neongrey

Yeah, realistically speaking, I think the makeup has to be there. It's two and a half paragraphs and they're not long ones; the actual prose can probably use some work but I don't think it's wasting a lot of space. I think it's important both as the setting point of establishing the ubiquity of cosmetics on males even this young (since just dropping it in before didn't seem to go over well) and as the character point that Thalan here would literally rather use someone else's stuff without permission than go without. The rest, hmm, I'll take a look at. I made sure to hit the name and unique descriptors for the clothing early on for that; I think what I want there is to get 2-3-4 looked at within the same reading session to see how that comes off. That second conversation will definitely need a looking-over, I think, yeah. Savae's lack of resources is a majour restriction, yeah, but they've got a lot of personal capabilities. Makes for some interesting constraints. It's interesting, though; when people do accidentally misgender Savae, they really do go with 'he' most often. When I do it, it's pretty much always 'she'...heh.

Savae definitely should come off more off-kilter outside of their own head, so I'm okay with that much at least. They're not "crazy" (ugh) but their answer to a broken system is to tear it down and build something new, and a) we haven't gotten to the 'build something new' part and b ) they're mostly talking with people who're so used to the system it doesn't occur that it would be possible or beneficial to do so. They're not exactly scrupulous, but they don't exactly have room for scruples in their position. It is the author's position that they are the closest thing this work has to a hero, for what that is worth (and what it's worth is basically that and nothing more; authorial intent is really only good for telling you what the author intended, and that's the boring part). Not that that's necessarily obvious at this point in time, or that everyone will necessarily agree with that, but, well. That first conversation is definitely supposed to be odd and almost non-sequitorial but if it's outright confusing I can probably smoothe the edges. The second conversation dragging, though, is one of the things I was pretty concerned about as I was going over it. I'll glare it into submission.

Honestly, I think the issue with using the elephants as a symbol of growth or meaning or change is that David doesn't actually display any meaningful growth or change through the story. He starts as a violent, petulant manchild, and ends as a violent, petulant manchild. It's fairly transparent symbolism if that's what you want, but as it is, I don't think it works. Maybe if it were relating to him continuing a cycle of abuse with them, but I don't think that fits the rest of what you've got going on here and tbh the cycle-of-abuse narrative has laaaargely been discredited but still stigmatizes abused people.

I'm glad that it's not obfuscatory; genderfluidity can be a little tricky to follow in text since you generally want consistent referents for a character (and one expects a change to be permanent) but I think this'll work well for maintaining clarity. I'm kind of cribbing from Robin Hobb in terms of how I'm dealing with Kathalania/Thalan. Regrettably, it seems there's no more elegant way to talk about the character external to the text without using s/he, because either could be applicable at any given moment, and they never is, but, well. That's English for you! And yeah, I'm really not in love with this chapter. There's stuff in it I really like a lot, but I feel like right now the following actions shouldn't be in the same chapter, and can be reshuffled later if need be, but I've got concerns about the second conversation being too expository, and lacking general substance. So far it seems like the exposition isn't a huge issue here, but the lack of substance might well be.

I do appreciate that.

Don't think turning into a car hasn't been on my mind... :v

I keep meaning to! There's just so much I need to catch up on...

Actually, I'm the worst Canadian, because I've never actually gotten around to seeing LG....... ahah

As far as it goes, for my part, you know, the biggest reason to put things around a group like this is so you can find this sort of issue. I ended up throwing out nearly fifty thousand words because extensive structural issues became clear. My absolute strongest objection here was the lack of appropriate content warning-- if it had been signposted appropriately, I'd certainly still question the necessity of handling the scene that way, but it wouldn't have blindsided me as it did. And obviously, you don't want to surprise people with that sort of thing.

I coulda killed netflix when they started cracking down on VPNs this year. But yeah, we do a lot of things better, just, you know, sometimes you hear things like 'there's no racism in canada', and I'm just, buddy, let me tell you about the residential school system...

This sort of thing is everywhere. We live in a world where one of the most prosperous countries in the world has a leading political candidate who states that he would "grab [women] by the pussy". Where in articles about women who are experts in their field, there is in inevitable focus on their appearance, on their home life. Where actors are asked to discuss their roles; actresses are asked to discuss losing weight. Where making the leading character in a franchise entry in a majour film series a woman creates widespread outcry. Where people with female-sounding names on applications are categorically subjected to different treatment in how those applications are handled. Where women receive less pay than men for the same work. Women are harrassed on streets and told they are supposed to appreciate it. This sort of thing is pervasive. It's absolutely possible to go through life if you have a certain level of privelege to not realize the myriad ways, subtle and otherwise, that sexism can play a role in one's life. But the fact is, 'I don't experience it, therefore it's not a problem for anyone' is a highly myopic sentiment. I mean, different in a lot of ways here, but a lot of stuff is absolutely the same. It seems like every few months we've got news coming up about yet another judge saying a woman was 'asking for it', street harrassment is still a huge problem (but that, I think, is worldwide), etc, etc. We're better at some things, but, man, I wish Canada was the wonderful fairyland people wished it was.

My request, and subsequent blocklisting, is neither censorship nor about the suggestion. I do not feel comfortable with this person reviewing my work. Your two cents will not make me more comfortable with this person, nor will it make me feel comfortable having them associated with my work in any capacity. I do not want this person's input upon my work.

The thing is, those kinds of points have been made about technology basically as long as we have written records for. This has been said about newspapers, about novels, about telephones, about postal mail. I don't think you're bringing anything new to the table on the subject with this story, in large part beacause you avoid actually doing anything other than presenting blank dialogue, but especially not with how you have it basically culminating in a sexual assault that you didn't warn anyone was coming. You owe us an apology, at the very least, for that. This is a hill I'm willing to die on here. You should feel ashamed of yourself for doing that.

Is there any chance we could get a content tag for sexual assault? Using a combination of S and V can sort of give the impression that the story has sex and violence but not sexual violence, and S alone would fail to address a case of, eg, non-violent sexual assault. There's circumstances in which I can deal with with encountering sexual assault in a work (eg, not in a short, not in a prologue), but in any case where it occurs I very much wish to be informed beforehand, either so I can prepare myself or take a pass.

No problem! For most people this really is rarely intentional, and it is hard to deal with seeing it all unraveled, But there's no way to deal with it if you can't, so... Yeah, this one's trickier because it's less uniquely offensive than, say, describing a black woman as having chocolate skin, but in most cases it's pretty exoticizing. I wouldn't take issue with a real person using that sort of phrasing to describe themself, say, but it is the sort of phrasing it's good to watch out for. So one thing I noticed a lot of is that you are giving a lot of exposition that is straight-up not needed. Just off the top of my head, the bit about the relative age thing is in no way relevant to anything occurring on the page and none of the events occurring is the slightest bit enhanced by giving hard numbers for the characters' ages. We know they're adults because you've written them as adults, and more than that is just bleeding urgency away. It's your world and you're excited about it an you want to tell the reader about it, but it's not necessarily going to help the story for you to do that. You can convey a lot by painting around the fringes.

p.1 So if you're going for a dreamlike quality, you're using far too meany simple declarative sentences. You're just straight-up telling us these things and you're relying on the fact that they're not particularly ordinary to carry you. You're giving us clear facts. Facts aren't great for creating atmosphere in general, but they're basically the opposite of dreamlike. Three-quarters of your very first page is entirely undescribed, un-attributed dialogue, from characters we are entirely unfamiliar with. How are we the reader intended to discern who is saying what? And again, the dialogue is very grounded and mundane; you're also falling back on cliche right from the get-go ('i can't help you unless you tell me everything', the entirety of the 'it just feels so fake' line, etc). No actual sense of mystery is created by this, especially with you giving nothing to make us interested in why we would want to know what's going on. p.2 As above. Mystery and interest are not created by saying point-blank 'I know something you don't' and leaving it at that, which is basically what's going on here. At this point you should be asking yourself: what have I done to make the reader care about what is going on here? p.3 So. 'Man who is now a woman' is pretty gross. If he's a woman now, he's a woman now. If he remains a man through the change in form, he's a man. If he doesn't know what a change like that means for him, that's fine too. 'Man who is now a woman' is not. Especially if you're trying to go for a dreamlike atmosphere. Dreams fixate in the moment, and they aren't concerned with durational nonsense. But there's basically no way to create dreamlike through unattributed dialogue. p.4 I assume we're intended to be shocked or at least interested by this point? You're giving me nothing at all here. This isn't a story, it's a script, and even a script has stage directions. p.5 Again, you're falling hard on cliche. I assume the 'crying for myself' bit is supposed to have weight. But it's a pretty hackneyed line. p.6 Honestly, the bit about the dune is the first time I've felt like there might actually be something interesting going on here. You also do need a specific grammar pass. This isn't a great format for that sort of thing but I'm seeing a lot of minor errors throughout. p.8 The descriptive paragraph at the start of this leans a little on passive voice ('begins to appear', eg) but is decent. If the rest of the work were more like this, you'd be more on target, I think. Gwent, however is the name of a highly popular minigame (to the point of receiving its own spinoff) in an extremely famous video game. I suggest going with something else. It's unfortunate to go back to the script after that, though. p.9 'Nature ruled over man'? What is this, the fifties? You've got tense issues in the final paragraph; you waffle between past and present. Also some passive voice problems here. p.10 This one's probably the least effective description thus far; stacking adjectives too high in too rapid succession makes for a very awkward sort of phrasing. I feel like you're trying to create thought about the nature of reality here but you're hamstringing yourself with the complete lack of... anything. p.11-12 So now we get description? Please consider what this says about where your story's priorities lie. If nothing else, it comes off to me like everything prior to this was filler and this scene is the one you wanted to write. p.13 And now we're back to the script format. You've got a couple more hooks here, a few things that carry interest like the artist, but it's really too little too late by this point. p.14-15 ... Why do you feel a depiction of sexual assault is necessary to the story you need to tell? Why do you feel that that is neither gratuitous nor worthy of unique warning? And this is stopped by him strangling her to death and this is... okay somehow? because she's an ai and it's not real or something? and he's carrying about his day? p.16-17 The description here is in a completely different style from all of the description previously and it's not in a way that is particularly to its credit. Where you do finally provide dialogue narration, you're using odd said-bookisms (cries) and inappropriate appendations (said squealing), eg. Your grammar's falling apart around here. This is a really immature conversation as well. Again, you're falling into every possible cliche of the negative depiction of the ex-wife/girlfriend character. The actual content of the conversation has a very high school writing sort of feel to it. I don't feel a real understanding of the sort of ways people behave to one another after a long-term relationship has fallen apart. If I encountered this in a published book, I would think that whomever wrote this was angry at an ex when they did so. p.18 eh.

I'm going to ask you to refrain from critiquing my work in the future, please and thank you. I will do you the same courtesy. Please do not feel a need to respond, as I am adding you to my ignore list.

But that one's my favourite! :v (why yes, I do have a miniature Holtzmann action figure) Mako Mori as a test is interesting if only because Pacific Rim doesn't pass Bechdel-- it sort of exists as an alternative, though if you can get both that's obviously best, and it's sort of established with a different purpose. There's additional context to Bechdel and I'm not 100% comfortable with it having inflated as it has (the original context is two lesbians frustrated with heterosexual romances in films), and it's not an inherent 'not sexist' card either about the depictions of characters or the narratives, but as a starting ground, it's very good.

P.1 I don't think your second sentence scans. It's got some odd inverted construction such that the first section of the sentence reads very fragmentarily. I also don't like that 'however' in the third; it reads waffley. The sentence you choose to close out the paragraph with is effectively devoid of meaning. Overall despite a solid first sentence this is a really weak opening paragraph. Your phrasing is awkward, as if you're not comfortable with the words you're using, and it avoids meaning that would be used to attract interest. Moving on, things like 'could have been seen at miles' is a strange, passive-voice phrase that feels very weak overall. You're not doing much to capture interest, and so much of this does come directly from sentence construction at this stage of it. You're not writing in a way that says there's anything interesting to come. You're also using waaaay too many adverbs even here; I don't believe you should never use them, but generally, you do need to mind how, where, and to what purpose you're using them. 'pale' is implied by moonlight, eg, and generally puts the reader in mind of other media that has used this phrase to greater effect. As a rule it is a bad idea to go for direct reference this early on in a work. At this point the only purpose it serves is to make the reader want to consume said other media instead. You go for redundancy a lot here; 'desperate urgency', I see another occurance of the specific, non-common 'seen at miles', and 'like a living creature creeping slowly through the city' is a simile that just does not feel right. Just going over the first page, I strongly recommend doing a lot more analytical reading of prose that you enjoy reading and working out what makes you like reading it before going back and doing further revisions. Right now, it feels like you're struggling. P.2 Peculiar inhabitants. Peculiar in whose opinion? Right now we seem to be using an omniscient, disconnected narrator. While this is less in fashion these days there's nothing wrong with that, but it makes a value judgement like 'peculiar' seem very strange. You're doing a lot of telling in the way you're conveying the information about these people. This is not an appealing paragraph to read. Also, while there's nothing wrong with the word, 'lithe frame' generally puts me in mind of character descriptions used for online erotic roleplay. I might consider something else. So, this dialogue, this opening line. Let's talk about this. There's a lot going on here, and there's not very much of it that I like. So you're describing it as 'urged him anxiously for what seemed like the hundredth time'. This is quadruply redundant (urged is implied by the dialogue; anxiously is implied by urged, and for what seemed like the hundredth time is well-evoked by all the rest); we've got a 'him' at a point where we haven't had a person being the subject of a sentence since the very first sentence of the work, and this line of dialogue is not phrased urgently. Please, read this aloud. Read it aloud exactly as you have written, every single word. This is not an urgent line. And let's talk about how this line is as an opener for a female character: her very introduction is framed in context of a man, and it's framed as her nagging. This does not endear me-- not to her, but to the work as a whole. We're also going straight from that semi-omniscient thing into POV and it's a very very very jarring. And then the descriptive paragraph, yikes. I'd like you to review this twitter account: https://twitter.com/femscriptintros because this is the sort of thing you're doing here. Also almond is really not an appropriate descriptor for eyes in general; it kind of plays into racially-charged descriptors which are insensitive at best. Avoid food as any descriptor at all when referring to a person. So then it's immediately followed with maid-and-butler dialogue, which in this context is straight-up mansplaining. If this were a book in a store, I might have read up to this point if a friend were insistent that it was good, but this would be a hard dealbreaker. Beyond that, it's not appropriate to use numerals in a story like that; the number should be written out as words. 'Study and matter-of-factness' is both redundant, and factness isn't a word and doesn't really scan if you try and use it as one. The rest of the page is devoted to making the woman appear foolish in the face of the man's important actions. Last paragraph has sentence structure issues also. Again, I do recommend reading aloud, word for word. This is some very stilted phrasing, and that is liable to help. P.3 In the strongest possible terms I suggest you find something other than 'the black army' as a name for this enemy force. This is racially-charged language, regardless of whether you intended it that way. There is a categorically bizarre lack of urgency going on here. He's casually looking through the window and oop the enemy is breaking through the lines right there, and... this line of action and dialogue makes no sense whatsoever. You have this very very calm, very deliberate, very stilted language being used in the dialogue; it does not appear as either of the characters speaking actually care what is going on. 'said inquisitively' is very redundant, and 'worry thick in his voice' is a sentence fragment. Again, this doesn't read like you're comfortable with the words you're using. Your grammar kind of falls apart toward the bottom of the page here. The line of dialogue at the bottom is frankly contemptible; so far this interaction has entirely comprised of him treating her like the sort of rubber duck it's recommended that programmers explain their code to. p.4 Numbers again, and you're falling out of voice to shoehorn in exposition. Are we using a character's POV or not? If you are, why is Lyzell stopping in this theoretically incredibly dangerous and urgent moment to think about his age relative to a human's? Again, your grammar is all over the place here on this page; this format is basically useless for that sort of correction but you do need a thorough editing pass with that in mind. 'enhanced' ears? Have they been modified in some way? p.5 You fall back on cliche a lot in your description here. I do not find this pleasant to read. The word 'stuff' is thoroughly out of register; it sticks out like a sore thumb. I'm also not sure how at all we're supposed to believe she's fierce because she has literally spent the entire time on the page either being exposited to or her body put on display for the male reader's consumption. She has nagged but ultimately aquiesced to this ultimately superior male figure. You tell us these things about her, but you write her as an object to be coveted. Why is it important for the reader to know how beautiful she is? Why is it more important for the reader to know how beautiful she is than it is for us to literally know anything at all about the man mansplaining to her? Why are you raining down information that we have no reason to care about as yet, but not devoting a single sentence to revealing anything about the characters? p.6 said adverbedly is a construction that should be thoroughly avoided. Again, your prose on this page... I extremely strongly recommend you look closely at how other books you like are written, on the fundamental mechanical level. Look at what they're doing and look at how it works and what makes it work. Look at how description is used and where it is used and to what purpose it is used. p.7 Even where Alandria is ostensibly confident and in an area of her expertise, she is aquiescing to Lyzell in every respect. At this point, I'm going to talk about litmus tests. The Bechdel test is pretty well-known: do two women have a conversation in a piece of media, one that isn't about a man? Hooray! It passes Bechdel! It's not the be-all and end-all, but it's a reasonable indicator that the narrative at least considers women people. But I'm not going to talk about the Bechdel test here. I'm going to talk about something called the Sexy Lamp test. The Sexy Lamp test is thus: can you take out a female character and replace her with a sexy lamp without affecting the storyline? If yes, that's a fail. We're failing Sexy Lamp. So far, Alandria's entire existence has only had served to be a valuable object who gets explained to. Otherwise, I don't think you're conveying urgency at all. 'Placed' is not an urgent word. p.8 Despite being described as fierce and capable, Alandria's combat prowess has come to literal nothing; she has literally never been correct or successful. p.9 ... Well. By habit I don't really read over other comments before I do mine, but I assume Kaisa has already given you the talk about this sort of thing. You're now going to get the angrier, less patient version as presented by someone with poorer social skills. So you have here a female character, presented as a nag who is continually wrong and failing at every action, described in terms of her beauty and desirability to the male character. Her purpose thus far in the story has been to exist as a coatrack to hang exposition on and to be critically injured so that we the reader can know how real the danger is to the male POV character. You have chosen to do this basically immediately. This is the first series of actions that the reader will encounter. I have some questions at this point that I think you really need to consider. 1) Why do you think this is acceptable? 2) What message do you think this sends about the role of women in your narrative? To be clear, not in your worldbuilding, in your narrative. 3) What other methods of displaying how serious this matter is have you considered? 4) What other methods of exposition have you considered? I'm going to be very real here and say that when I encounter this sort of thing in published books, not only do I not read or purchase that author ever again, I actively discourage friends from reading such authors. I raise this as a reason not to read or purchase these authors whenever their names arise. And I don't mean I discourage people from reading that book. I mean anything such an author has written. Ever. And I remember this sort of thing. For years. I take my time and my money elsewhere and I encourage others to do so as well. Is it the end of the world to do it in an early draft like this? Nah, because it's still possible to remove it. But I want to make it as clear as possible that this is something actually very serious. p.10 All caps. Really...? So the last paragraph, you're using somewhat erotically-charged language to describe Alandria's brutally injured body. 'Soft moans' are sexy words, and you're juxtaposing both her blood and the monster looming over her. If this character had been presented thus far as anything other than an object for male attention, I might be willing to give more benefit of the doubt given the rest of the paragraph, but at this point, she's been so thoroughly objectified, I can't apply any other reading. I don't necessarily think it's intentional, but this is extremely unpleasant to encounter. Otherwise, this scene is very awkward to actually physically picture. The motions don't make a ton of sense in space. p.11 This final section is extremely grammatically awkward. It's also basically an it-was-all-a-dream ending to what just happened. This... basically means we've watched this woman be brutalized in loving detail only for 'nope you're gonna be okay'. It feels extremely tacked on. Overall, you do a lot of jumping back and forth between short declarative sentences, and really overwrought descriptive lines. The jumps between the two are awkward and don't flow naturally, and your declaratives are repetitive in construction 'he, he, he', and your description falls frequently on cliche and piles and piles of adverbs and adjectives. You devote a lot of space to saying things but not conveying them; Alandria is supposedly a capable warrior but displays no competency, everything is terribly urgent but everyone acts slowly, deliberately, almost lazily, Lyzell supposedly loves his wife but constantly condescends to her and in POV treats her as a nag, etc.

Thank you for the suggestion. e: Actually, on second thought, no, I'm going to unpack this, because there's some severe misconceptions going on with this. 1) What you're describing here is tokenism. Straight-up. Now, I'm of the school of thought that tokenism is better than literally nothing in terms of representation, but it is in no way a demonstration of lack of bias either in the text or in the author. In fact, it's a demonstration that the bias exists. If the reason you are including women is so that you don't appear sexist, that is an act of sexism. Is it the worst possible act of sexism in the world? Nah. But it's sexist, and learning to recognize when one takes such action is key to helping stop do them. 2) It is in no way similar. Let's talk about why, and the answer comes down to representation of marginalized groups. Priests, of any religion, real or fictional, are not a marginalized group. They're an opt-in group of people who typically have authority within their communities. This is literally the opposite of being marginalized. Women, people of colour, non-cisgendered people, non-heterosexual people, all of these people are marginalized in real life and in fiction; they are frequently subjected to violence on this basis, they are frequently singled out for violence in fiction on this basis, if they are included at all, and they are subject to both social and political restrictions within many societies in both real life and in fiction. Having a main character be a priest who is a violent revolutionary attempting to destabilize the empire that colonized and subjugated their people is not the same as, for example, portraying all women in one's work as shrieking harpies. It is not even the position of the author that this is a negative depiction at all. An analogy is only appropriate if it takes into account the implications surrounding both sides of the analogy, and in this case it very much does not.

There's probably some D&D or Pathfinder novel that has that.

That is an entirely valid reading, and one that is not wholly unintended. This is a story about the exercise of power by the corrupt, about them using established power structures for the exploitation of others, and the exploitation of religion for political power. And about the agents of a blood goddess attempting to destabilize an empire. Thanks on the rest, I'll make some notes!

*No violence occurs on the page, but the POV character is rather fixated on an act of violence. Previously: Savae Alevrin, the human jeweler, archmage, and priest of the moons, is at best politely tolerated in the aelin city of Ilidria; at worst, the normally tightly-restrained people are openly hostile. Beholden to the crime lord Varael Ashana, they're tasked with obtaining a token from a senator so that he can work his dread magic. But they have their own tasks, and an object they need in order to perform one comes in the arms of a nervous adolescent girl calling herself Kathalania. After some coaxing, Kathalania blurts that she believe she's killed the city's own living goddess... Since it's been a while since last chapter, some WRS notes: in chapter 3, Lasila encounters a priestess of Alia matching the description here, named Maranthe. Maranthe told Lasila that she holds the potential for a probably-illegal form of magic, and invited Lasila to celebrate the goddess' rebirth in a month's time. I have some issues with this chapter but I was treading water on it for a long time and it accomplishes what I need done, so. Right now I'm not going to direct you at anything specific; I want to see what you come up with. Thanks!

Between 4 and 5k is a perfectly reasonable target for chapter length! Just, this one did what it needed to in two, lol.

There are a few authors who are known for having the pull to 'fire' their editor and just not have one. It's pretty much always a marker of a sharp divide in quality in their work. Anne Rice, I think, is the canonical example...