industrialistDragon

Hello and welcome to Reading Excuses! Overall, the world seems very interesting and I don't mind the subjective omniscient narrator so much, though it is rather uncommon nowadays. However I'm afraid I found this section very confusing, both in the plot aspects and from a technical standpoint. Plot-wise, I'm with the others. I have no context for what is going on and receive little sense the characters as individuals. The characters come so many so quickly that I had a hard time keeping them all straight. Since I couldn't get a handle on the characters, I couldn't really figure out what was going on with the plot. either. A small summary of the important events from book one would probably have helped me. Comments as I go: Having sentences of varying length and order is a good thing, since it keeps readers engaged in a work. However, I found many of the sentences in this piece were so long that I lost the thread of what was going on, while others were so confusingly arranged that I couldn't figure out what they were trying to say. Be careful of run-on sentences, sentences with too many dependent clauses, or multiple clauses that need to be broken up into their own sentences. I like the narrator's personality, and that it's in a style that's not often seen nowadays. It feels to me like you are very comfortable with it as well. However, like @Mandamon, I do think it's overdone at times and comes across as a bit twee. Likewise, the descriptions are very evocative but at times seem to me to be a bit overwritten. None of it is wrong, but I feel like it could be dialed back a couple notches. The switch to first person for the narrator caught me by surprise and confused me. Is this a character in the story or just a commentator? Either way is fine, it just needs to be consistent. "Simian" is a really awful way to describe a human, much less a servant, if they are not an anthropomorphised gorilla or monkey. It has some really unfortunate implications. From your summary the story seems very interesting and I would like to see where this goes.

Close! It's more like "mix" or "miks." Coined in the 1970s, it's the M from Mr/Miss/Mrs plus the variable 'x' meaning an unknown element.

Overall -- this is improved. I'm not frustrated at the text anymore and I'm getting more of a feel for the character as her own person. The action happens faster, but I think E's motivation and the story's through-line is still somewhat lacking. As I go: I do not think they're hunting animals anymore, at least. Though, now I'm wondering why N is there at all. She's an interesting character and the interaction's not bad, but it doesn't seem to do much for the forward momentum of the story. It seems like now that the order is the primary thing that gets E moving, and most of the info about T -- and N for that matter -- comes out in internal monologue anyway, I feel like N's character could be just as easily conveyed in a personal PS to the bottom of the message itself, and the official text or whatever could establish the plot more concretely early on. I feel like since E's already prone to internal wandering, that the plot should be clear and bold as early as possible so E can embroider around it effectively. I agree with the others that a more recent death would make more sense and give E more of a reason to go hunting in the desert. It would also give a little more believably to the is-she/isn't-she reveal around T's death. Queen being all female still feels weird, but less so now. I also don't understand why there are beetles on top of the flyer. It seems impractical and redundant and not especially good for camouflage if the suit can spot them that far away. I honestly feel like it would make more sense for E to save the headband and that as a side-effect saves the M, than for her to decide no other human needs to die today after she's just spent this time calling M in general all sorts of disparaging things and generally having the story show that none of the colonists care at all about them. Or maybe E decides that the headband means T isn't dead at all and thus saving the M becomes the only way to find out where T is now... or just... something decisive? It just doesn't sit right with me and I can't quite place why. It's like after E fires the rocket all her higher reasoning functions just turn to mush. The scene at the tree doesn't sit right for me either, but I think I know why I'm feeling it. E is mostly catatonic in the scene -- she's passive and doesn't take her own initiative to save herself. She's short-circuited from too many emotions before, but that was brief, and quickly followed by action. Here, the M (which E would rather see dead than alive) has to repeatedly prompt E to take a basic lifesaving measure that apparently she already know how to do. E listens to the M and passively follows instructions. It's a very Foxfire So sort of reaction. I feel like the stabbing makes even less sense now that the M know E's name. If they're looking for her, and since they don't try to kill her (and also this isn't flash fiction) I assume it's not to assassinate her, then what's the purpose of stabbing her like that? Drugging, knocking out, that I could see... maybe a bit of roughing up as payback for the rocket...

Hello and welcome! Thank you for letting us be the first ones to see your work outside of your friends. I know how tough that can be! Overall, I thought this was a very well-done piece! I enjoyed reading it, and am interested in the world and the characters. Technically I thought the piece was outstanding. I usually don't care for present tense narratives and usually have difficulty following what's going on in them, but the prose here flowed so smoothly and so well that I barely noticed it was in a format I disliked. Well done! That said, I do think the beginning could be tightened. It felt to me that the carriage ride went on a bit long; I found myself wanting to skim through parts of it. Also, I was confused by the long block of italic text in the beginning. I didn't know what was going on and the tense switch between it and the rest of the story threw me off for a while. My main issues with this piece are not so much issues as worries. As I read, I found myself becoming worried about certain aspects of the text and characters. Nothing's risen to the level of being outright problematic for me yet, and I feel like I need to see more before I make any final judgments, but the way certain things are set up is making me uneasy. I was worried about: Skin tone -- like @kais , I also picked up on this. It's not bad yet, but it has the potential to be pretty easily, so I'm worried. Albinism -- Additionally, if she really does have albinism, then I'm troubled by the pairing of it with a people that's apparently being stereotyped as otherworldly or evil. People with albinism in the real world face massive amount of discrimination world-wide and are even murdered in some places (their body parts are thought to have mystical properties. The articles I found about this are from 2014, so it's in no way an ancient problem). Again, only having one chapter to go on isn't indicative of much, but when I read the descriptions of the princess, her appearance in connection with her demon and her heritage sent up some warning flags for me. Inner demons -- This is a cool idea and I like it in the text, however, I'm also worried that it isn't an actual demon, but either the princess' negative emotions, or an actual mental disorder. Again, linking mental health issues (including anger management) to demonic possession is a harmful stereotype that does real damage to real people. I'm not saying it's bad right now, but in conjunction with the rest, I feel a little worried about where it might go. Tropes -- This piece seems to be dealing with a lot of very traditional, well-worn stereotypes and tropes. While having tropes in a work isn't necessarily bad, it's not necessarily good, either. When dealing with well-worn tropes it's important for an author to make sure they are differentiating their characters and plot from all the others stories out there using the same archetypes. How is the author turning the work from just another Trope X tale into something uniquely their own? That's what readers of genre fiction look for in trope-heavy stories. They want to see how this story makes something new out of something familiar. Or at least, that's what I look for. The Western European, medieval, pale-skinned royalty searching for a spouse scenario is very generic for a fantasy setting, and I feel like I need more than just the demon to really counteract how unremarkable it is right now. The worth of a woman is her womb -- Additionally, the extent to which the trope of "women only being valued for their ability to have children" is in use here makes me uncomfortable. This piece appears -- because the lack of individualizing details means I fill in the gaps with archetypes -- to be headed for a setup where the princess finds someone who loves her despite her demon/heritage and then she decides that marriage is great and she has found her self-worth in producing babies for whomever-it-is. I came to this extrapolation because, despite her saying in the beginning she didn't want marriage and would be a "horrible mother," by the end she's wishing she could care for a random child off the street, wanting to show "them" that she is as good and caring a woman as any mother, and calling her subjects her beloved children. Once again, reinforcing these stereotypes causes real harm to real people, and yes, this is a lot of conjecture on my part, but at the same time, I saw enough indicators in this text to make me feel the need to point it out. I just want to reiterate after all that negativity that I really did enjoy this piece. I think the princess has the makings of a good interesting character, and I feel like her servant has intriguing hidden depths as well. Technically the writing is smooth and about as flawless as anyone can expect a draft to be. Don't get discouraged, and I look forward to your next sub!

Overall... Overall I had trouble getting into this. I felt like it was all over the place in the beginning, and I didn't get enough of a feel for the character before the story went headfirst into introspective wandering for me to want to wade through it. Every time I'd get reengaged, there'd then come another round of memories, and they'd break the flow for me again. It's not that I disliked the piece, but that I ended up feeling frustrated at the end of it. At the text, not the characters so much. I found a lot of similarities between E and your characters from other books, and I just don't feel like I got enough of E to differentiate her from Foxfire's So. E reminded me of Foxfire's So (introspective to excess, obsessive, not wanting to be around people because of how they view her, having issues with a more extroverted female friend who wants her to go somewhere because of a ruling body) wearing an Ard Ne costume (bulky flight suit, hip holster, big boots, broken old-earth tech). I would really have liked to get more sense of E as her own person in these early pages than paragraph after paragraph of old-earth longing. To answer your questions: I didn't see much infodump, once I corrected for an overwhelming amount of old-earth maundering. I feel like the story didn't really find its feet until the beetle attack, and that I would have liked more info on T and the relationship, and T's decision to die than all this "woe is me this is not earth" that's in there. I think a lot of "punching up" will happen naturally if the beginning is pruned heavily, and E and T find their own personalities. I got no sense E was a scientist. There's definitely a compelling story in there! I just feel like it's buried under a lot of exploratory, author-is-getting-a-feel-for-the-world paragraphs right now. As I go: E feels very much like foxfire's So, but with a few more curse words. Introspection can be nice, but I'm having a hard time not skimming these first few pages. I feel like a lot of this "oh woe is me Queen is not Earth" at the beginning is less worldbuilding more just maundering. At the end of it, I know very little about Queen other than it's red and oh-so-horribly not Earth, and what I gather about E is that she's prone to such extended woolgathering that I question her effectiveness as a sentry. Maybe her post is the proverbial left field of the planet? A safe place to chuck people who can't hack it elsewhere but can't be fired? I am also confused by the sudden switch to anger, happening as it does right after so much prolonged introspection. What is actually happening here? I thought they were hunting, with the mention of hides, but it's some kind of return-home order? I'm lost, and at the moment I don't feel particularly attached to Foxfire-So (The Red Dust Mix). So M are a people but T is a person (singular)? I thought they were, again, animals at first, because of the focus on plant and animal life (and leather) early on, then I thought M were just one person, since T is one person and they're handled so similarly in the text. "See T’s mother" -- Wait, whose mother? Whose wife? Does E have a daughter? I'm confused here. At least I have confirmation that T is a singular person and M are a group of people. Definitely also have hologram issues like the others, but I won't belabor the point. Yeah, when E throws these introspective "Queen is terrible oh woe It isn't earth oh woe, woe woe" pity parties I just lose all interest. It's too much for me, too many passages of this particular kind of introspection. I get it already. "Queen’s complete lack of resources had taken T and M stole what few we did manage to store" -- Wait, what few Ts? Is T a person? T is a person, right? Because here T is talked about more like a supply or resource and I thought I had it figured, but now I don't know. I guess you can't marry a resource, so therefore T is a person? Unless, on this crapsack world people ARE resources in which case I have no clue what's going on. I think part of my problem is this habit I seem to be seeing of describing most things two, three or even more times, just using synonyms and increasingly flowery language. Foxfire had it too, but this just seems to be a lot more concentrated version of it. And, like, a little of this is sort of thing is fine, but I feel like you could trim literally pages out of this current story just from taking the triple-repetitions down to doubles and still not lose a great deal of pertinent information. Once we hit the beetles, I'm still heckin' confused (is it a blue shawl or a blue headband and how the heck is a headband/shawl made of leather dyed with fabric how do you get actual dye out of fabric in usable quantities and then it's used as some kind of bolo/wrap like what going on why are we suddenly talking about water is there even any action happening or did E just like zone out while watching people die?) but I finally feel like I'm engaged in the story.

I was wondering if that might have been the issue. So again, don't be discouraged! Writing anything in a non-native language is super difficult, and while it does need work, it's not a bad start by any measure. I studied German for eight years and I know, even at my best, I couldn't have done a story this well in that language. Improvements come with practice, though, so the best thing to do is just keep at it. It might be worthwhile, if you haven't already, to look up some ESL/ELL resources on the internet (ESL is English as a Second Language, and ELL is English Language Learner. Sometimes you also see EFL, English as a Foreign Language). Honestly, I think most of it you will find you already know, but if you look for things like "present vs past tense" or anything about verb tenses and point of view (POV) in general, I think it will be helpful.

Hello and welcome to Reading Excuses! Also congratulations on submitting your first work for critique! It's never easy to take that first step into review. Just one quick formatting note, I see it looks like you have put two spaces between each word in your piece. Normally, the "double spacing" requirement in most submissions guidelines (including ours) means double the usual amount of the empty space between each line of text on the page. For people like me who have trouble reading on the screen, double spacing between lines of text is massively helpful, plus it's a good habit to get into if you ever intend to submit work to a publisher. If you've never encountered that requirement before, it can certainly seem confusing and labor-heavy! Fortunately, almost all the word processing programs I know of have easy ways to double-space the lines of text in your document. Here are a few tutorials if you need a guide: MSWord: From support.office.com and from a different site ; WordPad: From WikiHow ; GoogleDocs: From support.google.com and from WikiHow ; Apple (* -- I don't actually have a mac so I can't verify these instructions. They look right though) from support.apple.com ; Adobe inDesign: (* -- again, I don't have inDesign, so I'm mostly guessing. Seems decent, though) from forums.adobe.com . Anyway, on to the real critique: Overall, I think there's a good basis for a story here. I enjoyed the way the story introduced the Chosen One from a different angle and was interested in why the Prophesy pair were in the city. However, there are a great many tense shifts and grammar issues that made it difficult for me to get invested in the story. I also had trouble keeping track of what was going on when the POV shifted, and during some of the dialogue exchanges. Like @Mandamon, I was a little confused as to what the purpose of the story (was it a chapter?) by the end -- it didn't seem to go anywhere, and the shift away from Y and A to the Prophesy pair made me feel confused as to who were the actual protagonists. To answer your questions A/B: Interest and Characters -- Overall, I was minorly interested. I thought Y and A had far more personality and more interesting interactions than the Prophesy pair (I keep calling them that because I'm having a hard time distinguishing between them and remembering their names), though I do like how grumpy the Chosen One was. The grammar and language usage issues, and lack of focus kept me from being fully engaged, however, and even with Y and A, the lack of descriptions made the whole thing feel sort of disconnected and floaty for me. C: The city -- I don't have any real feelings for the city right now because I know nothing about it. For me, just from the text, all I know is that it's a city, it's old, and it has an inn or two. I would need a lot more description and character observations to form any opinion of my own about it. Again, welcome, and I just want to reiterate that I think there's the bones of a really neat story here. Don't get discouraged and I look forward to your next sub!

I've been trying to search for the words "hello" and "welcome" and it always returns 0 results, no matter what I do. I've tried other common words like "begin" and not had an issue, so I don't think it's that they're too common. I'm just a little confused is all.

Mary-Robinette's post goes into this in detail here: http://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/kowal-mary-robinette-on-the-subject-of-my-name/ Basically, two-part first names are unusual in the US as a whole, but more common in the South, where Mary-Robinette is from. However her two-part name is unusual even by the South's standards, so eventually she felt self-conscious about it and the confusion it caused and stopped using her whole name. She's decided to go back to using the whole name now, for reasons she gives in the post.

You may think you are engaging in debate, but what you are doing is called sealioning and I will not be part of it. I will not explain to you settled caselaw you clearly have neither read nor understood. That is not my job, and I do not owe you that time or effort simply because you claim to enjoy a "debate" wherein you have repeatedly implied I was stupid and ignorant. This is off-topic and I will not participate in it any longer.

What I am talking about is the concept of attempt. Attempt only requires intent to commit a crime, completing a substantial step towards that crime, and then failing to accomplish the crime. Because time travel is involved, it is impossible to prosecute X, I agree; however, I meant this more in a general and somewhat lighthearted sense. The fact that the thoroughly discredited Bell has never been formally overturned doesn't change either the nature of the right of procreation or the standards that apply to it. See Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942), where the court stated that the right of procreation is considered fundamental under the Constitution and thus that any statutes restricting that right should be examined using strict scrutiny. From the case: "We are dealing here with legislation which involves one of the basic civil rights of man. Marriage and procreation are fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race. he power to sterilize, if exercised, may have subtle, far-reaching and devastating effects. In evil or reckless hands it can cause races of types which are inimical to the dominant group to wither and disappear. There is no redemption for the individual whom the law touches. Any experiment the state conducts is to his irreparable injury. He is forever deprived of a basic liberty." Skinner undermines Bell's rationale and strongly distinguishes Bell, suggesting it is only tenable in extreme circumstances. Forced sterilization for people with disabilities has a long and fraught history, and many of the statutes reflect a profound level of discrimination. They are incredibly controversial and, as you mentioned, increasingly being overturned entirely. Again, the fact that the laws exist does not change the nature of the right. Additionally I believe my point still stands that the forced sterilization being discussed would in fact be much more of an issue than the character makes it out to be.

This was an interesting concept, and I enjoyed it, however I pretty much agree with @Mandamon -- I feel like I didn't get enough background to understand what was really going on when the story switched from being a little romance-meet at some kind of steampunkish transit station to an action sequence with kidnapping and swordfights. Why is the traveler so well-equipped? What's so bad about the luggage-guy that the traveler has to make a detour to deal with him? I was okay with the description of the actual caddy, but I feel like I needed more of a description of WHY throughout -- like, why is the man's normal-seeming behavior off-putting? Why does the traveler suspect kidnapping when he'd before only mentioned luggage-stealing? I don't need a whole ton of information or background, or even a lot spelled out concretely, but I feel like I need enough to ground the action and the twist as natural progressions from what I've read before. It's just not quite there yet. Again, this reads smoothly and from a technical standpoint I can see a ton of improvement so keep up the good work!

Overall I found this story hard to get in to. I definitely agree with @shatteredsmooth's assessment that it began slowly and finished too quickly. I feel like I wasn't really involved in it until page 6 when the two talking finally get around to what X intends to do. I don't really feel like I needed the background information covered in the beginning pages for the rest of the story to make sense. I didn't have a whole lot of problems following what happened, but I also feel like I would have enjoyed it more had I read more about the time-travel adventures. I like the twist ending, it made me smile. As I go: -- I am also picking up on some of the gender issues that @kais did, and I'm not sure I would have finished the story had I been reading this elsewhere because of them. To me, they make the piece feel hostile and out-of-touch. -- A lot of this dialogue uses demonstrative pronouns in place of actual specificity in what's being said. I think it goes a bit towards what @kais was saying about general wordiness, but too many words like that in close proximity makes me confused as I read. -- Be careful with using italics for emphasis. We all do it, and it's tough nowadays with the way we chat informally on the internet, but in more formal prose (such as writing like this), italics for emphasis should be used pretty sparingly. I feel like every other sentence out of these two guys has at least one italicized word in it and that's left me feeling fatigued not even 5 pages in. -- "I've decided to test the grandfather paradox" -- this would be a fantastic opening line and would immediately capture my interest. Plus, it leads directly into the meat of the story and I think the discussion about the killings would do just as well as the beginning technobabble to convey character and setting. -- ...Depending on how far you'd gone with your plan before the intended victim died, you absolutely could be convicted of trying to kill someone who's already dead. Additionally, the right to reproduce is considered a fundamental right under the Constitution and forcing someone to take contraceptives unwilling actually is a pretty big deal. The fact that contraceptives exist and people use them willingly on their own is immaterial to the illegality of the act. I didn't think a whole lot of this guy to begin with but now I'm wondering how he's escaped being imprisoned as long as he apparently has. He doesn't seem very smart to me. -- The actual time travel feels a bit hastily written to me. I would have liked to experience a bit more of his actions as they happened, rather than read about them in summarized hindsight. -- I did lol at the twist.

A lot of times new writers think they have to write a certain way or "sound like" a popular author in order to be successful. Trying to write like someone else can be a good exercise from a technical standpoint, but trying to shoehorn yourself into boxes you don't enjoy and don't fit the way your experiences have shaped the way you see the world is not going to be productive in the long run. So, to me, "find your voice" is more about writing enough to both recognize your specific writing-related idiosyncrasies, and becoming comfortable with the way that your writing is going to be different from everyone else's writing.

That is a tough question! There are ways to write in English without using pronouns. John Scalzi's books "Lock In" and "Head On" both avoid using pronouns for the protagonist. They're also written in first person, and that does make it easier. It's still possible to do that in third, but it's more difficult. Ann Leckie's "Ancillary Justice" uses one pronoun for all genders and seems like it might be tackling similar problems to the one you describe. Looking at ways other authors have gotten around similar issues can be helpful in figuring out how to handle your own. Otherwise, then, you could try using one or more neopronouns. I know I've read books where characters used a neutral pronoun when they didn't know the gender of the person they were speaking about, and once it became known, they switched to using whatever pronoun was appropriate. There are links upthread with lists of different types of neopronouns and how they're used which might be helpful to you if you haven't had much exposure to them before. The singular "they" would also work if you didn't want to use a new kind of pronoun. As long as the pronoun is easy to track back to the person it references, I feel like readers can handle a fair amount of complexity or uncertainty.

I agree with a lot of what @Mandamon says. I do like the idea, and also felt like it found its footing fairly late. However, I didn't get much emotion out of this story. I think technically from a writing standpoint it's one of your best, and I also agree that the jail scene was the best part of the story, but I didn't really connect with any of the characters. I've had trouble putting my finger on exactly why I don't care... I think it's multiple things and so nothing really stands out. For instance, I just don't care about M, or her rages. We're told about her rages, using that word, and we don't get a lot of context for why she feels rage. Some of that might be to keep up the is she/isn't she mystery, but I feel like that maybe that mystery is less important than understanding the POV character. I also feel like maybe some of the sensory details about the anger are off? Like, she says she's angry, that she has rage, but we're not given a lot of the, like, body language? distracting effects? of having so much emotion.... I feel like maybe the story is leaning too hard on the words "anger" and "rage" to convey the depth of what M is feeling and not really showing as much as I want it to? I also feel like just maybe I don't know enough about the weres or the world in general in the beginning to be worried about M, like @aeromancer mentioned. I feel like I don't have the setting down before the rising actions start and that just, like, shifts everything else off kilter. With E, I feel like sort of the story is presuming more out of the relationship the readers have with him than is warranted from what the text actually shows. At the beginning, he's just a plot point, a nosy neighbor who calls the cops and sets the real meat of the story into action. The end, though, I feel like treats E like he was an equal character with M almost, and tries to rehabilitate or at least evoke sympathy for him. I think there's just not enough framework in the text to have me even register E as a character, must less interact with him to the point of feeling sympathy for his predicament with some heretofore unknown nephew. I just have one grammar issue, and that's "Perspective students were lined up " -- it's "prospective," unless she's talking about how the line of students seems to recede in the distance (and it should probably be "prospective test-takers," now that I think about it, if they are already students trying to take placement exams...) anyway, it is well done and I don't think it should be scrapped. It just needs a bit of work is all.

Just a word of caution: using the gender of a trans or gender non-conforming person as a "gotcha" is transphobic, homophobic, and just generally rude and in poor taste. Something more like a "breeches role" (where a woman dresses like a man specifically to get around some kind of societal restriction) has a deeper literary history, and, while not without its own issues, is generally considered less hurtful than other gender-related "gotchas." Anime's tradition of "otoko no ko" is often hurtfully mistranslated and doesn't really map well to any one word or concept in English, so I wouldn't recommend using it as a basis for a gender-related "gotcha" without a lot of research.

Overall, I agree with much of what @Mandamon and @kais have said. S is an interesting character, and I like her, but she reads to me as a young master or senior journeyman, not an established master of any great age. D is tougher. I'm not as interested in him, but his section was also one where I felt there were some factual inaccuracies that kept me from really engaging with his POV. Additionally, Having two POVs in the first chapter, compounded by what I'm recalling of the dead man's POV in the prologue, feels to me like too many new points of view too quickly, and that would also contribute to my inability to engage with the characters. To the thesaurus! Crack -- shatter, break, divide, sunder, carve, split, part, dissociate, rend, sever, chop, cleave, breach, fracture, schism, beat, ruin, mangle, contuse, pummel, wreck, pulverize, crumble, splinter, pound, grind, fragment, hammer, smash... Or you could just make up a word, maybe with some hard 'k', 't', or 'p' sounds to echo the nature of the power? As I go: From what I remember of the prologue, I feel like the story could start here with S without the prologue and be just fine. I like S and I'd like to spend more time with her. For D's parts, it might be worthwhile to look up some information on how the human body reacts to high temperatures and lack of water, or even just desert survival in general. Running, sweating, even feeling hunger and thirst, all of these things function differently under high heat and stress. Here and Here are a couple links that I found that seem like they might be helpful. I had a hard time getting into D's parts, mostly from what I think are dissonances between what I know of the effects of dehydration and sunstroke and the what D is described as doing and feeling during his trek. "They were beautiful and extremely comfortable" -- official, highly formal clothing for women being "extremely comfortable?" Now that's a fantasy world I can get behind! Just a gentle reminder that it's okay to have female characters display basic competency skills AND enjoy getting dressed up now and then. S isn't a bad character by any stretch, but in this dressing scene I feel like she's falling a bit into the She's Not Like Other Girls trope I was a bit confused by D's vision. I also thought he was dead at first.

Overall: I feel like the first section of this would be much improved by some of the action and focus that's so prevalent in this second part. I feel like I would have liked to have had a bit more focus on the actual heist than all of the front-loaded information, and I would have liked to have had more time with the characters I'm supposed to sympathize with. As it is, I mostly feel for E, and agree with him, and am rooting for him, not any of the other characters. Much like the last submission with J, the way nothing ever goes wrong for him really neutralized a lot of whatever tension I was supposed to feel for the situation. I can't sympathize with someone who is completely perfect and apparently cares about nothing. Technically this continues to show improvement and I only had a little bit of trouble with the blocking (which felt fairly complicated so that's really very good). As I go: I know this is supposed to be a tense scene, but I really don't feel much tension in it. Like the last story that featured J, I don't feel much of any stakes or danger because J himself is never worried and never has to struggle for any thing he or his team does. The team's plan works perfectly, every bit of timing is right, everything is in its correct spot at the correct time, the guards aren't a worry, the weapons are useless, every move anticipated and accounted for... so why even bother? Why not simply walk up and take what he wants if everything is so simple to predict and easy to pull off? I"m still sympathizing most with lord E, who, besides being a terrible auctioneer just trying to retire, is apparently having his one close friend betray him and his reputation destroyed, and it feels like the good guys are enjoying rubbing his nose in his failures and their betrayals. Most of the good guys feel like arrogant, cruel jerks to me and I'm having a lot of trouble caring about them and their perfection. E is far more sympathetic at this point, and after watching him struggle and adapt, I want him to succeed and show these arrogant interlopers why he's lasted as long as he has. I'm not sure I care what happens after E is dead. It's pretty much a foregone conclusion that they escape unscathed, with everything they wanted. I'm not particularly interested in the item they were after, because most of the characters haven't shown much interest in it other than the fact they were hired/assigned to take it. A heist with no danger and no jeopardy is just bullies stealing things.

I was out of town most of last week so i'm just getting caught up, sorry! Overall: I think this is a much better introduction to the story, and I do like giving E more of an active role in the events. I understand more why M is so gung-ho on saving B now, but I'm wondering a bit if the focus of this part of the story isn't off, especially if the rest of it is similar to the first version. Like, this is shaping up to be mostly about M and E, and B is more just there to put the M+E relationship into higher relief, whereas in the first version it was mostly B and E was the superfluous one. I'm concerned that by the end of this section I'm expecting a family drama between M and E, and if I end up with a B section later on, I'm going to be really lost for why it's there (which is sad because I really liked B and their dogs-first approach to life ) As I go: This is me giving the side-eye to science and reason leaving no room for religion. Plenty of scientists are devout. One does not preclude the other. Plenty of cryptozoologists would argue the supernatural precluding the scientific, too, but I'm willing to give that one a pass since it's a pretty well-established trope. I'm a little confused as to why E is being kept in the dark about the family's heritage if M and so many other members apparently have been read in on the extra-human parts, and E is have real consequences to possessing extra-human abilities. But, maybe that's something from the other books? This whole opening page is reading very stream-of-consciousness and slightly info-dump-ish to me, and I feel like it is disjointed and a little repetitive as a result. yeah, no. I think M's being the jerk for meddling, not E for asserting their boundaries. Asserting boundaries is a healthy and brave thing to do and right now I'm feeling for E and I think M's out of line. I feel like M is coming off as much less sympathetic to me in this version, mostly for the way she keeps thinking E will get "fixed" and then somehow E will be grateful for M's meddling. To me, M seems like she thinks she deserves E's continued friendship and is entitled to mess with E's life uncontested, and I really don't like that. I like the foreshadowing with B, but I'm just not as interested in their conversations and the uncle's stroke as I was in the first version. I'm far more invested in E at this point.

I was out of town most of last week, so I'm just getting caught up. Overall, I agree with a lot of what @kais and @Mandamon have said. There were too many POVS coming too quickly for me to become invested in any one character and I felt like I had no clear idea of what was going on for much of this section. There were also technical issues that I got hung up on, same as mandamon. I do think this is better structured than the last one and improvement is definitely noticeable! As I go: I really like the opening sentence! It is a good hook and interested me, however I skimmed the next page and a half of information on E. The extended summary wasn't able to hold the interest that the first sentence generated, and I got very little of who E was as a person out of them. It seemed to me that the narrator was more on display than the characters in that segment. I'm not sure I really believe in the polymath scholar. So far, the only thing A's shown me is that he's arrogant enough to believe he's an expert in everything. So, E's just got a bunch of legit auction items cheek-by-jowl with fenced goods, hanging out in his study, and he didn't bother to verify authenticity of a piece before taking it on as agent? I'm wondering at this point why anyone would hire him to sell anything legitimate. Given the way he was blatantly skimming, and his apparent negligence in verifying the goods he's using as a screen for his fenced items, I'd be chary of having him handle my stolen goods as well. It took me almost an entire page of G's POV to figure out that he wasn't just E by a different name. I was extremely confused by the abrupt switch and subsequently had trouble figuring out what he was doing with ropes and pitons. Diamond is incredibly hard and stands up to crushing pressures well, but it's very brittle and cleaves very easily. A knife made entirely of diamond going against wrought iron would shatter long before it cut through anything. "ques" -- questions? cues? queues? something in Spanish? He goes on to describe features or attributes, so I'm really confused what he's talking about. the switch to POV 3, J, is better telegraphed than the switch to G, but I'm starting to feel a bit burned out on new perspectives of the same event. And there's E badmouthing an item he's been commissioned to sell, then giving it away for free. Yep, I would NEVER hire him as my agent (which is what an auctioneer is), to sell anything legal, illegal, or anywhere in between. "gold inlet" = gold inlay? onlay? I'm not sure I believe or honestly really care about this attempted arrest or the somewhat conceited way J tries to create a verbal loophole for himself. By the point we actually get to the reveal, I care much more about E than I do any of the other players working against him. Even if he is a terrible auctioneer, he's trying to retire and that's a far more sympathetic motivation than what I'm seeing from the "good" guys, all of which seem uncaring and far too overconfident for me.

Overall, I agree with a lot of what @Mandamon said, and I think most of what I would say otherwise on this section has been said on the previous sections. I feel like it hews a bit too closely to the movie, so much so that I recognize it even though I've never actually watched the film, and that does lessen the impact for me. As I go: Was this originally coffee and changed? I've never heard of tea being asked for "black," or served with cream and sugar in the States -- I thought that terminology was mostly for coffee... Okay, the depth of detail on the pee part of the diner scene squicked me out a little. "GoJoe convince" -- convenience? Like the other sections I'm picking up artifacts from the present-to-past switch, along with other grammar and typographical errors. I think @Robinski mentioned this in a previous section, but for compound adjectives and especially when using the modern vernacular of adding -chull as an intensifier to adjectives, it's extremely important to hyphenate them for clarity. Here are a couple of links discussing how and when to hyphenate compound adjectives: http://blog.stratamp.com/words-january-2015-grammar-tips/ http://writing-rag.com/2918/a-good-explanation-of-why-hyphens-are-important/ I like all the dogs and the dog info, but I feel like I could use some more description of them a little more often. It might be WRS, but I kept having a hard time keeping all the names straight and remembering their relative sizes and breeds. Re your grammar questions in the text, here are a couple of links about the future conditional, which I think is what you're looking for: https://www.englishpage.com/conditional/futureconditional.html https://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/advanced-level-future-unreal-conditional

I... think I like the more passive version a bit better. ^^; I'm willing to be outvoted if the consensus thinks otherwise, though

That sounds good to me!

Sounds good to me.