kais

Overall A bit too much at the start of R's speech, but other than that I think it read well. The apprentice argument was well done and I was very excited for a moment to think they might just head out immediately to the rescue. Overall, a solid chapter. As I go - oooh, I do love that kicker! - I find myself overwhelmed by the recap in the first page. It's a lot of information and names and I had to read it three times to sort it all out. I don't know if it needs changing, necessarily, but it is a bear - interesting debate between the apprentices. Read smoothly - pg 8: It's jarring for me to switch to R's POV when we could easily stay with the apprentices for a speech. I'm unsure if the POV switch was necessary - pg 9: Aheh R and her hand love... - pg 10: "The Life....main headquarters is on a moon...." I feel like this is where R's talking should start. This is the information we need to get the momentum of the chapter going. Everything before it read like filler that could maybe be sprinkled in later - pg 12: Okay R needs to move on from V. He's holding her character back from evolving at this point - that last page is excellent, and I really want to stay with E and open that portal, instead of dealing with the council!

Overall This chapter has some good promise to it. R's part was shaky, and I think needs some retooling, but I enjoyed M's a lot. The last line of the chapter was awesome and makes me really excited to read more. I think you can get away with the head hopping at this stage in your series because we have such a strong foundation of the characters. So no complaints from me on the multi POVs this time around. As I go - pg 1: YAY R! - pg2: ah they're back together are they? The electric shiver line seems too... coarse? Like I either need it broadcasted before, so I know it's coming, or more subtly delivered, I think - pg 3: I'm surprised V is still in this. I feel like he should be done with by now, and to keep dragging him back into the books makes it feel like we aren't progressing forward. Or maybe I just hate him still from his first time around. Could you kill him in this book please? - pg 5: scars under his sleeves? Is he attempting suicide?? - pg 7: I feel like slapping V wouldn't accomplish anything. Surely R knows that by now? He either needs real physical stress or some type of psychological game - pg 9: I know we've been through this before, but the queer coding of V still bugs me. It's made passably better now because you have other queer characters to help balance - pg 10: the whole interrogation scene seems off. R seems very amateurish and it seems like V is driving the convo. I also don't get a lot of desperation from him despite the descriptions of the place - pg 11: nice to see M again! - pg 13: so wait, I think I want more info on why it's now okay to have two houses, when it wasn't in M's time - solid end line!

Overall The usual editorial stuff is needed. Aside from that, I'm not sure what this chapter adds to the story? The make out scene signaled, for me, a ramping up of action/tension. This brings it all back down, like we are back in a chapter two. It doesn't seem to add anything to the story and significantly detracts from the through line of our characters. It reads like filler, when the story was progressing at a nice pace (assuming novella or short). I know I've said it before, but this piece really would work wonderfully as a short. But to do that, this chapter would need to be meat tension/action, really driving the plot. There isn't enough in the first few chapters for this to work as a novel, so if you want to string it out with interludes like this I suggest going back and plumping up the first few chapters. Other than that, it read fairly smooth. I just want things to go now. LOL. Ahh, I agree with @Mandamon None of it really makes sense to me because it reads as filler. I'd cut the whole chapter and move us towards the plot! As I go - pretty certain it should be 'brackish' water, not 'bracken' water. Bracken sounds like 'bracken fern.' - there are some pretty heavy typos in those first few pages - pg five: it's hard not to skim because I'm waiting for the tension to amp. With the make out scene previously, that signaled the beginning of the tension amp. Yet here we are with more brooding mood stuff, which is the opposite direction I was expecting. It makes me antsy and makes it hard to focus because I want something to happen, not more introspection. We've already had a ton of that

YES!

I'll also be at a con this weekend hawking books. I wish you many sales and excellent costumes.

I didn't have any as I go comments. I think the make out scene did add some needed tension, and the magic reveal after it made sense. I still think this feels like a short, and would work very well as one, since now that the tension is building I expect A to harness their power (of love? aheh) and go get their property back. Like this could wrap up very nicely in another chapter or two and be a solid short, especially for the anthology. If it were novel length-however, I think I would feel adrift, knowing that the tension wouldn't amp up fast enough and I'd be caught in a sort of middling tension the for hundreds of more pages. But as a short I would be very excited about it. It remains one of your best written pieces to date!

Okay, so no as I go since its a trial piece. Generally, it paced along well until about page four, when the head villain showed up and the dialogue fell into bravado and almost maid-and-butler back and forth. The fighting of the minor villains was interesting, but I didn't have enough feel for the world to be engaged in a larger boss battle so early in the book. I need more grounding before I'm ready for a pages long dialogue-and-fight. I also think the primal reveal comes too early. Maybe that should be more the focus of the book, with our MC finding that out at the end? Starting off with a chosen one trope where the choosing has already happened doesn't lend a lot of tension. For some comp reading, The Blade of the Poisoner is an older MG novel with this same sort of talents vs. elemental feel, and does well with tension around the chosen one issue. You could read it in like two hours, if I am remembering correctly how short it is. Your Questions Concept, power, and limitations The gun parts are entertaining to me, as I generally like guns. The magic system as it were I think could use a bit more mystery in terms of elementals being revealed so early. I have more thoughts on that above. As far as limitations, it already appears that our MC is The Most Powerful, so right now I don't have a sense of tension about his harm. I do enjoy E the powerful flower vendor, however. Read more? I'd be wary due to the boss battle already and the reveal of Super Power, but I'd give it another chapter to see if E develops. Fights within a flower store could be really fun to read. It's a good start for a draft, and I think with tightening it could be a solid novel start. It is definitively urban fantasy, so your grounding is firm.

Overall This read pretty well, and I don't have a lot of comments. I do feel like S has regressed a lot, and we're back at the start of book one. I'd like to see a bit more growth on him, even as we recognize all the horrors he went through in book one and how they affected him. Even if it's just a bit of introspection about how he could go out if he had both the twins, but not without one, or something akin. I expect him to be reeling from what he did, and losing his memories is a great touch, but I also want to see some touchstones of his growth over book one, too. I remain, as always, very excited for where this book will go! Dramatis personae I generally love these, although the format of yours is much longer than I've seen before. In sci fi I feel like they're usually species, age, gender, some identifiable characteristics. The ones you have given are probably too long for people to read at first pass. I'd suggest cutting them down. As I go - pg 5: a lot of redundancy on 'what was the sound?' Suggest switching it up to things like 'did you hear that?' and such - the 'new house' is more or less a reveal, even for your seasoned readers. I'd suggest leading more with that idea, like S contemplating his new house.

There's some precedent for using xie/xir in mixtures in SFF. I have seen 'xiefriend' for girlfriend/boyfriend and X. in the place of Mr. or Ms. You can of course, avoid the honorific issue by giving the nonbinary person a title, like Dr., but we have Mx. for that, too. Personally I adore the xie-additions to normal words, but I don't speak for everyone in the community, either.

Ahh good call. I've changed so much in the beginning it doesn't make as much sense. I have edited it heavily Check. I've tied it back into the magic versus nature thing I put in the edited beginning. I think it makes more sense now This is partly WRS and partly bad blocking. Will fix. Have fixed sleeve description and O's problematic blocking Yes. This got played up a lot more in the early parts so it isn't so shocking now Have expanded! Ehhhhh. There's like three lines about it scattered throughout. I'll reread and see how things are coded now. It may or may not stay. Thank you so much! One more read through and this thing is off to the editor!

Your questions Yes, it sounds like your pitch. I don't think the pronouns were a problem. I think my biggest question is how long were you planning on this running? I don't think it has enough 'thickness' for a full novel, but could make a great novella or short of some other form. Overall This piece I think actually would work really well in the anthology we are both in. I'm not sure how it will fare as a longer piece, as there's not enough tension to keep me invested. It was hard to keep reading in that last chapter as I was waiting for something to kick off, or some inciting incident. Overall though I think this is the best piece of writing you've submitted to the forum thus far. It has a lot of heart and great characterization. With a little bit more forward momentum it'll be a great piece. As I go - pg 3: trespassing is one word, not two - end of page three: while I had been enjoying the ambiance, it's dragging on way too long at this point. I need either a plot development or some tension - ch1: I'm not sure how I feel about the first chapter. From a technical writing standpoint it's solid, and I like the imagery. I think it might just not be my genre, because I don't sense an immediate threat, thereby don't have any tension. I also wonder at this point how A can save their old house when they have failed to follow through, it seems, on a number of prior things (like PhD, etc.). I think I might need a reason for the failures and some show that things have changed and this is the turning point in A's life. That might help a lot - pg 5: as an academic aside, if they went right from undergrad to PhD, I'm not surprised they didn't make it. That's hard. - pg 9: Is A purposefully coded as bipolar? - I enjoy the A&P interaction - aren't all wines fruit wines?? - pg 12: ah okay, so definitely bipolar

Overall Much improved and I think almost set to go. I made a few notes below. I do have a question though. Are we meant to see that Ori is pompous but the council is also bullish and pig headed? Is it sort of a both sides are grey deal? Because I want to get behind Ori at the end but his reasoning prior is problematic. Not sure how you were hoping the piece to land. If the stimm gets better explained, I'd feel comfortable saying he falls within a recognizable yet still accurate band of autism behaviors. Depending upon how much more you want to do, @Mandamon, you could show that Ori really understands by seeing the need for pressure from hitting the wall, and then deducing the blanket pressure of the air (which I think is implied, but could be pulled out more, too). This is a grey area because stimming is not inherently autism related. It generally comes from SPD, so you're weaving in a (very identifiable) comorbid into the equation. But the general population doesn't know how to tease those apart, and many autistic people do also have SPD so it makes sense. (As an aside, so many autistic people also have SPD that my kid's therapists insisted she must have it too because they'd never seen autism without it. That was a lot of fun. Ahh, small towns.) As I go - intro rework: ahh, I get a much better picture of O now! Yes, the pompous comes through. - pg 21: the hitting the wall while writing-- you've identified the stimm but not the cause. Since he enjoys the equation he presumably doesn't need to stimm from that. Is it a reaction to their presence disrupting him? If so you might want to add something like 'when they'd first come in he'd just been writing, but now he stopped every so often to knock his hand rhythmically against the wall." or something. A stimm, generally, is a way to calm down from too much input, or to give input when too little is available. As you've presented the equation as enjoyable and what he prefers to be doing, reading the section had me immediately go back and search for the disruption, since, to me, knowing what inputs he likes tells me a lot about the character. - I'm still confused as to why Kr doesn't know how to help La. If all males in the species are like this, shouldn't all the women know more or less how to help? Or is it just Kr, specifically, that doesn't know? If so might be worth a line with her indicating that everyone else seems to not mind but she's got places to be, or something. - I like the part where Ori considers diving into the equations. Shows us a bit more about why he is the way he is

Final installment! Edits since last time:1) Methal is now a heavy magic-using kingdom. Magic is banned in E but there’s still a black market2) MCs no longer do poo battle with dragons. Now they just get pulled into the carriage after getting damp butts from the sedge3) Methal has a large magic library, from which Met stole a book written by the original colonists about early magic, and how early colonists kept ending up in other people’s minds. Book has a way to stop it but one of the people has to die. Other than that, events are all basically the same. I have about 500 words to play with and I wouldn’t mind using them on these last two chapters, especially the final separation scene, which might be too brisk. Any thoughts at all are welcome, but especially if the ending hits home and if you think the separation magic stuff needs some work.

I'd like to submit on Monday

Happy to have another read through.

So this has me thinking about media that has good autism rep, which is hard. The saying is of course that 'if you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism' because the spectrum is SO wide. The Accountant (a movie with Ben Affleck, who is clearly not autistic) was pretty decent, in my opinion, in showing a well-rounded autistic lead. He has some comorbids in there, especially Sensory Processing Disorder, so if you give it a watch know that that is a separate issue. The needing to complete things is, as far as I know, more part of the general autism package. You might also consider reading 'Asperger's Children' which is a fairly new book but looks at why we think of autism on 'high functioning' versus 'low functioning,' which is utter hogwash, and how that kind of thinking came from Nazi Germany. It gets into the nitty gritty of how autism is defined and how we relate it to children. The other thing to consider is sex differences. Things like ADHD and autism manifest differently in girls than in boys, and no one is quite sure why that is. For decades people literally thought girls couldn't be autistic, that it was just a boy thing. There's some neat areas of research that look at autism and the brain--looking at autism as a sort of 'masculinization' (since we equate analytics with masculine thought). The theory (and it's only a theory) is that since girls are socialized more, the masculinization of their brain simply moves them closer to a non-autistic boy brain (and in fact, brain scans show autistic girl brains looking very much like neurotypical boy brains!) and that for boys who are already socialized to be more analytical, it moves the brain into such a deep analytical plane that social skills are left behind. It's just one theory, but I think it helps contextualize understanding autism, and sex differences in autism, and why so many autistic people are on the queer spectrum as well. I think if you read that book and watched the (very different) movie, it might give some starting points. So I guess... happy homework?

I think the issue is that these two things don't play well together. You're (unintentionally) implying that autism = childlike, which is squicky. I suggest removing one or the other to avoid those Unfortunately Implications. A quick primer on autism as well, below, if you're unfamiliar. I think it's a bit muddled in the narrative, because it isn't really defined. Autism, itself, is not a disability so much as just a different wiring of the brain. It's the comorbids that can come with it that can create disability, such as sensory processing disorder (doesn't like loud noises, needs loud noises, doesn't like the way fabric feels, can't eat certain foods, etc.), ligamentous laxity (super loose joints--why some autistic kids walk kind of funny), speech delays, etc. Autism itself is really more the brain prioritizing analytics over social. I could see this working in a hive sort of situation, especially in an engineering Pixie domain, but I think it might need to be brought out a bit more... like he can't leave his blueprints because he's not done with them yet, darn it, and O keeps trying to get the guy to look at him so he knows he is listening, but the guy won't because he can hear O just fine, why does he have to turn his head and listen? But you could also just throw some of the comorbids at him and not have the autism at all. You can definitely have Sensory Processing Disorder without autism, for instance, which might be easier to write in a short because it has such well defined parameters. Happy to answer any follow up questions. I'm not sure we have any autistic members on the forum anymore, (or if we do, any that want to chime in), but my kid is autistic so I'm in this world, if only tangentially.

Overall For a short I think it works pretty well. The ending might need a bit more punch to it, since I think it won't land for anyone who hasn't read your entire back catalogue (I have learned the term is 'completionist'). Particularly, I think O's chat with the council should be a bit.... stickier? More dynamic? Show him really breaking away from them or something akin, so this launches into Tuning. Your Questions -Is it enjoyable? yes! -Is the magic system and worldbuilding clear? yes, but I'm old hat at it now -Are the characters engaging? Well, more or less. I still don't get much of a sense for the Pixies as a whole. O is more O in this installment, and less doe-eyed than in the first one. I don't know if that's good or bad. I liked him naive but this feeds better into the main books. -Does the story make sense? yes -Is the end of the story satisfying? Are there any promises you don't think I fulfilled? As below, I think you need to really hit the nail on the head with the council. Really show how O takes the council's dismissal and how he resolves to interact with them in the future. Make it sting. That would make a nice, sharp ending. As I go - Is L autistic? Is that why O gives him the pressure and the schedule to focus on? - he recovers pretty quickly from killing someone - so if the offspring won't be engineers, does that mean they'll be warriors? Yes? - I don't understand the reveal in the 'make choices quickly' paragraph - pg 32: The 'finally, recognition' part is VERY O. - pg 34: so does the Hivemother use the Symphony through singing? or is that some other thing she is doing to get the soldiers to genuflect? - pg 36: there's a strange disjunct between calling L's items 'toys' and having him be the mother's mate. Is this meant to show the infantilization of the men?

Ahahah typo. Urp. I've pulled it out a touch more in the first chapter. I just don't have the space to really drag it out. Since it's not super plot relevant it may just need to stay subtle. I LOVE IT All little things and easy enough to fix, especially since some of it was dealt with in edits to chapter one. Thank you!

Lantern it is! This is my perpetual problem with this anthology piece. I have a hell of a time writing future magic systems. I'll see how I can build magic into the world earlier.... and looking into this just now, it looks like I put a bunch of it into chapter one when I rewrote it after last week. Aheh. WRS and some vagueness on my part. Will punch up. LOL. Okay, good info to have! I'll get this all smoothed out. Thank you for the comments! Hoping to get to yours today.

Any and all edits welcome. Changes since last time include: the visits are now only 30 seconds long and they come with a lot of nausea and unfocused vision.

Oh that's fine then. Exactly what I was going for.

Also up for the 4th

This was intentional. I liked the idea of a slow world reveal but if it bugs people I can always change it. Gay cliche or market cliche? yup! Can you tell O has had like four different pronouns at this point? This is a relatively easy fix to do that I don't think should add too many words. Check. Gendered greetings are so standard in many parts of our world that it seemed... not quite right to ignore them on a colony planet. Who knows what culture colonized it first! Thank you for the feedback! Will get to the LBLs tomorrow likely. Ah, I was wondering about this. I've clarified that there's disorientation and nausea for a good part of it, and have shortened the time to thirty seconds. I've also made the first interaction a lot more rushed. Hoping that helps. Okay, that's two votes for this. I've stuck in a mention of solar farms early on. Might do another little thing as well. Probably about 400 more of those, too, since I keep going back and forth. Ugh. Why are pronouns so hard? Hey @shatteredsmooth can we call an enby conclave and just vote on a standard set, please? Thank you as always, @Mandamon! Good edits to hit.

LOL that'd be me. I've frequently gotten the feedback from agents that you need to give readers time to get invested in a character before you swap the POV, otherwise they leave the book. I have to say that over time I've come to agree with it, as sometimes I get so mad at POV swaps that I skip the sections with the new character altogether and then get frustrated and chuck the book, whereas if I get a few chapters with a character I'm a bit more willing to put them aside for a moment for someone else.