Eagle of the Forest Path

A surge of inspiration, so to say. Something to lift your spirits.

I'm not familiar with that publication. Any good?

I'm pro-epigraph (but technically "pro-" and "epi-" would cancel each other out, so I guess I'm just "graph"... and yes, I'm fully aware of how sad this attempt at humour is). Seriously though, if well done, epigraphs can add a lot to your story. But be cautious, if you start adding in two-page poems about fictional creatures in your setting (or excerpts from Lasila's brother's not-a-metaphor sword book), you'll probably lose readers. IMO restraint is key.

So how do we do this? I was thinking I'd PM you the link to the google doc? And if there are any other takers I'll invite them to the PM as well.

Firstly, congratulations kaisa! Will your book be published only in the US, or will us Europeans be able to find it as well? (Or the other way around, I just realized I don't actually know where you're from.) Secondly, @krystalynn03 suggested a while ago that I bring up a topic here in the lounge: the snowflake method, which I use for outlining my plot(s). So my question is if anyone would be interested to take a look at the (work in progress) snowflake outline for Jet Black Medium, as sort of a case study. Do take into account that it's a mystery and looking at the outline will spoil the ending big-time.

How about something with the prefix meta- ? Meta-view, meta-sight, the meta-layer (in deference to @Robinski), ... edit: or "the synth", as in "synthetic reality"

These 'character sketches' are pretty good. There's a lot of world-building in there too, but I feel you achieve a good balance between that and the character info, and the world-building is done differently for each POV character. Quirk is good overall, and I really liked the "attack of cynicism" bit. I see a well-cultured white-collar criminal in this piece. (my own cynical comment: I'm not even sure McD's has any actual meat today!) Moth has a lot more personality, but is also a bit more confusing . What kind of flaming convent is she in!? Moth is a rude brat, isn't she. Which is amusing, but might get tiresome after a while. I didn't like the Robot POV as much as the other two. But I do have to tip my hat for the stylistic choice you made here. I get less character out of this than the others, and more of a generic robot. But I might just have a touch of Asimov's Frankenstein complex.

I really liked this story and hope to see more. The only thing I'd like to point out (which has already been said by Mandamon) is that Host Doctrine is probably wrong about urban warfare (which might be intentional, pointing out that angels are bad at war). A city is like a massive series of bottlenecks, and in a bottleneck the global amount of combatants matters less than in other settings. In a street fight, whether you've got an army of 100 or 500, you can still only put 10 soldiers across the width of the street. Of course, now that I think about it a bit more, things might be different if all your combatants can grow wings at will. But in that case, incendiary bombs wouldn't make a lot of sense either.

In general, I agree with the previous assessments that there's a lot of information to deal with and not a whole lot of character development. You can still get really good stories with this - look at Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series, for example - but the current fashions in fiction writing tend to shy away from this and put the focus on character, as this is more interesting to most readers. I liked how you use metric system prefixes for religious titles and time division. (From the use of 'local months' on page 1 I'm assuming that periods are mostly used when speaking interplanetary?) As for detailed stuff, I only want to mention one thing (well... maybe one-and-a-half) since most of it has already been said. At the bottom of page 2: "get a second Giassa some dozens of times." "A second" means a single event, if it happened again after that it would be "a third Giassa" and so on. This doesn't work with the "dozens of times" you say it will happen. You could say "we'll have another dozen Giassas" or "we'll repeat Giassa some dozens of times" or something similar. "not to say" implies that it's not likely to happen, what I believe you're looking for here is "not to mention". (that's the and-a-half) As for the "almost nameless" planet, while technically that's not possible, IMO this can be justified with "descriptive liberty", because it's a pretty cool phrase.

Ok, I'll lead by saying that I enjoyed the chapter. I particularly liked the character of Iluya and the bantering, it's refreshing to read a high-society female that doesn't immediately belittle the 'new girl' MC. However, I have to say I really can't appreciate the way you're reacting to the gender inquiries. I understand this is a personal matter for you and that you have your own view on the subject which you might not want to discuss in this topic. But when people here - your test-readers - tell you that they are confused about something, you can safely assume that your eventual audience will be confused about it too. What's offensive to me is that you appear to be saying: "No, you can't ask me about this. Because I said so. And if you've don't understand something, tough luck, deal with it!" If you want it so Lasila can recognise immediately that Savae is non-binary, that's fine. Personally, I don't have a problem with her instinctively referring to Savae as 'they' (though I did wonder about it). But you should explain at least a bit of why she can so easily identify their non-binary nature. Maybe you'll go into the subject later in the book (maybe you won't), if so, just tell us that (give us a RAFO card) and don't deny the issue. We give feedback and ask questions so that you can end up with the best possible version of your story; for most of us, this includes not leaving your readers with unresolved questions nagging at the back of their heads. You can ignore any input you want, it's your story and you have to make the decisions, but getting the same remark multiple times is an indication that something is a stumbling block. You not wanting to deal with it right now is not a reason for us not to tell you right now (because five chapters later it won't matter any more). Please note: I did not tell you to take any particular course of action. I said that "here is something that might be improved" and leave it to you to find a way to do that while staying true to the message you want to convey. Okay, rant over. I repeat: good chapter. I hope to read more (and not just because it means we'd also get to watch kaisa's orgy dance).

Really? I placed Pascal and her family solidly into the middle class, maybe upper middle, but IMO there's too much resentment of the 'pents' (nice term, by the way. Is it based on penthouse or the name Penton?) for them to be part of the higher class. I'm kind of confused about the painting in the hospital lobby. Is it a static image with the multiple parts that you describe next to each other? Or is it animated on a loop? The description is pretty vivid, so kudos on that, but I'm also wondering why a hospital of all places would want a mural with all of that death and decay in it. It might be a post-apocaliptic cultural thing, I guess, but when I'm looking for medical care I'd rather not be slapped in the face with such a reminder of mortality.

Thanks for the input @ccstat , it's given me some good ideas. Along with some substantial wiki-browsing on Obsolete Scientific Theories. They're actually not completely unrelated, though the relation is based on a misunderstanding. Imagine an experiment where you have a piece of wood in a (sort of) closed space. If you burn the wood you end up with a pile of ashes and a certain amount of water vapor. When weighing the ashes and the (condensed) vapor, the mass (weight, really, but whatever) would be greater than that of the piece of wood. This made people at the time believe that there was something in the wood that had negative mass (phlogiston), which left when it burned, making the resultant ash and vapor heavier than the wood. (It was actually that oxygen combined with hydrogen to form the water vapor, but the oxygen wasn't taken into account for the original weight of the reagents.) It's an interesting idea, but not really what I'm looking for. It's a bit too... esoteric?... for my purposes. This is a possibility, but I'd have to adapt it substantially. At the moment I'm thinking along the lines of the Fluid theory of electricity. Taking away "positive negative charge" from an object, making it go positive if it was originally neutral. It would allow me do a lot of things with attraction-repulsion effects for action scenes if I want/need to. And there's the possibility of sparks . The ductility/malleability/plasticity idea is also promising, but that one still needs a lot of thought concerning the paired attribute. I'm thinking size.

(A) “Can’t we just deliver this baby and take the money?”, and they're talking about infertility poison... please tell me this was intentional. (B, sort of) You add a moment of tension when the customs official wants to check the other crates, but then you immediately defuse the situation with the majus' x-ray vision. Not a big problem, but it seemed kind of a bland solution. (D) So the Baldek family orchestrates a thoroughly inhumane plan to decimate (an) other species using sabotaged medicine. And then they put that medicine into bottles with their own logo? And only the Baldek bottles are tainted? Could still be a misdirect, but otherwise it's kind of a big oversight from the evil mastermind. (C) Nothing especially, but it's got to be a very tense situation. There's little way out for Methietum, actually, on the one hand, if the crew do nothing the planet dies out slowly from the drugs, on the other hand, if the crew go to the authorities they've likely got an interstellar war to deal with in the near future. The only way out would be that the crew somehow manages to not only stop the shipment they've got, but also discover and halt every other plot the Baldek (or other agency pinning the blame on the Baldek) have going to distribute their infertility drugs. Those are some steep odds for a crew of 5 traders to deal with. Things are looking kind of bleak for the Dissolutionverse, Mandamon. Overall, good story, I'm excited to see where you're gonna take it from here.

Hate to nitpick, but it's actually phonemes. In addition to @Mestiv's remark about technology, there's also the matter of ease of use. If you have a reasonable complex (or even not so complex) concept or object that gets used often the natural consequence will be to contract the word into fewer phonemes. And there you have an evolving language which eventually would be just as messy and senseless-seeming as any other. How do you determine the sequence of phonemes? Does /c//a//t/ mean something different in your language than /a//c//t/ The following is mostly a joke. If you have a sentence like the following (contents of brackets to be replaced by their relative Phonemes) [possibility]+[verb]+[interrogatory] [second person singular] [action]+[verb]+[movement]+[direction]+[first person singular] [food]+[grain]+[product of division]+[water]+[heat] [polite]+[request] it's a lot easier to just say "Could you pass the bread please?" (and I even left out salt and yeast from the bread description, can you imagine how hard it might be to describe yeast?) Edit: the concept reminds me of Newspeak from 1984. Doubleplusgood, anyone?

7. Chris Columbus (movie director) 8. Christopher Columbus (15th century explorer) 9. Christian Bale 10. Kristen Bell 11. Kristen Stewart 12. C.J. Samson (British author who prefers to publish under his initials) Chandrian can go next

*blink* Huh. Never heard of it.

My opinion is that you're rushing things, a lot! Which results in unnatural characters. Like Darkness said, first Tim's screaming about his master being dismembered by a monster and the next moment he seems totally fine about it. Leo's acceptance of Tim is way too easy: "Oh look! A boy just dropped out of the sky onto my doorstep. I have no idea who the heck he is, but instead of asking about it let's just randomly make him a student and give him a magic tutorial for no apparent reason." Kai just got his behind kicked by a total newbie and he's completely fine about it? The conversation between Kai and Tim was all over the place; "My town got destroyed just yesterday, and somehow I expect you already know all about it. I'm totally fine about it, though. By the way, why are people handing out soul keys like candy?" immediately followed by "Hi, I'm a half-dragon. What kind of magic do you use? Oh, here's a bunch of expensive magic items, but it's okay because I'm royalty."... Everything comes too easily to Tim. In the morning he gets handed his soul keys and later the same day he's already learned a bunch of ice spells, and suddenly he's joining a guild because of that. Without any hint as to why he chose to learn ice spells in the first place, instead of any other element out there. In general, everybody's too nice. The point of any book should be the main character overcoming difficulties, but there aren't any difficulties for Tim to overcome. After the monster attack, there's not even a hint of any conflict. Also, really think about how your characters would react to certain events. You have a monster attack, an that is the reason Tim ends up at the school, and that's okay, but Tim's acting like it never even happened, which means he's massively in denial or he's a complete sociopath. Somehow I don't think that's what you're going for. It never even gets discussed that Tim lost his home and his mentor. How would you react to these things, how would your best friend or a relative react, think on that and use it to create your characters' actions. I'm sorry if you feel I'm being too harsh in the criticism. You could have a good story here, but if you cram all these events into less than 3000 words it's just a roller-coaster that will leave your readers' heads spinning and confused which way is up. Which is not an encouragement for them to keep reading. My advice is that you take what you've written and use that as the basis for expanding the story. Take your time, build up a logical chain of events, keep in mind how your characters would react to those events and don't be afraid to re-write things that you're not sure about or satisfied with.

Jack and the beanstalk?

14 George Sand 15 Emily Brontë 16 Anne McCaffrey 17 Beatrice Potter edit: I guess Daniyah's next, she named 7

In that case wouldn't "it" be better than "them"? To me, "them" implies that the gender is unknown (or perhaps bi/trans/multi-gendered). If Death - or any other quasi-mystical being - had made a decision not to have a gender, I'd think they would think of themselves as an "it". "It" might also give off a more inhuman vibe, which is sort of the point, if I read you right. Your descriptions of the scenery are sometimes a bit awkward in their wording, there might also be just too much of it. (This is hypocritical of me to mention, since I do this myself, but that means I know what I'm talking about ) You're doing a lot of interesting world-building in this piece, but I feel it's a bit wasted in a stand-alone text. If I knew the story and/or the setting would continue after this, I could be interested to know about the cultures and religions. As it stands, apart from the Reaper-Lover opposition (which is some powerful symbolism, appropriate to the story), I'm feeling a bit "Crumbling, mysterious temple... and?" How did the dark man get on the altar? It couldn't have been Cael/Death who brought him, from the exchange that follows. And I doubt that he tied himself up. Meaning that Death has followers or allies who trudged all the way through the jungle with the victim, and then for some reason didn't even stick around to watch the sacrifice. I'm getting more Malazan Book of the Fallen from the confrontation than Wheel of Time, but I agree with FormlessFox that it needs more context for the reader to be invested in the outcome. The battle itself is pretty awesome. There are solid bones in this piece, but it does require polishing. I'd like to read more of this.

I think it depends on the goals of the writer. If the goal is to be published, then by necessity fanfiction can only be a phase (copyrights and all that). If you write for personal enjoyment and don't mind being limited to the internet, then fanfiction can remain a valid option for however long you want. In the second case I believe it then comes down to what kind of person the writer is. If they're crazy fanboys/girls going "kya" and only want to go nuts writing badly spelled semi-pornographic romance about their favorite ships, they probably won't ever quit fanfiction unless they stop writing altogether. (Okay, so I might be a bit lot prejudiced, but anyone has to admit, there's way too much of that stuff out there.) The somewhat more serious writers (who wanted the canon story to go in another direction or simply enjoy expanding the fictional worlds they have read) will probably at some point feel the desire to create something from scratch, but that shouldn't be a reason for them to leave their fanfics behind altogether.

@Mestiv What about birth marks?

It's ok that people don't know, but IMO you should. That's how you can work out all the cool powers and limitations. That's just my personal philosophy on the subject though, there are other valid points of view. I guess it all depends on just how structured you want your magic system to be.

No problem, no concern, just not very used to it. And there's the whole plural thing...

8. the "other Uncle Ben" Obi-Wan Kenobi (original Star Wars trilogy) Does Gandalf count even though he came back to life? edit: 9. first female mentor, Moiraine Damodred (the Wheel of Time), oh wait, she came back to life too