mrwizard70

W and L hurt to read. She gets weird in the lucid/tired section, and the weirdness is weird, and it makes the reading a bit hard to follow. If there are important bits in there, be aware readers will miss details while reading through stuff like that. I can tell you love this section with the D. It’s got none of the problems the rest of the chapter does. Really interesting, great ending with opening the door to let the reader see before ending the chapter.

Everything @industrialistDragon said, plus it feels painfully like an info dump as soon as you get past the telling. Character has no traits, feels like a stand in for an adult reader who got aged down. Have you spent much time with kids? They’re freakishly smart, especially the ones librarians deal with on a regular basis/have kids that have parents who would buy them books. Character is genderless, not sure how effective that will be. Telling about family is painfully infodumpy. Book is about the mom, the kid is just a accomplice, and that literally removes the demographic of kids who have mother challenges, which is a good half of them. The world/plot/side characters seem really well done.

Notes as reading Oh god. I think I have literary whiplash. The tone/themes are not clear and it’s scaring me. Judging from the tone so far, maybe pull the suicide reference? Find some other way to make the point about the character losing it. I, and a lot of other readers, have a fairly visceral reaction to anything relating to suicide, so having it just thrown in there was brutal on my immersion. “Inhuman coercion” sentence needs another rewrite. Is this the way things normally go? I had this pegged as a mystery, but having the antagonist pointed out like this makes “plot twist, he’s not the antagonist!” *and* making him actually the antagonist obvious, with no real good options. I have no idea where this is going, but you’ve just messed up the whodunnit aspect for me, unless things get much more interesting.

This has not that much to do with the feedback, but thank you for your kind words. I used to do fanfiction, I can handle criticism. I’ll try it.

I’m absolutely stonewalled by this and it’s really making me mad. Every single podcast they bring up characters and character conflicts, how they drive the story, and how you have to focus on them. Yet somehow I cannot seem to find anything on how to actually make characters. The best I’ve found so far is Robin Hobb talking about how her characters will just show up in her head. How the heck do you actually design characters? I keep trying to write characters and realizing they’re exact archetypes with one boring twist. No matter how detailed I make them, they’re still boring archetypes. For those of you who read my submission, no matter how hard I constrain the backstory of my main character, (parents must be alive and unimportant, knowledge must come from mundane schooling, etc etc) he always turns out to be the farm boy who goes on a adventure because he hates his current life and wants to see the continent, or wants revenge, or wants to know what happened to his parents, or a million other things. My officer is always the mentor and the duchess is always the love interest/token female power character. Obviously, these are archetypes and roles I want them to fill; but how do you get your characters to not *just* fill the archetype. I give them quirks and flaws and play with the silly slider thing but at the end of the day they always feel like their just fulfilling a silly role because I need the plot to move forward. They never talk to me, never distinguish themselves, never have any personality besides stuff I’m just tacking on. /endrant. Help?

http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/top Eh?

Thinking about it again, it’s got “literary merit” too, given the title is an oxymoron if the reader has a decent vocabulary.

TBH I don't see it as all that problematic. if the world the characters use is nether, that's fine.

As a discovery writer, this is problematic for me. The idea I've been playing with recently is to make it about the army and the challenges the army faces, but that deemphasizes the character, who already basically doesn't exist.

Well I completely failed to convey that stuff. Huh. Thanks.

Is it alright if I turn this all into one document and send you the whole manuscript with gdocs comments? Things get hard to keep track of after a while.

Notes as I read; It’s obvious why she’s thinking about the saying, so her talking like it isn’t was a little odd. If they have animal pens in them, why are they called mines? I like the moth. Good symbolism, good way to point out her animal connection. The elder scene is well done, but also canned. I’ve sat here for like ten minutes rereading trying to figure out why I feel that way, but I think it’s mostly just the ordinariness of the plot, which isn’t a valid criticism because there’s also this interesting religious and possibly racial stuff going on. I’m interested in what others think. “She needed shadows.” Is both beautiful and clunky. I love it and I love the implications, but it doesn’t quite fit the way it is. Syntax change in the paragraph might help a lot. The cleaning scene is well written and designed, but hard to follow because the viewpoint character is freaking out. The vision is on the nose foreshadowing, but it also excited me. The lack of voice/tone change was a little weird. Dialogue is cool. Maybe not the easiest to follow, but I like it. Oooohhh. I’m rooting for Lewis. And you storming killed it. Ouch. Mah hert, mah soul. Age difference makes that realisitic and reasonable. Promises I see thus far Creatures and Druid magic, cleric magic, monsters, and wonder and awe, love triangle, woman vs society conflict.

Notes as I read: The first sentence isn't explosive. I wondered if the character had been concussed by the explosion because the response seemed so muted. Descriptions are beautiful, but the repeated raking of nails and peeling of skin lost effect as it came up multiple times. Angsty angst is angsty. I don't like it, but many do. The character not going back and looking through the ruins sounded completely nuts. Character's decision-making process is emotional. Hard to follow, a lot of the time, generally gave me the feeling of being stuck in the head of the kind of people who make my life difficult. Age seems good and consistent. Thoughts overall Seems fine, as a new reader not seeing any issues, kinda conflicting messages with the dainty little flower feel I got the last chapter suddenly melting people's faces off. Really like the descriptions. You're writing the way I aspire to write and it makes me jealous.

Well, that's... problematic. First off. Writing with the intent to be published, though that's kinda a pipe dream seeing as I'm a business major. Thank you so much for the corrections. I'm not going to defend, just going back to the drawing board.

Super sorry, this is what I get for trying to submit via iPad. Fixed the gdocs piece, and the second email has the attached double spaced docx.

Hey all, This was written on an iPad in a bus, sorry for any silliness or errors. I have lots of ideas on how to improve this chapter (actually have a whole list of them in another doc) so please let me know what the problems you encountered are. There is a google docs file and a .docx. Hopefully this helps you guys see why I have a problem with my dialogue. This is actually an attempt at starting a story. Thanks, Wizard

Edited.

Rereading, I honestly think I need to stop going over these in the morning. I somehow didn't pick up on the idea that she was interested in anyone. Possibly I fell back asleep and forgot the last few pages. This deals with motivations in a way that didn't feel cliche. I like it.

Guilding: Put it in the first chapter. I wasn't attempting to say I was done reading this: my point, which I conveyed terribly, was that it might be more effective in terms of sales to let the readers get interested and committed to the piece before you give them the opportunity to put your piece in a little box and decide they weren't interested from the start.

Going to make an attempt. Frog Mongols was an idea I had when I slammed my steampunk Rome into my Jupiter planet: an area of deep mud the size of central Asia, with frog Mongols to fight. Story was going to follow the StarCraft plot arc, which brought me to military on this huge world, whereupon I scraped the frog Mongols in favor of travel.

I don’t want to write a commander novel; The idea I’m grappling with is how to introduce conflict and such without having the solider involved in any of the military decisions. I’ve been playing with the idea of cross dressing plot, but I fricken hate that trope. I’ve listened to every single HH, but I’ll look into History of Rome. Thank you! The empire is a conglomeration of Prussia, Austria, and Great Britain in 1700. State religion, British government, naval superpower, with Prussian efficiency and military tradition and Austrian delusions of grandeur and willingness to annex people. The greater world is a planet approximately the size of Jupiter, created as a social experiment by an AI. The readers will never figure this out, but it gives me an excuse to have a planet so large the age of exploration just never ends. This nation has just locked down steam power and invented the train, so they’re going to start conquering neighbors, which is where this travelogue is coming from. The eventual plan is to come up against an empire with rifling and diesel punk and see where that goes. Original idea was what if Rome got steam power in the 300s, could they conquer everything with trains, etc. I took that and smashed it into my idea for a Britanniaesque travelogue, got this. If I have too I can include the Frog Mongols I’ve been thinking about, but that has to be a commander story, which tends to become a history book with no character.

I’m a history guy, I want to write about grand battles and worldscapes, but I can’t actually write characters involved in these events because I know too much about history. My current project involves a solider in the army of an empire, but it’s kinda shaping up to be a workplace drama within a regiment where there are occasionally battles. Ideas for tying the world conflict to character conflict, or even more helpfully podcasts on the subject?

Doing some idea generation; I was wondering what you guys thought about stuff set in the Enlightenment/Refromation/age of exploration? Not necessarily historical fiction or steampunk, but thinking in terms of pike and shot style combat. It lends itself to a military travelogue style thingy, which is one of the few things I feel comfortable writing.

Willow wants to be a hunter because she wants the love and attention of the town that she is an outcast from. Original. I mean interesting and realistic motivations. In the chapter, your character admits how unlikely she is to achieve this stuff iirc. If she was at least after a boy it would at least be a well-defined cliche, but why does she care about these people's love and affection? Usually, social outcasts want nothing to do with society, so why is she different? Does she want to find out if the titan-thingies are actually not evil? What inspired that, outside of vague feelings and questioning the established religion during her childhood? I know you know the answers to these questions, but I don't, and more importantly, it doesn't appear to me that Willow does. This is possibly realistic, as most people don't know these things about themselves, but I as the reader haven't identified the main story conflict yet. Keep in mind I'm only one reader and have peculiar tastes in my books. Others may find this extremely engaging.

I’ll have something by Monday.