Syme

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

Leaving Andronicus confused at the end was probably realistic, and may fit what you want for your story, but I was hoping for a stronger end of the chapter. So far, you've ended on the death of a king, a senator(?) plotting to become an ambassador, and an ex-slave woman becoming some kind of powerful magic creature. This one ends with Andronicus just confused.

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.

Plus, Andronicus can't figure out what Karpos is up to, I don't have enough information at this point to do so either. Especially not at the beginning of the book like this, when this is the first scene with him in it.

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 think the tension and anticipation would be higher if you had Andronicus realize one possibility that would be bad (even if it is the wrong possibility -- heck, probably better if it is wrong.)

I'll think about including some speculation there.

I seem to recall you are currently writing this. Later, when you come back to edit, you might want to consider if you need the first part of this chapter, with Andronicus and his wife. It might be better to jump right into him kicking Eugenia into doing something. If there is something in the first part we need to know, perhaps we can get worked in later.

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.

One other general observation for later editing... I've heard said, and it makes sense to me, to intentionally try to connect opening scenes from different POVs in some way. Since the POV is different, having a similar setting, mood, circumstances, etc., can help keep the reader from feeling too lost. (One example is Martin's Game of Thrones, where at the very beginning, even though he's jumping between POV characters, each one picks up the story more or less with the same people and setting, just with the next part of the same story happening to them. Later it branches out wildly, but at the beginning it helps to introduce the people without needing to explain more about the situation, etc.)

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 mention this due to the inverse; be careful of similar things when you don't want a connection made. When Andronicus was talking to his wife, who appeared to be sick during the day, right after the chapter where we get an explanation about the magical power making people not tolerate the sunlight, I made a connection there, and I don't think you meant for it to happen.

I deduced soon enough that this wasn't happening here, only to then wonder if the bad news was about Filista or her family (since she had gotten into my head from the prior connection).

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.

What I liked about this chapter is the political structure which reminds me of the early Roman republic (with the Senate, the Plebes, and the two Consuls chosen for a limited period). It's an interesting aspect of the world and the built-in power balance can bring wonderful opportunities for conflict.

I agree that Andronicus (sounds Roman) was a bit too passive for my taste.

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.

Not that big of a problem early on, but I like to see opening POV chapters showing the POV character being good at something. Here, he just shakes up Eugenia and acts as a figurehead. Even during the discussion with the other king, he only seems to make a weak attempt and giving it up too easily. I think he should have at least tried to convince the other elders that granting powers to the other king was a bad idea.

I'll look into that.

Now, what bothered me the most is on the writing side. I found a lot of instances where you tell instead of showing and in some instances, you tell the same thing more than once. I might have noticed it here and not on the other chapters because the action was quite low here, so I looked at the writing instead. Not a big issue for a first draft, but something to keep your eyes on during revision.

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?

Well, this is actually my first critique of another's work, so sorry if it is not very helpful.

I'm honoured to be the recipient your very first critique. Don't worry, it's been quite helpful.

In all, a very good piece of Short fiction. I enjoyed it, as well as the priesthood you created. An enjoyable mix of Egyptian, Aztec and Others. I liked the fight sequence, and the randomised Sacrifices. I believe I read that it was set in the same world as one of your other novels you are working on - I have not got around to reading it yet, so this is from the point of view of someone who has not read any of your work.

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.

However, I would personally enjoy a closer look at the magic system in the story. Simply shooting blue flames, force fields and *draining magic* seemed to be the only power, without any indication as to why or how this happens.

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.

A suggestion would be to more closely associate these abilities with the priesthood. A "Prayer of Protection" could conjure a shield for example, but perhaps only so long as the chant is flawlessly recited in perfect pitch and rhythm, without stuttering?

However, as you tell me this part of a world you already have in place, such a drastic overhaul of your magic system is possibly not such a great move.

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 only other question, is why he needs Texcoyo's help in the first place, where most of the fighting seems to be between the two magic users. In my opinion, if you write a second draft, Texcoyo must be able to do something, or have something, which gives Ixlti a stronger advantage over the High priestess she would not have, if he asked a common mercenary for help.

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).

Characters: The viewpoint character is pretty bland and reactionary – he has to sacrifice the girl because it’s his duty, he then has to be convinced to save his own life by attacking the high priestess and then, in the battle, he doesn’t contribute much at all. It seems everyone has an agenda and is acting upon it except for him.

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.

Priests: What I found most interesting about the priests was that they lived for a very long time and can’t stand the sun, which made me think they were vampires. It’s never stated if they are or not, but it’s an interesting thing, a human society with vampires as a priesthood.

Nope, they're not vampires.

Magic: The magic is a little generic, with force fields and flinging blue fire around. I’m not really sure about the rules of magic, what it can do and what the limits are, and since it’s magic that resolves the conflict in the story you might want to flesh this out a bit more. The biggest drawback comes back to Texcoyo – there is one battle in the story and it’s the most important one, but he can’t really do anything and is relegated to the side lines while the priest first weakens the priestess and then kills her – though granted Texcoyo did hit her with an arrow, but her powers were weakened by then and Ixtli could’ve taken her with a little more fire.

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.

Descriptions: The descriptions, for both the characters and the locations, are lacking. Now I understand this is a short story and you’re not going to describe things as lavishly as you could in a novel, but of the characters I’ve only got a clear image of two: the young woman who was sacrificed and the high priestess after the fireball. The rest are shades of grey, so I feel those could be fleshed out a little more.

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.

One thing I wonder about in all the motivation, though, which I don't think is addressed by the story: often, the religion and priesthoods of a group of city-states (which this kind of seems like) would be similar or the same across those states. Why, then, would the priesthood be as concerned about which son becomes king, and therefore how close they are to that other kingdom? It seems like a flimsy excuse to me, but maybe it is supposed to be -- or, maybe, Ixtli and the others really are scared, but not all of them enough to do something to the high priestess.

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.

I mention this as another warning sign. In your other story you fairly clearly distinguish right away that they aren't vampires (maybe in a bit of an info-dump, but it is there from the beginning). In this one, there is no such thing to distinguish, and the first-person POV can't exactly explain that very well, so it leaves the story feeling like the priesthood is populated by vampires who can do magic.

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.

Regarding the first-person POV, I thought it took a significant chunk of potential tension from the story, given as it has the implicit assumption that the POV character survives (especially in a short story).

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).

During the attack on the guards, why do they not wait a bit longer for Ixtli's mind magic to have an affect? Or have another pretext for separating the guards?

It presumably does have an effect in that the guards are less suspicious and slower to react.

Also, knowing Ixtli's motivations a bit more by the end of the story, why is he close enough to take a wound once the fighting has started? Alternately, how did the guards get lucky enough to wound him? It affects the upcoming fight, but it seems a little unlikely, and may need to have an in-scene view on how it happened.

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.

How soundly do the not-vampires sleep? They seem so close to vampires in this story that I was kind of expecting the high priestess to be so deeply asleep that they could more or less just drag her out into the sunlight and let that do it's thing. I suppose the way the magic works that doing so wouldn't be quite to Ixtli's advantage, however -- does he have to actually be the one to kill her in order to absorb her life energy? I kind of recall that from your book.

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.

One last note, about the first notes. The focus on the sacrificial girl at the beginning, and the extra detail on her rather than on the other characters, made me think that she was going to be more important to the story than she ended up being. My thoughts were along the lines of the "feasted for a month" sacrifices, rather than having her be sacrificed nearly immediately. The details are decent, but put all together like that they lend more importance to the sacrifice than the main character at that point. (You might try having Texcoyo try to keep his thoughts elsewhere, but keeps noticing details about her that he would rather not, since he thinks it will be easier to sacrifice her without knowing them.)

Likewise, for someone who is only ~21-23, thinking of her beauty as in "full bloom of youth" is odd, since he is also young. It seems more like an older-person's phrase.

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:

For the first, when something is this obviously based on Greek history I would usually expect to either have the actual Greek names (at which point I'd start to think of it as an alternate history, or possibly historical retelling), or to factor strongly into the world building and history of the story, with that to be revealed later.

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:

Now, if this was the leader, I can understand better even if I'm wondering why he took her and not her step daughter.

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.