industrialistDragon

Hello! Welcome back! Just a small formatting niggle to start with: please remember to double space your submissions. 1) it's in the guidelines, and 2) for people like me who have trouble reading on the screen double spacing (or even 1.5 spacing!) is massively helpful. Moving on... This is very well done! It moves along briskly and much of the action is clear and entertaining. However... I don't mind things starting in medias res like this, but I felt like I needed a bit more background to really get into the action. I have no clue why R is breaking in, what a Shade is, why he (or his employers) needs it (is he employed or is he doing this on his own?), or even what city or country or kingdom this is. By the end I still don't know anything about any of those things, and have merely been told it's in a politician's keep. Are these city-states? what's the weather like? Why are politicians apparently assumed to have walled keeps with their own security force? Is this in a city? It seems weird for there to be walled and privately-guarded keeps inside a city, but conversely it also seems odd for a thief to be in the country and musing about union (?) guards. I don't need everything in one go, but I need something to hang my hat on in order to get invested. The action is good but the world feels sketchy at best, which leaves the scene feeling untethered to me. Why are the guards wearing veils? This random tidbit seems to pop up too conveniently, and sounds like a pretty egregious violation of the Evil Overlords List. It also seems a little odd that the veil is lined, but that's a really minor quibble. I'm a little skeptical that this guy could manage all those acrobatics and fisticuffs after taking as much damage as he did. It makes his eventual take down seem arbitrary to me. I loved the bit about pole vaulting! And while I totally believe reeds could be used for such a purpose, their use in all the other things has me a bit skeptical. As for the locks, youtube has a bunch of tutorial and explanatory videos. Here's one and a couple of websites I pulled up with a cursory search: http://home.howstuffworks.com/home-improvement/household-safety/security/lock.htm https://www.kwikset.com/how-to-choose/how-locks-work.aspx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L15WqIQomIM The basics are that one piece of a lockpick set is used as a lever to turn the lock while one or more other picks are used to jiggle the lock pins out of their "locked" position.

This is very well done again! Technically it is well put together and the characters are distinct and interesting. However, the first thing I noticed about this piece is the number of times the narrator goes off on a tangent about a bit of information, then sums it up with something along the lines of "but that's not important." So then, I have two things I think of: first is "if it's not important, why is it in here," and the second is "He said it's not important. I need to absolutely remember this for later." Five pages in and I'm getting overwhelmed by the amount of "not important" important things I'm trying to keep track of. I really feel like this piece could use some condensing. Not just cutting irrelevant parts (and it could probably do with a trim), but reworking parts so that the events in them happen faster or are said more succinctly. The details are great, the characters are good, but nothing much is going on and by the end of this segment I'm still waiting for something to really grab me and make me say "No, I won't go to bed yet, I have to finish this story." Right now, my feeling is sort of ho hum. 15 pages and barely even a hint of the meat of the story. It's not quite stagnant, but it's definitely sluggish.

I think this is my third or fourth time through this chapter, and while it keeps getting better overall, I think now it's becoming a victim of too many inserts, especially the early parts. I keep seeing passages that don't quite line up logically within the paragraph, old bits that stand out in tone to me, new bits that are repetitive or slightly contradictory of old ones just a few lines removed from them. I think it just needs a pass or two to sand down the rough edges a bit. S seems fixated on their hands in the boat. In the span of about a page, they are clamped, scrubbing, baling, wrapped around shoulders and clasped to ears. Is S supposed to be this fidgety? The new bit with the ruddermaster is very good! I like that she finally gets a name, and doesn't have to pretend not to recognize S anymore. But I'd've really liked it if we'd gotten the name when we first met her. It feels a little repetitive as-is. I thought the ruddermaster and S were facing each other? But in this new bit it seems like they might not be? Honestly, I agree with @Asmodemon re the boat. It's still fairly difficult to picture. Remember not everyone's had actual experience to know the whys and wherefores of actual leaky rainforest boats on snake-infested gigantic rivers to be able to fill in the details when something is mentioned. I also agree with @Asmodemon re the dunking as well. It makes less sense now that the rest of the stuff surrounding it makes more, if that's understandable.

The jump to diary style does seem pretty extreme for a shorter work, I agree with @aeromancer and @Mandamon there. I would also liked to have seen some of the interactions summarized there actually play out, since they would go a long way towards making T more sympathetic. I'm also a little confused by the POV in the early sections, as it seems to wobble a bit. Lines like ", both of them feeling guilty " seem to me to have an outside narrator, which conflicts with the limited third perspective that's elsewhere. The majority of this section is also very heavy on the dialogue, and like @Mandamon I was confused in places. Moreover I feel like something of the setting and feel of the first part of the story has been lost when there is nothing but dialogue and no other sights, sounds, smells, feelings or actions. Within this dialogue there seems to be fair bit of Character X commenting on Character Y's feelings, instead of Character Y actually demonstrating or conveying those feelings themselves. It is a good story, and done well, but I think it could be even better if the front and back parts of these stories harmonized with each other a bit more.

I agree with @Robinski and @Mandamon here. Unfortunately this chapter does very little for either justifying the previous one, or for tying what happened in chapters 1 & 2 to what's going on now. As was most everyone else, I am also confused by the god-child reference and perplexed by the lingering over an apparently random pretty pastry girl. I'm also confused by the mid-chapter ditching of J. I liked him! I thought he was going to be a regularly-occurring sidekick or friend and I was looking forward to that. I still don't understand anything about servicers or service days or why they are so important as to warrant a full two chapters out of a whole story, especially when the main character already has an apprenticeship that sounds much more interesting and appears to have much more importance to the story and in his life. Like @kais, the level of grammar and spelling errors in this submission made it hard for me to get engaged in the piece, or even figure out what was happening in some places. I did like where things were headed by the end, so I'm looking forward to the next part!

Despite what's intended, as long as you have slavery and sex together "sex slave" is what is going be conveyed to the reader. It really doesn't matter for what reason the slave was bought or how "nice" the master is otherwise, once he decides he's going to have sex with her, the slave literally can't say no. I'm not against writing slavery in fiction, but here for this specific piece it does nothing for the plot and colors the otherwise good interactions between the characters with all kinds of unfortunate implications.

Hello and welcome to RE! We can be tough, but I think we do try to stay constructive. On a formatting note, my email program flagged the link to googleDocs as a malicious link and I had to spend a little while convincing it otherwise. If you're writing in gDocs (I do too!), then you want to make sure you use the File->Download As option to save your piece as either a .docx, .rtf, or .pdf for this list. If you go the .docx route, you'll then need to open it in some other writing program (I use openOffice but there are a fair number of better ones out there if you don't want to buy in to Microsoft's monopoly) and re-save it to convert it to the old-style .doc. gDocs does some formatting weirdness fairly regularly so it's a good idea to open the files it makes and scan them for oddities regardless of format. Moving on to as-i-go comments! Be careful with using italics for emphasis. We all do it, and it's tough nowadays with the way we chat informally on the interwebs, but in more formal prose (such as writing like this), italics for emphasis should be used pretty sparingly. If it's so important to keep tabs on these student/subjects, why not use some kind of microchipping or GPS anklet or locator bug in their phones or some other superscience/sci fi gadget instead of relying on what seems like the honor system, some mook guards, and the work ethic of modern teenagers? While the argument between Be and his father does a good job of coming across as natural, it is also feeling to me to be very as-you-know-bob (also called Maid-and-Butler here). I'm also wondering about the father. For a government guy it's weird he's holding his minor son to any kind of binding agreement. As a father, it's a parenting minefield asking his 18-year-old to be beholden to his 7-year-old self. It just sounds really off to me. I am very confused by the dead guard reveal here. I have no idea at all of where these people are located or how they moved to be in that position. Bi just seems to disappear and reappear at random, and the bad guy's initial dialogue feels so cheesy I think I need some crackers and maybe a bit of wine to go with reading it. Oh dear, and now his shirt is coming off? That seems very illogical and fanservice-y to me. The characters are both randomly getting naked? I guess that's better than only one or the other, but how is that solid battle training for fighting world war 3? This is made all the more bizarre for the fact that I have no connection to Bi and little to Be at this moment. The feel very generic hero-kids to me. I'm really unfazed by this amped up mook taking his unspecified revenge on these two right now. also, if the villain was good enough to sneak in to a highly guarded government facility, kill a guard, sneak into the dormitory and splatter blood all over the room without getting any on anything else, why didn't he just take out the people he wanted to kill immediately and avoid all this unnecessary nearly-naked fighting and posturing? Why is there a little girl? Why is she being used as a sponge? Why is there enough blood to have her be used as a sponge? what in all the world does kidnapping a random mook's family have to do with getting revenge on... any of the characters we've been introduced to so far? It feels like she's only there to make Be give up a weapon. I'm so confused. I really wish Be's interest in dance had been explored more. That was an interesting bit of his character and I had hopes it would lead to something more for me to latch on to, interest-wise. I'd happily trade this villain for a fun dance-and-chat (or even a dance-and-chat-and-fight). It seems to have fallen by the wayside though, and that makes me sad. " bullet had split the ropes " I'm not sure that's physically possible, with bullets... "He’d thrown away his greatest weapon" Point in fact, katanas are kind of junk as far as swords go. they're monotaskers and prone to snapping. I have really not much connection to anyone or anything that's going on here. This evil tranforamtion of evil is coming out of nowhere for me and I don't find it very interesting. "s katana had fallen to the ground" It was stated earlier that the bad guy purposefully dropped it. Also Be said that the superkids received *rapier* training, not katana training, and the two are not compatible. Again, however cool they might sound, a katana is not something that holds up well under stress and requires specific knowledge to use. There are so many better swords out there, I agree with @aeromancer here. What exactly has this kid done besides cut classes, especially to warrant this kind of ultra-violent revenge? This feels like crazy overkill since the only thing he's done so far in text is smart-mouth his dad and cop to ditching class. I am so confused and still not really connecting to any of the characters. Bi might as well be a coat-rack in a bra at this point; she just stands there and interferes with Be's movement occasionally. " both weapons s" I thought he only started with one sword and a gun? I am confused. Now I count three swords, two knives, a pistol, a metal-lined jacket, three times the random shirtless posing and i'm so very very lost. The villian's dialogue has turned downright silly at this point. Okay, I give up. I'm sorry. I really tried. I made it to page 16, but really, I couldn't follow any of it once the baddie appeared. I'm not invested in any of the characters besides maybe the villain, and then only up until the point he hulked out for no apparent reason. I have very little grasp of why any of this is happening, where it's happening or why I should care it's going on at all. Technically the writing is good. The piece clearly shows writing skill and a level of technical mastery. There's nothing inherently wrong with the super soldier or the child soldier tropes, either, but I need more than just those things blandly on their face in order to be interested in a story that's relying so heavily on archetypes and cliches, even down to the dialogue. The thing to remember here is that Tropes Are Not Inherently Bad. They're also not inherently GOOD, either. They're tools, and shorthand, and some are far more problematic than others. They can be deliciously subverted, or comfortingly met. They can be horrifically overused and terribly written, too. Any way they are used, though, the author should be aware of them in the work. If the tropes are desired in the work, then how is the author differentiating their characters and plot from all the others 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. I'm not sure this piece is quite there yet, but keep at it! I look forward to your next submission!

All right, here I go: The dissonance between the Game of Thrones style naming and the vulgar language at the open puts me in sort of a sour mood to start off with. Also, this early out I'm mostly ignoring the appellations because they mean very little to me yet. I really read that as palmistry at first, not looking over the hands for signs of age. "the curtain’s edge, staining the plaster " The curtain is made of plaster? Dude, that's a serious window dressing! (Unless it's referencing back and it's the carpet that's made of plaster? But wouldn't plaster carpet just be like concrete flooring? Unless-unless this is one of those regional difference things and plaster is not what I think it is? Because i'm totally thinking it's the hard stuff you make molds with and/or slap on walls when you want them to be smooth and white (or you're painting on them wet, like in fresco) and that doesn't really work as curtains....) I am already so not on board with this sex slavery thing and I'm just one sentence into it. This looks cliched as all heck. It was boring and overused in the '70s and I'm already ready to skip to the end just to make sure that it's worth my time reading the middle. "get hard" the crass nature of this internal monologue is very much at odds with the high fantasy style of the opener. I feel like I've been taken by a bait-and-switch, but I don't know which part was the bait.... ". Asbaed besada" this unfortunately just sounds like gibberish to me, not magic/ijk, language, prayers, or mantra. I'm starting to dislike the faux mideast thing. It feels very inauthentic and tacked-on, like cheap party decorations. So, if the focus of this was on this fantasyland Alzheimers, and one man coming to grips with it/telling his partner about it, that would be an awesome story. I really like that idea, and I feel like it could be explored at any length you wanted to try. This piece right now is all snarled up in affectations (majik) and rotten cliches (happy slave girl, really? what purpose at all does the slavery serve beyond being icky fetish fuel. She doens't act like a slave, he doesn't treat her like a slave, everything in the story would be just as possible without the slavery including the need to sneak her in places (which honestly isn't terribly necessary either, imo) ) and I just can't get into it. I'm left wincing at the bad too much to sift out the good. One thing for writing short stories -- keep the size in mind, but write as long as it needs to be. You can cut or rewrite to be more concise after you've seen the shape of what you've written. Also, if outlining is what you do normally, why should the length of the story determine whether or not it's necessary? Word count doesn't affect the way a good plot is structured, nor does a small one somehow make the piece easier to do. Short can often be more difficult, as each word has to carry more of the story, which would make outlining shorter pieces MORE necessary to my mind (if outlining is a thing you usually do). For a title, Grains of Memory is all I've got.

I usually take my busking bag to cons (bonus incentive for REcon? ). Just don't ask me for any of those gigantic sculptures. I'm almost totally linework only.

Okay

1-pass line-by-line highlight reel, as requested. :3 i mean >:{ Grr! Serious face! Hidden for space. Getting better every time!

As I go: WRS: Is this the same protagonist that was in the previous chapters? If so, he seems awfully chipper for all he's been through. Were there no repercussions from that night? (Note from future me: I went through my backlogs and it appears that this is the same person? but not the same age? I can't tell) "he imagined warm bread,..., permeating the air," So.. if the bread is permeating the air, does that mean it's flying? I mean, I think I've just spent at least five minutes pondering just how loaves of bread could potentially be described as "permeating" a given space. It's been amusing, but I'm fairly well derailed from the actual story at this point. I once read a book where the bread grew rudimentary internal organs. Not that the baker INTENDED them to grow internal hearts and lungs and whatnot, but still. Levitating bread is not out of the question for a fantasy story.... (also, kid's got a really idealized idea of food service! XD ) The first... three-ish pages or so feel really repetitive as the boy tells us at least two or three times how he got to be enjoying the early morning. Did we learn what a servicer was in previous chapters? I'm slightly confused by the term, but it might just be me. "hung well past their shoulder and rested near their chest" this whole section with the girls -- if you're referring to one person and using they/them, then you're only dealing with one set of bodyparts. However, if you're referring to two people, they both need to have their own bodyparts. their shoulders, their chests, their tails, their braids. Every time. I'm sure sisters that close share lots of things, but shoulders are probably not among them. "homemade slips that draped" Having two descriptions of the same people so close together feels repetitive to me. This implied rape threat seems to pop up out of nowhere for me, and I'm not sure it serves much purpose other than make K seem "bad" enough to make P look heroic when standing up to him. Again, I'm not particularly invested in "the girls," who even the protagonist can't bother to differentiate into two separate individuals, and if this is the same boy we met in chs 1 & 2, we've already seen him save from danger a random girl who is mostly devoid of personality. If it's not the same boy, the similarities in the two scenarios have me greatly confused. I'm seeing a lot grammar and possibly editing issues in the text that are confusing me, feel repetitive, or both. I'm really confused as to the blocking in the section where P meets K at the bakery. They seem to be described as having a face-to-face confrontation in a doorway, yet B is able to stick his neck (and only his neck?) between the two boys, and right after that P is noticing K's back. As belligerent as K is, I don't feel like he would turn his back on P... The part with the head chef is good! It moves along at a nice clip and we get a bunch of good description. The chef has a clear personality and is described well! I just wish this section had come sooner or that the rest of the piece had been chugging along at a similar pace. "“Sheers. I’m a tailor’s son.” I was willing to go along with the food service scars, but sewing? As someone who makes fitted, complex garments from scratch with some regularity, it's puncture wounds and burns from scalding water or precision ironing that are more the name of the game, or cut off fingertips. Rotary tools are unbelievably sharp and I've sliced a nice chunk off my fingertip and nail a time or two (once by way of demonstration to a customer who didn't take using a cutting mat seriously. USE A CUTTING MAT WITH ROTARY TOOLS it will save your table, your tools, and your sanity), but what the heck was he doing to get blade scars on the top of his hands? I'd've fired him too, if he was cutting fabric that way! Overall, I found this chapter to be uneven and confusing. the beginning is very slow, the middle interesting, and the end is a summary of events I would have loved to see played out, at least a few of them. I'm still trying to figure out what this chapter has to do with the first two. I remember from before being interested in P and his powers, but this ch3 version of him I just can't get into. He seems very bland now.

Hello and welcome! This is a very well done submission and doubly impressive for being your first fantasy! Overall, it's an interesting premise, and a good beginning for something longer. Most of the stuff I snagged on is pretty small. Just a small formatting niggle to start with, though: please double space your submissions here. 1) it's in the guidelines, and 2) for people like me who have trouble reading on the screen double spacing (or even 1.5 spacing!) is massively helpful. "empire with less casualties" Fewer. Casualties are countable, and plural. ". It had no trunk, but rather several main branches" Sorry to quibble, but being trunkless is one of the main features that distinguish woody shrubs from trees. Not that I've, uh, vociferously participated in debates on that very subject or anything... It's like a magical azalea... I am slightly worried by the dead daughter being the sole motivator for the protagonist. Yes, it's backstory, but the way it's framed in the story makes his Batman-like obsession feel perilously close to fridging. Real people, even ones that have experienced a terrible loss, or who are deeply depressed, have more than one single motivation, and think about other things than their obsession. It's early yet in the story though, so I don't want to call it truly a bad thing without knowing more of the shape of it, but it's definitely sending up warning signs. (Standard TV Tropes warning: TVTropes.org is a sucking black hole of the internet and WILL consume your entire day if you aren't careful. Click with caution) Less concretely, something about the religion and the religiosity of the entire piece is rubbing me the wrong way. I wish I could be more specific, but I can't figure out what's making me put the little mental warning pin in it. It's there, though. Something feels... off. Like I need to be watching out for something horrible writing-wise (not story-wise. it's a good story!) and I just can't settle in and lose myself in the reading of it. :/ Sorry. (Note from future me: maybe what i was picking up on here was the lack of emoting @kais was talking about. For me, the only really defining characteristic of most of these people is how they are used to build this religion. Maybe?) But to reiterate: these are not major issues. It's a good story and I'm interested in reading more! My advice is: Overdo it! Emote for the cheap seats! Turn it into the most lurid, soapy soap opera you can. Think you've done too much? KEEP GOING! If having characters show emotion is problematic for you, it'll almost always be easier to dial them back later on if you choose to, and also, what seems like "wayy too ott" for you has a good likelihood to be "just right" for the rest of us. I swam competitively for years, and had coaches all the time tell me to exaggerate movements when they were trying to fix my awkward stroke. What felt way too overblown and weird for me was in fact just about right when viewed from the outside. The same theory applies here, except you don't have to swim 2000 yards with plastic paddles attached to your hands to fix awkward characters. Also seconding the actions over internal monologues. Think about how you know someone else is angry. It's not by blunt statements of what they're thinking, but usually by clues in body language, tone of voice, and actions (someone who slams the door and yells at the cat is likely not as "fine!" as they shout at you when you ask how they're doing)

Thanks @kais and @Robinski for answering my questions! They're both interesting things to think about that would not have occurred to me otherwise.

Thank you for the comments @kais ! You must have the darndest time with my raw comments. (I try to limit myself on the forum here ^_~) If you like it, then totally I meant it that way! XD If it's weird, is there anything specific you can point to that really breaks the "fairy tale" for you? :3 :3 :3

Actually, I think coptic binding is annoying and a bit ugly. ^^;;; I'm in the process of teaching myself how to do it, so I try to do some coptic when I do the one I really love, the french link (the ones with the ribbons over the spines in the picture). Heck, I'd take an artfully done long stitch on even just a paper cover over a coptic bound, but coptic is fast (especially once I get up the nerve to try multiple needles) and what everyone wants, so I need to know it. I mean, coptic's not *bad* (I think I'll like it more once I start tackling endbands) but french link is just so beautiful! Well, technically, only the burgundy velvet is plush, but I take your meaning. :3 Thank you!

It's quiet this week! So here, enjoy the blank journals I've made.

@rdpulfer & @Robinski thank you both for the comments! I really appreciate them. Could you elucidate a little bit on this? I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean. Are you talking physical, visual space on the page? That's just me being unable to convert between googleDocs and OpenOffice. Once I get a decent text program, I can clear that up no problem if that's all it is. Not for me, it wouldn't! XD

Well, not when you're 10, lol. XD So, my logic went like this: to a 10-year-old 10 is grown up, but not as grown up as an actual grown-up, so still a child (grudgingly). 6 is not the same as 10, and definitely not a grown-up. So if you're not a child (since 10 is a child, and 6 is not 10), and not a grown up, you are therefore a... It's at least easy to fix. The problem with transcribing dreams (or at least my dreams) is that dreams like to keep all options on the table. Most of the issues in the first couple paragraphs (as well as any awkwardness in the actual dialogue) are artifacts of my fixation on writing things down AS THEY HAPPENED instead of crafting a story that reads well or makes sense. :T But if it's going to be a story it needs to read well, so a fixing it will get. Just imagine them all as parentheses, then realizing DEAR GOD 3/4 OF THIS THING IS IN PARENTHESES and frantically changing random ones to create visual space. Then it makes perfect sense! I'll see what I can do. "She was small but far more ferocious blah blah blah" is totes supposed to be foreshadowing! but apparently is totes not coming off that way. Something to ponder. I tend to type, when I write anything at all, in Notepad, with word wrap off. It's ridiculous, but at least it doesn't look like I'm writing. When i share anything, it tends to be to a private longform blog with minimal text formatting, that only about 4 people know about and maybe half of those bother to check nowadays. These are remnants of it's original format, my habit of Net-speak, and my fear of editing. Easily fixable at least, when I screw up enough courage to do it. Duly noted. It's a pivot. Start sentence heading towards A, end at W because you thought of something completely different. I do it a lot IRL, but I'll see what I can do for clarity. Wintergirls is a great novel by Laurie Halse Anderson! Glad you mentioned it! Uh, phrasing? Is "phrasing" still a thing? Because, phrasing? XD Y'all're funny.

This is the thing where you talk about the stuff that you thought about the thing that I wrote about the stuff and sent to the thing. And stuff. Please feel free to comment on whatever suits your fancy, up to and including grammar quibbles, my addiction to parentheses, and/or a name for it. Thanks and here's to another 100 posts!

To celebrate my 100th post (see it? it's right over there. this is post 101), I'd like to submit something at the next submitting-time. Something that is not fanfiction.

You can ping me all you like, I'm not doing Quirk/Magda fanfiction. >:P

Yes, this. Think about how you know someone else is angry IRL. they rarely say "work made me angry!" What they do is bang open the front door, stomp into the house, sling their keys at the keybowl with enough force that they lip the bowl and fly right out again, and yell a curse word at the cat when the falling keys startle it. You say "how are you feeling?" and they say "I'm FINE! ARGH!" and you know they mean exactly the opposite of that without them having to tell you anything directly. Think about how you react when you're angry. You probably don't only go around thinking "i am angry!" You think about how the person who made you angry is a kittening idiot for doing or saying That Thing and how it was dumb to even do That Thing in the first place, and how you woulda coulda shoulda told them off right there because That Thing really deserved a zinger of a comeback but you were trying to be nice and didn't grr growl grumble. Have faith that your characters and your readers can pick up on things at least as well as you can IRL and write what the characters' emotions make them do and say.

Fun! I really liked the fight scene. from what little i know of martial arts, it seemed really good! (and I caught that sponge reference :3 )

I don't think there's anything crazy at all in being interested in developing your own language for a story you're writing! There's a lot of culture and worldbuilding involved in making a language from scratch, and even more in deciding how a language is used once made. It might not be for you, but I could definitely see someone using the process of making up a language as a way of exploring the background of a secondary world or character. Published or unpublished doesn't matter. It might not be the right thing to do for every story or for every author, but the way culture and language intertwine is fascinating and important IRL; it certainly isn't useless to think about in writing.