Syme

Here's chapter 4 in which Leontas prepares for the mission to Sarkis and we get a closer look at his personal life.

It's true, this is really just an exposition and set-up chapter, but in an epic fantasy, I don't think it hurts too much to have a few of those in there. And Leontas (the POV from chapter 1) is not a senator, but just a wealthy and influental citizen of Thereos. Thereos doesn't have any sort of senator or really any professional politicians at all. Yeah, that's intentional. You don't have any additional relevant information; in fact you have much less information than Andronicus, so it would make him look pretty bad if you knew what's going on while he is confused. I'll think about including some speculation there. Orginally the chapter actually didn't have the scene with his wife, it got added later. I like the scene here because it establishes the various family connections and shows his relationship with his wife. That's a good point and I think this is very well done in A Game of Thrones. I tried to do this as well here, where each of the first chapters for the three POV characters deals with the fallout of what happened in the prologue: Leontas deals with the changed political situation, Filista has become a refugee and Andronicus deals both with the political and the personal consequences. I'm sorry, but I'm not worried about this at all. I think readers should be allowed to come to false conclusions when using faulty reasoning. There are some instances where I can see readers being unintentionally mislead because of some things not being written clearly enough, like on the last chapter where several reviewers thought Filista's family was from Sarkis. Misconceptions like those I will try to fix, but what you mentioned above seem to me to be just wild speculation. Speculation like that can be fun, but one shouldn't be surprised if it turns out wrong. Actually nothing Roman going on here, it's all Greek. The political structure of Sarkis is modelled after classical Sparta and Andronicus is a genuine ancient Greek name (in a latinized form of course). However, the Romans copied all sorts of stuff from Greek culture, so it's not always easy to tell them apart. I'll look into that. I'm actually not sure what you're referring to here. Could you give an example?

Thanks for the prompt reply.

I'd love to review it, but I never got any mail from you. Are you sure you sent it?

I totally forgot to ask for permission to submit this week. Is it still alright for me to submit my next chapter today?

I'm honoured to be the recipient your very first critique. Don't worry, it's been quite helpful. I'm glad you liked it. Not sure however where you got Egyptian from. If it's because of the pyramids, those existed in many different cultures throughout history, including the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican cultures. I wanted the magic in this story to feel scary and a bit mysterious. Texcoyo is an educated man and understands in general terms what magic is capable of, but he does not have any detailed knowledge. Had I wanted this story to be about the intricacies of the magic system, I'd have told it from Ixtli's POV. Sorry, not an idea I like and also doesn't fit into the magic system. Also keep in mind that just because one particular culture reveres these magic users as priests, does not mean they actually get their powers from their gods. The main reason he needs Texcoyo's help is that it makes Texcoyo complicit in the crime. With Ixtli High Priest and Texcoyo King, they have both the clerical and the secular power, so no one can touch them. I think this is not entirely clear from the text, so I'll clarify it in my revision. The second point is that a mercenary would not be trustworthy, especially when it comes to a job like that. It would be entirely possible for one of the mecenaries to betray Ixtli to the High Priestess in hopes of rich rewards (in addition to getting out of having to commit the ultimate sin - just because you're a mercenary doesn't mean you don't have a conscience and you're not religious). That's fair enough. I think I didn't do a very good job of conveying his goals and motivations, I'll try to improve that in my revision. Nope, they're not vampires. While Texcoyo is put in a supporting role in the battle, he did tip the scales in Ixtli's favour and Ixtli would not have won without him. You're right, it's something I'll work on. Personally, I have very weak mental imagery, so when reading I almost never form pictures of the characters in my mind, so I don't mind a lack of physical descriptions and tend to get annoyed at longer descriptions. But of course my writing needs to also be enjoyable for people with strong mental imagery, so it's something I'll have to improve. The city state Actlalia has its own independent priesthood. There's no clerical authority above the High Priestess and she is only High Priestess of Actlalia, not any other city state. Who holds the majority of the secular power as King is therefore quite an important question to the priesthood. How do I distinguish them from vampires in my other story? I remember two reviewers for that chapter saying that they did think of them as vampires. To be honest, I don't even know how one would go about showing that a particular supernatural creature is not a vampire. I suppose I could show one of the priests eating a dish with garlic or something like that, but that would be rather clumsy and still not necessarily establish anything since there's versions of vampires out there that don't mind garlic. The whole notion of vampires has really become so broad that it's hard to even pinpoint what a vampire is. There's vampires that don't mind religious symbols, vampires that don't drink blood, vampires that can walk around in daylight, vampires that reproduce sexually rather than by converting humans and even vampires with short lifespans. Well, the same would be true for third person limited if I stick to only one POV; in both cases the protagonist essentially has plot armour until the end of the story. But even in first person it's entirely possible to have the protagonist die at the end (or possibly even shortly before the end with a sort of epilogue from a different viewpoint). It presumably does have an effect in that the guards are less suspicious and slower to react. Three against six is fairly doable if you have the element of surprise on your side, two against six is quite a different story. There's no deep underlying reason why Ixtli gets wounded in that fight, just bad luck. I don't see why it seems implausible to you. Because he cannot use his magic without waking the High Priestess, he's just like an ordinary man in that fight. He's a competent fighter, but so are the guards. They don't sleep any more soundly than ordinary humans do. And who killed someone is irrelevant to absorbing the life energy, you just need to touch someone who's died in the last couple of minutes. Yeah, good points. I agree that I went a bit overboard on her description. Regarding the ending: Two out of three of you said they expected the ending, so I'll try to make it a little less transparent. Thank you all for your comments, you've been very helpful.

This thread is for critiques of my short story Sacrifical Rites. It's a first draft, so I apologise if it is a bit rough in parts. Edit: I just realised that I forgot to find a name for the poison which I named "X" as a a placeholder. Oh well, you'll just have to imagine some truly original and awesome name for the poison when you're reading this

I agree with cjhuitt that we don't need a holiday hiatus. If people don't want to submit on the holidays, they don't have to and if people don't have time to critique, they can still do it after the holidays. On a related note, I'd actually like to submit tomorrow. However, I've been quite sick these past few days, which has thrown a wrench in my writing plans which means I'm not entirely certain whether I'll be ready on time.

I'll remove the mention of bats. You might have misunderstood something here though: lykanides cannot turn into any animal. I'll keep the sunlight thing. You offer some good suggestions, but unfortunately I don't think they fit very well with my magic system and the rest of my worldbuilding.

I don't have an explicit reason in my worldbuilding for why there is something resembling ancient Greek culture. There's a few reasons why I don't simply use actual ancient Greece and insert some magical elements. First of all, the geography is different. Not only is Daeolia geographically different from Greece, the continent surrounding Daeolia is not Europe, but is actually based on the Americas. Secondly, the history of Daeolia is different from the history of real world Greece. And lastly, the religion and mythology also differ. I find that this combination of real world aspects and new ideas gives me a setting that is unique, but also strongly grounded in reality.

Thanks a lot for your comments, I'll take them under advisement. I'm not quite sure what you meant by this: In particular, I didn't quite understand the bolded part. Could you elaborate on that?

Filista's family is not from Sarkis. They are from a minor city state called Philara, which has no relevance to the story and therefore never gets mentioned in the text. Philara is part of the southern colonies, which are currently being invaded by the Yacatu. Sarkis is in Daeolia itself (which is a peninsula northeast of the southern colonies) and is not being attacked. Since the two of you had this same misconception, I'm going to take a close look at how to make things like that clearer. I'm a bit confused by the following comment: Why does it surprise you that he prefers Filista over Sophia? As for the vampire thing: This is not a vampire novel and lykanides are not vampires. Lykanides don't have superhuman strength or reflexes, they are not vulnerable to garlic or religious symbols, they can't transform into animals, they can enter houses without being invited, they have normal human bodily functions and metabolisms, they don't have pointy teeth, they (normally) don't bite people, they can't turn ordinary humans into lykanides and the list goes on. It's true that they do share some characteristics with vampires, most notably the vulnerability to sunlight and the high life expectancy, but even those are hardly unique to vampires. At most, one could describe lykanides as sorcerors with a few vampire elements mixed in. You do however raise a valid point with the sunlight thing being overdone. It's the one part of my magic system that I'm not entirely happy with. I introduced it as a means to keep lykanides from being overpowered. Lykanides are very powerful and if they didn't have a major weakness like that, they'd have already taken over the world by now. You could go the Kryptonite route instead, but that's hardly original, either. I couldn't come up with a good and orginal major restriction that fit into the rest of my world building, so I went with the vulnerability to sunlight.

This is the thread for chapter three, in which we're introduced to Andronicus, the third and final major POV character, and get a first look into Sarkis.

Thank you for your feedback, akoebel. I'm no longer entirely happy with the opening scene, either. I think I tried a bit too hard there to keep things short and move along quickly. I'm currently contemplating several options on how to change the beginning. One is to keep things mostly as they are, but add a scene or two at the start to ease the reader into the story and to have a bit more time to establish Lysandros as a character. The second option is to completely scrap the prologue and start with what is now chapter 2, followed by what is now chapter 1. And the last option I'm considering is to start the whole story a few months earlier at the start of the war against the Yacatu. This would give me plenty of space to set up Lysandros as a fully fleshed out character and would make his failure and his death more surprising and give it a stronger emotional impact. For the moment, however, I'll just keep writing on and I'll go back to fix the beginning later. As for the whole retreat part, I'm not entirely sure myself how realistic that is. My research hasn't really turned up much on that topic, so I just used my imagination and my best judgement. The reason they didn't keep any reserves is that the war had already been going quite badly and this attack was basically an all-in move; they were gambling that the other Yacatu army would not arrive in time. Besides, they were already stretched quite thin and didn't have enough hoplites to keep any sort of reserve. My research indicates that 10k at an assembly is not unreasonable. The assembly in classical Athens routinely had somewhere around 6k people attending. Not sure on the whole underlining vs italics. I've looked into this some more and found conflicting information on this. Seems like some people say you should still underline, others say that underlining is outdated and yet others say that either is fine.

I'd like to submit again tomorrow if that's alright.

Thanks for your comments. I'm glad you both liked it for the most part. Most of the questions you have about the chapter, Halcyon, are good questions which I would want readers to have, so I take that to be a good sign . This is a chapter in which Filista goes through a lot of disturbing and confusing things, so I find it fitting if the reader also experiences some of that confusion. Some of your questions will be answered in time, others are clues to deeper secrets. In the interest of keeping this spoiler free, I shan't reveal which is which. However, I dropped the ball on Zotikus's death, there should be more of a reaction there. Please keep questions like that coming. Even if I can't answer many of them without giving spoilers, they still help me figure out what new reader think while they're reading the story. When one is immersed in one's one story, it becomes hard to see one's story through fresh eyes. Good point on this chapter being heavy on infodumping, Mandamon. I'm finding it quite hard to figure out how and where to do my info dumps. I think I have too little information in the prologue and chapter 1 and people found that confusing, but now I may have gone too far in the other direction. Any tips on that would be appreciated.

First of all, I think your prose is quite good and your setting is interesting. However, I found myself utterly confused. There are just so many questions in this that are never answered. Why is there a rebellion? What do the rebels want? Why is Maia regarded as being so valuable? Why is she in that rose and how did Hirundo's people obtain it? Why is conveying the false impression of Maia being dead so imporant? Why does Hirundo believe that his enemies believe him to have Maia, but will assume her dead upon merely seeing her rose destroyed? Why is he so angry at General Sun escaping? Presumably, General sun has recovered the destroyed rose and should then assume Maia dead, meaning that Hirundo's plan has gone as well as it could have and on top of that he's captured three copies of what I assume to be some sort of innovative weapon. Shouldn't that be cause for celebration, rather than embarrassment and anger? What are these flying machines and what is their significance? Reading your story, I just did not have enough information to really appreciate your plot. Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad, I don't know because I just didn't understand most of what went on. I think this would be fine as the beginning of a novel, where I as the reader would accept being confused at the start in the expectation that you explain things later. Or it could be a short story set in an established world. As a stand alone however, it's just too confusing. I suggest adding in some more explanation and in exchange simplifying and streamlining the story a bit, so it does not become bloated with the new info that you're adding. Another thing I noticed was a rather high density of spelling and grammar mistakes, which always tend to pull one out of the story. In summary, I think that this story has a ways to go, but with some more explanation, less confusion and some clean-up, this will be a good story.

This is the topic for chapter 2 of my novel, in which we are introduced to Filista, our second main character, and learn more about the supernatural elements of this story.

MS Word word count does exactly what one would expect, it simply counts the number of words (with contractions counting as one word, so "it's" is one word whereas "it is" is two words). However, publishers typically count words in a different fashion. See for instance this article: http://www.sfwa.org/2005/01/what-is-a-word/ As for words per page, it depends on how big your margins are, what font and size you're using, etc. Standard manuscript format with Courier should be around 250 words per page and a bit over 300 with Times New Roman. As for printed books, it varies widely. Smaller paperbacks usually have around 300 words, larger ones can have over 500. My paper back copy of Storm of Swords has a whopping 600 words per page.

I'd like to submit again next Monday if there's still room.

@Halycon Thanks so much for this very detailed citique. I realize that I'm throwing readers into the deep end here, but I think it's necessary to keep the pace of the story quick. As a reader, I always hate it when authors break POV to infodump or take ages explaining things before getting on with the story. However, in reading your critique and in a fashion seeing the story with fresh eyes, I realize that there are some things which could be made clearer like what peltasts and hoplites are. My setting is heavily based on ancient Greece and some of the terms used in my novel are taken directly from ancient Greece (like hoplite, peltast or helot), but a lot of readers may not be familiar with them, so I guess I need to drop a line or two of explanation here and there. Lysandros being in the front line makes sense given the setting. Thanks for pointing out the bit about organisation, I now realize this is confusing. The Yacatu army as a whole is organized in the sense that their troops can move quickly and with good coordination because they are united under a single leader, whereas the Daeolians have several different leaders and coordination is difficult. @Trizee You're right of course that Daeolia is based on ancient Greece, Thereos is based on Athens and Sarkis on Sparta. It's supposed to be obvious, but I don't think that's a bad thing. As for the command to retreat, I don't think it's unrealistic that a well trained army could perform such a manoeuvre in a relatively organized fashion. The fact that they're in a tightly packed phalanx also makes coordination easier. Even though I disagree with most of your criticism, I'm still grateful for your critique and I'll take what you wrote under consideration. @Mandamon You're right about the paragraphs, that's my bad. As for the underlining, I think it's standard practice to use underlining in manuscripts to indicate italics because underlining is easier to see. You're right that there are some somewhat similar names, it's an issue I've considered myself, but I'm not quite sure if it really needs fixing. I think the questions you have about chapter 1 are actually all answered within the text. What I'll take away from that is that I'll need to make some things more explicit so as to not confuse readers too much. I'll also look to include more character building early on. Thank you for your critique.

Hello everyone, this is the beginning of my first novel. Please tell me what you think of it.

Overall I like the chapter. However, the beginning seems a bit rough. The conversation at the start feels a bit unnatural to me, especially the reactions to Fen's jokes seem excessive. Maybe there's stuff going on that I don't realize because I didn't read the previous chapters, but at least to me it just doesn't seem anywhere near as funny or offensive as the characters' reactions suggest. As far as craft goes, your dialog does work very well though. Then there are some minor nitpicks I have with the first couple of sentences: In the second sentence, why is it surprising that Aken's glass is full? It seems to me, you're implying that he's a heavy drinker, but even so that doesn't make it any more likely for his glass to be not full. He might just as well have refilled it very recently. Also in this sentence, Aken is drinking from a glass. This might just be my ignorance of your setting talking, but it seems to me that your setting is based on Antiquity or the Middle Ages. While glass did exist back then, it was too expensive to be used for drinking. The third sentence uses passive voice for no apparent good reason. The rest of the chapter is much better. You show Fen as a young and inexperienced leader making several newbie mistakes, which should set you up nicely for either showing how Fen improves and becomes a better king or having him fail and stay an ineffective ruler who crashes and burns. The dialog in the council sounds realistic and plausible. The councilors are quite disrespectful towards Fen, but with his obvious inexperience and the aforementioned mistakes, it is quite plausible.