Asmodemon

I thought this was an enjoyable prologue, though it doesn’t really read as such (more on that later). Lanath and Ganril are likeable characters, they suffer a tragedy and seem to get drawn into a conflict with the emperor, which, for now, is portrayed as a mystery. Is the killer working for the emperor or not and why was Relia murdered. Those are good hooks. There are some points which hindered my enjoyment however and, in a full book, might make me put it down before finishing the prologue. The main reasons for that are the first two of the below point which deal with the first three pages. Maid and Butler: The story starts right off with a maid and butler sequence, the two characters are giving information about the setting by talking about things they both already know and they both know of the other that they know. This goes on for the first two pages! If what they’re regaling each other with is so important maybe the story should have started there. To a lesser extent, the last conversation between Ganril and Lanath also feels more like the options they discuss and why things won’t work are for the reader’s benefit rather than the characters actually looking for a solution. Slow start: In part due to the maid and butler sequence, followed by a patrol even the two characters find boring, the first three pages of this prologue are really slow and that’s something you’d better avoid. It gets better once Lanath and Ganril draw their swords. The Fire: What is the fire? It’s good to have a bit of mystery, such as with the swords that somehow seem to have some sentience or at least a magical effect that warns their wielders. It’s not important to know the exact thing about how the swords bestow this sense, only that it does. The Fire however is just a term without a clear effect or source. Especially considering it has no apparent role in the rest of the chapter except make Lanath angry – the death of Relia should be enough for that. One-sided action: The fight felt one-sided to me, in terms of description. The lead up is good, Lanath’s realization that this man is a threat, that he has two swords and knows how to use them. And then you get to the fight and I’m clearly seeing Lanath move and to a less extent Ganril. Their opponent however is a grey blur. Pressed on two sides he should be the most active of all, despite the hampering of his injured leg. What are his expressions like, what does he do? How does he fight with his injury? But all I really get is that he’s taking steps back. That’s not a very exciting fight. In fact, there’s never a moment in my mind that Lanath and Ganril are actually in any danger. Kari’s: I thought that finding the culprit was too easy. He left one tavern to go to one where no questions were asked. Why didn’t he go there from the start? Why did he go to the first or second tavern and not an actual safe-house? It’s almost like he was trapping Lanath and Ganril, but injured the way he was, being a professional, that doesn’t sound likely either. POV error: There was a POV slip I noticed after the fight ended. It’s on page 17, the perspective should be Lanath’s, but then you get to: Now it’s suddenly Ganril’s POV. And next POV returns to Lanath. Prologue: Aminar already touched on this, but this doesn’t really feel like a prologue, more like a first chapter with two main characters. Especially considering the actual chapter one and two. Granted, I haven’t read these yet, but I skimmed them quickly to determine the relevance of the prologue with respect to what comes directly after. Lanath and Ganril are lords, they have children and these children are the protagonists. So, we have a prologue that establishes the Lanath and Ganril were friends, that Ganril’s sister was murdered and that one of the emperor’s men did it. Unless all this ties in very strongly it doesn’t seem (so far) that the story will need this prologue. So why is it there?

In this chapter, Black Rose surveys the city as the attack on Overlook begins and two Shifters force her to move ahead of time.

I've got another chapter to submit on Monday if there are slots available.

To start with, the premise of the prologue has potential. A group of mages forced to make a difficult choice to destroy the world and create a new one or wait until everything is dead without a chance for rebirth. However it is mired in its execution. The prologue is too long for what it does and that’s in part because of the following points. Thesis: One of the big problems is that this doesn’t read as a story but more like a treatise on various uses of magic. This is especially true for the first part where the Gods destroy the world. The one spell they cast takes several pages. You describe a lot of effects and this may be cool in a visual medium, but in a book it’s dead weight. I started skimming. If I do that in a prologue you can be sure the book gets dropped. Redundancy: You have a tendency to explain the same point several times, usually in the following sentence even. This isn’t necessary, the reader can read between the lines and not everything needs to be explained. Take the following examples: Dialogue: I didn’t really like the majority of the dialogue. It’s not exactly people talking to each most of the time, only mouthpieces for the magic thesis. And where it’s not, it’s stilted. Take the first conversation between the Gods, it’s a maid and butler sequence detailing their motivation and the brief history of the world leading up to its destruction, nothing more. Gods: I don’t like them, don’t care about them. Enthisa is the foil through which we experience the five siblings, but the whole thing is about the magic and not them. And seeing the world they created I really doubt their motivations. In the first world magic is almost dead. The Gods use what’s left to save a part of the world. However, in the new world there are suddenly a dozen realms and magic is again thrown about willy-nilly. This gave me a lot of pause; seems like the mages just wanted to becomes deities. Maybe this is indeed the hidden plan. If so, Enthisa better not have been aware. I don’t mind untrustworthy viewpoints, but she has no reason to lie to herself if that’s indeed the plan. Athir and Hinther: I’m sorry, I don’t like them either. Hinther reads like a spoiled child instead of the leader of an army. And for the most part Athir is Enthisa all over again, just a foil for the world and the magic. Cetoki: A group of beings, Gods, create the world. One of them turns on the others. Maybe he is evil, maybe not, but either way this isn’t terribly original. Minor stupidity: Why is she surprised he’s using evil magics? She already knows he summons daemons. Sword: I hate Athir’s rhetoric about the sword ‘it’s a weapon and only a weapon’, ‘a spear can be used to hunt to gather food’, blah, blah, blah. To me this is pacifist nonsense. A spear is a weapon just as much as a sword is. If she had a spear she wouldn’t take it up to gather food, she’d take it up to kill her brother, same as the sword. Waste of Power: Why make such a big deal about how much energy the sword has if one big spell wipes out the entire energy supply? Is it to make the spell seem grander? Because that didn’t really work. So far we’ve seen big spells being cast, but there is no way to measure how much energy is really needed and for what kind of spell. To me this was too vague and didn’t fit with a cursed sword of awesome power. It was more like a dud. Dragons: Super powerful beings that could easily win the war but they do nothing. They give Athir a stupid prophesy that either she dies or her brother dies. Supposedly the dragons care about her, she’s even one of their own, but instead of all of them going out and simply wiping out Hinther’s army they do nothing. Conclusion: I don’t know what comes after, but after reading all of this the prologue had better be very relevant for the rest of the story. If not, you might be better of cutting it and presenting the relevant information elsewhere. At the very least the prologue needs to be trimmed. Do away with the thesis parts and work on your characters. So far I don’t care for any of them and that doesn’t bode well.

Nice chapter. It’s good to see the group pull off another heist. The conflict between Jorah and Dexter is a good touch, the group could use some more tension to make things interesting. I do wonder if this explosion between them shouldn’t have happened earlier, given how Kat behaves and Dexter obviously feels, but that is a minor concern. The others already addressed some of the important points, but I do want to add a couple of things. Passive: While not exactly passive voice there are a couple of instances in this chapter where the phrasing makes certain sentences and paragraphs read slower and feel more detached than they could/should be. This happens where you use things like ‘had looked’ or ‘was helping’. Removing ‘had’ from a couple of sentences can make them stronger. An example: Alternatively: Exclamation mark: This is a nit-pick, but you used an exclamation mark a couple of times in the dialogue of the heists scenes. For people who are committing a burglary it doesn’t seem prudent to talk with exclamations. McGuffin: Finally we see the blue crystals that give the story its name and I hope they’ll actually play an important part rather than only as a catalyst to get a whole lot of people after Jorah. Right now that’s what it seems like they’ll be and that would be a shame.

I don’t want to sound harsh and maybe I do (most likely I do), but I’ll be honest here, this chapter needs a lot of work. In fact, it probably needs to go completely once you start editing/rewriting the first draft. I agree with most of the points that Jack raised, so I won’t go into them overly much. I do want to address a couple things. Hook: One of the primary functions of a first chapter is to draw in the reader. You have to entice the reader to keep going and this chapter doesn’t do that for me at all. It’s about a man and a woman taking a bath. Real slice-of-life stuff, with a couple small twists (house is derelict, somehow being a jester and acrobat is life-threatening, there’s something odd going on with luck) but none of those things are sufficiently powerful to keep my interest in light of the rest of the chapter. Perspective: At first I thought you were using third-person limited with a lot of perspective errors, but I suppose you’re using third-person omniscient instead. That isn’t a style you often see anymore and to me it’s a style that doesn’t work really well for me, though mileage may vary. In this chapter the omniscient viewpoint felt bland and not involved with the characters. Which leads to my next point. Characters: I’m not drawn to these characters, they don’t even have names, just ‘the man’ and ‘the woman’. This doesn’t help at all in connecting with them. It also doesn’t help that I have almost no image of these people aside from gender. If you’re trying for an air of mystery, this is not the way to do it. It just creates a detachment from the characters where you really need to make the reader feel for them. At least give them names, give them conflict. Let them actually do something. Location: The characters start the story in a bathroom with functional plumbing, e.g. the bath. But then all of a sudden they’re actually in a derelict house, rubble all over the place. How does this place even have running water left? Description: You describe what the characters are doing, but hardly anything on what they look like or where things take place. How are they dressed, what kind of time period are we talking about here? Is it modern times, something medieval? I’m leaning towards modern based on the house, but jester and acrobat make me think medieval. I’d like see this cleared up. You mentioned how you almost used a mirror. You’re right, this is a bad way to do it, but not giving any description at all isn’t good either. Rumination: Both characters ruminate a lot about their worries, going on about choice, profession, chance. Ad nauseam. You tell about these worries instead of showing them. She is worried about chance catching up with her. Apparently this is a big deal, but this isn’t given enough gravity in the slice-of-life environment. Is she just obsessive or superstitious? Is there an actual reason why chance would turn on them when it hasn’t before? Or has it before? I don’t know and therefore her concerns don’t resonate with me. I don’t know the characters or the setting well enough yet. Style and grammar: Jack already touched upon it. This might very well be the most detracting thing about the chapter, but make no mistake, even if it was spot on that still leaves the above issues. Though I will say that the grammar mistakes and the like probably made the above points worse for me. I’d strongly suggest looking into grammar rules and style, because I see the simplest mistakes all over the place and once seen it cannot be unseen. Should actually be: This is just a basic rule of dialogue punctuation. Why do you have a couple of sentences that are indented so much? They read almost like scene changes here and there. This just isn’t done. You also have sentences that seem to ramble and are hard to parse. Some actually made my eyes glaze over and I had to put conscious effort into reading them, instead of skipping to the end. These are two such examples. Even if this is a first draft I think these are things you should look into. The ideas about using luck and chance might be interesting, but at present they are being overshadowed.

After a little detour in the land of short stories here’s the next chapter for Maiden of Thorns, returning to Dais. Last time, pursued by thugs, he jumped off a roof to escape capture. Now he might just wish he hadn’t jumped at all.

What I liked about the start of the chapter is that it sticks with the characters doing something, rather than one character having a big introspective moment. Nothing much happens in it though, except getting on the road to the testing grounds, which we knew was going to happen anyway. I don’t mind the first two pages, it shows a bit of the ‘home’ life for the characters and that’s good. In fact, I like this part, though I’d like to have a bit more description on what the place looks like. I’ve mentioned lack of descriptions before. This chapter suffers for it throughout. A lot of places and people are grey forms moving around. I have to imagine a lot myself and that mental image gets jarred a lot when you suddenly though describe something. An example of this is when the Jorah and company leave the straight road for a different path. For some reason I pictured wilderness, but this can’t be since they’re still in the city. I was jarred from this image when you mentioned ‘soon he again noticed the houses decaying’. The sequence about Jorah, Dexter and Lance being on the road feels superfluous. You put a lot of attention on this one road, remarking that it’s straight, but I haven’t seen enough of the city to really feel that this is something special. I hope this road and its guards become important later, otherwise this scene only slows the chapter down. We then get to a long scene of the three standing around near one part of the testing ground; Jorah is afraid, the other two aren’t. Jorah doesn’t want to enter that way and only wanted to show them the testing ground from a different angle. Why doesn’t he want to enter it that way and why does he want to show his companions what looks, to all appearances, to be a normal park? He’s afraid the monsters are going to get them on the clearing, but how is the other path any better? To me this scene also doesn’t matter in the grand scale of the chapter. Or am I missing something? Things really pick up when they find the stuck bag. That part of the chapter is very good, though I’d like more descriptions here as well. Panic, fear, mystery, the hands reaching out from the ground. Good stuff. There is a point that didn’t work so well for me though, and that has to do with getting stuck. First I thought the bag was stuck because the hands were holding it down from below the ground. I liked that image, but apparently that isn’t the case. Somehow a magic is keeping the bag and everyone else down except for Jorah. To me this pushed me out of the story a bit. There’s no build-up that Jorah has a special power (or can negate other magic) and magically getting stuck on the ground doesn’t feel quite right to me either. Especially when you’ve built up the grasping hands. How scary would it have been to have the character struggle to lift the bag only to have them drag up a hand as well. And then the other hands come up to grab them…that’s just a thought though. I am curious where you’re going with this power. Apart from a few dragging moments I liked the chapter, but I have to agree with Jack – I’d like more physical descriptions as well. The bag and getting stuck came out of nowhere though, so maybe some build up would be nice.

I've also got another chapter to submit on Monday.

The first, and so far the only You raise a lot of good points. They'll help me a lot. I might indeed need to add a chapter dealing with Rosalin and Serissa between chapter eleven and chapter fourteen. The three days between are a bit too long to just leave off-screen. I'm starting to get some ideas on what to do with such a chapter. You're also right that Rosalin is, in essence, a very young girl despite her current physique and fighting skills. She realizes more due to Rosen's presence, but most of her decision making so far is really based on her youth. That's why she sticks so closely to Serissa. I think I've downplayed this aspect of her - it's in my mind, but as you said, it's hard to keep track of that fact. I can see that the ending does have a bit of a coincidental air to it. Rosalin and Serissa do have to be in the camp again...something to keep in mind, but for now I'm inclined to leave that as it is. Next chapter is back to Dais again, you'll finally get to know what happens to him

All right, first thing I want to say is that I really like Molly’s character and her conflict of dealing with her fear of getting caught and keeping her gang together. It’s good to see she’s taken notice of who gets caught and punished and who doesn’t, though chapter four proves that she’s already overstepped her bounds. Of the three POV characters I enjoy hers the most. That said, the first three pages were a bit hit and miss. I liked that she takes care of a cat, but didn’t that she basically rehashed the last two chapters through her monologue with the cat. I liked reading about her motivations for sticking to low-end crimes, but not her introspection about Katsuro. I think it’s because her conversation and introspection don’t provide anything new. We already know what happened in the last two chapters and can infer much about Katsuro by Jorah’s observations in the previous chapters. It’s also better to show these things, like Katsuro’s behaviour, in the interaction between gang members rather than be told like this. Last chapter I wondered along with Jorah if maybe Katsuro liked anyone in particular, considering the implications of that in light of Jorah’s slight jealousy, picturing a group of young thieves and the tensions between characters. Now Molly basically kills the mystery. I’d much rather have gone on guessing for a while longer. On the whole the first three pages slow the chapter down. Now after that chapter three picks up and gets interesting all the way to the end. I liked the way the gang members interact with each other and how the direction their group is heading is decided. Like Molly you get the foreboding feeling of a slippery slope. Their crimes are going to step up and so is the attention they’re having. In that regard chapter four is a great follow up. They’ve been lucky so far, but the police is aware of them and are going to step up the investigation a bit. It’s a short chapter so I’m not sure what to make of Alberic yet or how important a POV character he’s going to be. He seems competent and I like that in a character, especially an investigator.

You're welcome

Instead of the next chapter for Maiden of Thorns I thought I'd submit a fantasy short story I've been working on. It's a little under 8,000 words.

Let's try to change that a bit I've also got something to submit this week.

I can see what you mean by you trying to get a fix on where to start the story. You’re doing some things I recognize in my own chapters when I’m feeling things out – abundance of background information, elaborate thinking instead of acting and the language was a little rough in places. The chapter has some problems, but it also contains things I like. Slow start: The start of the chapter is something of a pet peeve of mine, a character standing around doing nothing for a page except reminisce of something that is better integrated elsewhere in the story. If there’s one thing I’d cut it’s the beginning. The chapter might as well have started with Molly speaking up and Jorah startled from his recollections – without going into the recollections. To me Molly’s first line would look good as a first line for the chapter. Show instead of Tell: You’ve got quite some instances of telling instead of showing. The whole start with Jorah’s past for example. The way it is now it reads like an info-dump flashback. I think it’s better to paint the picture of where he came from in smaller chunks. At this point the reader doesn’t need to know this yet and frankly I don’t care about Jorah enough to care about his lost love. Another instance of telling is with Jorah’s conflicting feelings about Kat and Violetta. You tell us that Kat’s affectionate behaviour towards others makes Jorah uncomfortable. It would be more subtle to show this when Kat is actually being affectionate with another man. Jorah would feel a pang in his heart. Then he’d admonish himself for feeling something for someone other than Violetta. Again, you don’t need to tell us all about Violetta, but with such a simple showy scene we’d know Jorah has feelings for two women which creates an emotional conflict for him. We’d know a bit about Kat, because we’d just seen her with someone and there would be a mystery about who this Violetta person is (rather than info-dumping Violetta’s past at the start of the story and taking away all questions). Setting placement: I’m not quite sure about the setting, timeline wise and architecturally. Cobbled streets, wooden warehouse doors, make me think medieval fantasy setting. The mention of business men and the sensibility of Jorah wanting to marry makes me think something closer to Victorian times. At first I wasn’t even sure this was fantasy, not until the mention of reincarnated gods and monsters. I’d like a bit more description on where the story takes place, just so my mental image is consistent. Thieving crew: I liked the thieving crew, especially Molly with her concerns, so I hope to see more of them. The banter between them and Molly’s realistic worries about moving on to bigger things and thus getting closer to getting inevitably caught is a nice counterpoint to usual thieving crews. And to me it’s one of the highlights of the chapter. While I liked the crew personality wise they don’t stick out to me visually. The most I got for descriptions are genders, Molly’s height, Jorah’s beard and some assumed appearances based on names (a little racial profiling). I don’t need to know what they look like in close detail, but I’d like more than a name and a gender. Just a small visual aide, if the characters become more important later on there’s plenty of opportunity to describe more. Proving ground: The second highlight is the proving ground. Monsters in the ground, reaching up like zombies in the night, paints a powerful picture and raises a lot of questions. What are they? Why are they there, in a park, in the middle of a city? It’s a proving ground for what? Good hooks and based on what Jorah thinks of his companions it’s a place we’ll see more of if the crew wants the wine back. Jorah: Not sure about him yet, so far he seems easily distracted, wistful and a bit of a whiner. I don’t dislike him, but I’m not rooting for him yet, though with the recollections I know where he’s coming from and can sympathize a bit. Still, to me, the chapter (and story so far) is being carried by Molly and the proving ground. So, yes, the chapter is a little rough but it has good points and I’d like to read more of this.

Thanks for the feedback on the last couple of chapters everyone, it’s been of great help to me In chapter fourteen Rosalin is going further astray, looking for supplies she needs to find her way home. The precarious peace inside Overlook trembles as the inevitable siege nears.

And this week seems to be the same I don't think there's a problem with me submitting another chapter.

Chapter thirteen, a return to Overlook and Dais, scouting the location where he believes his father is kept.

I know the feeling, it's busy lately. Despite that, I do have a chapter to submit for Monday.

In this chapter Black Rose leads an imperial cavalry force through the Passage of Elders south, under the watchful eyes of the mountain tribes and a powerful beast.

Looks that way. Maybe there'll be some more, though it doesn't seem like it will this week...(prove me wrong, anyone?)

If it's all right I have another chapter for this monday.

Truthfully, this story took a bit getting into. The start is slow and Brenton wasn’t a very sympathetic character for what seemed to be a coming of age story. He’s apparently sheltered, but I just don’t care about his frustrations over failing with the plants or about the rest of his home life – which is sufficiently generic as to not matter at all. . Most of the beginning is Brenton telling us about his life and failures. The story would be stronger if we were shown instead of told. It’s also not clear why his mother is being such a harridan about keeping Brenton sheltered from the world. Later it becomes clear she has her reasons, but at the start that gives us two characters I didn’t particularly care about It’s not until Brenton got into fire that things started to work for me. Instead of a coming of age story it was like reading a super-villain origin story. I don’t know if that was your intent, but that’s what it seemed like. The magic became apparent and both Brenton and his mother started to come alive; him with the potential of a dangerous future and her with her desire to keep her son out of trouble. Trouble that’s all too real all of a sudden. The fire imagery and his coming of age really meshed well together, once it became apparent there was magic involved. At first I was surprised, and not in a good way, when the fire didn’t burn his skin as a regular person’s should. Suddenly it was a fantasy story instead of, to all appearances, a tale about a normal world. I liked seeing his mother’s affinity with the plants at the end, making them grow where she walks. It’s something I missed at the start. The fact that Brenton couldn’t duplicate her efforts would have showed the reader his failings right from the start. It would also be a lead in to him using fire magic and the existence of magic in this world. The ending itself felt a bit lacklustre to me. I was expecting more after the forest fire, some sort of confrontation. Instead Brenton and his mother are almost amiable about the whole thing. He’s got the potential to be a big threat, he just wiped out a large area of nature on a whim, because he couldn’t control himself or refuse the voice of the fire. And she just let him go. Suddenly she’s kind, where before her character revolved around being as restrictive and stern as possible. Prose wise the biggest things that bothered me are you telling instead of showing, especially at the beginning, and a tense shift for a couple of paragraphs. Most of the story is in past tense, but starting with the following sentence you shift to present tense for two paragraphs. This could be an interesting villain story, but to keep me reading (for the sake of reading, instead of critiquing) I’d need a couple things. First, start with more show instead of tell about Brenton’s failings ,life and the magic. Second, I also need to have a reason to care about Brenton, which right now I didn’t have (at least not at the start, where it’s really necessary to draw the reader in). Slow start, telling instead of show and a character I don’t sympathise with are not a good story starter. When the story does get going I want to read on and find out in what spectacular fiery way Brenton is going to break free of his old life. As such, the ending needs some work to properly resolve this build up.

On the whole the chapter is not that much different, in terms of plot, than the previous iteration. Which is fine, since I liked the last iteration too, minus a couple of issues. I’m glad you cut the first couple pages of info-dumping you had in the previous version, though the start of the chapter is still too much information for my tastes. Yes, it’s more streamlined, focussing on the district Till is in rather than describing the whole city, but it’s still two pages in which the only thing that Till does (or what happens to him) is that he walks down a street without anyone bothering him. So, it’s better, but there’s more you can do with this. When describing the threatening atmosphere that Till has cultivated around him, you mention hypothetical footpads, where an actual ruffian would make it a stronger scene. Show instead of tell. For instance, Till notices someone coming out of a dark corner for him, the man sees him, sees Till’s distorting shadow and goes elsewhere. Now we see it happen rather than get told how it could have happened if there were ruffians around. I see in your comment that you cut an actual ruffian due to page count constraints, but if I may make a suggestion I’d cut the first two pages of information and replace that with an actual encounter. To me that would be more interesting. There were a couple of sentences that didn’t read well. “what do want you... no good, soul stealing, conjuring fiend” “But since Ayami’s death, since his rise to legitimate practice, Till did have the same patience for Surr.” I think you meant “What do you want, you…no good, soul stealing, conjuring fiend”, and “Till didn’t have the same patience for Surr”. The chapter gets better when Till enters the tavern, though I share Kartys’s problems with the Remains. It doesn’t completely mesh with it being a rundown place. I liked Roa’s description, very evocative, but I miss an age-component. I’m guessing she’s middle-aged, but I don’t know for sure. The drawing scene worked really well for me, it shows depth to Till’s character. Surr I cared less about, but maybe that will change in the coming chapters. The last thing, and I believe I griped about this in the last iteration as well, is the would-be assassin. So far he’s the worst assassin ever. Unless you’ve changed much about the next chapter I know the reason for this, but at present the assassin’s incompetence feels jarring. After building up Surr’s dangerous reputation as well as that of Till and his tavern it’s improbable anyone would send an amateur after Surr. Having him there doesn’t feel right. On the whole I liked the chapter and I can definitely see the improvements over the last version.

In this chapter Rosalin and Serissa find Lady Senna’s camp, but it might not be the haven the rumours claim it is.