Shrike76

I'd like to submit this week as well.

Seeing Rdpulfer mention it reminds me that I noticed it too and it made me wonder the same thing (although I assumed Hellas would have known who St. Peter was and said something). I ended up going with the assumption that these were just normal people who'd gone to heaven and were now fighting with the angels.

P7 - "both of kept moving in place" - missing a word P11 - I love the room full of drawers. And so many keys for so few doors really brings in a sense of mystery. I liked the interaction between Trahaearn and Caughthron, and I liked that the younger two are having a completely different type of conversation while it's happening. I really got a sense of the age difference between the pairs, and of the attitude difference as well. I'd have needed more of a sense of scale when the boy followed Joanna downstairs. The guest in the basement is some sort of giant, but how big is the basement? You mentioned shoes like furniture, but when he stands up I'd expect him to be 30 feet tall? Maybe more? Does he actually fit standing in the basement or is there something strange going on? The first chapters of the book were a little slow, but still well-written and interesting. This chapter is a wonderful follow-up to the disappearance of the father, and carried me right along. I'm a little disappointed that we don't get to hear the conversation between Trahaearn and Caughthron, but I suspect how they say what they say isn't terribly important compared to what the outcome of their conversation is, so I suspect by the next chapter or two I'll admit that missing it was no big deal. The boy's been to Caughthron's before with his father, but he's never met Joanna? It's not a problem, it's just unclear. I'm so looking forward to the next chapter(s) to see where this all leads. I think it's a wonderfully-crafted fantasy so far.

Thanks for the comments, Robinski. It's a first draft and so it doesn't surprise me that I'm short on descriptions, but I appreciate readers pointing out exactly what they felt was missing. For the most part, you guys seem to be asking the sort of story questions that I'm aiming to provide answers for in the next chapter or three, so I think that's working well enough. Time will tell. Thanks again!

P2 - "surmount the peak" - The verb you want is "summit". Also, why has nobody climbed this mountain before? P3 - "worse than a golem's crap" - Maybe intended to be funny, but golems don't need to eat, do they? P4 - The paragraph starting with "Well, there goes any chance of invading" uses the word "first" 4 times. P5 - "like it lead down into the sewerage system" - led, sewage P7 - Hellas knows who Eirael is, but she has no idea who he is? ADDENDUM: Ah, I didn't realize he had the mask on. P9 - Seriously? He'd leave her trapped here if she won't fight for him? He can't just free her because it's the right thing to do? Hellas is being a butt right here, and I really kind of hate him for negotiating this. This is not the time or place. What a doorknob. This is the point where I would give up on this book, because right now I don't care if Hellas wins or loses. P10 - And seriously, why are they wasting so much time talking here in this jail? Aren't they even a little bit worried about guards or patrols? Not my favourite of chapters. Hellas looking for the entrance in the crater wasn't bad, but after that I didn't have much interest. Meteors seem a little excessive for this place. Meteors come from space and do catastrophic damage for miles around. Is it just rocks falling down after being spewed up by small volcanoes? For the events in this chapter, it seems too easy for Hellas to make his way through this place once he's in, and too easy to free all the hundreds and hundreds of prisoners. They seem very fit for prisoners who've been there for a decade, and the lack of guards until too few of them show up too late just served to make the whole scene feel too easy. I never once felt worried for Hellas, or the prisoners, and since it seemed too easy I never really cared because I never doubted that he'd pull through. 1. What do you think of World’s End? - Eh... It seems weak. I never got the impression that Hellas was worried about stealth, or worried for his safety. All in all the place isn't as horrific as I'd expected it to be. Mostly it seems to be a place where hellspawn kill each other in a fiery background. 2. Is it plausible that Hellas could sneak in and out with his soldiers, or do you think that’s a little ridiculous? - It's plausible that he could sneak in. I haven't seen him sneak out but I'd say no, given that he was spotted on the way in (by a dog that really didn't seem to care, at least not enough to raise an alarm. Are we going to get to see them leave? Because I assume the hellspawn can take the same tunnel to get out? 3. What do you think of the new character (Eirael)? Is she badass enough? - Too badass, even. Or at least too capable after all that time in captivity. And why didn't she use her magic to escape before now. She can destroy a staircase, but not a rusted cage? 4. How is the pacing of this chapter? - The pacing is generally okay, but I find the sequence of actions implausible

They updated last week I think. It's like night and day. As for planning, I've always been an outliner, but my outlines have a lot of detail. I'm a slow writer, so the heavily detailed outline means I don't have as many big structural things to fix when I've finished my first draft.

Thanks! As I said to King007 above, I struggled with representing Leni in this chapter or not. Same with the angels. The next chapter should start to answer some of those questions. I'd actually cropped this chapter and moved a scene to the beginning of Chapter 2. We'll see if that worked or not next week I guess, or if it would have worked better as a finale to this one. And yeah, that's a pretty horrible sentence on pg 4

Thank you for the comments! I'd debated about adding an early scene with the sister and decided to leave it as is. We'll see how that works out in the long run. Similarly with the angels, I didn't want them too front and center because I was worried that it would cause problems, so I went with this first glimpse. Time will tell on that front as well how readers react to them.

There's not much story to critique so I'll skip that and focus on the language, since that's what you asked for. In general this is pretty clean. I think you've more or less made the second person work (I tried it in a story once. It sucked and I never felt like it was doing what I wanted), and the general use of shorter sentences, as they represent shorter thoughts, works well for this sort of thing where you're depicting someone concentrating hard on a particular task. Also, short sentences keep the pace high, which is good for a fight scene. I was interested most of the time, but I can't say I was immersed because it was so short and there were a lot of ways where you lost my attention, as detailed below. Anything that doesn't immediately focus on the action at hand (including the setting and the opponent) takes away from the tenseness and the effectiveness of the scene. You don't have to cut it all out, but you don't want to present something interesting and have the reader want to skim past what they consider to be "the boring bits". For me, the entire paragraph that starts with "Who said this was going to be easy..." was an example of this. He's in the middle of a sword fight, he shouldn't be dwelling on his opponent's motivations. In a longer story you'll want to characterize the fighter and his opponent, but not in something like this. Same thing for the paragraph near the end that starts with "Alright then, don't hesitate. You've practiced this..." - That's a lot of thinking for the amount of time it takes for a sword to complete an arc. Don't tell me he's practiced it, show me his body making the move before his mind tells it to BECAUSE he's practiced it so often. When he defeats his opponent, is the other man dead? You describe it in a fairly final manner, but you didn't describe it earlier as a battle to the death. I'd expected the POV character to be in a different mindset if his life was on the line rather than simply a trophy of some sort. There's a few places where you pulled your descriptions short and I would have liked to see them fleshed out a bit. 1) "Examine your surroundings" - Show them to us. Or show us some small important thing which the swordsman notices, and that he/she thinks can be used to their advantage or to their opponent's detriment. Show us the crowd, and describe the opponent, at least a little bit. I wasn't sure if this was a longsword tourney, or a fencing duel, or a gladiatorial bout, or something else entirely. 2) The opponent being defeated. A bit more description of the final blow landing and the opponent dropping would have been good. 3) You never mentioned until the very end that they were wearing armour. That affects how nimble he is, and he should feel its weight. For your response to Mandamon's comment: As a native speaker, strove sounds far better to me than strived. But whichever of those you prefer, "strifed" is still wrong. All in all a good effort. Keep up the hard work!

Yeah, some of the exercises are better suited to random work, and some require a lot of prep. I still found the podcasts informative, even though I flaked out on the exercises by somewhere around May.

Hello everyone. Here's the first chapter of a fantasy novel (with a working title I dislike but haven't spent a lot of cycles on), probably somewhere in the YA range. All feedback is appreciated, but if anyone also has time to poke at the questions below, that would help very much. - How much of a feel do you have for each of the characters? How old do you think Giselle is? - How much of a feel did you get for the setting? - Was there anything that confused you, or that you didn’t believe. - My first drafts are often short on details. Is there anything you would have wanted a longer description of?

Things I noticed which were mentioned above are the changes in point of view (unless your intention is to write 3rd-person omniscient), and the changes between past and present tense (for which there isn't a good excuse). This is a really short submission so it's hard to get a feel for where the story's going, aside from you having pointed out that Alfred's looking for someone to exact revenge on. What I can say is that everybody's actions seem excessive. It feels like they're overreacting to everything - The harbor master seems to come on too strong, then Alfred reacts strongly, and the harbor master loses his mind for some reason. Then everybody sort of calms down just as quickly. They're not behaving like people behave. As to who's important, I feel like you're setting up Alfred to be the main character, but we spend a lot of time focused on the harbor master, and you end with a full paragraph on him, so if he's not going to be important later then he shouldn't be played up so much here. It's a very short scene. Focus on Alfred here, tell us about him, about what he wants and how he reacts to the world around him, and show us the others later when we need it. Aside from the tense and POV changes, the language is relatively clean, but I find it wordy. You'll describe the same thing in multiple sentences, particularly when using an adverb to describe an action, and then add description again ("Alfred fervently interrupted, anger burning in his eyes" as an example). This scene could be tightened up considerably.

I fell behind a bit, I'm at episode 10.47. What was it that you disliked about the season?

Now reading Westlake Soul by Rio Youers.

P1 - "property line" feels like such a modern term for this story. Mentioning a natural or artifical marking would be more effective. P4 - Why is the hay fork he was using before suddenly too heavy? P10 - "You pa hasn't gone." - Your P10 - The room took to spinning - This line felt like it was trying too hard. P12 - "The world is already awake, and you're late to it." - He's just more or less repeating what he already said once. Once was enough. P15 - "but the water it is bright and still as glass - would be better as either "but the water, it is", or "the water in it is", or "the water is" P18 - "I'd say she entirely unpleasant" - she was I loved the description of the hidden stranger in the barn, which turned out to be milking the cow. It was very tense and pulled me right along. And once she starts talking I very much enjoyed her rhyming speech pattern. Also tense was the boy realizing his father wasn't around, but this I think should have stricken him more strongly, and more immediately. I don't know how long he was in the barn, but long enough for his father to have fallen asleep making a fire? This should be punched up. Trahaearn arriving to explain what's happened, guide the boy through calming himself enough to explain, and lead the way was an excellent scene. I'm wondering how solid of a promise was the one he made to not speak of the stranger, and wondering if there will be repercussions later for his revealing it to Trahaearn. All in all an excellent pair of chapters, and a great continuation of what you've already submitted so far. I'm very much hooked, and I think you have fantastic potential. The only suggestion I have for improvement is that this hook that seems to start the main arc of the story comes at what I think is Chapter Ten? If you plan on submitting this to an agent or publisher in the future, you should absolutely look for ways to bring this hook forward in the book so that it is arrived at sooner, because if this book is going to get someone's attention it's this section right here is that's going to do it.

For the moon, that makes more sense. I think Phobos is the closest moon to its planet in our solar system. I'd suggest the easiest way to clarify that is to give us an early scene where someone mentions they've used telescopes to look at minute details on the surface, that way we we know that it's feasible for them to see details of the capsule itself later, otherwise people might react as I did, thinking that what you're describing is impossible. It's always tough to take the beginning of a novel and turn it into a short story, but I think you have a good first step here. You have a decent foundation that you can carve a compelling story out of with a bit of work. If you ever feel the need to bounce rewrite ideas off someone, let me know. I'm happy to help.

P4 - "non-magus terms" - This sounded wrong. I'd have preferred layman's terms P4 - Science nitpick: How close is this moon? The astronomers spotting the capsule on the moon with their telescopes is no easy feat. I don't think there's a telescope on Earth that can snap a pic of the Apollo landing sites on our own moon, and our tech here is pretty damnation good. If this is a magic-enhanced telescope, it should be stated. I'm not sure how exactly Origon deduced that this particular guard was the assassin. Something about the eyes I don't recall, but reading on I think that the other race were much thinner? I'd have had to read the whole story in one shot to remember that, but from 3-4 weeks ago I didn't have a chance. A reminder would have helped a lot with a story of this length, and I'm still not sure it works. If the race can be fatter or thinner, even at the bottom end of the scale he should have looked like his own race I think? More or better details regarding what sets this race and the other apart would maybe help make this work, but as it is it was confusing. For your questions: I would definitely read more things in this universe, I think you've built something interesting here. The conclusion wasn't satisfying at all for me for a few reasons: 1) My first problem is that things wrapped up in commentary rather than action. Origon (a little too easily and without a lot of obvious deduction) solves the assassin bit and then the rest is basically the mayor, Origon, and Rilan standing around and explaining why everything went down the way it did. I was disappointed. 2) The mayor's plan fell apart completely for me. The plausibility of the plan seems so insanely elaborate that I can't conceive of how this method would have been better than just doing it the right way in the first place. - If I read this right: The mayor purpose-built a crappy shuttle, designed to fail in just the right ways, so that after assassinating the majus who was supposed to fly it, and knowing that Origon would be in attendance to replace him, that it would sap Origon's strength just enough so that he could barely return, at which point he'd be murdered, and ALL OF THIS in order to gain the sympathy of other species just so that they could price gouge them? O_o - What if the capsule had crashed on the moon and killed everyone? What if they had sapped too much of Origon's strength (because I don't believe that they could have calculated exactly how much he'd have left) so that he couldn't return? What if the assassin (He was starving himself, weak people make mistakes) had missed his shot on Tejus? What if the assassin had been caught? What if Origon had chosen not to fly the capsule, or if he'd slept in or been sick or just simply been delayed? It seems to me like the plan could have failed in a thousand different ways and they'd have had nothing at all to show for it at all. They set all this up for sympathy, but any single failure in the plan would have left them without a portal to the moon at all. Would they really have risked it? - And I don't think that any of this even explains that Drain in the jar? I have no idea what that was there in the capsule for. That, to me, is the biggest unanswered question/promise. Overall: - I think the worlds, the races, the characters, the tech, and the magic system (which I especially like) are all very interesting in this story, but simply need to be fleshed out appropriately so that the world is clear to the reader. You're packing a lot of worldbuilding into a short story, and normally I'd say hold back on as much as possible, giving only what the reader absolutely needs, but if your plot hinges on those worldbuilding elements then they need to be solid. - The writing is generally clean, but a trimming pass would help. Cut out some of the excess words and phrases to tighten it up (Maybe go for the 15% that Writing Excuses often touts) - The plot needs work, mostly because I don't think the conclusion is believable at all, but that's not unfixable. Finding something that works better than this current ending and then writing directly towards that conclusion would fix most of the issues I have. I've read some of your other work submitted here and I think you can do better than this particular ending.

Slacker! On a related note, I'd like to put my name in for this coming week.

I'd kind of made a leap assumed that Set was Seth (brother of Cain and Abel) and was waiting to be proven otherwise through more information, but in re-reading this I wonder if Set is Scrios' brother?

P3 - "Scrios looked closely at his protege, He saw the determination..." - I'd assumed this scene was in Hellas' POV (like almost all the others are) so this threw me out of the story. P5 - "An almost-invisible rune flashed on his forehead" - We're in Scrios' POV, so there's no way he can see this. P5 - "I saw that Lucifer didn't give you a mask" - Didn't he? I'm sure he did. Addendum: And then a couple of paragraphs later there's something about him replacing a black mask. I'm confused. P8 - The keeper's been watching Hellas "his whole life" but he doesn't know who sent him into the labyrinth? P12 - So the Keeper just asks Hells a riddle he knows Hellas has solved before? Kind of weak. The italics in the first scene felt inconsistent to me. All your previous uses have been dreams or flashbacks, but this felt like a scene that actually happened in real time so the italics took me out of the story a bit. World's End - Not sure why it's called that. Is that supposed to be Hell or is Lucifer elsewhere at this point in time? I remember Scrios, but I don't remember if Hellas should trust him implicitly with the details of his armour and his secret identity. Maybe their relationship needs more exposition up front to make it believable that Hellas telling him about this is something other than sheer stupidity. I couldn't say exactly why, but by page 4 I'm kind of expecting Scrios to betray Hellas later. something about his brother being in league with Lucifer, and him having a source on the inside of World's End, it all feels too convenient. Part of me almost expects Scrios to BE Lucifer in disguise. I don't know how far off the mark I am. Overall, a decent chapter that advances the story, but most of the steps of advancement felt less organic than I would have liked - more plot-driven than character-driven. For your questions: 1) What do you think of the Keeper of Secrets? - Interesting, although I'm not sure what his role is in the world. As a dispensary of secret lore, he seems to give it up to Hellas fairly easily, so I don't know why he has a bad reputation. 2) Is the whole “riddles” thing too cliche? - Maybe a little, but I'm more curious as to why he'd ask a riddle Hellas knew the answer to. Is the Keeper the unnamed teacher from that flashback scene? It felt a little weak to me, unless the point is that the Keeper is trying to test if Hellas casn summon up these memories that are otherwise suppressed? But if that's the case and I thought of it, why is Hellas so dense that it hasn't occurred to him? 3) Is it convenient that there’s a back way into World’s End? - A little too convenient, especially since it felt so easy for Hellas to get the info. I hope the path turns out to be exceedingly difficult, otherwise this kind of falls apart. 4) Are you interested in Hellas’ forgotten identity/do you know who it is - Honestly, Hellas doesn't appear overly concerned enough about his forgotten identity (ie. uncovering his forgotten identity doesn't feel like a large enough part of his current identity), when he mentions it it's almost always in passing, so I never concerned myself too much with it, but I kind of assumed it was:

Silk is the gatekeeper but doesn't check on this thread every day.

Next week for me I think. I have the first chapter of a new novel I'd like to get feedback on.

Wasn't 5 usually the max? I think you're fine.

I didn't notice anything obvious on the language front, so well done on the clean, readable submission. P4 - "the patterns of stars were far different from on Kiria" - I had originally assumed that all the worlds orbited the same sun? If not then you could specify that because otherwise this line rings false, or your universe behaves differently from our own. Our constellations (from Earth) look the same no matter what side of the sun we're on and that's roughly 300 million km difference. Even viewed from our own planets further out, you wouldn't notice a difference. P9 - Drain seems like such a common word, that naming this never before see anomaly "drain" feels anticlimactic, like it should have a modifier of some sort. I don't know if Origon reaching for his song is a new edit or not, but I prefer it to the "light" he was using in previous submissions. Well, that was tense! I liked the events of this chapter quite a bit. My only gripe is that I have no idea what this Drain is or where it came from, and I feel like someone (it could have been anyone but maybe especially Origon), should have asked the same thing at some point. This fragile urn didn't just show up there so it must have been cargo (and possibly cargo with a purpose?), and if it was in the capsule the whole time I wonder why it didn't eat the urn from the inside. I'm wondering if this drain is going to swallow the whole moon at this point. That'd be a neat trick. Reading the comments above, I agree with Robinski. Now that the Magus' role is theoretically over for the flight, I'd have liked to see the captain taking more of a lead. I see that things are getting done around the capsule, but showing us the captain making it happen properly would have been ideal. I kind of want the next submission RIGHT NOW. Mostly I'm anxious because I want to watch Origon throw a wobbler and take a nailbat to whoever engineered this mission.

Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology