neongrey

So, I was away the week the original version came out, so this is my first look at it this story. Overall: isn't this the intro to Gladiator? Nearly note for note. p.1 Your first paragraph is incredibly weak. Misplaced commas in the first sentence aside, you're opening off by telling us that wow, all this potentially interesting stuff has already happened and there's no particularly interesting thing going on presently. If you'd like, I can pull it apart in more detail, because in all honesty, I feel like you could use this opener as a teaching example of how not to open a story. But that's the gist. Straight-up, I would not read past the first sentence if I encountered this story in the wild. I'm also really tired of characters whose fortunes are presented as inherently tied to war but are always hoping the war is ending. It's a very tired design cliche used to add interest to otherwise paper-thin characters; it is more or less the grizzled manpain form of 'but she's very clumsy' common to weakly-written YA heroines. That is, it's never actually presented as a meaningful point in the character; it never meaningfully informs the character's actions, there's never a consequence or opportunity cost. It's a standard bolt-on. Your second paragraph reinforces your first, including in having commas that should not be there. para 3, holy expository dialogue, batman. This is parody, right? You do not expect the reader to take this seriously, do you? You cannot. para 4, the paragraph itself is just really badly constructed, your actors are tangled, and... okay, so, both keep from angrying up my own blood and because there's enough here that I'd need to use gdocs or word, I'm not going to give you line-by-lines here but every single sentence thus far has stuff I'd call out if I was doing that, some in multiple places. I'm going to have to skim, and just make broad notations per page. p.2 You're breaking POV to tell the reader about your main character. Do you really have that little faith in your own ability to convey this by how you present his actions in the story? You need to read your dialogue out loud, because right now your phrasing is incredibly stilted. "She is getting big" is in no way a natural construction and pretty much everything else is the same calibre. Your narration too would benefit because it's got this very ponderous, unnatural phrasing to it. You'd do well to look at sentences that you feel have a natural flow to them and pull them apart and look at why they work well. And we bottom off the page with a one-two punch of very tired heteronormative cliches. p.3 Oh, god, you're fridging the daughter. You're fridging the daugher. Five dollars says you're fridging the daughter. Look, this paragraph tangent you're going off on here is effectively a filmic technique and it's noted for being really tired there. Gladiator had trouble selling those scenes, and you're not Ridley Scott. It doesn't work in text. p.4 Language continues to be highly stilted. Kendaryk is in charge of the army? Where's he getting his intelligence from? What sort of strategists, tacticians does he have? This seems like a major, major, avoidable blunder if he's at all qualified. p.5 This reads like an outline, and the dialogue continues to serve no purpose other than exposition. This reads more like bullet points. p.6 No new comments here but all old ones remain. P.7 Bland and telly and outliney. Somehow you took a cliched sentiment like boiling blood and put it into passive voice, hamstringing any possible impact you might have had. p.8 You're using way too much passive voice to convey emotion here. You're disconnecting the reader from the action. p.9 Oh wow, I figured you were going to fridge the daughter, but you did that and the mother, too! Two of the three female characters you've seen fit to include in your story have solely existed within the narrative to provide fuel for your main character's manpain. That's vile. This is the sort of decision that in addition to being an incredibly cheap emotional play and showing sheer contempt for women is also the sort of decision that causes readers to think less of the writer as a person. The fact that you're literally opening the story with this-- shock! women are dead, fueling this man's desire to do literally anything at all! is pretty repugnant. I've been trying to be restrained prior to this point but knowing that literally everything I read through up to this point has solely been leading up to this? I'm actually disgusted with myself for not bailing when I saw the warning signs. This isn't okay. This isn't okay at all. You should seriously rethink the decisions that led you to choose this as a motivator for your main character.

Yes indeed! In all three styles! Still jealous, because you have one and I don't, hee.

If I wanted to spend something like a hundred and fifty, I could get it in silver......... one day, hahahahaha

No cars, alas (but it is my favourite movie), probably no duels or highly sexual holes in people's chests, quite a lot of people posing dramatically in elevators enclosed rooms talking about needing to break open the world, definitely a whole load of bi people. I definitely wasn't eyeballing prices on an etsy seller's rose rings just the other day, nosiree. (foiled by the canadian exchange rate, unfortunately)

This is one I'm going to tentatively chalk up to WRS, yeah; magic is literally everywhere, though in the sort of way that, I dunno, plumbing is in reality, in the sense of the presence thereof being taken as typical, not in the functional sense (though the plumbing here is magic... heh). This particular magic is............... incredibly shady, and not only because it's presently being used solely as a weapon of war by an enemy. We'll see a bit of it in action earlier on before this point when I do that insert scene with Savae earlier on and in 11 we'll see two people do some unpleasant things with it. How shady is not really supposed to be knowable yet, though. 'Stealing blood from poor people' might be a thing later on. Reference, intentional and otherwise, is definitely a personal problem of mine. I'm not saying that there's a character we've already encountered that I've been known to describe as 'basically Akio Ohtori' (who is probably not discernible yet), but I will say the series is hugely influential on me, just as a general matter of course. Mm. Well, I'm not going for romance or romantic with it; it's far more of a symbolic gesture, so there's that. If it seems overly aggressive I'm okay with that given it's not pursued further. If it's worse than concerning, I'd need to look at it some, but I think 'unsure' is about where I want you to be, so I think I'm probably good that way. Change, not so much, but those are definitely influencing her, as well as this actually being the first time we've seen her on even footing with pretty much anyone. Which is not something that occurred before I say that, so I might need to do something about that. See how it works out going forward, too. Thanks!

I guess this is (S). I'm a bad judge. Previously: The living goddess of Ilidria is dead and Lasila Vahendra has been invited to celebrate her return. Lasila's elder brother Varinen has left to assist with negotiations that might put an end to the war that has been draining the city dry. At the celebration, Lasila finds herself trying to put together the pieces of political discourse she catches, and meets both her escort's brother and his intended, Iluya of house Judessa; though she finds her escort, Eshrin, a difficult person, the two girls hit it off, and Iluya offers a potential lead for a job. Savae doesn't appear in this chapter, so I'll hold off on a full recap for them. Last time: Iluya warns Lasila that there's more going on than meets the eye; a particular Senator is more aware of Lasila than he should be, and that Eshrin is suspicious of why Lasila might be present at this event. Before they can discuss much further, Lasila is taken to see the priestess Maranthe, who invited her to this event. She also briefly makes the acquaintance of a stated high priest of the goddess of the moons, one archmage Savae Alevrin. Maranthe and Lasila discuss magic and the war against the shudkathra; Maranthe uses Lasila's blood in a brief ritual that reveals... something. Savae departs and makes arrangements with a veiled shudkathra woman, who is somehow involved in the death and rebirth of the goddess. They then go and make a prearranged exchange with an agent of an organized crime group. This time: Lasila makes a decision that is no choice at all (or is it?), meets a boy, talks politics, and takes something she wants. Next time: The goddess Alia. And...

She's stating that Rienri Linphori is the economically correct choice, that she prefers Eshrin to Rienri (and that she is absolutely having her way with Eshrin on the side), and that she's got to marry someone because she's got very few options available to her. And she definitely both invited Lasila to a threesome and it-would-be-possible-to-interpret-her-statement-this-way-maybe-if-you-have-a-dirty-mind implied Senator Melqueth is off having his way with Eshrin. I dunno, I'm honestly not sure what markers you're looking for on this. No character at any point is particularly batting their eyelash at same-gender relations; most reactions indicate that bisexual attraction is more or less the norm but marriage is generally discussed in economic terms and open marriages are vaguely suggested pretty much every time slightly unfavourable conditions for marriage come up (Iluya, certainly, is outright polyamorous). There's generally been no particular social value placed upon virginity when the subject has arisen. Savae did straight-up suggest social stigma against aelin-human relations, strong enough that even in the case of formal anonymity it's still extant. As I've been saying, there's a scene to be inserted on edit which will have this, as it clearly provides necessary context. I've just been summarizing the intent of said scene for the past few subs to paper over the fact that it doesn't exist yet. Thanks!

All right; given the nature of the sub I'm going to leave off prose commentary. I don't much care for Quirk's POV; I think he would be more entertaining from someone else's eyes. As it is I find him pretty tedious; trying too hard, as it were. There's a sensation of disdain for his own trappings that I'm catching on, I think; he may think it's nice that people appreciate these particular fine things, but I'm not feeling so much that he does, either. He comes off like a poseur to me, a few degrees out from 'correct', and it chafes. Moth is generally more readable, though her vernacular is all over the place. She does not have a coinsistent voice; you're mixing both age and formality registers like crazy and the result is kind of dissonant. The homophobia and misogyny feel unnecessary, too; I don't think they're adding much to the character's voice or personality; one gets a pretty clear impression of her roughness without going that route. Even so, I've got a strong preference for her and her voice. Professor Robot is novel, though something feels inconsistent in the stylings of some of these messages; the warnings in particular feel a bit out to me. Still, this one was fun.

I'd be less inclined to that-- sometimes you get initialisms coming into common usage (laser, radar, snafu, etc) but by and large people tend to abbreviate, especially when it comes to slang. And a common slang usage probably would not be coming from the formal/technical term. It may sound tempting because you can verb it easily and I can certainly see it as being, say, the word that gets pushed by marketing interests, but-- well, people don't like to run with that. Consider, say, how people reacted to the initial reveal of the name for the xbox one. marketing's thought was that people would 'just call it 'the one''. People mashed the words together and were calling it the xbone in under a day; they then more or less settled into calling it the xbox, same as previous iterations. Since something like this would inherently be a commercial service, I'd start with what it's technically called, go from there to what it's marketed as (this might not necessarily be super different, see: 'the Internet'), and start lopping off syllables or mashing words together and go from there until something seems snappy.

Lasila's reaction to confusion is something along the lines of faking it until she makes it, yeah. She's supplying basic context which she does have, and then assembling situations from there. I made a pretty conscious choice to go with a main character who was familiar with the general shape of the situation if not the details and would actively piece things together herself, rather than need to be explained at; I find the 'start the main character ignorant' thing tedious at the best of times. That said, there's definitely stuff coming, as we're seeing, that does need to be explained to her...

Among other things there's a lot of demagougery flying around and I think excerpting political speeches, religious sermons, and letters will help. Melqueth's presence looms large but he's not got a lot of physical presence in Lasila's story, or at least the outline doesn't call for it. And I outline loosely so there's room for that to change, but... Then too there's the matter of Varinen's correspondence with Lasila; the letters will start coming soon after where I'm currently written up until. Would be smoother than integrating the text into the body of the chapter. See how it goes; I could place them where I need them on the first go-round and then pin in backwards when I've got the complete shape of things. I have, which will probably not be surprising at all, quite a lot of material to draw from. There's always people who skip these things, but my feeling is generally that while if i'm being boring, that's my fault, if someone's actively skipping text, I'm not responsible for them not knowing things they actively chose not to read. This is only true early on-- once people are invested, you'd be shocked at what you can get them to do. And I say this once having gotten people translating something like a hundred and fifty words worth of wingdings... in jpeg format. But that was an unusual story, and by that point I'd trained the readers to expect things like that in the supplemental material, so. It's all about properly laying the groundwork. That said-- I'd call that book more interesting than Lasila gave it credit for. She disdains a lot of that stuff. It's also not exactly pertinent to her situation. But don't tempt me into excerpting The Happy Little Taenosil, a children's classic about a taenosil who wants to grow wings. The moral of the story is that succumbing to social pressure is a good thing. :v

Savae, I fear, does not return until 11 (where they are a very busy person indeed)

More Savae will give a bit more context, and I think some epigraphery would be a benefit also (but that is something I think I would want to add after a first pass). Part of this too is that Lasila is well in over her head; she's putting pieces together as she sees them so there's that at least, hopefully. But yeah, there's room for cleanup here too.

My 9th next week? But I'm afraid it might kill Kaisa, bless her little shipper heart (an intentionally misleading thing: ).

I would actually place that point in 10, at a very specific point; it's where I place the close of the first act, at least. Where we presently stand, we've met... most of the major players. And most of the majour plots are underway. If one wanted to compare to a bit of popular fiction, this party is this story's Harrenhall. There's technical reasons about the way I write that led me to err tame to start, yeah. Should be dirtier in redraft, lol. Nah, it could probably use a bit more definition. Probably not a textual one beyond that Lasila was already seated when Iluya arrived last chapter; the text makes much of Lasila's substantial height (around five ten; Iluya is around five five) in various ways. She can be quite imposing when she cares to be. Yeah, I see a typo there. You know, I meant to go fix that line but it slipped my mind entirely. A rug; I could have sworn I mentioned it, but it seems not. Thanks!

I've got a pretty love-hate relationship with stuff heavily based on Abrahamic mythology; some of my favourite stories use it but it can be pretty lazy in terms of how it relies upon reader preconception. Plus, it's one of those things where it's familiar enough that being out in certain ways can cause an uncanny valley effect, or just annoy people when things are wrong. And I feel like it's pretty overdone, especially when it comes down to, say, literally playing devil's advocate. "What if the devil wasn't as bad a guy as he's made out to be" is pretty bog-standard teenage gothery and PSX-era JRPGs. Now, something being done before isn't a reason not to do it, but it does make things a harder sell, it makes it harder to bring something new to the area, and honestly, it does make it harder to do it right. p.1 'smile at once enigmatic and reluctant' honestly doesn't make a whole lot of sense either from a 'what does this actually look like' sense or from an internal POV sense (since this does appear to be Lucifer's POV). Self-describing something you do yourself as enigmatic? Nah. And honestly, it's pretty telly. Then you do a hard follow up to that with 'amusement' and eh, yeah, no. Again, I'm having trouble with basking in the sensation of hammers pounding the inside of the skull. So far I'm kind of having trouble feeling these characters as angels just by narration and dialogue. And it's only a page in, so we'll see how it goes from here. There's not really anything particularly other about them thus far. Now, it's possible to do angels driven by effectively human motivation or emotion but it's brutally hard to do well. p.2 So, going with 'evil is a tangible thing that exists', huh? I've got a casual interest in theodicy as addressed by fiction, so... we'll see. Okay, the motivation we go into further down the page is put-the-book-down level of cliche. You're on really, really well-trodden ground here, so the interested reader is liable to be familiar with fiction covering the subject; you need to sell to the reader fast that you're bringing something new to the table. p.3 This reads like fanfiction. Which is not a knock on fanfiction, I've written fanfiction, there's a lot of good stuff out there. But your dialogue reads like it's primarily informed by video games, and the actions accompanying it... you use 'retorted' as a dialogue tag twice in four paragraphs, once acompanied by an adverb. If you're doing this it's showing a lack of confidence in the actual words being used. Do you really need 'retorted defiantly' to convey a sentiment that should be done by the dialogue? You shouldn't. I'm not line-by-lineing here but I'm not seeing much in the first section on this page to like. Going into the second section here... yeah, I am not feeling this character as an angel. p.4 "'Cathy,' he panted. 'We were right.' I'm out. Apologies, but this is as far as I'm going with this one.

eeeeeeeeeeeeee!

It's not meaningfully possible to be anachronistic with this story (certainly, if anything is anachronistic, it lies in the outfits, which are mostly 2015-2016 runway pieces), is why I framed it as I did. It's possible for words not to fit, absolutely, but the faux medievalism that poisons this genre generally causes people to ascribe style mismatches to chronological issues in all possible cases. While sometimes this actually is the case, realistically this issue is misattributed everywhere in the genre because really, most 'medieval' fantasy has about as much in common with actual medieval stylings as hard SF does, ie, basically none... but this story isn't a period piece in any meaningful sense of the term. ... basically, if he's not tripping you up it's fine, but his register bears markers of things that other people have ascribed to anachronism before, so I was just heading that one off at the pass. There's a chart; I can link it in my emails but right now the only thing I have is my live draft in evernote so I can't be posting it in a public forum, and right now it's got several notes-to-self in it. I meant to include it this time but forgot. Lady is a valid form of address (senators' wives, heads of certain houses, etc) but yeah, miladies is not right there, even with Savae rather intentionally being a bit rude here. (and in this case it is a bit rude to ascribe that style to either of them). I'll figure out something. Maybe leaning harder on the foreign. Possibly the initial one yet to be written, since that also does the job of showing off some... practical applications, but not with the extant bit with Savae, no. Savae hasn't sat down and thought about this stuff in years. The dialogue just needs rework, I think that'll fix most of it. Probably a lot of this doesn't need directly to be conveyed.

I'm not gonna call out general grammar here; just mind your subject/verb agreement, your tenses, and your comma placement. You're out on the first two, and on the latter you've got issues both with not placing them correctly and using them to splice independent clauses together in sentences. p.1 Your opening sentence is pretty muddled in terms of meaning; I see a lot of fixation on 'almost nameless' which could be made to work, but the front half of the sentence can't carry the weight of a phrase that sacrifices meaning for a vague sense of poetry. 'all often-used routes' is a mouthful of unnatural syntax, and centering 'a space-ship crashed' in the middle robs immediacy from the sentence; we're diving right in already disconnected from the action. Your second sentence is a lot more effective, at least halfway; you're evoking images decently, right up until you drop hard from conjuring images into clinical numbers and distances. The dissonance here is not pleasant. 'got a broken piece of metal' is pretty weak phrasing, even for as distant as you're holding your POV-- is this limited or omniscient? Another verb here would help though I think general rework on the sentence might do better. Piece of metal is pretty vague. 'assistant of the Centa' is not super natural phrasing in English; it's a pretty awkward passive-voice construction. You'd want to look at things like 'Centa's assistant' or similar. 'didn't lose a word'? I'm not certain what you're meaning by this. 'eyes of the Centa' is another of those passive-voice constructions you'll want to look out for. in general, if you see yourself writing in the form 'x of the y', it should usually be 'the y's x'. "Centas across the galaxy, everybody would" you're gonna want a semicolon instead of a comma there. It's spelled Faithful. p.2 The first two paragraphs: yikes. You're cramming a ton of information into a very small space. I would ask myself how many of these names the reader needs to know right away and start paring down from there. Commas go inside the quotation marks; you need punctuation at the end of sentences before going into dialogue, and the first letters of new sentences should be capitalized in dialogue. I would actually recommend reading this; despite the framing device, it's a pretty good overview of both how you attribute and punctuate dialogue, and also why you do it that way. 'merchant lady' is a phrase that sours me right from the get-go. Merchant is not a term that needs a gender attached and we've established earlier in the sentence that she's a she; it comes off condescending to phrase it in this manner. Comma splice at the end of Regent Zayfa first line; you'll want to swap the comma after Ascoldiusi for a semicolon. 'blessings on our weapons will expire' is an incredibly video gamey phrasing; this is where I would stop reading entirely. Evoking buff maintenance in an MMO is never a good move in narrative. A lot of this dialogue seems to be people explaning to each other things they already know, and the ways in which you're introducing the characters feels awkward. You're giving one-two lines of description each but they don't have very distinct voices. 'a second Giassa some dozens of times' is not a construction that makes sense. p. 3 'raid of the pagans' is not grammatically correct here; you want 'by' rather than 'of', or simply 'pagan raid' would both be correct. 'nobody lived on giassa anymore...' etc is a sentence that is really clunky. You'll want a semiclolon rather than a comma, and the part after the em-dash just makes me want to go all wikipedia and say 'citation needed'. 'some said' is not really a meaningful phrase. who's saying this? why are they saying it? is this something the reader needs to know? is it something the reader will want to know? 'by the superstition of the people' is, again, pretty awkward. you've got passive voice with the 'superstition of the people' and then it's extra passive voice by 'pronounced [...] by the superstition'. The sentence is tying itself in knots to frame what it's trying to convey as circuitously as possible. 'Pilgrimmed' is not a word. 'Celrya XIII'... this sentence runs on and on and on, and is loaded with comma splices. Of note: 'was competent for a centa'? Is it generally expected that they be incompetent? 'With this Celrya blonde they at least had' this sentence just does not work at all, grammatically speaking. p.4 No unique comments but phrasing is out throughout. Overall: I would say 80% of your problem is grammatical; it's a severe problem throughout. This goes a bit deeper than just subject/verb agreement and more into severe syntax issues. Basically you're not assembling sentences in ways that scan to habitual speakers of English, which hinders people being able to understand what's going on at all. All I can really suggest on this is to read in English more, and look at the ways sentences are constructed. Omniscient POV isn't used super often anymore in English either and it's as a rule very difficult to work effectively; I notice upon scanning upwards that people are having trouble recognizing its usage here; I'd ascribe that to the awkward syntax. That said I think if you managed to get the sentences parsing more naturally I think we'd have a decent, if chilly, intro section here. I think you've got interesting seeds under here but right now this is not particularly readable.

They've got a very long formal style, yeah, hehe.

Are you sure about that? I'm doing a ctrl-f and the first occurance I'm seeing of the name here is in Maranthe's introduction.

I'm honestly not going to count this a point against, tbh; Lasila is certainly more the main character than Savae is, but if this story has a hero, it's Savae. And if there's one thing I worry about in terms of how this story is received when it's done, it's people thinking Lasila is authorially intended to be the hero. She's not going full Walter White any time soon, but... Yeah, I'll probably ratchet it up during redraft, but, oh, we've got a few chapters where we can do this. I'm not the best gauge of how far is too far, so I definitely leaned tame for the initial draft. There's another reason why; you might get a kick out of it. It's always nice to back a winning team... As far as is knowable right now, they're not, anyway. :v You might forgive him next chapter. Their name isn't used until Maranthe introduces them. Next chapter! :v

Previously: The city of Ilidria's living goddess is dead, and Lasila Vahendra's only brother has recently left her to fend for herself so he can assist at peace negotiations; the war that has drained the city for nearly eighty years might finally end if they go well. Lasila has other concerns: she has been invited to attend the celebration honouring the goddess' return. Savae Alevrin, Archmage, priest, and jeweler has other goals here: they have been tasked by the crime lord Varael Ashana to obtain a token from Senator Riruna at this event and pass it to his brother-in-law Aserahin Ealis. They have ceremonial roles as well here: both the goddess' death and her return appear to serve their dread portent. In 7: Lasila witnesses a coalition forming to blockade an electoral bid, meets two senators-- one of whom needed no introduction to her-- and finds herself taken under the wing of her escort's brother's intended bride. Savae, alone, makes briefest contact with Aserahin and obtains the necessary token. Now: Iluya gets handsy. Lasila doesn't much mind. Maranthe exposits. Savae completes preparations for the remainder of the evening, and makes the exchange with Aserahin. Next time: Lasila considers what's actually important to her, and meets someone in a similar position as herself. She sees something that she wants, and she seizes it. I suspect Aserahin is going to parse too modern for some people-- he's the first person to habitually use informal registers that I've submitted. Varael Ashana does as well, and after revisions the reader will have met him, at the very least, before now. Suffice it simply to say that it is supposed to stick out like a sore thumb, it isn't socially appropriate here, and modernity is not something this story shies away from in any capacity. ABCD isn't something I find useful at all for me, but if the format helps you articulate your thoughts better, I'm not going to say don't. Just don't feel the need to do it on my account, please.

I can take a look-- it's a little outside of what I choose to read usually, or at least this has been thus far, but that just means I need to try a little harder to get into it. HMU if you don't mind that.