Robinski

Hi ID, thanks for reading! It goes into palmistry, yes. It's intended as the sunlight staining the plaster of the wall. The word 'wall' is excluded of course, which maybe is causing an issue, although I think some people caught it. Fair comment. It's not intended as sex slavery, and the 'crass' characterisation of what Thep is feeling accentuates that. I'm going to change that word. Okay, fair enough. All noted, thanks for reading, ID

Excellent!! I love spitballing titles - thank you for these. I like the word 'wasteland' and maybe having 'sorrow' in there is good, because it ain't exactly a happy ending!! It started out as "Sand, Blood, Light, Love" before it reached RE - that got ditched in favour of "Desert Tide", also now gone. Presently, I'm working with "Slaves of Us All". Thinking about that now, it sounds a bit pseudo-Shakespearean (no doubt because of the line from Hamlet (Thus conscience does make cowards of us all)). 'His Last Oasis' might be my favourite of those 4, I think. "The Memory of Sorrow" pops into my head from a few minutes mulling just now. Thanks again!

It’s only fair that I start with your submission after taking so long last week! ‘shopfronts’ all one word. Also, the ‘shop district’ seems really redundant after you’ve just talked about shopfronts. You could say retail (although that sounds modern) or commercial district, as an alternative. I’m not keen on capitalising ‘town centre’. No, no capitals for ‘uncle’ or ‘dad’. “Among them, a few newer buildings loomed above them.” – typo. ‘lord-hood’ – I would say hyphenate this, as speller doesn’t like it as one word, but consider knighthood, which is one word, as is kinghood. Pet seems full of doubts and lacking in confidence. Viz: · "Why would they send us to do this?" “No. At least I don’t think so,” "Ah," Petro said thoughtlessly. This is not very interesting or appealing. Jai is the one who appears positive and interested. “A beautiful girl started at the sight of them” – This is not good, imho. You don’t get to just say she’s beautiful, it’s meaningless. Everyone’s concept of beauty is different. You need to convince the reader why she’s beautiful to Pet, and it can’t be what she’s wearing, surely. “if his friend could speak, Pet's face flushed with heat” – I feel there are commas missing on a fairly regular basis. This conversation is strange. We’re not getting the conversation at all, we’re getting a second-hand impression of a commentary that is taking place in the room where the POV is. It’s quite peculiar. “who looks a bit like a God-Child himself” – where did this come from? “Pet still didn’t grasp what she implied” - here he is being kind of dense again. He's not very compelling as a protagonist. I’m skipping ahead now, looking for something more interesting than Pet washing dishes. Okay, I’m sorry, but I gave up on this chapter. You say your story is 1,300 pages long? Well, I think you’ve only got about 200+ words a page, so they’re a bit short for pages, but still, I imagine it’s 1,000 pages otb. I think the most important thing to concentrate on is what to leave out. It feels like you're writing every single event that happens to Pet, in every moment of every day. I think you have to be way more ruthless in thinking about what the reader is going to find interesting. Consider how many books there are out there in the years since Tolkien wrote The Hobbit that are about the hero’s journey, there must be thousands, published and unpublished. It’s been done soooo many times before that you really have to find a way to make yours stand out, to make the reader turn the page. I think you’ve got some work to do on that, quite a lot of work. What is it that excites you about this story? If you’re not writing about that, but wading through pages of set-up, what makes you think the reader is going to go to the effort of reading all this stuff to get to the exciting bit? You can convey all the drudgery very simply, I think, by writing a couple of boring paragraphs, like: ‘Day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute, Pet grafted away in the kitchens. It never changed, the pots arrived in a different order with different stains and sludge and debris, but they always arrived, and Pet always had to wash them.’ Etc., whatever. You can intersperse these with the odd interesting event, but still convey the drudgery of his life in short sections. I’m sorry to be down on this, but there’s no point in me blowing smoke, of course. What would I do to add a spark to this? Honestly, I’m really struggling to imagine how to do that. Set it on a ship, a floating city in the sky. Give Pet some kind of unusual or challenging condition. Make him deaf so he has to read lips. I don’t know. I’m not sure what the USP of the story is, so I'm not sure what kind of ideas to throw out. Sorry not to be more positive. The one thing I can say with complete confidence is, don’t give up, even if it means taking what you're hearing from all the feedback and writing a different story, a short say, just for practice. Change up something significant, take a radical, unusual idea and write a 2,500-word short about it, just to stretch the creative muscles into some other area than hero’s journey, which is really overdone, I think. I hope there is something in here that is some kind of use. Good luck, <R>

Well, if that's the ball rolling for Monday coming, please put me down for a spot, if there is one going. Edit: Actually - scratch that. Nothing from me on Monday.

Hi RD, many thanks for reading. I'm so glad parts of this are working for you. As to this, yes I really do need to work the ending. Everyone agrees on that Fleshing out gives me issues with the word count, but I may just need to swallow that and move on

Hi Vreeah, many thanks for those comments. Yes, this is exactly it. I will clarify. Also, I like your suggestion about reading the mind of the crier. The only snag is that The is having trouble with his ability. I'll mull on that. Thank you so much.

Yup - #iagreewithkais #iagreewithmandamon Awesome memory skills, Man! You criticalled your 'dispel WRS' roll there - nice! ROFL - sorry. I know you only need to insert 'aroma of' o/e, but really ID, flying bread? Have you heard of the 'ancient' tradition of throwing bread rolls across the room at formal dinners? I don't approve of this practice, but is has happened in living memory Yeah, new hashtag, #iagreewithyuoaman. Good gravy, Batman - even Brandon on a 'bad' day...

I'm really sorry it’s taken me so long to get to your submission. I hope something there is useful here. Summary at the end. Why capitalise ‘willow’? It’s just some willow tree. And then ‘Temple’, I think, should just be ‘temple’, unless referring to a particular temple. “A service his uncle…” and the next sentence are one sentence. I’m not grabbed by the first couple of pages. There’s some fair imagery, but the events are kind of boring. Pet is going to work. Everyone goes to work (in some form). It’s not especially entertaining “well past their shoulder and rested near their chest” – sounds like they’ve only got one shoulder between them, and one chest. There’s something off with the last part of this section, it seems to repeat events, like Pet sitting down and the old man storytelling. A city reminding someone of an ant colony is a pretty heavily used image. Verging on cliché, I think. “…the cement structure stood over ten feet tall” – Okay, engineering grumble, sorry. Cement itself is not that strong. If you build a 10-foot wall out of cement with no reinforcement, it will crack and fall over, because mass cement doesn’t work in tension. The wall goes into tension because the force of the wind acts laterally on it, trying to bend it over about the base (where the wall is fixed). Also, cement is expensive compared to rock, one of the reasons that concrete contains aggregate (small rocks). These prevent cracking and also add strength. The Romans had concrete, so you could use that term and not be out of line with a sword-and-sorcery tech level. Why capitalise ‘ceremonial’? We wait a long time to get the sister’s names. Pet says he knows them, but he doesn’t think of them by name, or greet them or differentiate between them for some considerable time. Also, we already know they’ve got ponytails; the description sounds a bit repetitious. There’s a fair amount proofing stuff; I'm not going to call everything as no doubt you’ll be editing anyway. I found it rather predictable that it would end up that K worked in the kitchen. Was that intended as a surprise? I didn’t really land for me. Do you make a sweetbread? I would have said you cook it or prepare it. I don’t know how much preparation there is, maybe just butchery and some flour on the outside before you fry it. Forgive me asking, but do you know what a sweetbread is? I find it tends to crop up when an author is looking for something that sounds sophisticated to serve, to show excess or fine dining. To me, it would be a pretty strange thing to eat on a common basis. It’s your world, of course, but a diet of sweetbread is going to lead to the gout before long, I think. Sweetbread is either the thymus or pancreas or a calf or lamb. Yuck! I’m Scottish, I eat haggis and black pudding with great gusto, but sweet bread, nope, not for me :O/ I wouldn’t capitalise ‘uncle’ unless using the name, like ‘Uncle Buck’, for example. Honestly, sorry to say it but, for me, nothing very interesting happened. Boy goes to work, stands up against a bully (standard reluctant hero), the bully works in the same place. Hero gets to wash the dishes. It’s hard work. On the last page, you mention the tedium of the work. That’s really what this chapter is about, but playing up tedium to the reader, I think, is not a good idea. I believe you could cut this down dramatically, certainly the bit once Pet gets to the city, probably to a couple of pages. A little of this hard graft goes a long way. Sorry not to be more encouraging. That’s writing, you keep at it till it gets to where you want it, and where it gets the feedback you want, obvs. I’ve not read the other comments yet, but I'd be surprised if there wasn’t a lot of encouragement to get past the boring stuff and get to the interesting, unexpected, surprising stuff. Good luck! <R>

Hi everyone! Thanks so much, @Eagle of the Forest Path, @aeromancer, @Mandamon and @Paracosmic_nomenclator, for your excellent comments. I do feel that perhaps I'm hamstringing myself a bit by imposing the 1,500 word limit. I'm hoping to pitch this at Daily SF but at the end of the day, if I'm trying to tell a 2,000 word story in insufficient words then probably I'm not doing myself any favours. Some great comments here. I'm going to try and respond communally, as there are some recurring issues. Magic/majik - there isn't much space to develop it, but mind reading is the only use overtly mentioned. I don't have much room to develop more, but I'll try and drop another use in. I'm glad for expression of the 'majik' found some favour. Maybe I'll try a pass using 'magic' instead, but I like the idea of using the space to introduce more world building, since the word 'magic' is pretty much invisible. Swears - Yeah, cheap shot. I almost took them out before submitting. They're gone. I started off with an idea and almost instantly changed direction! 'Plot' - This is clearly an issue in everyone's comments. I refer you to the line above. Not point in outlining 1,500 words, so this is what you get. The idea changed as I went through, and then changed again before I edited, so I need to tidy that and go back through with that in mind. Title - Yeah. I think I'll edit this a couple or three more times and then submit again, if there is a slot available next week. If you see it again the title will be different. I had two title before this one. They were (1) Sand, Blood, Light, Love; and (2) Sands of Time, Light of Love - neither of which really float my boat either. I agree with Mandamon (there it is) that I haven't addressed the age/deterioration (really) in the title - good call. Punctuation - Ha-ha. Thanks, Para. I was trying to convey meaningful pauses, but punctuation is a minefield, and never sounds the same in two peoples' heads, I feel. So, "The majik... (meaningful pause) eludes me." (yes, maybe it should be ellipsis), and, yes, I'll take the rap for the second one and will change that. Relationship - Yes, I'll try to tighten that up in the next edit. Clearly, it completely intertwined with the ending, so really needs to be consistent. Thanks so much, folks. Much appreciated. <R>

Hey there, here's a short that I wrote and edited several times this weekend. It's intended for submitting in the near future (I hope!), so I'm looking for anything - thematics, character issues down to the most detailed line-by-lines, if you want. Anything and everything you care to mention. This includes the title, which I'm in two minds about. Thanks for considering. Cheers, Robinski

In case Silk doesn't come back on before tomorrow, you're fine at that level. At +10%, I wouldn't bother asking. If you're over 5,500 every week, people might start to notice. We've had 6,000+ if it's the last episode or a single short story, but not very often. I would ask the question if you ever plan to go that high.

I'd expect nothing less

I think you're No.5, but Silk usually will be on later today to confirm.

Fair comment. And glad to hear you say that. I don't like it there either, for what it's worth, so, I'm very even handed For the avoidance of doubt, I'm very much looking forward to your next submission.

Did you just make that? Tell me you did... (if it's true, obvs).

I feel insufferably coy saying this, but wait until pt. 2. I think a lot of your concerns will be addressed by it. Yeah, okay, they may be, but what I'm saying is, not revealing what actually happened when Treb knows it, and we are in his head for sizeable periods of time, feels like a POV cheat to me. No one else feeling this?

I'd like to submit on Monday. I'm toiling away here editing v2.0 of TMM and writing v0.1 of TCC in parallel. I need a break from SF!! So, I'm writing a fantasy short story this weekend

Excellent!! Setting people on fire is definitely part of our remit here at RE!!!

Yay, well done, but no, I'm afraid not - well, it didn't happen for me I guess maybe you have to submit too?

Now I'm excited Welcome sort of back!!

Ok, but the first reference to murder is the guard saying he killed his own daughter. There's no rejection of that statement from Treb, so I must assume it's true. Also, there's no indication that the guards are automatically bad, so Treb killing one without regret seems inherently bad. My issue is that we are in Treb's head, but he doesn't think 'Who could have done that to my daughter?' If it was the guard, and that's the reason for Treb feeling no guilt at killing him, then why wouldn't Treb have thoughts about that? Why would he not, previously if not now, have sought to defend himself? This, "The only people exempt from this rule were the guards that watched over him and the other prisoners." would seem to contradict that.... AH, NO - I see it, you mean the guards watching the prisoners, I suggest cutting the underlined, to stopping the sentence after 'guards'. I read a comma where there isn't one, but I still think it's less than clear.

I'm not connecting with him because he killed his daughter You don't need to be in their POV. You show people shuddering or wincing, crying (bit extreme), going pale. Think how people around you react, how your react. We shout, we growl in frustration. The signs are all around us, you just have to 'harvest' them for later use with your characters. Also, analyse how authors that you read show emotion. Lol - forgive me if I went too heavy on you with the sentence thing then. Give your phone a slap from me I would say that the reader doesn't need to understand the units, just their relative intensity. So, you could say something like thief had 40 thermos; murderer 80 thermos and rapist 120 thermos. I agree that Centigrade is strange and implies a certain level of science and technology, deriving from Earth. Yup, like how does he feel about killing his daughter? Does he believe he did it? I call unreasonably withheld!! I've got to disagree here; I feel like it is no sort of motivation for him at all. He seems pretty much unaffected by it. Although he does talk about having that nightmare for the rest of his life, but DOES HE ACCEPT THE GUILT? DOES HE BELIEVE HE KILLED HER? Hmm - personally, I don't think you need to go that far. You've got a story with great potential for subtlety and leading the reader to question their own beliefs and values. When I'm trying to adjust something, I tend to make a small change, then test it again, then another change (if required), test it again. and you've never had an argument, right? But building sympathy for a child killer... as far as the reader knows. Yup, 100% agree. ...and I agree with @Mandamon

#canyourepeatthatinEnglishplease?

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Reading Excuses. It’s always great to have new contributors to the forum, and exciting to open up a file from a writer you’ve never read before, I think. I enjoyed your comments on Kais’ submission. I love having that ‘I thought the same!’ feeling. This is a principle that to refer to as the ‘I agree with Mandamon’ principle – which has served me well for 4 years now Anyway, enough of my blathering – I do apologise. Summary / overall thoughts at the end. Any first line including the words ‘bowl of slop’ has my attention! Ha-ha – in the UK, we have Trebor Extra Strong Mints. “Eventually, they went out, and he threw them the trousers to floor” – ‘they’ was the flames, of course. “But he’s a murderer! He killed his own daughter!” Personally, I would like to know this sooner. My default setting is to assume that, because he’s the protagonist, T is unjustly imprisoned. I’m almost two pages in (in fact more pages, because the text isn’t double spaced), before I find out he’s a bad man. I feel that my assumption has been turned on its head, and not necessarily in a good way. “Was that true? Could he be forgiven?’ – I would say that only he can forgive himself. Also, if he thinks that he can find forgiveness for murdering his own daughter, then I don’t think I want anything to do with him. You’ve not shown anything to suggest that he did not do this most heinous of crimes, so I'm still thinking that I despise him. If you're going to turn this around later as a reveal, I think I'm going to feel betrayed. Bottom line here is that I don’t know what to do with my sympathies. I think that’s a problem this early in a story. “constant hushed roar of the M falls…” – This is the name of the falls, and therefore should be capitalised, as should the name of the river; it’s part of the name. I'm thrown off a little in relation to the setting. I had assumed a certain level of technology – a sort of fantasy standard default – so to hear the term ‘Centigrade’ was a bit disorienting. “prepare for the prisoners’ arrival” – the letter indicates he will receive one prisoner, but this indicates more than one. “What mattered was the contents of the letter. It had given Es enough information to prepare for the prisoners’ arrival, while hopefully” – conflict here. I would say ‘was the content’, rather than ‘were the contents’, personally. “…vague enough that, if intercepted, it would yield…” – sorry, I'm in super picky mode. I only do that when the prose reads nicely apart from one of two odd bits! I was thrown by Es’s title. Is he a bishop? If so, it’s strange that he would be addressed as ‘father’, which more usually would be used for a bog-standard priest, I think. To quote the internet “a bishop is "the Right Reverend", and is formally addressed as "My Lord" (in UK terms at least). If bishops are called ‘father’ in this world, what do they call priests? Bit confused by the replacement guards. Where are they going? I thought they would come to guard the prisoners, but are they going to the city, and the newly arrived guardsmen are going to stay with the prisoners? “before one of the prisoners, Nald, spoke. “The priest…” – full stop. “Esirta saw the young girl, hesitate, unsure whether or not to speak” – That first comma is awkward. I don’t like the idea of forcing the reader to hesitate. The second comma does enough, for me. Adding another feels like overkill. “unsure whether or not to speak. “Go ahead, Iriam.” – The dialogue is definitely a new sentence. This seems to be a regular occurrence. I’ll stop flagging them now “you are removed from those you could hurt. That being the case, I see no reason not to try and better your lives.” – Hmm, so the bishop does not believe in the concept of punishment, paying a debt to society? I think he and I are going to have some philosophical problems. “empire with less casualties” – fewer casualties. “I’m sorry,” he said, knowing that the words…” – Ah, whereas this is part of the same sentence. “The only people exempt from this rule were the guards that watched over him and the other prisoners” – Confused. The guards I get, but is Tre no exempt? Or did he pray out of choice? It sounds like the other prisoners have an exemption, but he doesn’t. Then, in the next paragraph, it sounds like all the prisoners were praying (in the monastery). “the priest who had led them to the monastery yesterday” – I though Es was a bishop? I really need to know much earlier in the story whether I can reasonably feel sympathy for Tre or not. He thinks about whether he should feel guilty about killing the guardsman, but what about his daughter? He never thinks about her and her death. I'm really struggling with this when in his POV. I don’t know what to think. “Yes, Father.” The description of the soulblossom is very effective. I notice that you used ‘seemed’ twice. This is a word that I'm trying to stamp out of my writing. It’s a very imprecise word, and leaves vagueness in its wake. I suggest trying out another word in its place, and see if the description doesn’t sound more effective and direct. “This type of breed was created” – this feels awkward to me. Surely, there must be a more scientific term for ‘type of breed’. Is it the next level up the phylum for plants? Would it be ‘species’ or ‘genus’, I wonder. Wiki suggests that, for lilies (for example) the genus Lilium is divided into species (which I would equate with breeds). In turn, Lilium is a member of the tribe Lilieae, and there are families and orders sitting above those levels (interesting stuff, I’ve become distracted!!). “Another oddity is that those near this tree” – you were talking about the blooms facing people before this, so I took ‘those’ to still be referring to the blooms. I enjoyed reading your writing. A bit sparse on description perhaps, but I thought the narrative was very smooth and flowed really well. This made certain details stand out, as per the comments above, but in terms of style, I could quite happily read a novel that you had written. What I struggled with the most, I think, was the moral position of some of the characters, and the sympathies engendered. There’s no indication, I think, the Treb is bad, so I assume he’s good, only to find out he’s a child killer. Ouch. That was a slap in the face. Then the priest seems to want to make the lives of these criminals better, but he’s actually not, he’s going to kill them (eventually). There were one or two of these shifts in sympathy that left me a bit confused. There are some very interesting ideas here, and I'm looking forward to reading more, most definitely. My major problem remains with the moral position of Tre. He feels like a good character, because he’s not clearly marked as bad, but this thing about his daughter’s death is being dangled in front of me, and I feel like information is being unreasonably withheld. How can I be in his POV and him not thinking about what happened with his daughter? I strongly suspect that it’s some kind of ‘Fugitive’ situation, and he’s been wrongly accused, but he’s completely devoid of anger or frustration at that – so I can’t bring myself to believe it. That leaves the option that he’s guilt of his daughter’s death, in which case I'm being encouraged (I feel) to sympathise with a child killer! Either way, I’m fairly certain I'm going to find up being angry with the writer. Such things, of course, can be ‘fixed’ – if you agree they’re a problem – as can anything I’ve mentioned. I don’t see anything truly broken here, and I'm now keen to read more. Good job. <R>