cjhuitt

I agree with most of what the others said, but I'm going to take it a step further, perhaps. Not only was I expecting the emergency council to somehow show that he had been outmaneuvered and deposed, or something as vital, I was looking forward to it. So far, all Fen has done is walk around the castle and apparently not know how to lead at all. Getting booted would potentially have solved that issue. (In fact, I was looking forward to it so much that I was already mentally composing my suggestion that you compress the chapters between the king's death and Fen being deposed.) As to the council scene, again I agree with all the others, but beyond the problem with Fen suddenly becoming a war-fixated maniac, it shows him as not having been trained to rule at all. This is especially evident in that he doesn't know why he can't send the whole army (I could think of a few more reasons, off the top of my head), it shows in that he doesn't know where his coin comes from, and it shows in that he doesn't know how to approach a council meeting. This is in addition to the previous parts that I could believe him being bad at; newly wed and maybe not relating well to the council members. As a result, I end up not caring about the character much at all. I would also point out that this seems very unusual for a country whose customs are to only have one son in order to prevent succession problems. Wouldn't the custom also include some thought of statecraft with it? After all, it's not like there would be a second or third son to step up to the plate if the first one screws things up. My best suggestion to fix this is to give Fen a goal he is trying to pursue himself. Something beyond finding who betrayed his father, since he's delegated that. In fact, he should probably have a few goals, such as gaining the respect of his wife (failed in this chapter), gaining the respect and trust of his councilors (failed in this chapter), etc. It would be better to see him have a credible plan to do each of them, only to have them go awry. Finally, many people who give advice on writing suggest having a strong antagonist, who's actions impact the protagonist's life. Right now, from the number of chapters, it seems like Fen is the protagonist, and the mercenary leader (whom I can't remember the name of) the antagonist, but aside from the one action of killing the king, there has been no noticeable impact. I could see one or two of the councilors also becoming lessor antagonists, which may also help, but as a reader at this point I'd like to see stronger action in opposition to Fen, so that he is forced to take action to go after his goals.

Congrats! I need to get mine finished, but work has been rather hectic this month. I should start to get more time sometime about... January.

This topic is a bit old by now, and most anything I wanted to say has already been covered, but I did want to bring up one possibility regarding Ethen and his relatability. I had these same thoughts, and to me, there is one relatively small change you could make that might improve this immensely -- which is to swap the roles of the argument between the two brothers. If Lieneth is the one who thinks it is impossible to get out, and is worried over how his mother will react, then he can argue Ethen into using his blood-mage abilities against his initial desires. This has two noble sacrifices -- Ethen doing something he doesn't want to help keep himself and his brother out of trouble, and Lieneth sacrificing his own body and energy by arguing Ethen into taking that course. You can also work in a little more malevolence for their mother -- just as a hint, mind you -- by implying she would be upset with Ethen if she found out they had been stuck, his blood magic could have gotten them out of it, and he refused to use it. It all gives some nice motivations to the characters that the reader can sympathize with, while keeping the actual actions fairly close to what you have written.

These are my meandering impressions of the past month so far. My novel is a big mess right now. I think this is the messiest I've ever had the novel before. I have summaries of what I think should happen for the rest of the novel scattered around, although most of them are in the front of the novel. (I wrote those every now and then, when I sat down to write a chapter but couldn't keep from thinking about the rest of the story). I have the Goal/Conflict/Disaster notes scattered throughout as well, which I faithfully typed out before every scene (except one, that I thought was a sequel but turned into a scene of its own). I have the Emotion/Reason/Anticipation/Choice notes scattered throughout near sequels also, though I didn't formally figure those out as much. (That is probably something to look at in editing). I have summaries of chapters written in omniscient present tense, as well as actual chapters written in past 3-person limited. Sometimes I have both for the same chapter. I have notes about what I need to have happen in the future, which I just foreshadowed, where I had the foreshadowing. I have notes about what I need to put in foreshadowing for where they occurred to me, usually five or six paragraphs before I triggered the event that needs foreshadowing. My descriptions are very haphazardly scattered in, and I have lots and lots of placeholders for names, and sometimes for other details. Despite all that, I'm feeling really good about the writing process this year. If it wasn't for an early illness that had me not writing for 3 days, and barely writing for 2 more, I would easily have cleared my best mark for words written in November. I came close even so. Plus, the writing was a lot less of a chore this time. I partly attribute that to the mess I mentioned earlier, both because I didn't worry about placing things correctly at this point in time, and because I could skip "levels" for my writing, as it were -- writing the 20000-foot overviews, writing the capsule overviews I stole from Jim Butcher, writing the scene and chapter summaries, or writing actual scenes and chapters. Being able to change it up definitely kept me interested and writing when it seemed like things weren't working on one level. Another thing I think helped was the prep work done beforehand, reviewing the Jim Butcher posts and coming up with the novel summary and beginning, middle, end targets before writing. I have previously outlined my stories, or gone completely pantsing, but this seemed to be the write amount of pre-writing structure for me. It gives me a goal, but doesn't make me think that I've figured everything out, and now just have the chore of writing it. There are still details and what-not to be discovered along the way. I was generally writing my chapter capsules a few chapters ahead, and my chapter summaries a couple ahead, so when I wrote my chapters, I was aware of what would be happening soon, and could keep that in mind as well as what was supposed to happen there, and make a few tweaks along the way to make the story better. The third thing that helped, I have no doubt, is actually having practice at writing novels. This was my fifth novel attempt, although the first two were really unstructured and I didn't take the time to try and learn anything from them. I actually recognized fairly early on that one of the problems I was having writing the novel was that I was unhappy with the arc of one of my main characters, so I spent some time thinking about that and what it should be, and came up with a similar arc (with a couple different key events, and a different focus) that made me a lot more excited. I hadn't gotten to any of the different parts yet, except in very-high-level form, so I was able to change that with little effort and dive back in, excited. Something similar happened with another part of the story that I realized didn't make sense, and which led to me thinking about other ways to have the same POV-visible evidence happen, which led to a nice secret society that I think is going to be a lot of fun also. Finally, this was the first sequel I ever wrote. That itself was an interesting experience. I didn't have to spend as much time worldbuilding, and I had a couple characters all ready to go. However, it also meant I could just change the setting or characters to fit the new story; they had to be basically the same as the previous one so that they can work in both. On the whole I think this helped me, but it also led to some interesting places where I had constraints on my creativity. It also led to me having more characters from the first story make appearances, although mostly brief ones so far, but it was also fun to be able to write a "side" character with a lot of history and mannerisms already defined. Oh, and of course I'm not done yet, though a lot closer to the spirit of NaNoWriMo this year than the past three tries. The first time I "won", I had burned myself out on the story and just stopped writing it at just over 50k words. The second and third time I won (two years ago and last year), I had written over 50k words, but not gotten to the end, and although had outlined them and knew what the end was, I was missing large pieces of the story. This year, with the summaries that I've written, I have both gotten above 50k and know what should happen all the way up to the end, though I forgot to write those two little words. I think that my story probably still has 40-60k words left to write, on top of the 62k I officially wrote during the month. I'm not sure when I'll get them all written, but I'll get there. Then I have to go back through and clean up my notes and capsules and what-not, which will probably drop over 10k from it, and maybe up to 30k depending on how messy I've been. That puts me on target for 90k-110k for the novel, maybe a touch long for what I was targeting, but by no means unwieldy. Well, those are my initial thoughts. I may try to do another post later with my original idea/how it turned out, but I think that should probably wait until I'm actually done writing.

So, at least some of you participated in NaNoWriMo this year. How did it go? Did you finish? Were the Writing Excuses pep talks any help? Do you like your novel? Hate it? Did it work out like you expected, or not at all? Did you try something different this year? How did it go? For the rest of you, why has it been so dead around here? (Or has there actually even been a "rest of you"? Maybe everyone did it.)

9.5k in a day is definitely impressive. That's almost 20% of the 50k novel right there. Looking back at my notes, the best I did was 5.5k on a Saturday. Hmm, I might be able to apply this to mine, but not as easily. My biggest drag was getting sick about 1 week in, during which I lost my entire lead and spent the next week or more keeping my head above water, as it were. I've definitely found chapters where I had a strong summary were a lot faster to type. Even if the strong summary is all in my head, but I don't recommend that in most cases. I tried that some during the month, and I definitely liked doing it. I'm not sure I was more productive than the evening for me, though I do think I was more creative. I usually used that time to sketch out where the story was going next, or figure out plot problems, and the evenings to do the "real" writing. I also found that, similar to what Dan had previously said in Writing Excuses, taking a break between work and writing helped (even though I'm not technically a writer at work, there is still a lot of written communication happening). Some of my best evenings writing came after a 45 minute workout and 15 minutes sitting in the sauna at my rec center, just thinking of ideas for the story.

Please do. I'm curious to see what others got out of this. In a few minutes, I'm going to try and write down my day-after mess of impressions about how it went this year.

Congrats to both you and Mandoman... I saw purple bars for both just now when I checked. It took me about 1/3 of the way in before I realized what was wrong with my original ending, and fixed it. Then things got a bit easier.

That might be neat. I might do that... a few weeks after I get done writing.

Thank you. You two have helped keep me pushing... I didn't feel like I could fall behind. I still have a ways to go until the end of mine. I just validated to see how far off Scrivener was from the official count, and joyful surprise, I gained a couple hundred words.

Thanks everyone for taking the time. Some brief comments. Right now, Dexter is paranoid but not consistently so. I may need to show that earlier, or alternately remove the inconsistency, because I'm suddenly struck with the memory of Brandon talking about Dalinar(?) in tWoK needing to lose the split personality effect. Of course, since Dexter isn't a POV character, it might still work out. Still, perhaps it would be better to change, given further thoughts below. I'll spend some time thinking about it, anyway. I'll definitely look into adding more here. This thought has occurred to me before as well. I actually started with "Molly" and "Holly", which was even worse. I'll probably rename Hollie on some future draft. I got the same feedback in the first revision, so obviously I haven't fixed this enough. I had hoped the differing responses would be a small mystery that would be (incorrectly) solved at the end of the book. I'll probably add something to the backstory of people's experiences with testing grounds, though sparse. Basically, the testing grounds don't always do the same thing, and it changes based on who is in the grounds, and also who is experiencing the strongest emotions (particularly fear). Basically, the response to Jorah (right now, anyway) is shambling monsters, while the response to Lance is getting stuck forever. I haven't yet completely figured out if Jorah getting stuff loose is a response to Dexter (paranoia), or due to the crystals, or just the testing grounds having some "fun". Generally, though, I haven't put any real personality into the magic running the testing grounds, so probably not the last. I also wonder about intensifying the stuck part by eventually starting to have those things (and especially people) that are stuck start sinking into the ground. This is one of those good/bad news things. Apparently I got the response I was going for, but need to rebalance it some to keep interest. I knew this might be a problem going in to the section. (Hmm... after previewing the post, perhaps I don't do "brief" comments as well as I thought.)

Likewise. My username there is the same as here.

...and NaNoWriMo has officially started for me. As I mentioned, I changed stories right near the end. I decided to make the prep work part of my writing for the month, and have done a lot of it this morning (I still have the resolution to do, and I need to think about it, because I don't think my ending I wrote down is a properly dramatic ending, but rather the denouement after it). I'm also going to try and do my best to do the scene/sequel bullet points (four each) for each one of those I write, and to try and be conscious of going between them as I write the story. Right now my plan is to summarize the key scenes overall to get a bigger plot, then expand them as I can/am inspired to in order to make the word count goals.

Since you are still in the middle of writing the book, I'm not going to give a more detailed critique, because I've found that those cause me (and some others) problems while writing the first draft. (By the way, are you aware of NaNoWriMo? The whole goal is to write a story during November. Sure, you started a bit early, but you could still have a goal of writing 50,000 or more additional words on your story in November, and hopefully finish it also.) Instead of critique, I'll give some of the impressions I got while reading it. The "zoom in" at the beginning was decent. It's not normally something I encourage for beginnings, but it worked for me for this one. It seems slightly unusual for me to see a lieutenant out in man-to-man fighting instead of trying to direct anything, but maybe that's the point the fighting has gotten to. Mmm, a good demon fight. Heroic action all around, it appears, against nicely malevolent foes. This may be described in the world as witchcraft, but it seems like some seriously powerful magic to me. Is Kirrin going to be a main character, or at least viewpoint character, in the rest of the book? I kind of expected him to die fighting in the prologue, although that obviously didn't happen. I expected him to be able to hold his own for a bit, then be struck down and see the rest of the results as he was dying. This could also work if he is more seriously injured, though you might have to have someone else behead the bloodwitch instead if that was the case. You do have some details and words that could be trimmed down, plus the occasional typo, but don't worry about those at this point. Those are for the second (third, fourth, etc) draft.

Also, for anyone curious, I have decided that the story I was working on for the Nano prep is not the story I will be writing, after all. I had always planned on having another novel or two after the current Blue Crystals story, and since I have been revising that one, the characters and potential plots are dancing in my head. Thus, I will be changing course not-quite-midstream and trying to take on that instead. If I have time, I'll try to go through these exercises for my new novel plan, though I may not get them posted (or the helpful feedback) in time.

So, this cold really knocked me for a loop, or I would have had this finished a couple days ago. Now, we'll have to see what we can fit in, starting with the climax. Read Jim Butcher's article on endings. Write down the following for the story climax: Isolation: How will the protagonist be isolated from any (apparent) support? Confrontation: How will the protagonist/antagonist confrontation work? Dark Moment: What else goes wrong as a result of the confrontation? How badly are the odds stacked? Choice: What revealing choice is the protagonist forced to make? Dramatic Reversal: What is the unexpected way things change at the end? Resolution: What needs to be wrapped up? [*] Review the scene/sequel steps and the beginning/middle/end you wrote. [*] If you have time, write scene and sequel bullet points from the opening scene, leading up to the middle, then to the final resolution. This is your outline.

Ditto. This is all a good idea also, I think. I like the acid idea better than wings, although you may consider making it a little more subtle than straight-up dissolving... such as somewhat slowly degrading, only to become obvious it's directly associated with him (and not ill luck) when he's stressed, or something. Or you may want to go all-out, I suppose. I don't know exactly how the rest of the story will play out, so I don't know exactly how to advise here.

As mentioned in the email, sorry for the day's delay, I was waylaid by a cold. Silk may also feel free to censor me if needed, since I am sending this out without an official go-ahead. Previously, we met Jorah as he helped his group of small-time thieves with a robbery. He wandered into a testing ground and lost the loot he was carrying when he was attacked by monsters. Alberic, head of the guards, learns of the theft from Lord Dominik and is tasked to retrieve them. Molly, leader of the guards, then is warned by Dexter that Jorah may be unreliable, only to find Dexter's predictions apparently coming true much sooner than expected. As usual, I'm looking for any feedback, but specifically on any or all of the following: - The further characterization (of Jorah, Dexter, and Lance mostly) - The developing conflicts and tension - As usual, the worldbuilding. Thanks. Edit to add: Small language warning. I hope nobody reads it and is bothered before seeing the warning.

Is that so? These are pretty good ones, overall. I'm thinking the same thing. For my summaries, I'm actively trying to keep them as short and on-target as possible, so that I keep the story progress in mind -- the essence of what the scene or story is trying to do. I usually have no problems adding in backstory, reasons, and dead-end plot devices. Anyway, it's been helping me lately. This gets to the heart of the difference, I think. I'm beginning to suspect that I might be at least partially a multi-drafter, at least at this stage in my writing. I do outline some, including key scenes and whatnot, but I tend to find the motivations, reasons, etc (all that stuff I listed before) as I write the first draft. For the second one, I move things around, split and combine, add (appropriate) foreshadowing, and usually find one or two subplots that I should add or emphasize to help the main plot. For this year's Nano, however, I've been doing at least this planning, and I plan on doing something closer to what you describe... call it somewhere between an outline and a first draft. I may well write out some scenes in full, while just summarizing others. We'll see how it works. You've a good point here. I may need to change it to let the match end in a properly humiliating manner, then go to the message. I think there's a mix (though that's just my opinion based on my interpretations of the items). I'm going to intersperse some comments here... Sulking definitely fits the bill, though I wonder if a bit of anger might be worthwhile as well (in the principle's office, anyway, or right when she is taken by her father). The shame is good also. The biggest problem I have here is the "time passes" part. While I think it could be done, and narratively it sometimes helps to gloss over intervening time like that to make a story tighter, I think a lot of the point of the sequels is that they are immediate progressions... or at least, not delayed by significant time. In particular, referencing the example from the article of a car crash, the emotion was the immediate panic, and maybe anger or worry. How long can such emotion last, however? After just a bit, it gives way to the reason aspect. "Stews" and "irrationally blames" to me seems like emotional reaction still -- not that this is horrible, just making sure things are placed in the correct spot. The "I should have"s sound better here. The bit with her mother sounds like a scene to me. She sees something, her goal is to find out what is going on, and she ends up failing and not knowing. Then the "suspects her mother will do something drastic" sounds like another sequel after that scene, to me. I would think it could be expanded to all of the parts listed. The Gayle-is-missing part, I don't know where it goes. It's information that needs to be in here, but perhaps it's just background (plot) information. Again, finding out what Cliff knows seems like a scene, leading to revealing information ("Yes, but..."), and then the decision for action seems like reason/anticipation for the sequel to that scene. Here is a definite choice, followed by possibly another scene: Extracting the promise from Cliff to help, but being denied in getting it immediately. Having said all this, I'm not sure your version is wrong. I can't recall where I read it, but I know I had read a suggestion that the scene-sequel view can be taken up a level and viewed in a larger form, which this might well be. The same suggestion was made that it could be taken down into the scenes for action-reaction alternation (although abbreviated, of course). Well, that's this for now. I'll be back with more later, probably tomorrow.

Thank you all for the feedback. On Molly: These fascinate me, and I think I can see some of the problem... it will give me something more to work on fixing in the next revision, I suppose. I think part of it is that I took one aspect of her personality that was interesting, and transferred it to Dexter. That part, at least, seems to be working well, but I think I forgot to then give Molly something to be driving her again. There are conflicts, goals, and exaggerations to be had in her background, but I didn't think to pull any more out and make them more obvious. Yes, she is still short but I made it more subtle this time, and her a touch less short. She's still basically a pixie, however, especially compared to Dexter, or even Lance. On Dexter: All this makes me (mostly) happy, since as I mentioned above, I was trying to draw Dexter's character out more. It appears I'll have to do more with the Dexter/Kat thing, but basically (and I'm not giving anything important away here) he thinks there is more to it than she does, or at least a strong potential for more. On Jorah: I still think I need to do more in an earlier chapter, but this is good also, since that was one of the big changes I had planned in this version. It does also make the conflict seem more believable to me as well. Thanks for helping confirm my thoughts on this (though I may suffer from confirmation bias as well). On the world building: ...and I still have some worldbuilding to do. On the names, yes, they are purposefully (mostly) common ones that we would recognize now. In fact, I think so far I've taken all of them from one baby name dictionary or another, though it's possible I'm mistaken for one or two. Not all of them are English names, though. Other: I've come around to agreement on this as well. At least partly because it leads so nicely into the next chapter, and partly because it works better as you state, with the reader having more knowledge to anticipate and judge the character's reactions. Hi! I'm pretty sure we have some non-native speakers writing here, but if you want to practice your English while helping out aspiring writers, I'm certainly not going to stop you. From your brief bit posted here and in Trizee's topic, I wouldn't have known you as a non-native speaker, though I would have guessed either a younger (mid/late teens) person, or one in a hurry, due to a instances of unusual sentence construction. Still, rest assured I had no problem understanding you. Again, thanks to everyone (and if you're reading this later, you can still feel free to chime in).

The biggest item to mention for my critique of this chapter (sorry it's a bit late) is that I never got invested in any of the characters. I think it's because there's no tragedy or impending tragedy in the chapter. You have a character that is running with his lovely wife whom everyone admires, having a religious discussion with one of his friends, and is "proven" right in the discussion. At the end of all this, he gains more zeal for his religion and redirected to another goal. There's no pain, and only the slightest bit of drama (since his position in the religious discussion is the proper or accepted one for his tribe). Besides all that, only the last little bit seems to advance the plot any, and it seems to be in a way that doesn't yet make sense. In fact, this reads to me more like an interlude between sections of the book (such as Brandon's interludes in Way of Kings) than it does part of the main story. If it really needs to be here still, I echo Eri's suggestion that Beloken is probably the better PoV character. He is an outcast from their religion by his own choice, he has doubts about his wife-to-be, and he gets his worldview entirely blown up partway through the chapter. I'll echo this for emphasis. Also, I'm going to emphasis in another critique how useful it is for me as a reader to have the PoV character be the first named character in a chapter (or after a scene break). This is especially important when all of the characters are new ones. In this case, it wasn't too bad because we dive into Imhaken's head in the second sentence, but it shouldn't be hard to rearrange the first paragraph to allow this. In going with the PoV theme from earlier, I also don't think that Inhaken, in the midst of his righteous bloodlust, would notice one of the other non-Fariol men leave the clearing. A suspicious Beloken might, however. Finally, the word "dauntehrs" scanned too closely to "daughters" for me, so I kept thinking they were going to do a massacre of all the tribe's young women, which didn't sound like the sort of book you were going for. I'm not sure what to suggest on this, but maybe if you italicize the name to show it as a word in their language, that would be enough. Or maybe just don't pay any attention to the crazy guy who reads words that aren't there.

I have another chapter (maybe two) ready for submission. I was thinking about waiting until late tomorrow to mention this, but I thought I'd buck the trend and try saying so a day early.

This is to discuss (draft 2 of) chapter 4 of Blue Crystals. In chapter 1, we met Jorah as he helps his group of small-time thieves with a robbery. In chapter 2, he wanders into a testing ground and loses the loot he was carrying from the robbery when he is attacked by monsters. In chapter 3, Alberic learns of the theft of valuables from Lord Dominik, and he is tasked with recovering them as soon as possible. I'm looking for any feedback, but specifically would like opinions on the following: - The characterization of Molly - The setup of conflicts - The worldbuilding I'm considering swapping the position of this and the last chapter, but am undecided. I wouldn't mind feedback on that either.

It's only what, 10 days to October? Time flies when I'm ignoring it too much. Next up is sequels. Read Jim Butcher's article on sequels. Write down the following for the sequel to your opening scene: Emotional Reaction: What is the characters first, primal, emotional reaction to the last scene's setback? Review, Logic, & Reason: What does the character immediately think about the setback (after the emotional reaction flares through)? What other thoughts have a bearing on their reaction (and following aspects of the sequel)? Anticipation: How will the character's options play out in the future? Choice: What does the character choose to do next? (Note that this usually ties directly into the scene goal for their next scene.) As I try to remember this, the character has to CARE backward, or CARE-back. For extra credit, repeat the above for the story you are currently revising. For additional extra credit, vary one or more parts of the sequel and see how it affects your setup for the next scene.