Asmodemon

A need for more line-edits seems to be a recurring theme, I’ll have to pay more attention to that. You raise some good points about the lockdown while the city isn’t actually besieged. There are reasons for it; misinformation, conflicting interests of the defenders, to name two. I’ll go into these reasons in a few chapters, but it might be a good idea to lay some groundwork of what’s going on in this chapter too. I’ll have to consider it. Thanks

I'd like to submit another chapter on monday.

Another good start with the excerpt, I’m getting interested in learning more about this second world and the person who wrote the excerpts. At first I thought it must be Jimbo, since he’s just fallen into this second world, but the language doesn’t seem consistent with him so now I’m not so sure. The rest of the chapter is short and focuses entirely on Jimbo, which should have been a good thing as we have a chance to get to know him better. This didn’t really come to pass as the first part of the chapter is about him falling and seeing strange things while he does. From the start his feelings on the matter are that he’s having a bad trip so he doesn’t feel as involved with his plight as he should. When he does it’s so brief it doesn’t leave an impact. He also takes really long in falling (three pages), which kind of ruins the tension of the scene because it takes so long. In a way it becomes almost tedious, which changes the question from “what’s going to happen to Jimbo?” into “when is he finally going to land?” What he sees is interesting though, it’s more a question of timing – to me free-fall isn’t the moment to expound so much about his surroundings if you want to keep the tension of his fall going. But that might just be me. What I thought had a lot of potential during the fall though is when Jimbo looked at himself from the outside – two of himself falling through madness – but which you ultimately didn’t really do anything with. At one point he’s on fire, but it doesn’t hurt. It might be cool if he saw himself (his double) being burned out of his clothes and writhing in pain and then he notices that he’s on fire too before he falls through the light. Just a thought. I perked up when Jimbo woke up and saw the strange cart coming his way. This was the most interesting part of the chapter and just as I’m getting into it the chapter ends. For my part I’d like to read more about Jimbo while he’s on the ground and less about when he’s in free fall. Also a thing to consider is that all though this chapter is about Jimbo I still don’t feel more connected to him than I did in chapter one.

In this chapter we meet Dais, the final viewpoint character, as he’s hunting for birds in the locked down city of Overlook.

I got them. You had a lot of good points, I pretty much incorporated all of them. Thanks

I'd like a go for monday as well.

This was a hard one for me to critique, I neither read nor write middle grade novels so I don’t know what specifics to look for. The opening felt pretty standard, the first-person point of view starting the story auto-biographically about how his life suddenly changed, giving the reader titbits to look forward to and then jump back to the point where things start to go different. But then this is middle-grade, so chances are your target readers haven’t seen this kind of opening before, or at least not much of them. I’ll tell you up front I’m not the biggest fan of first-person stories. I’ve read a fair share of them, but it takes a pretty strong effort to get me interested. I didn’t really feel that here, but that might just be me. I didn’t find Sam that interesting a character truth be told, he reads like a pretty generic kid, nothing to set him apart from the norm except for his family who all served for a time in space. But that’s more about the family than it is about him. What makes Sam an interesting character in his own right worth following? I haven’t seen it yet. Other than the hints of aliens in the first few pages nothing really happens in the first chapter. Sam plays with his uncle and they have dinner. Both men are professionals or purport to be such, so Jeff’s remark about the Omicron system is really clumsy. I didn’t buy it, the hasty covering remark by the mother is also pretty typical. Later Sam listens in on his father and uncle. The two should have gone to talk about this elsewhere, outside for instance, if it was really that much of a secret. The second time information is dropped when it shouldn’t. It’s not a subtle way to get the ball moving, but then again this is middle grade so you might not want to be too subtle. The second chapter is very short and, for the most part, tell rather than show. Jake and Jeff explain what happened before, how Jake got in contact with aliens and why Sam is in trouble now. While the seed’s there for something cool, their telling it feels bland. The back story also makes me think of Star Wars. A, “When I met him your father was already a great pilot”-sort of thing. Now obviously Jake is no Vader, but it still reminded me of Anakin’s back story. The claim of retribution feels like a plot device. It doesn’t make sense as anything other than a way to get Sam into space. The battle of the belt was fought, whether a descendant of one of the key players shows up years later or not doesn’t validate or invalidate anything. No organisation in the universe would create rules like that. Jake’s story about how he got into the alien business is also really farfetched to me. Earth is protected so no one knows about the aliens. Yet he snuck aboard a space ship run by people who make it their business not to be detected and hid in a closet? Really? Sam’s acceptance, even though he’s young, also feels like it’s too soon. He believes his father is telling him the truth (about something so completely outrageous) because they’re joking around so naturally about it. Maybe it’s the middle grade thing and I’m treating this as something it’s not supposed to be, but truth be told I didn’t find these two chapters all that special. I don’t really care about any of the characters and I don’t believe in what’s going on. Maybe middle graders will see this differently, but I can’t shake the fact that it’s too simple.

Yeah, I got the chapter just fine and I wanted to get to it a week ago, but things got in the way as things are wont to do. Sorry about that. Good opening, a sentence like “This is the story of the fall of Earth” really grabs your attention. There are hints there of what happened and how what people think might be wrong. We don’t really know much of the details yet, but already I’m interested in finding out. The downside of the first section though is that it’s not terribly original, since I’ve seen openings like this before, but despite that it caught my attention first and it wasn’t until I was through reading it that I felt it was familiar. The pacing of the chapter feels really high, snapping back and forth between several points of view. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. In this case I definitely felt it worked. You were also quick in getting an image in my head for the characters. This was good since with three characters and limited pages you don’t have much time to get the reader connected. Take Jimbo for example, I only needed the first sentence of his opening paragraph to invoke an image of a redneck or hillbilly. The rest of the paragraph had me nodding in confirmation, from that moment I had a grasp on him. The same goes for the other two characters, though Akari remained a bit of a mystery since she’s alien. I had the secret agent vibe to latch on to though. There is a downside to this and that’s in order to quickly connect to the characters you’re exploiting character clichés, the redneck, the sheriff, the secret (alien) agent. As I was reading I didn’t care so much about this, the fast pace just pulled me through the chapter and the familiarity the characters inspired made it easier to accept the alien monster, but in the next chapters I’d like to see these stereotypes broken up a bit. Coming back to my first point, how the opening felt familiar after I was through reading it, I kind of felt the same with the whole chapter. I liked it but when I was done and started thinking about it I realized the whole chapter felt familiar somehow, like an alien invasion action movie, including the snappy dialogues when the monster appears from people who probably should be pissing their pants at the sight of it. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing, since it does promise to be quite a ride right from the start. But it’s something to keep in mind as right now there isn’t that much to set it apart from most action movies. The crystal fingers were a nice touch though (depending on what you’re going to do with this disability). In all I’m curious about the next chapter, but I feel that you do need to break up the familiar soon.

In the fourth chapter Rosalin has to deal with the aftermath of her town’s destruction and her flight away from her sister. To her nothing is as it should be. To others that just might be an advantage.

If there's one thing I hate it's hard drive failure. But I've still got your documents on my file system, I'll mail them to you.

I've also got another chapter for this monday.

I have and I'm also familiar with the Track Changes feature, so if you use that it's no problem at all.

Ah, yes, I see what you mean. What’s going on is that Rosalin and Sericea are equally tall at the end, as Rosalin’s changed into a blend of herself and the giant. So while she’s taller she’s not giant tall. I address this a little more in the next chapter, but I should clarify it a bit more in this one too. If you’ve got the time for it I’d love to get some line level editing. I think that would be a great help.

You could do that, I certainly know the feeling of wanting to rewrite right away after receiving critiques, but I’d advice against it. You run the risk of falling into the trap of continuously rewriting the first chapter(s) and never get the book done. You rewrite the chapters, receive critiques, rewrite the chapters again, etc. The thing is that after finishing the draft you’ll want to edit the first chapters anyway, to add things like foreshadowing. Or to add a whole new character because 3/4 of the way through you realize you need a character and that character needs to be inserted in the first parts too. Depending on what you think of those edits might be significant rewrites too, which could undo your earlier rewrites altogether (making those a waste of time). You can’t know what the starting chapters need until after you finish, even if you work from an outline you’ll still be changing things to suit the ending. So knowing that it’s better to first finish writing the first draft, taking notes of the changes you want to implement, and continue onward as if you’ve already made those changes.

We haven’t seen much of Jhuz fighting so far, so this is a welcome change. It’s always nice to see one of the main characters excel at something. On the other hand though he’s really good, killing the flying enemies. I was a bit surprised by this since he only fought a few times, none so skilfully as now, and at the start of the story he was forbidden to fight at all, so how experienced can he possibly be? So his metsi might be powerful, but I never figured Jhuz for a skilled fighter. Even so, though Jhuz was skilled and strong I didn’t feel like he was invincible. He killed a couple of enemies, but not the whole army or even a whole squad by himself. He used speed most of all and that felt right. I was a bit fuzzy though on the logistics of the earlier part of the escape. I get that Jhuz had to be close to Hex to become invisible and that being tied together helps in that, but you have the two tied at their waist, wrists and feet. I’m surprised they can even move without falling, let alone actually manage to escape and move and fly. Also, wouldn’t Hex hold on to Jhuz and not just rely on the bindings? That way there’d also be less stress on the binds cutting into Jhuz’s flesh. And what bites into Jhuz should also bite into Hex, but the assassin doesn’t seem bothered by anything. When the binds do break both of them become visible, this was also counterintuitive, since I expected only Jhuz to become visible when he dropped out of Hex’s range. Hex’s invisibility isn’t dependent on the binds, so why did he become visible? Shock of falling? Lack of concentration? I don’t really understand his power well enough yet to know these things. Also afterward Jhuz thinks that now he can fly as fast as he wants and still carry Hex, so why the binds then if Jhuz can carry Hex anyway. Or, why fly so slowly when bound but not when Jhuz actually has to put in some effort to hold Hex in the air? Given that Jhuz and Hex leave the tent at the same time as the guards who have to rouse the camp they should’ve been able to fly away well before the camp was mobilized enough to stop them. This would mean no action scenes, but it would also make a lot more sense to me. But maybe that’s just me. Otherwise it was a pretty short and sweet chapter.

I'm glad you find my comments useful I don’t really agree with your point about Tommy. He doesn’t fit in well at school, his father is missing/abandoned his family, he spends his time reading books. This is not the making of a popular person, this is the making of a misfit bookworm with few friends who ought to feel very lucky if he isn’t teased mercilessly in school. This type of character has no reason to feel invincible. He comes across as socially awkward and at that age that isn’t a confidence boost. But Tommy isn’t just confident he feels invincible in a barbaric world with no way home, no idea how or if he is ever going to see his family again. All he sees is the ‘adventure’ and ‘fun’. To me that just isn’t believable. He’s old enough to consider the implications of what happened, he should be worried, he should be scared, and if he were to overcome that it’s character growth. But he’s already at the top of his game, you can’t top invincible, so it doesn’t feel like there’s character growth at all and that there isn’t going to be any either. That leaves us with a character who’s not believable, isn’t emotionally invested in his plight, and can’t grow – except in special powers and fighting skills. The problem is that this isn’t an interesting character to read about.

The battle for the village and Tommy’s role could have been a really great way to create character conflict for Tommy (how he deals with his fear, the thought about dying in a book and never going home, dealing with shame if he should run away, etc) and to get the reader to root for him (he’s a fourteen year old bookworm caught in a barbaric battle far away from home). Unfortunately the chapter falls flat in that regard for the simple reason (and I don’t want to sound harsh) that I don’t believe the characters are real. Take Tommy. You tell us he feels horror in one line, later that he’s a wimp, but nothing else makes me think he feels anything at all, like a robot he just observes and reacts. I don’t feel emotionally invested in a character who has no discernible emotions. Despite finding himself in a book world Tommy is still a regular kid, and a regular kid doesn’t rush into battle or danger, they’d go the other way. Take soldiers and bodyguards for instance, it takes enormous training to overcome the body’s natural responses to danger, which is to get the hell out. People who overcome this instinct have a reason to do so, to save a loved one for instance, or to survive if fleeing isn’t an option. Tommy could have run the other way, he could have hidden in the village. He has no connection to the people around him, in fact, to him they aren’t even real. Why should he risk his life for them? The other characters, let’s call them NPCs, also don’t react as people but as automatons. You need Feron to not react to the stalking painted man so Tommy can save him. You need the painted man to take his time and taunt his victims (in the middle of a battle) so Tommy can overcome his rather unbelievable hesitation. Nobody screams, but Feron can obviously talk and he can walk. But only after Tommy speaks to him after he’s rescued. This also happens in the fight with Jubuska. Mylva kills one of the attackers and saves Tommy. She would have seen Jubuska when she saw Tommy in trouble. Yet after she kills one man she doesn’t act or notice Jubuska stalking her. Another moment for Tommy to save the day and rather easily at that. The whole fight was easy. Tommy may be in the body of Tamaska, but he’s still a child at heart. He doesn’t have the skills of the character Tamaska, he’s fourteen and he’s a bookworm. Yet he evades like a pro and takes down the better fighter. When Tommy’s back home it’s like nothing happened, he’s very callous about the whole thing. It’s like you know Tommy should feel horrified after killing the painted man. So you have a line that says he feels bad, but the moment he’s away the death is out of his mind without any impact on his character at all. Same with rushing into battle. You have him think he’s afraid and then go on like he isn’t. It also feels like Tommy thinks in terms of ‘we’, when he describes the villagers, too soon. He’s hardly been there a day. To him these characters are all fictional and they are going to get him killed with their pointless battle. What I really miss in this story is believable characters, both Tommy and the side characters. The premise of the story can work, but the lack of believable characters, motivations, and actions really hampers it. One thing you could do to show Tommy’s emotions is to modify the descriptions of the battle to reflect how he’s feeling. Right now the descriptions are clinical and detached from the main POV perspective. It’s like a newsreader is reporting on the battle, safe and far away from the danger, but Tommy is right there. Fourteen years old and in the middle of a battle, but his descriptions are bland instead of involved.

This week it’s time for the third chapter for Maiden of Thorns, where Rosalin discovers why the ground is shaking.

I've also got another chapter for coming monday.

Sure, just PM me with your e-mail address and I'll mail it to you.

I'd also say that five is a good number. There are weeks when I can do more, but on average five a week is more than enough.

This week the second chapter for Maiden of Thorns.

Well, if there's room for Tuesday I have another chapter ready to submit.

Good chapter with a good number of reveals. I get your concern about the amount of things you reveal, since basically the whole chapter is devoted to explaining the motivations of the Chell. You might be able to do away with some when you get to writing Lisu’s chapters, since she already seems to know the Chell and you can reveal some of these things through her chapters. Some of the reveals the Chell give Jhuz felt a bit like the villain explaining his master plan since the hero is obviously captured and going to die – or in Jhuz’s case, forget all about it. If so, explaining things to Jhuz has no meaning, instead wouldn’t the Chell have finished their argument without dragging Jhuz, who they see as a pawn, into it? Despite that I liked what the Chell revealed, such as how Jhuz’s perspective and what he thinks he knows about the Chell is obviously circumspect now. Real nice, I wasn’t expecting that. What I also like about the Chell is how ironic their motivations are. They fault the humans for warring amongst themselves and destroying each other, only the bonds of the Chell keep the humans in line. But from what I see the Chell bicker amongst themselves and would readily destroy each other if it weren’t for the gods holding their leashes. The gods sounds really interesting though, I wouldn’t mind reading more about them or seeing them show up on the scene. During the initial argument between the Chell I missed Jhuz’s perspective on what he was seeing. Emotionally there’s a big leap between “These are the Chell” and “Jhuz couldn’t take it anymore”. I liked the trick Grishka played on Nivel, saying he’s not a true Chell, which allowed Jhuz to manipulate the geas. Maybe not the smartest thing to show Jhuz how he can get around geases, but I can see how an ages old entity like Grishka is arrogant enough to demonstrate a weakness and believe he won’t fall prey to it in the end. Also, how he freed Jhuz is suitably gruesome. Hex’s tenets make a little bit more sense to me now, as they are obviously a derivative of the Chellic laws all the races have to follow. The small reveals about how Lisu killed the ambassador don’t mean much to me, since we haven’t seen her perspective yet and Jhuz has no thoughts on this as Grishka reveals it.

I really liked the opening here between Tommy and his ‘dirty wife’, a great reversal of the trope of the guy falling into a different world and meeting the love of his life. The stories never mention rolls of fat I did expect her to say something when Tommy spurned her instead of her immediately bursting into tears. The character Tamaska is married to Mylva, they know each other pretty well. The way she talked makes me think the two of them are pretty open with each other and given how the women characters of the village talk to the men it’s not a traditional patriarchal society, so why didn’t she ask him what was wrong? Everyone sees him act differently but no one asks the question. At the den when he meets the other woman I missed having a bit of description for her, we’re still getting to know the setting so having more visuals to key in on would help a lot. I’m making a guess here that this isn’t the only book Tommy is going to end up in, but even so it would help make this ‘temporary’ setting more real. Since this is also new to Tommy he’d have a reason to pay attention to how the people look. I felt that Tommy reacted too readily to the voice speaking in his mind, that he and Rendall are connected. He reacts to readily, passively, to everything. It’s all still a wonder to him to be sure, but he’s old enough to realize he might never go home, yet he’s not worried in the slightest. The other characters are too easy on him too. In such a primitive society I’d more easily expect Tommy as Tamaska to be taken to a witch doctor because some demon is possessing him. Instead he also gets a new ability and immediately knows how to use it, which does fall into the trope of the guy falling into a fantasy world, so I didn’t much like that. The end was a good cliff-hanger and Tommy is afraid he’s going to die. Good, I’ve been waiting for the fear to kick in. In all though it was a pretty good chapter, though it felt too easy in places. I suspect Tamaska is something of a chief so Tommy can ride on his reputation a bit as he gets his bearings, and that’s the reason people aren’t grilling him on his passive and OOC behaviour. As a result I didn't really connect with him except right at the start and right at the end of the chapter.