've read Mistborn, the way Brandon writes Pushing and Pulling vs. pushing or pulling makes it pretty clear what's going on. Maybe I've just read enough fantasy, but I immediately understood what you were doing. I found the differentiation between fire and Fire helpful and effective, not clunky.

It's been so long since I read it that I don't remember the specifics of why, but I had the same reaction as many above. I loved book 1, book 2 was excellent, and book 3 made me never pick up another of her books.

I'm sure they knew what they were doing. It's probably meant to look artsy.

Whoa! I've only used this avatar one other place and it was the only one I saw there for years, I figured it was an old enough picture that I'd likely never see another one. I'm partial to it, but it should be easy enough for me to find a replacement.

Someone recently turned me on to a Turkish goth band called She Past Away, so that's been my earworm for the last couple of weeks.

I use Scrivener for all my creative projects whether it's writing, role-playing, or something else. As a compulsive worldbuilder and thought gatherer, I find it much easier to use than anything else, and it's very reasonably priced.

Yep. The Turing test is an interesting tool, but I've always felt that the Turing test better reflected human fallibility than AI potency. Certainly if a piece of code can consistently pass the TT, fooling an overwhelming % of a large group, that'll be something, but it still might not be AI.

That list is for vulnerabilities and a vulnerability is not a virus. I used to manage Cisco devices which would spit out a new vulnerability every other hour or so, but I've never seen a router with a virus. OSX systems have a MUCH lower rate of malware/virus infection than Windows machines.

At home I use a Mac, and I really prefer it to anything I've had in the past. At work I use a Windows machine to manage a small horde of Linux servers, and I hate it (Thw Windows, not the Linux), but to be fair it's a corporate machine with some mandatory software that bogs it down which probably contributes to how slow it is, and thus how much I despise it. I have an iPhone and an Android tablet, and I love them both.

Chin up, you're doing fine! And you're doing the most important thing, which is writing. Something to keep in mind, always - Writing is a skill, and like all skills it can be improved. You WILL get better at it, even if you don't see it on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, and having good feedback is very important. I look at the last thing I wrote, still just a first draft, and I look at what I was writing years ago and I wish that I could send the new stuff to myself in the past so that I could see the difference. I'm not saying I'm a master now, but I can see easily now some of the things I was doing terribly then, and those early mistakes are ones I don't make so often anymore.

No problem. In general I try to avoid making specific suggestions on how to change things, but some people do appreciate it. If there are ever things I'm putting in my response which you'd prefer I avoid doing, please mention that as well. I don't want to put anybody off.

I enjoyed this entry more than I did the previous chapter. The pacing was better, and I found the grammar and spelling improved, though still with some errors. Some story/plot issues: - I'm not sure if Louis was introduced earlier but regardless, I don't feel that the phone conversation accomplishes much. Moreover, I'm not sure why Renfield would wait until he was down underground to start such a conversation. - The gorilla scene. This feels forced to me. It seems set up to give us information about what has happened before, but that makes it mostly exposition, and somewhat transparent. Also, the gorilla threatens Renfield, but I never get much of a sense that Renfield actually feels threatened, which would have been more effective. - Renfield & Bannister: This may be a function of my not having seen the first few chapters, but I don't get the relationship between these two. Renfield needs Bannister's help to have a bounty removed, but Bannister hates him? What's in it for Bannister? - The Bounty: In one paragraph it's 100 million, and in another it's one hundred g's (a g is a thousand, so one hundred thousand). In either case, that's an awful lot of money, why doesn't it seem like anyone's trying hard to cash it in. Does a giant underground gorilla who hates Renfield not want the money, or does he not know about the bounty? In general I would have liked to learn more in this chapter through the characters' actions. Renfield and Bannister are interesting, but they don't do anything interesting here. Coming on the heels of the last chapter where Irving thought a lot but didn't do much, you want to avoid having too many chapter in sequence where the characters aren't actively driving the action forward. You can work on this fairly easily without changing too much around. If we know early on exactly why Renfield is in the tunnels and what he hopes to accomplish, his accomplishing it or failing to (or risking failing to because there's a giant gorilla in the way) becomes character-driven action, and gives us a sense of fulfillment when it happens, rather than taking the information we got and waiting for it to come into play later. Tense: You write in past tense, so when you refer to events in the past, from the point of view of the story, you need to use past perfect. This happens a few times, but here's a couple of examples: - "the undergroung railways were used to carry...": should be "had been used" - "The Master used the Terminal": should be "had used: P1: - "the Renfield's family": either "Renfield's family" or "the Renfields" or "the Renfield family" - "...bottom of the Marina Trench" - "How they exactly they had ended up in the tunnels": This sentence needs some editing love. P2: - "like a bullet, straight and rounded" Is it straight or rounded? There's probably a better word entirely. Cylindrical? - "fireless locomotive": This sounded wrong and I had to google it. A better description here would help. - "wrecking hell": wreaking P3: - "breathing hot air into his face, and by extension, the face": what? P5: - "Renfield starred at his hands - his very, very, very big hands.": should be "stared", and "very, very, very big hands" reads as comical and cuts all the tension out of this encounter. P6: - "Fury, rat-like" should be "furry" - "strode into a tab carrying a slab of meat": I don't know what word was supposed to be there instead of tab - The last paragraph repeats "the train car" three times. Try to cut at least one usage. P8: - "Richard clinched his fist": clenched All that being said, I enjoyed it, and I look forward to the next chapter. Good work.

I had made a note about precisely that and forgot to include it. I'm also interested to see the logic behind Fire and Light being on opposite sides. It's not something I remember having seen before and I'm curious to see how/if it gets paid off.

I thought this was a very interesting chapter, and I think the overall quality of the writing is very good. Thoughts: - The name Alduin: I immediately thought of Skyrim, as Alduin is the big bad in that game. This is something that will likely be noticed by anyone who has played the game, and it may not get the reaction you want. You may want to change it. - "as their bones drained the heat to sustain their inner fire": I thought that this was a great line, and a great feature of skeletons. Then to have it paid off as the basis of the magic system made it even better. Good job. - At the end of the first section you say "the mayor sent a message lightward", which piqued my curiosity as to what that meant, but the entire last paragraph about people beyond the Balance point felt superfluous, like too much exposition. You could keep the first and last sentence of that paragraph and it would have more punch than it has now with the lines about the favor of the people. - Speaking of sections, I don't feel that this chapter benefits from having multiple points of view. There's nothing happening here that we couldn't see through Alduin's eyes, especially since the person we switch to, Henrik, appears to be a throwaway character who snuffs it. I think the chapter would be greatly improved by staying in Alduin's POV. - I find it odd that these armed men know they're dealing with something they're violently opposed to, but don't immediately react with their weapons when they see it. Not even when he starts draining torches of their fire (the source of his power). Henrik even tells Alduin to draw his weapon. I can't help wondering why. - The command word "Ordon". We hear it spoken and the men shine with brilliant light, but practically speaking what is the impact/meaning of using a command word? We're in Alduin's head when it happens, but we don't get any sort of reaction from him at all, or any information about what the implications are of facing down someone using things called command words. - During the fight Alduin is nailed in place by a spear, then the scepter rips it out of him, and then he's nailed in place by it again. The section needs a check for consistency. - The fire behind the door: This was too much of a surprise, especially since you refer to it as "the inferno beyond". Where was this fire before and how did it get there? If it was that much fire, I would have absolutely expected the men to feel its heat, to hear the roar of the air it is consuming, to smell the smoke of its burning, to see the light it is producing through the cracks... - The later combat scene, one of the men fires a crossbow and throws a knife, and the knife taks a long time before it hits his colleague? But that colleague jumped into the line of fire? Then the struck man pulled the knife out and light came out? Was he hit by the knife on purpose? The action in this paragraph confuses me greatly. Page 3: "He walked blindly up to the pile of bones and wiggled his hand into it, carefully, not to break any of the fragile bones." I feel this line could be tightened up to only reference the bones, and their fragility, once. Page 6: "The specter slammed" should read scepter. Again, overall a great effort. I was interested by the character of Alduin, the system of magic, the world revealed (even if only a small slice of it), and by the action. I very much want to read more.

I've wondered the same thing, but never tried too hard to get it running on my Mac. I certain it's doable with a virtual machine, or through a WINE layer since Mac is basically a prettied up Linux machine, but I never bothered to go through the hassle of getting it running. There's also Crossover by CodeWeavers, you can get a free trial of it and see if it lets you run EBoN the way you want before committing cash or finding a cheaper/free alternative. There are decent places online for random name generation, and free iPhone apps as well. This site works well enough for me at the moment: http://fantasynamegenerators.com

I noticed this but it didn't bother me. I assumed it was simply the style of the story (humor to defuse a tense situation, similar to what's common in, say, Marvel Comic movies, but not something you'll get in Game of Thrones). But yes, if you're going to use that tone then it should be consistent, and you should be aware that it does kill your tension, so if that's not what you're aiming for then it should be fixed.

As I said in the other thread, I only signed up last week so this is the first one I've read, though I read the summary contained in the email. I need to be up front that the quality of the writing in this submission is a big problem for me. The story reads as though it might be entertaining, but there are spelling errors, grammatical errors, and punctuation errors in almost every sentence, and that makes it extremely difficult to be engaged by the tale. I wanted to like it, but the story never really took hold of me (though it came closest during the fight sequence where they're coordinating attacks against Neetuts). A few specific things stood out to me: - Bladders don't pound. I don't even know what that would feel like but I imagine it would signal a strong need for a doctor and not a strong need to urinate. - "As I creep up the stairs, the voice becomes clearer": I feel that this line is redundant. You convey precisely that effect with the quoted line above that one (where more words are progressively comprehensible). I already knew that the voices were becoming clearer by the way you wrote them, you don't need to say it again. - I feel that it doesn't make sense that Lumi's mother would harp about responsibilities without any examples. Surely she would have been nagging Lumi with specifics her entire life (proper decorum, knowledge of history and local nobility, embroidery, find a husband and produce a child). You miss a great opportunity here to develop both Lumi's character and her relationship with her mother by showing us the way she reacts (either poorly or favourably) to the specific things that her mother expects of her. - The polar gryphon. This may seem minor but if your POV character knows that it is a polar gryphon, that information should come before he describes it. Giving it a name right from the get-go doesn't take away any of the impact, and there's no reason to withhold it - It can be a polar gryphon first, and still be a four-legged horror dining on the intestines of slain guards. I feel like it gives it less punch the way you've done it. Which begs the next point... - Warlocks. If they've been gone for decades, then this character has never encountered one. How does he instantly know what they are? - The way you describe the Neetuts following the Scepter out of the manor made me think that they are on the same side, which I don't think is what you meant for that scene? The story has a few other issues but I think the structure holds up well enough. Beyond that I think you should devote time to improving your basic English skills. It might seem like a boring thing to do (indeed, the eating your vegetables of being a writer), but if you want to keep writing prose in English, you need to have a good grasp for the conventions of the language, and I don't see that represented in this submission. You can have the best story idea in the world, but it won't come across if the language you convey it with is flawed. Specifically regarding spelling errors. Do you use auto-correct when you write? I see mistakes occurring that look like you mis-spelled a word and it corrected to something else (for example, defiantly where you clearly meant definitely, which is an odd thing to write unless you put down something like definatly and the computer fixed it for you). If you do, then you should turn it off, and use a spell-checker that allows you to select the word that gets put in place of the typo.

I just joined last week so I couldn't read the previous entries that were sent out, though I did go back and read all of the summaries. Here's what I've got. Paragraph 1-2: - "...gleaned from her sister Serena's psych evaluation": Who is the "her" referenced here? It isn't clear. It doesn't feel like it's Stephanie, but if it is then the words are too far apart. If Serena is someone already introduced in a previous chapter, then you can drop "her sister" entirely and just say, "Serena's". - You use the word "it" a lot ("It was all happening", "it shouldn't have started", "it was coming", "no stopping it": What is "it" exactly? If this is something introduced in an earlier chapter, then a reminder here wouldn't hurt. If this "it" is something the POV character knows about but isn't telling us because you want to make a reveal later on, then that feels like a cop-out. - I think these two paragraphs can be condensed and united together, since they follow the same train of thought. Paragraph 3: - "The buyer didn't operate such codes": You're missing a word here. - "The Buyer claimed to operate under ancient principles, but whatever principle(s) he followed it was one (were) devoid of honor": Your use of principle(s) need to match for singular or plural. - "Stripped of flesh" at the end may sound cool, but I feel it's implied in the word "bones" and it sounds redundant. If you feel a deep need to keep it, consider something like "flesh-stripped bones" instead. Paragraph 4 (not counting "Rebecca" as a paragraph): - "No matter how late in was" - The tense of this paragraph is wrong. If Rebecca's currently in a hospital (we find this out later), and we're in past tense for the bulk of the chapter then "Rebecca (had) waited", and "his wife (had) stayed", and "She (had) kept a .45". Not only is this grammatically correct, but the reader will pick up on the change and it will give a sense of wanting to know why his wife is being referred to in that way, and makes the paragraph where we find out she's in hospital pay off a bit more. Paragraph 5: - "he had long (ago? since? before?) given up the notion" Paragraph 6: - The first sentence is a bit of a mess, grammatically. I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here. Paragraph 8: - "The creatures he lived walked" - Again, something's wrong with this sentence. Paragraph 9: - "picked up the phone and dialed the number": What number and where did it come from? A previous chapter? Is there a business card, because if it's a number he's memorized, then we should know whose number it is. General: - The POV character is Hank Irving (based on reading the summaries), and this chapter dips into a deep 3rd person at times. Is "Irving" really how the character refers to himself? - I'm not sure why the character is doing what he's doing, or what exactly it is that he's doing (I'm going to assume that that's at least partly a function of my having missed the first 3 chapters). That being said, it feels like you're trying to convey a sense of desperation, but I don't feel it while reading this chapter because I'm not clear on what's at stake and what his current actions imply, for himself or for others mentioned. If previous chapters haven't made entirely clear what he's done and why, then this feels like you're trying to create mystery by hiding things from us which the character knows but isn't mentioning, which is not a great method. I did enjoy this, despite coming into the story somewhat late. It's hard to get a great feel for the characters and setting in such a short chapter, but it left me interested in reading more. I'm looking forward to the next entry. If anything's not clear, let me know. Also, if there is specific information I'm missing which was provided in previous chapters and which would change my reading of the chapter, I'd like to know what it is.