andyk

A lot of what I've said before, both positive and negative, applies here. Nice writing, could do with speeding up in places, intriguing if not very likeable characters, etc. Some more specifics: The PoV seems muddled on the first page, as does what's going on initially. This is especially problematic given how important this scene is. Switching between 'Rutland' and 'Blacklake' when referring to him makes for a confusing read. If you want to vary things up, maybe more 'he's instead? Same thing seems to be happening elsewhere with other characters, such as Peter / Lord Darvel. It makes it harder to keep track of who people are, pulling me out of the flow of the story while I try to remember whether two names are the same person. I like the names of places - they evoke a real old-fashioned sense of rural Britain. I found Blacklake's decision to negotiate with Sabine made little sense. She's tried to kill him, then killed someone in front of him, and shown no sign of inclination to cooperate. I like that his role as a painter becomes significant in his knowing his way around and into the manor house - it made who he was seem more relevant. I also like that he says a prayer before his break-in - it gives variety to his character, and seems to indicate him reverting to superstition in the face of the horror of Sabine, which is an interesting shift. Lack of attribution of speakers at the start of the telepathic exchanges again makes them confusing. There were a couple of points where Blacklake seemed to know about powers of Sabine's without having seen them demonstrated. This may be my faulty memory, but his actions were shaped by knowing that she had special senses, which I didn't remember her demonstrating, and he leapt out of the way to dodge a blast that I didn't remember having seen before. The twist of Tarquin also being a monster with Sabine was good, and made sense given his relations with other characters, but it felt too unexpected to me - I don't remember anything foreshadowing a connection between them. The fact that Blacklake was saved by Tarquin wanting to keep him alive, left me a bit unsatisfied. As Blacklake didn't even have to persuade him, it meant Blacklake was saved without his own efforts being any part of it. I'd have preferred it if he had to demonstrate his usefulness and persuade Tarquin to save him, in the way he hadn't managed with Sabine. Overall, this has been an interesting read - thanks for sharing.

I'm enjoying this story still. The set-up is interesting, and the characters, while unsympathetic, intriguing enough to keep me reading. I'm still struggling a bit with the wordyness of your style. It's mostly well written, but it's so slow that even the action sequences don't seem to have a lot of pace to them. I wonder if it's worth getting snappier for those bits, or whether that would break the tone. I agree with Asmodemon about the Sabine/Blacklake reversal - it shakes the story up in a good way. Though he was maybe getting a bit too unlikeable with the attempted rape just before that. I think that a lot of readers wouldn't get past that. The supernatural element seemed to come from out of nowhere, but it's fixable with some foreshadowing earlier. The first use of italics for a voice in Blacklake's head was confusing, as you didn't explain who or what it was. Hearing Sabine's voice in his mind would be very disconcerting, so it might be worth showing his emotional reaction as well as clarifying what's happening And later in the conflict, on page eight, I didn't understand why she let him embrace her, after all this. It was of no advantage to her, and opened her up to his attack. The shift of PoV mid-scene from Blacklake to Sabine was odd - maybe need to treat this as a scene break, even though it's got continuity of time and place? Looking forward to finding out how it ends, which I'm hoping to get to later today.

I don't really have a consistent approach. If I can, I'll often use a phrase from the text that seems appropriate. For example, I recently wrote a flash piece where the phrase 'stay with me' came up a few times. As a phrase, it seemed to highlight the theme of the story, so I used it as the title. Other times I'll try to come up with something that evokes the setting or main character, for example Mud and Brass for a story about a mudlark in a steampunk setting. Sometimes I'll even start with the title. I'll have some nifty, evocative phrase scrawled in one of my notebooks, and I'll try to work out what it is that's evoking, then write from there. That solves the whole naming thing from the start. I'm usually trying to think of something that seems evocative and intriguing, so that potential readers will want to know more about the story. I don't always succeed even to my own satisfaction - coming up with a suitable title can be a complete pain.

I agree with a lot of what's come before, both the positives and the negatives. I thought the writing was good. This is often something I forget to say, because good writing often fades into the background and lets you get on with enjoying the story. You mostly achieved that here, while also getting a sense of the PoV character across in the way you described stuff early on. I think that once the action starts it might be worth shortening up some of the sentences, to accelerate the pace - for example 'A sudden ruckus commenced as a half-dozen or more men piled into the room' - it's a moment of action, so making this shorter would help pacing - do 'sudden' and 'or more' add more in meaning than they take out in pace? But then, I generally like sharp, speedy prose, so this may just be personal taste. Like some of the others, I noticed that we didn't know why the mutiny was happening, and that bothered me. Discussing it would have made the situation more real, and given insight into all the characters' motives. I saw the twist coming from very early on, and I think the main reason this was a problem was that there weren't many other developments in the plot. They expect a mutiny, it happens as expected, they defeat it as planned. This meant these was no tension or doubt. Consider adding more pinches and turns, points where things get worse and events head in different directions, where the logical but unexpected happens. The story needs more of this, and it'll help to draw attention from the Bryon/Jared relationship, making the end less obvious. Nice to see that your month-long writing mission produced so much work with potential - I look forward to what happens next time you're on a mission!

I'm trying to catch up on some of the older submissions, and started with this. I agree with the point the others have made about the big revelation in this chapter. It tells us more about how the gods work in your setting, which is good, but it isn't treated as the big reveal it should be. I'm starting to notice a pattern in these chapters, where you put in description and some of the characters' thoughts and feelings at the beginning, and then largely ignore these for the rest of the chapter. So in this case there was some description of the outer room, but not really of the inner room once Mahau goes inside. This is a problem, as that's the room where the action takes place. At one point you have the five greater gods looking up at Mahau - it would emphasise their importance more if you had them on something raised, so that they look down at him - linking physical position and power. There are several paragraphs that start with an action or description, then go to dialogue. This is unusual in my experience, and makes for an odd reading experience. It may be worth breaking each of these into two paragraphs, with the second starting with the first line of dialogue. 'All I can say for sure is that the two killings were probably perpetrated by...' - this sentence seems contradictory - if they're only probably perpetrated in a particular way then surely the character isn'tt sure. I also wasn't clear on why Mahau thinks this is the work of one being and not a group. You've put evidence into the story, and yet he seems to make logical leaps based on nothing. It would make for a better detective story if he could link his conclusions to the evidence he's found. It's interesting to see this story gaining an element of divine politics, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that affects the investigation.

I mostly use Scrivener, as I find it very handy for organising my writing and breaking the work down into chunks. I sometimes use Write or Die when I want to apply the pressure and get lots of words onto the page. It's good for achieving volume, less good for quality control. I recently started using tiddlywiki for notes and research. Then the latest update of my browser stopped me editing my wikis (rage!). But I liked the wiki format enough that I'm about to try wikidot, as I think that'll get me past my browser problems, and be useful in collaborating with a friend on a project we have.

Thanks folks. Lots of good ideas, I'll give them all a try over the next few months. There were enough good ideas that I was even inspired to go and blog about this. Now to go and write some dialogue.

I just finished Pratchett and Baxter's The Long Earth. It was a good setting, and nicely written, but rather lacking in plot and tension. The characters drifted through an intriguing setting, as though they knew they were just setting up a sequel. I didn't feel that itch to read every chance I had, but it was worth a look for the world(s) building.

This is definitely a big part of the appeal for me too. In a world like Westeros, both women and children and largely disempowered by their circumstances. But Martin found a way to write a young girl who isn't a victim, who finds ways to take control of her life, in a way that's in keeping with the setting he's created, rather than some wacky exception to it. Her strengths and her flaws stem from the same events and personality traits, and that makes her all the more convincing.

I thought this got off to a really good start, with dialogue, description, thoughts and action well balanced and an interesting setting. And then that faded away. You soon seemed to lean heavily on the dialogue. After the initial section there wasn't much description or indication of what was going on in Kate's head, almost everything instead coming out through what people said. This had a few effects. Firstly, I found myself quite confused about what was going on. The characters didn't explain a lot about how the heist would work, how the VR worked and what people's roles were in it all. This is fine in itself, as presumably they knew it already, but it made everything unnecessarily cryptic. I think something's needed to make this clearer to the reader, as without understanding the rules of the setting - how the VR works, what the plan is, what's at stake - it's harder to follow the plot and feel tension around whether it's working. I had trouble picturing the team members, as several of them were introduced without any physical description at all, and the locations, for example what the city's like. All it needed was one or two distinctive features each time - a character with a twitch or a scruffy coat, the presence of neon lights or dripping pipes. But something. And the reliance on dialogue made some of the conversations a bit clunky for my tastes. It took me a while to figure out what was wrong, but the things characters said often didn't seem convincing as speech, and I think a big part of this was because you were using that dialogue for exposition. An example would be Arrogance talking about why the Paladins were scrapped. Why would he explain so much in those circumstances? You could get a lot of this across just by showing characters' emotional reactions, or dialogue that implies rather than directly states (or sometimes repeats) information on a subject. That said, I like the team dynamic you've started building, with the conflicts between team members. And I think your use of a lot short, snappy paragraphs is good for this sort of story where you want to keep the pace up.

Can I please have a slot for next week. Having that to aim for should get me to finish something this week.

Pretty much everything I said about the first part, good and bad, holds for this one, and I won't repeat it all here. My overall impression was that there's still not much happening, and this becomes more of a problem the longer the story goes on. While the premise and setting are intriguing, I'm not convinced there's enough happening to justify the length of this scene. On page 14 there was a bit of dialogue between Sabine and Peter that seemed odd. Saying 'not in front of Blacklake', or words to that effect, seemed oddly unsubtle given that Blacklake's apparently the PoV for this scene and so privy to that dialogue. I'm still interested to see where this is going, though my attention was starting to wander.

Thank you all for the helpful and encouraging feedback. I finally got round to editing and submitting this today - despite all the positive comments, doing the edits proved daunting, as some of them sent small ripples through the whole story. I have to admit that, while I did some research for this story, it wasn't extensive and was primarily on the political and economic situation in Song China. So if it felt authentic that's as much through the power of bluffing as through heaps of notes. That kind of showed in the dragon thing edonil picked up on - thanks for that, I wouldn't have known. Mandamon, in answer to your question about setting, this is meant to be set in a continuation of the Song dynasty, but a continuation where advances the Song were making led to late 19th century technology being developed a few hundred years earlier. It was based on an idea from a history teacher friend of mine, who pointed out to me that the Song were starting to make extensive use of coal hundreds of years before the industrial revolution. He also gave me the ideas that led to Land of Black and Red, the steampunk Mayan story I sent round, and another one set in a clockwork Baghdad.

Arya's recently become one of my favourites too. I like the way she's turning into this potentially deadly character, but the same thing makes me really worry for her - an eight-year-old girl should not start turning into a deadly figure of vengeance!

This story got its first rejection this week - broadly positive and encouraging me to keep submitting to that market, so they didn't totally hate it. Off the back of that I've done some more edits - thanks for the feedback Robinski. I have to admit that the 'hen' gender gibe wasn't deliberate - I was trying to use the word in the way people use 'pet' in Yorkshire, clearly misunderstanding its use. Anyway, now to send it back out again.

As the others said, well done on submitting your first piece - putting your ideas out there for others to comment on can be pretty terrifying. I agree with a lot of what the others said, particularly around the need to provide more focus on a character in chapter one. Starting at the point where 3-MAC gains consciousness might help with this, and with giving us someone to empathise with in that chapter. There were times when you were inconsistent in your use of past and present tense, and in using 'he' or 'it' to refer to 3-MAC. That sort of inconsistency immediately threw me out of the story, and is worth tidying up. I didn't know what either 3-MAC or Rain was thinking or feeling about anything. I also didn't get the feeling that either of them had a sense of purpose and was trying to achieve something. Without that, it was hard for me to root for them. I know that you probably don't want to give a robot feelings, at least to start with, but you could show what he thinks in reaction to the things that happen.

I was really intrigued by this. The setting's interesting, and well evoked by the style of prose. The writing is generally good, though I agree on it being adjective heavy - even an overdose of simple adjectives like colours can seem odd to read. I found this very heavy on extended description and exposition of back story, with not much happening. It also felt a bit repetitive at times, descriptions, thoughts and even occasionally bits of dialogue repeating essentially the same information two or three ways in succession. This is partly a matter of personal taste, but it puts me off. Once Sabine turned up things started to happen, and I started to feel more tension. There were a couple of bits of dialogue that felt out of place. Sabine's first bit didn't seem like something anyone would actually say - when a character says 'as I'm sure you know' it normally equates to 'as I would never really say, but the author wants you to know'. I'm sure you can find a more subtle way to get her point across. Later on she used the phrase 'shut up', which felt very modern and out of place among all the rest of the elegant prose. I'm interested in the characters - their passions and interests are out there and have me hooked - but they risk falling into cliches - the frustrated artist, the evil landowner, the femme fatale. Those are all figures that interest me, as long as there's something more to them as well, and I'll be interested to see how that pans out in the next part. Looking forward to reading more.

I loved that show. Good writing, excellent performances, especially from the young lad. Just a shame that their casting helped sign the death knell for Misfits, my other favourite recent piece of UK TV.

I accept that Sherlock is an exception where UK TV's concerned, and when he's on the ball Moffat's one of the best writers out there (if you've not watched them, find his Coupling episodes where he plays with timeframes and parallel narratives - I think the best ones are called 'Split' and 'Eight Minutes' - for really interesting examples of story structure). But even as a Dr Who fan, I find that show inconsistent in quality compared with the good US stuff. Oh yes, and welcome to the group!

Welcome to the group. I'm fairly new here too, and I've already found it really useful. I like your setting and concept, but I end up saying that a lot here - I guess it's why I'm in this group and not, say, a romance writers circle. There's a lot of exposition - as Mandamon said, after the initial moment of action you stop for a big info-dump, and then repeat this whenever you add a character or situation. It gets the mix of steampunk and magic across clearly, but it's too much. I didn't feel like much happened in this chapter. This may just be me - as I mostly write short stories, I have to get to the action pretty quickly. But not much seemed to happen or change. I know that's partly because you want to introduce the characters and situation, but I wonder if you could do this by cutting much more quickly to the action that's apparently going to be the next chapter, and introducing the characters through what the do then? It would help break up the exposition, and create some tension to keep readers going through the initial introductions. There were also a couple of details that bothered me. I thought the bit where Soli had to leap from one flyer to another was cool, but it didn't make much sense. These guys have radio and hand signals and (presumably) the ability to come up with a variety of plans in advance - why would they risk losing officers to horrible mid-air accidents when they could use those sorts of things? If this happened as an individual sequence because a radio was broken I'd buy into it, but not like this. Also, within three paragraphs of introducing your female lead you had her thinking about getting a haircut. I know it was a way of getting some description of the viewpoint character in, but it was such a 'how blokes think girls think' cliche that it really bugged me. Other than that, it seems to be building up to an interesting confrontation between these two forces, with internal struggles in both and the outside pressure of the storm. All of this brings together a good variety of conflicts and makes me interested in what'll happen next.

Well done, that's great. Nice to hear some successes coming out of the group.

I really liked this as a concept. The fire-fighter scenario was unusual and had me intrigued, especially when I was wondering at the start how that would combine with something fantasy-related. It was nicely written and I particularly liked that you used snake metaphors on the first page in a way that, in retrospect, subtly foreshadowed what was to come. I didn't have a clear idea of what sort of fire they were dealing with for quite a long time. Unless I missed something, you didn't say that it was a house fire in the early pages. The reference to the fire not being routine led me to expect something weird or special, but then this was never explained - what wasn't routine about this? It led me to expect a pay-off that didn't come. Unlike Mandamon, I wasn't drawn in by the pacing. Despite the scenario I didn't feel any tension in the early pages, as there was no sign of the fire worsening or anyone being in danger. Even once you started on the stuff about Melissa going into the house, I thought that you gave more detail of everything than necessary, slowing down the pace. Once she found the kid, I didn't understand why she waited for him to be comfortable with her, rather than just grabbing him to get him out. For that matter, I didn't understand why he didn't just leap straight at this opportunity for rescue. For two people in a house on fire, they didn't show the urgency I'd expect about getting out. The next thing I'm in two minds about, but I think you might also want to do more to set up the presence of fantastic elements early on. The use of 'by Hades' and a couple of references to her heritage in the first couple of pages hinted at there being something odd, but it wasn't enough to make me sure this wasn't a sci-fi setting, or even something mundane with a character of unusual ethnic background. While the second helmet was, in retrospect, also part of this, there again wasn't enough to tell me if this was sci-fi, fantasy, or just my ignorance about modern fire-fighting equipment. Keeping from the reader the fact that this is a fantasy situation and a character isn't human is fine, but keeping those things from them when the PoV character is the non-human one, that feels forced and unconvincing to me. Oh, and I agree on the he/it thing. And on the previous discussion about the title - it's great, intriguing and poetic. Like I said, I think this is a cool and unusual scenario for a story, with some nice writing. But making the PoV character the twist didn't work for me.

If you're after a really rich new world then try Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines books. It's a YA series whose set-up involves mobile cities chasing each other across a blasted landscape. While it's presented as a post-apocalyptic future Earth, it's so far from modern or historical reality that I'd call it a new world, and while it's not technically fantasy it doesn't feel like sci-fi either.

Same caveat for me - haven't read the previous chapters, just going on this and the summary you sent. I like the world you've got here and am intrigued to know more about it. It feels like there's a tangled and well-developed political situation going on in the background, which Dimas is presumably going to be drawn into by the situation with the device. Casual details help to give this a sense of reality. My biggest problem was something jParker mentioned - not getting inside Dimas's head. Most of the time there was nothing about what he thought and felt, so I had no idea how to feel about anything he was seeing. This also meant I sometimes didn't know why events or conversations mattered. There were times, like when he was staring at the ceiling, that seemed like they were meant to be a moment of self-reflection, but without putting in his thoughts it was just an extended description of a ceiling. I found the doctor incredibly unsympathetic, because she treated Celia and Thais fairly unsympathetically. She seemed quite insensitive for a doctor. If this was deliberate it could have done with more explanation, or with the others, including Dimas, reacting to it. The conversation in Dimas's bedroom was a bit confusing, but seemed to me to imply that he's Celia's father. Whether that's the intention or not, I think that this, like some of the other situations and conversations, could have been cleared up by showing more of Dimas's thoughts and feelings. And if the PoV character really is the father of the girl he's caring for, then not revealing that until nine chapters in feels very jarring. Also, if this really is the first time Thais has spoken to her father in fifteen years then I'd expect a strong emotional reaction from her, which I didn't see. I liked the descriptive parts in chapter ten, though I was again frustrated by not getting inside Dimas's head. The device activating had me really intrigued. But the bit at the station didn't work for me. When the violence started I wasn't sure whether Dimas was in among the crowd being attacked. The idea that the panicked protesters were 'strangely hushed', while dramatic, made no sense, and the same goes for a train leaving the station while there's a riot going on - surely there's a terrible risk of people getting on the tracks and being hit, never mind the fact that the train seemed crammed full of rioting crowd.

My latest effort, a short story using a steampunk Chinese setting. Looking forward to seeing what you lot think of it.