Silk

Hi there! I'm not sure what moderators you're referring to in particular, but as the moderator of the RE subforums I have no problem with the question being asked. We're a dedicated critique group and have all manner of craft-oriented discussions here (though I suggest the lounge thread for general discussion). No one is obligated to engage with a discussion they don't want to engage with, here or elsewhere on 17th Shard. Sorry folks, not sure how I missed these tags before. I can take a look at the threads in this forum and delete anything that needs deleting, but I only have moderating permissions here on the RE forum. Anything on Creator's Corner you'll have to request from the mods there. And I'm guessing that hiding the text in a forum post with a spoilers tag wouldn't affect the search engines, because they're only scraping for content, whereas a "hide text" thing on this forum is a visual formatting tool. Also, welcome @Aspiring Writer and @karamel to the group! Edit: to clarify on the font question, the guidelines suggest Times New Roman and Courier as they’re generally accepted standards (maybe they aren’t anymore?) but the actual rule is just to make sure you’re submitting in a legible font.

Yep, it depends entirely on what you're looking for. As folks have noted, it's a pretty common experience to hit a point of diminishing returns when it comes to resubmitting editing chapters, but if there's nothing wrong with doing that if it's going to be valuable for you. If you think it's more valuable for you to get feedback on later chapters instead, do that instead. If you've made significant changes to a previous chapter that you end up not subbing, you can always mention that in your email/forum post if you think that context will be important.

Yes, low tolerance for bigotry here. It makes us a better critique group. I've been here literally since the group was founded and this is still true! In solidarity, I'll add my name to the list of people who haven't read much Sanderson, certainly not much original Sanderson. I've read the Elantris, the original Mistborn trilogy, Warbreaker and ... that might be it? Oh, books 12 and 13 of the Wheel of Time (I, uhh, never quite got around to reading Memory of Light). Nothing against Sanderson's work, there's just so many other books out there.

Note to self: never go to a party hosted by @Robinski. ...oh, who am I kidding. If you somehow blackmail them into pulling this off I wanna come.

I mean, if you must. Just kidding. Please do! Although, I firmly believe that doing things is overrated... but that may just be me...

Agh! Why are you watching me write? Ahem. My prose tends to be reasonably clean in terms errors and line-by-line writing, though not due to any fastidiousness on my part (and my early drafts are generally more verbose than needed, so that's a place where I can trim - which I don't bother with until the final couple of drafts). Structurally, however, my drafts are a mess. "Exactly" is not a word that gets anywhere near my plotting process; it varies depending on the needs of the individual project. I lean towards the pantsing end of the spectrum. A fair bit of my "plotting" is worldbuilding, which allows me to flush out major questions about how the world works and things that might act upon the characters. If my grasp of the protagonists or major supporting characters is shaky (which may or may not be the case, depends what sparked the initial idea for the project) I may spend some time figuring out what makes them tick - but this mostly happens during the drafting. I find rhetorical questions are a useful tool for me to help tease out whatever I'm working on. Ideally I'll start with an idea of the emotional beats that I want to hit, and I'll collect a few more as I'm, plotting, so I keep a living list of those and try to keep them loosely arranged in a chronology that makes sense. I'll keep doing this until I feel I have enough start writing without going in circles. Once I start I just keep going until I inevitably get stuck, at which point, depending on the problem, I might do more worldbuilding, work on timelines, look at whether I need to add or remove subplots, etc. Depending on how well I understand the changes I'm planning, I may write the revised scenes before continuing. If there's nothing left for me to discover by writing the changed scenes, I'll just keep on with the draft and come back and rewrite the changed scenes in revision. My first revision or two generally consist of major rewrites. I am experimenting with a tighter plotting process for shorter pieces, so uh, we'll see how that goes I guess.

We generally recommend reading and critiquing for a week or two first to get the feeling for how things work around here. That said, it looks to be a pretty quiet week this week. I'd suggest spending some time looking at some of the other threads on here to make sure it's the kind of commentary you're hoping to get. Once you've done that, if you you still know you want to submit tomorrow, you're welcome to. @Snakenaps also good to go.

Hm, okay. It's possible I missed something. When the "manipulate" thing came up I thought it was new information, but it read like information I should already know.

Consequences are delicious.

Overall: I felt a little let down by the first chapter in this sub, especially the early bits, where I was really hoping to see some narrative consequences from the events of last chapter. We left off on a tense and significant moment… and then slide into a montage in the next chapter that seems to elide the results almost entirely. S and T glare when they come over for family dinners, but that seems to be the only consequence. Do I and J have any sort of fallout over this? Does that affect her relationship with the other musicians? Etc. I really like where the second chapter here is leading in terms of conflict with Ir, her family, and the BK’s people, but the initial reaction to the papers seemed pretty overblown – all early indications were that there was a direct and immediate threat on the BK’s life, even he seemed to think so, and then the actual problem was … tabloids. (It's worth saying that the tabloid itself is great, btw.) I certainly get why this is going to be a problem for the BK, but the response seems, if not disproportionate, like a response to the wrong sort of threat; a military response to a PR problem. I think the threat and the response have to match each other a little more closely for this chapter to make sense. I did buy into it a little more as the chapter went on and it became clear where the security breach was, but a full-on lockdown and military response still seems odd (unless, I suppose, the translator for some reason stayed in the castle and therefore might still be caught, but that would be... a tremendously dumb move). This is more the thing for a good spin doctor and maybe a handful of quiet disappearances, no? A couple other random-ish thoughts related to the flyers: I assume that Su and Ta have been involved with this, in which case it'd be great to see hints of this in earlier chapters. This could be a good opportunity to up the tension, too, with familial conflicts and Ir's worries that her sister is Up To Something/that Ir might endanger her. And, especially since much of the city is illiterate, wouldn't a few targeted drops to people who CAN read be easier and just as effective? maybe bribe a few town criers really, really, really well? As I read: “…corrupted by M ideology.” Perfectly understandable sentiment, but up to this point, we haven’t really seen any major differences in ideology between the Ms and the Pems. I’m having trouble buying all the way into the level of anticipation that apparently exists around the census. I get that it’s narratively load-bearing, and of course there would be some interest and unease about it, but it feels to a degree like the level of collective interest being described is there to remind us, the readers, that the census is important. “…if the crowd decided to revolt against the census a day early…” If people are planning on engaging in any sort of protest or activism, they’d most likely have been doing it a lot earlier than the day before the thing was going to come out, since it’s hard to stop something once it’s basically almost done. P3 “her schedule and contact” should be “contract” P3 as they start gathering info for the census: this is the first real indication we’ve seen, aside from the fact that we know the Revolutionaries exist, of widespread civil unrest. Even the initial assassination attempt feels much more like the reactions of a few extreme individuals than something indicative of wider problems among the populace; the Revolutionaries don’t seem to have done anything particularly, well, revolutionary other than that, and the city as a whole seems to have taken the whole occupation more or less in stride. “It felt like the city was going to war with shouts instead of iron.” Oh, that’s a good line though. “Hopefully, nothing more than arrests.” So has the BK established a law that the protestors are in fact breaking? Lockdown? I am 110% board for whatever is happening right now. But, ah… paper falling from the sky seems considerably less threatening than I expected. Hmm. If the BK has a magical necklace to protect him from danger, why doesn’t he just wear it all the time? Okay, I get that these flyers are a problem for him, but this seems exaggerated. I assumed that there was an immediate threat to the BK’s life – somebody getting through palace security, an armed incursion, or in distant third, actual violence in the streets (which still wouldn’t necessarily lead to an immediate emergency lockdown). Paper flyers being dropped in a city that is mostly illiterate featuring information (called it btw :P) that was already rumour seems like … a problem, yes, but not a “treat as an immediate military threat” sort of problem. “I called myself Nobody…” Why am I suddenly getting an Odysseus and Polyphemus vibe? I've been having a bit of trouble with this too, just in general. It's apparent that this is what you're going for, I think, but the text hasn't quite hit the right balance for me. Or, if they're NOT talking to each other (which is sort of hinted at here, I think) after their argument the other day, I really want to get that too. Yep. You've got some great lines about the mood of the city which help sell it, but to a degree this does feel overblown. Partially a question of framing, I think. This worked okay for me, but that's because I interpreted the danger as the BK and his reaction to this development, and not the fey themselves. Certainly the BK seems to be reasonably dangerous in his person. It is a bit jarring. Maybe if you referred to her by breed? I think part of this may be down to the generality of the word "dog," whereas the other animals and therios tend to have more specific description attached to them, even if it's just "the bay unicorn." I definitely felt this a bit too, and I wonder if it's not part of the problem that some of us have expressed with the whole dynamic of the BK and his people being dangerous or not. We don't see a lot of the tension his war has caused out on the streets, it's mostly in Ir's thoughts, and on the relatively rare occasions the BK does appear on the screen, he's very measured in his responses. I don't want to say that writing a speech isn't taking action, because it is, but it is certainly not the kind of action we've been led to expect. YES 100% agree here too.

Overall: I don’t have much to add beyond the line by line comments below. I was glad to see some actual conflict in Ch20, as it feels like it’s a little past due. There are places where it seems that the BK’s operations are kind of shady for the sake of being able to call them out as shady (why does he need a bunch of shell companies?) but I’m assuming there’s a larger plan in place. I do think that we very quickly need to move beyond hints that the BK Has Plans to actually understanding at least some of the pieces of his plan, and the implications thereof. As I read: “Letting in both the cold Sc winds…” Maybe WRS but I don’t think we’ve seen this word before. It wasn’t until its second appearance a few sentences down that I realized it referred to a month. “…their wisdom streaking through their hair.” Nice line here. Took me a moment to realize that there had been a scene break between pages 7 and 8. “The [musical] scores would have to be removed.” Why? I’m itching for one of these scenes where the BK appears to give us some actual information. Right now it sort of looks like he has nothing better to do than micromanage his staff. I also have no idea what the endgame of this performance was. I thought the whole point was that she was supposed to be able to use her magic during it, but other than one glancing reference by the BK, it’s being treated mostly as a musical performance? P11 “S and T weren’t scheduled to show…” So clearly they’re going to show up unexpectedly and there’s going to be a scene, right? P13: CALLED IT. I mean, I’d hope that the stipulation to not talk politics is unnecessary. It would not be terribly smart for revolutionaries to go painting a target on themselves during a dinner conversation. “A real, professional musician for ourselves…” Okay maybe laying it on a bit thick there, S. P15 “shuttered” should be “shuddered” Wondering why the BK needs to conceal the fact that he’s the one doing the hiring for this place. P21 “a sign of relief” should be “sigh” P21 “but he takes creatures like” delete “like,” I think? “S stuck out a hip.” Odd mental image there. P22 “servants gate” needs an apostrophe

Overall: This reads like a very reflective couple of chapters. Which is fine, in and of itself, but I’m becoming increasingly anxious for some of the setup to start to pay off, as it feels like we’ve been in stasis for a little while now. There are also a couple of particular scenes that don’t seem to serve a purpose other than breaking up I’s time with the musicians. That said, I do like the way her relationship with the musicians is portrayed. P1 “no water to slick of his coat” should be “off” I’m not too sure what this first scene accomplishes aside from giving the BK the chance to look ominous and imposing. The only information we get is confirmation of the structure in the north, which has already been adequately set up to allow us to assume that it’s a plot point and not merely a rumour. P2 “Two days after the M’s” remove “the” P2/3: “If she was unable to pass…” Has it actually been suggested that if she doesn’t do a good job pretending to be a musician – not if she just decides not to or whatever - that the BK will renege on the contract? Or is this I worrying about things without having a firm basis for it? It’d be helpful to have it presented more clearly either way; at the moment it feels like new information and is a bit jarring. The scene between I and S also doesn’t seem to change much. I tells S that she did the thing she said she’d do, and that she’ll continue to not do the thing she said she wouldn’t do, and it doesn’t seem to change or move things forward. It doesn’t really feel like a “rest” scene either, because while there was tension in the previous scene it was also all internal conflict: I feels guilty about what she’s doing but seems to be in no danger of actually being caught. “What’s this note?” More likely you’d be drilling someone on phrases (play this set of notes) or specific rhythms (say/clap/play this) than individual notes, especially if you’ve been doing it for any amount of time, and especially if you’re working on percussion, where you’re working with individual pitches a lot less than other instruments. Oof. 21 siblings seems like way too many siblings. Wait, is J able to read emotions, or manipulate the p14 Why is Ir suddenly doubting that she’s been hired to find spies? What’s changed to make her doubt her opinion here? On the mundane horses: Nice detail here.

What's this? Silk just posted a critique actually on time? What sort of weird alternate world are we suddenly in? I do want to note before I get into the comments that it’s been a while since I’ve read anything I would call grimdark, so keep in mind that I’m not your target audience here. As I read – prologue While I don’t have anything against prologues personally, I’m leery of the combination of prologue and POV of apparently dying person. Taken together it seems like a signal to readers that we shouldn’t engage too much with the characters or events on the page right now, that they only exist to provide information for what’s to come. The revelation that A has of these two important characters is not very impactful, since I have no idea who they are or what they mean. S is a surname, I guess? I can reason my way through this one, but was initially a bit confused as to who S was. As I read – Ch1 Bottom of p2, V names the Blade, but in the first scene with O and M they noted that the Blade hadn’t told V its name. Was he lying to them or is this new? If the latter, we should see it called out explicitly. It’s worth keeping tabs on the types of devices you use to provide information to the reader. This is the second “POV character eavesdrops on a conversation” scene we’ve gotten in as many chapters. “You were not supposed to be here.” Isn’t this his house? Why would she or V’s father assume that he just wouldn’t come home until it was convenient for them? I had some trouble with references to the knife going into M’s throat “just over the shoulder” as “over the shoulder” would communicate to me that the knife went, well, over its target and missed. I understand the intent is “just above shoulder level” but it was a stumbling block; maybe “just above the collarbone” or something similar? I am not getting much emotion from V in this scene, considering his father has just died. I think it would be fine for V to be in shock and detached from it, but the narrative would need to sell that if that’s what you’re going for. Overall: Having read the first chapter, I’m still not convinced that we need the prologue. I appreciate that it’s setup for V’s discovery of the blade in the first Ch1 scene, but I don’t think it gives us much that we can’t infer – for example, M’s comment about the blade maybe being a twisted remnant is enough for us to assume that’s a bad thing. I think this is a better place to start Ch1 than the last version in terms of “in late, out early” but what I’m missing, this time around, is a sense of engagement with the characters. I got more of that last time, partially because we spent more time with V, partially because we got a better sense of character dynamics in the first scene with V and his friends in that version than we do in this one. In this version of the chapter, we have so much happening at once that it’s hard to invest in any of it. V and his friends are leaving, but we have less of a sense this time why that’s important to them; in the meantime, in the second half of the chapter, we’re introduced to 3 new characters, two of whom end up dead shortly thereafter, plus a revelation about V’s father who we didn’t know anything about anyway. I didn’t have any problem with the fight scenes themselves – they seemed clear enough, and I appreciate the fact that they were quick and to the point (which is sort of a strange thing to say about a fight scene, but a fight scene that drags on too long can get very dull very quickly and is also not terribly realistic), though I thought the insta-death of both T and V’s father was a little convenient. Or maybe it was just that not only did they both die very quickly, but V seemed very quick to accept that they were both dead, whereas it would be a very normal reaction to want to confirm that was someone was dead, whether you hoped they were or hoped they weren’t. That said, in my opinion what makes a fight scene exciting is not the scene itself, but the narrative tension that supports it, and we don’t have that yet. I don’t really have a good sense of why I should be rooting for V or rooting against any of these other people, except that he’s our POV character and the others aren’t. I think there’s a happy medium between this version and the one you subbed first, where you focus more on the moments of change (or just prior to) as you do in this chapter, but spend enough time that we feel grounded in the characters and the world before the knives start flying. I kind of wondered about him just going along with this too. I could see if if he was presented as so shaken up that he just grabbed onto the first person who offered him a kind word - shock is one heckuva thing - but we're not getting the emotion yet to frame it this way. Extremely tempted to bust out into an "IT'S RAINING MEN" parody here but sadly, "assassins" doesn't scan. Good call here. You are making a promise by having events go down this way.

Overall: I think my biggest issue here is still a lack of information. I don’t still don’t fully understand the situation, or the stakes. Obviously a plague is bad, but there are lots of questions around why the A would want to escape from (or plain sabotage) their containment, what the relationship between the A and the S actually is, why waking PS would be any sort of solution to the plague problem, and whether there’s any threat of anyone other than D being able to actually do this. I probably don't need the answers to all of these questions right away, but it's hard to fully invest when so many things don't quite make sense. As I read: P2: “A’s recently scared arms” probably “scarred”? The encounter with IG seems somewhat rushed. I get that it’s only remarkable to D because they don’t see new people that often and is presumably setup for later encounters, but it feels transparently so, because the scene doesn’t actually accomplish anything else. If the artist is so absorbed in their telepathic rant that they’re not paying any attention to the things D says out loud, why does A say loud that something’s come up? A appears to be talking to the artist and not D here. P3: third paragraph on the S homeworld, check the spelling of S there. The paragraph is also a little confusingly worded; I had to read it multiple times before it tracked. P4 top paragraph has a couple instances of “its” that should be “it’s” “Who’s hands” should be “whose” “It doesn’t surprise me that YOUR students would use it” I am 100% here for A dragging D. This conversation between A and D feels significant, but I still don’t have the context to fully appreciate it. I have a reasonable guess as to why A and D think that waking P would be a bad thing, but no idea why anybody else thinks it’s a good thing. How does this help with the plague situation? Top of p6: DRAG THEM, A “A seemed like their own thoughts” missing word here. “A seemed to like” perhaps? “Especially since every S carried the Z” this makes me wonder again why D was working close to an S guard without any sort of PPE, if this is the case. I’m starting to get confused; I thought Z was the disease but D’s inner dialogue towards the bottom of page 7 is making me doubt that. More and more, I’m getting the vibe that the A are actually prisoners of the S. The S insist on being involved even though they’re apparently a danger to the A because they carry disease and the A want to escape from them? In the last couple of paragraphs: is this D deciding that F has committed more sabotage, or D deciding to make it harder for F to do so?

Yep, I'd say this makes sense.

Looks like we have @sniperfrog and @Snakenaps up for tomorrow.

Not a lot to add about this chapter in particular; it seems like a solid chapter as far as establishing a relationship between J and I, but definitely felt like a stepping stone. You probably have some room to trim here, too. Skimming through the comments, I'd agree with those who have suggested that Ir is pretty terrible at secrets. There were two important slips in this chapter, I'm hoping the narrative capitalizes on them. Most of my comments at this point are more a general reflection of where the MS seems to be at, at this point: I’m starting to become very conscious of the fact that a lot of what we’ve had up until now is essentially setup. I don’t quite feel the text is dragging, but I am very much ready for an Act II. As much as I like the portrayal of the Ms as, you know, actual people who have opinions that differ between them and don’t fall neatly in line with the monarch’s opinions on everything, I keep wondering why basically all of the musicians, and pretty much all of the other palace staff that we’ve spent any time with, are Ms as opposed to people from P. It just doesn’t seem terribly practical to import an immense number of foreigners to do what seems like almost all of the BK’s work. Not to mention, the musicians are universally presented as one people, the Ms, when presumably they belong to a bunch of different peoples that have been, ahem, collected under the banner of the BK. Of course this is going to be coloured somewhat by I’s perspective, but with that many foreigners in one place especially, I’d expect to see things like friendly (or unfriendly) rivalries between different countries (it takes a long time to stamp that sense of identity out), different regional perspectives, etc. Again, not so much something that’s specific to this chapter, but it’s been niggling me for a little bit, and a chapter like this where you have so many people together might be an opportunity to bring some things like that to the fore. And it might offer an opportunity to complicate I’s loyalty further – some of the people who are technically enemies because they’re under the BK’s rule will have gone through the same experience that she did. And any decent revolutionaries would look for opportunities to exploit a potential weakness like that

Okay, well, since I'm not double-posting any more, I'll just put my comments on the prologue in a new post: I love the first sentence! That said, I feel like the second sentence actually takes away from that great first description. I think less is more here. “until they were long righted. And they would be, soon” the past will soon be long righted? Minor stylistic thing, but it’s awkward phrasing even though the meaning is clear. I’d consider deleting “long.” I felt let down when I got to the end and realized that that was it. In those couple of pages, I was engaged because I had just enough information to keep me reading… but then I didn’t get any sort of resolution, or to see any of the debate that there was apparently so much riding on. I don’t think that we need an explicit resolution to the question of whether Z gets what she wants, but I wanted to get closer to the moment of decision than the prologue ultimately brought us. As others have noted, at the end I didn't really have a sense of why this was important, other than Z thought it was.

Hey, if I can submit songs to this group, you can submit poetry It’s been a solid decade since I’ve critiqued anybody’s poetry, so take my comments with a grain of salt, but I’ll give it a go! And, I wanted to ask since your email mentioned slam partners, is this intended to be slam poetry, specifically? This definitely does not read like what I would call slam poetry, which is a very auditory, performance-based form of poetry, so I’m not critiquing it as such. (But, maybe there’s a regional difference in what’s considered slam poetry?) Onto the comments: There’s something very powerful about the way this piece frames death and dementia as both a loss and a type of creation or becoming. I found some of the later stanzas, in particular, quite striking. My biggest comment is around drawing a clearer connection between the idea in the opening (water rushing in a seashell) and the rest. It’s a very distinct image to open on and certainly a ready metaphor, but the rest of the poem doesn’t really come back to it, and it feels like a missed opportunity. I wondered about the line “I wasn’t there.” It stuck out because it’s the only place in the poem that seems to be mourning the narrator’s absence from their grandmother’s life; the rest of the poem seems to be very much about bearing witness, so this feels somewhat contradictory. In the second stanza on the second page, there’s a tense shift in the last two lines. It’s notable because it’s the only place in the piece (I think) that does that. I debated whether or not to note it because I’m not sure it’s detracting from anything, but by the same token it’s not adding anything either, at least in my experience of it. The four-line stanza near the bottom of p2: “eho board” is probably “echo board.” Finally: I wonder if there is room to play around with the line breaks at all. It’s a good way to play with emphasis and would also serve to break things up a bit – yes, the lengths of the lines are reasonably varied, but with a handful of exceptions, the lines are broken up pretty consistently by clause. All that being said: I love the core idea here, and this reads like something very close to a finished piece. I haven't had a chance to read the fiction piece yet, so I'll update with those comments once I have.

Overall: I can’t say much that I haven’t already said in the comments below. Really it comes down to: I think there are a lot of good moments in this arc, but the timing of the arc itself feels off, for two reasons: I need more information on/investment in the family dynamics for the family scenes to really pay off, and I have no idea how this family arc fits within the context of the larger story, which I still don’t understand in any meaningful way. As I read: On S being so happy that A is back: Similar to my comment on the previous chapter, I’m not totally getting the emotional impact that I think you’re shooting for, and I think it’s partly because I have no idea what A’s leaving means to any of these characters. Except for the parts when he’s directly thinking about them, and even then only to an extent, A doesn’t read like someone who is really missing his family a lot, nor does the chapter with S read like A’s departure left a significant hole in his life. We need a better understanding of what these characters have lost by being apart before we can rejoice that they’re together. I’m also not particularly invested in this “S runs away” plot. I had no idea why he was doing it to begin with, he’s thinking about it in a very casual sort of way, so it doesn’t feel like anything significant. It’s just a thing he’s going to do after he goes to dinner with his long-lost brother who he may or may not have expected to see alive ever again. Bottom-ish p1, ch4: “They stood in front of their house…” S has been so purely in his head for several paragraphs that I forgot anybody else was there. Are they just standing outside and grinning/scowling manfully into the night? “He couldn’t be that different, right?” If this was a point of contention for this family, then yeah, I’m coming back to the idea that we would have needed to know this before this big reunion for this to land. “...but he had gotten tall!” Remarks like this suggest to me that he was away longer than three years, or maybe that he ran away quite young. There are suddenly a lot of people to keep track of in this scene, some of whom we’ve barely met and some of whom we haven’t met at all. “I honestly thought I’d never see this place again…” Did he think that when he went running off? If so, he must have had a pretty compelling reason to join the army in the first place. Top of p5: Not sure what is meant by “elevated” voice. Does that mean he’s projecting his voice? Also, I’m now assuming that dad being a passive-aggressive jerk is the reason A left. Ch 5, bottom of p2: The phrase “he marched with a quicker step” shows up at the end of two paragraphs in a row. Ah. So yes, knowing that he was leaving to get away from an emotionally abusive father and that all that about never seeing this place again was a feature not a bug… would have definitely been good to know. I keep coming back to the idea that for this whole family conflict to land, we really need to have had at least some of this information going on. It’s not that it’s particularly hard to follow, but the changes we’re observing in the family dynamics here would be more meaningful if we had a baseline to compare them to. Wait, A and S are just going to go along with this “arrest” thing? Hmm… I’m not sure how I feel about the way the chapter ends. From where I sit, it looks like another obstacle that is preventing us from getting to the main story. An appropriately timed B plot can well and good, but I don’t even know what the A plot is yet. For a counterpoint: I understood this just fine, but it DID also strike me that the description itself ("not very nice to listen to") was pretty vague. A more specific description - tone of voice, glaring at the appropriate character, etc - might help get the point across. Yeah, I missed any irony or sarcasm there.

Overall: I’m starting to get a better sense of the characters, which is good! I’m not totally feeling the emotional impact of the family reunion, though. I’m getting that it’s fraught because he took off without (I presume) telling them, and possibly more than he realizes because he doesn’t know his brother’s run off yet, but I think I need a better sense of the family dynamics before we get this scene. I’m figuring out the context just fine, but it’s not having the emotional impact that I suspect you’re going for. Also, I’m not inattentive to what’s going on here, but I feel like we’re still taking too long to get to the story. This feels almost like a “rest” scene that you’d want to include after a period of high tension, and instead we’re just getting started. Not only that, but while we’ve had our inciting incident in the previous chapter with A, we still don’t really understand what changes as a result, for either the characters or the setting. Last general comment, which I’m making mostly because in the opening of the BR chapter you refer to them as soldiers several times: I’m still having a hard time believing that these folks are soldiers. That may be partially because we’ve yet to see them in a military context (which, in and of itself, is totally fine), but also, the group doesn’t seem to function as a military unit. I’m assuming they’re all the same rank and of course they’re without a CO here, but surely they’d have military training to fall back on in a crisis. If nothing else, I’m sure they’d have orders to regroup at a specific rendezvous point (even if that point was “the nearest outpost” or whatnot). As I read: (chapter 2a) Not sure if this is meant to be a whole chapter or a scene tagged onto a previous chapter – I didn’t quite get your description of where it was supposed to be placed, I think – but this scene reads like something that could easily be summed up in a quick montage. I’d assumed from the previous chapter that they’d hoped to follow the bird back to water, so the only new information here is that there’s a bird that is acting strangely, which really isn’t enough to carry the scene. Can whatever plot thread the bird is related to be foreshadowed in some other way? Or even in a few lines of summary, though that might feel cheap. (chapter 3) So the town that they find happens to be A’s hometown? This could be WRS but I’d had the distinct impression that A thought they were some ways away from this particular town, so them just suddenly stumbling into A’s hometown doesn’t seem totally credible. This is would be pretty easy to fix by noting in the earlier chapters that A knew they were nearby, and could potentially provide a bit more emphasis on A’s relationship with his family before (I presume) the reunion happens. “He still didn’t know why this dove had deviated from that pattern…” this seems very understated. It’s one thing to deviate from a standard flight pattern and quite another for a bird to literally lead a group of people to a place of safety. Also, if there are that many other birds around, would he still be able to pick it out? “I kind of doubt that some doctor would let us…” As established, A is from here, so why would they doubt him? It’s perfectly reasonable for someone to suggest staying with A’s family even without this remark. “...without any announcement, carrying a body. Typical.” Two reactions here: 1. LOL. 2. “Typical” seems… alarming. “Actually, I don’t care” Welp she’s my favourite now. Although I am wondering a bit about the title of “mother,” if she’s a physician who no longer runs an orphanage. “I’m technically still on duty.” Really? You’ve been wandering through the desert for days with no orders, no commanding officer, and no idea where the rest of your colleagues are. Unless this is meant to be read as an excuse for not stopping for dinner? This was clear enough to me, but I DO agree that it seems like a pretty fragile lifeline. Especially since they're leaving the shelter they barely managed to find at the hottest time of the day. I definitely think we need a better sense of their desperation up to this point to make it believable, especially since "hey we should follow that bird" is not going to be an obvious solution to everyone.

It looks like we have @Snakenaps, @Sarah B, and @PiedPiper for tomorrow.

No worries, it happens! Pretty sure I've done it myself.

Congrats @sniperfrog!

Overall: I know you’ve been around a couple of weeks now, but welcome again! It’s always exciting to see a new member’s first submission. There is some good stuff here. I enjoyed the way the friendship between V, M, and O is portrayed in particular. There is a LOT being set up in this chapter – V being assigned a new mentor, V and his friends leaving the village, the woman with the red hair, and finding the sword. I wonder if you’d be better off to focus on one or two of them and introduce or expand on the others in later chapters. Finding the sword seems to be the inciting incident so that’s where I’d be inclined to start, personally. And if it IS the inciting incident, then I think we need to get to it sooner. Something to think about when you’re ready to do a line editing pass: consider how you can vary your sentence structure. One of the first things I noticed was how many sentences started with “V was/was not” or similar. Many of your sentences are also simple sentences (which I don’t mean as a pejorative, I mean short sentences containing only one clause) and pretty much all of them start with the subject, so there are some other places you could look to vary your sentence structure in future drafts. Another thing I noticed was sentence fragments – there are two or three, for example, in the last paragraph on the bottom of p1. Nothing wrong with using them occasionally, but they lose their impact when used too often. It’s worth noting that all of these stylistic did improve in the later pages of the draft, although I do think that it’s something to watch for throughout. As I read: “Killing a man cannot be as hard…” I’m 100% expecting an arc where he learns that killing is hard and horrible now. The tone of the dialogue is at odds in some places with the tone of the narrative. The narrative is generally pretty formal while the dialogue shifts from from formal to very modern and informal and back again. “O and M were lounging… him with…” at this point, “him” could refer to either O or M. “You can just keep your hood up.” I have the impression this is a pretty small town, so that doesn’t seem particularly feasible. “All it really did was make him look like he had to…” I mean, it’s a great line but it does seem a little odd to have the POV character think that about himself. “O and M are going to come along.” Wait, have they actually discussed that at all? It seems like the three of them had vague plans to still be together after the ceremony, yes, but I don’t think they actually discussed V being sent away anywhere specific, which seems to be new information. The storytelling thing in the inn goes on much too long. Nothing wrong with using an in-world storyteller to convey some information, but it’s transparently an infodump and 2-3 pages of it is too much. I have to admit that I skimmed most of it, because by this point I was basically just looking for the one or two things this would tell me about our protagonist, who’s been pretty clearly set up from page 1 to be a prodigy/chosen one type. I’m all for fantasy tropes, but V wandering almost directly from storytime to significant dream to finding the sword is frontloading them quite a bit, and it makes the story feel a little disconnected. That said, you’ve already presented us with a pretty good reason aside from the dream for V to go into the woods: His father isn’t asleep and that’s apparently unusual, which I personally find much more compelling than an odd dream. I don't understand why V doesn't seem to be more worried about it. V mentions that if the wrong people find out about the sword he’ll be dead. It’s good that there’s some stakes here, but I’d like to have a better understanding of why having a sword like this paints a target on V’s head. Personally (and I'll note here that I am NOT lesbian or bi), I was split on M's representation. I'm glad to see explicit representation and I thought it was presented in a way that gave us a very firm idea of the character. In fact, I think M is the character I'm currently most engaged with, because you managed to convey so much about her in the relatively short time she was on screen. I am always a little bit leery of hyper-sexualized women characters especially ones who aren't straight because that CAN fall into all sorts of nasty tropes, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it either, and refusing to portray gay characters as sexual can be a phobic trope in its own right. I think the takeaway here, other than realizing that some readers will feel a bit wary when encountering characters like this until they acquire a certain level of comfort with the story, is, at some point in your writing or revision process, it will probably be worthwhile to consider M's position in the overall story. Is she the only explicitly bi or lesbian woman in the entire story? Does she end up as a "buried gay" or otherwise punished by the narrative? If so, that would be another indication that there are some things you should adjust.