neongrey

Here's an article and thread on a similar subject. Most of us don't write outright kids' books but nothing's in a vacuum and all.

When it comes to publishing and marketing though, there is a measure of responsibility that needs to be noted, in that while this isn't a zero-sum game, at times it can be closer to that than it should be. First, recall that it has been tested fairly thoroughly that names that sound both white and/or male are typically taken as being more authoritative regardless of field, regardless of qualification (resume tests are common for this but there's a lot of work going on in this field). Second, with trad publishers, part of why they're selective in the ways that they are is because they're only intending to publish so many books... ... which means that what can and does happen is that you will have publishers declining books on the grounds that they're already publishing these books on these subjects and they're by white/male/straight/cis/etc authors... They will get selected first for publication, demonstrably so. And then there's marketing: again, it's pretty well documented that on average, white male authors get marketed better than other authors; this puts them in people's eyes and minds a lot more above others. Word of mouth spreads them faster. They get recognized more, and this is by no means universal to publication (consider #oscarssowhite). And this is not a, you know, a don't/never/etc, but it is one of those things to be cognizant of as one acts. We don't live or work in a vacuum and this is the sort of thing that very much impacts the people around us.

Why didn't you at any point decide to learn anything about the subject before making pronouncements about it? e: though in retrospect, someone entering into a conversation about something without actually knowing anything about the subject of the conversation, making a sweeping pronouncement about the subject of the conversation regardless, and expecting this pronouncement to be taken seriously frankly precisely describes the phenomenon that ownvoices partially exists to address. You have consistently and repeatedly spoken in favour of oppressive systems and the preservation of oppressive systems. Whether you want to or not, whether you like that fact or not, you are supporting oppression. When you're trying to redefine the terms of the conversation based on a claim that someone else who has not weighed in would feel a certain way, that's taking agency away from them. If you don't want to discuss this here, that's fine, but do that on your own terms, and don't make decisions on Kaisa's behalf.

Then to be absolutely clear: you do not actually know what ownvoices is or what it is for, because it specifically addresses disparities in publishing and representation in fiction. What you are describing is memoir. That is something else. You do not get to redefine what ownvoices is to better suit your own privilege. Also, so-called meritocratic systems have been shown time and time again to not actually be reflective of merit-- they reinforce existing power structures, they don't level them. (I am at work and a little busy so I can't make my citations quite as thorough as I would prefer). What they do is disregard the systemic power imbalances and ways in which people have been systematically disadvantaged. As, frankly, you're arguing in favour of. Frankly, that's up to her and not you.

I mean honestly, there's a word for people writing about their own experiences as nonfiction, and that's memoir. Ownvoices is a thing specifically incepted to highlight those sorts of disparities in publishing fiction, and someone trying to say that this has no value outside of memoir is absolutely emblematic of the reason why it needs to exist. Saying ownvoices should only apply to memoir is saying that the very concept shouldn't belong to the people who incepted it, in favour of a so-called colourblind ideology-- Which, let me be absolutely clear, is a form of racism-- -- is contemptible. It is-- because I note that ownvoices was in large part incepted as a response to YA and children's books-- saying that marginalized children have no business seeing themselves in the fiction they consume. This is coming from someone whose perspective is consistently catered to in fiction, who has vast, vast swaths of literature being written from and marketed to cisgendered heterosexual abled white males. That's contemptible. It is a form of clutching all the toys to one's chest and saying no one else should have them. So I'm going to put that forward as an example of racism being alive and well even within this group because, well, it's present. It's alive and well in this group. And if someone happens to feel personally called out over publicly and repeatedly espousing a fundamentally racist viewpoint-- honestly, I don't care. I really could not possibly care the slightest bit less. It needs to be called out. These things need to be dragged out into the light and exposed for what they are.

Sure.

I mean it's not just with genders-- we have people in this very group who've demonstrated that they value physicists talking physics over, say, black people talking about lived experience as black people. Or people taking more seriously when they hear their physics are wrong than their linguistics are wrong. Social sciences are perceived less scientifically valid-- this extends to the real world too but it's very common to see people who know nothing about, say, sociology writing stories based on incredibly wrong sociological premises who would never dare to get their physics or their chemistry wrong. And this is in large part a problem of sociology, so... Western SFF loves to reinforce existing power structures though too-- look back at the fifties and sixties and look at the handling of women in so many of the popular works from the time. Going back further-- Lovecraft's horror is a horror of privilege: the realization that you are not the most important thing in the universe. So much of the genre is founded on examining everything but deeply-held assumptions or treating such examination as an inherent ill. It doesn't make someone a better person to have been culturally indoctrinated into a way of thinking if they're going to defend that indoctrination. Ignorance is one thing, though there comes a point where people really should take some initiative to educate themselves rather than wait to put their foot in it, but I'm mostly talking about causes, not further action right now.

Most of this seems to be coming in large part from a very firmly-held inherent assumption that there are exactly two genders and attempts to forcibly cast everything that occurs in that sense. This is lousy real-world practice, but it's downright ludicrous when it comes to SFF.

all of that said, you know, let's take a moment to talk about apologies. This sort of apology is of a family best described at "I'm sorry that you have a problem with the thing that I did". This isn't quite down to "sorry you were offended" which is a well-known format for a non-apology, but it's not that far removed. This follows the form of "I'm sorry (for thing I did)" which, okay. The problem is, y'know, what is this actually apologizing for? It's apologizing for "giving offense". There's a lot to unpack there. Let's start with that what the apology for is actually for hurting my feelings. The problem here of course is not that my feelings were hurt-- the problem here was twofold: One, that this was a crit that somehow hinged on reading something that is laboriously instilled in the text and coming away with the literal opposite of what the text says. Somehow you managed to read a text where the first-person narrator repeatedly narrates great distress at the very concept of being considered a woman and read that as 'this is a girl pretending to be a boy'. Okay. Sure. Whatever. This is not to say the text leads the reader to a specific conclusion about the character's gender, but 'not a girl' is a key character trait hammered in throughout. So, you know, the fact that your crit is about 50% "you should make it more clear they're a girl" peppered in with some really gross misogyny (which I let pass as being tangential to the issue, but I really should not have) really throws into question the viability of the crit. Two, that you couched your crit in language that, I stress, is used in the real world to drive real violence. A fact which you don't acknowledge and simply attempt to justify your usage of in this case. But the fact is this attitude causes real harm and perpetuating it does real harm. Even when it's not being used to drive violence, it's used to invalidate people. It was used in this very crit to invalidate the given text. So, I mean, the problem is not that I was offended, the problem was that the crit was dubious and couched in misogynistic and transphobic language. But let's talk more about invalidation and the way the 'offense' form is used to do that. Like one, obviously, it recasts the issue away from any actual thing being done wrong to a perceptual issue of feelings. It carries with it the assumption that there was nothing wrong with the act that caused it, only its result. Two is that specifically 'offense' is itself used to invalidate harm done by actions. 'Being offended' is far more often than not used as a rhetorical shield by the privileged against the marginalized-- in part because of the above recasting, and in part because it's treated as a thing people choose to do or be. This is not really true but this connotation is also part of why it's got no business being in an apology. Basically, any time "offense" comes up in an apology there's the inescapable connotation that the person doing the apologizing does not feel there is a valid reason to apologize. I'm not big into huge self-flagellating apologies, those are gross, but I think an aplogy should actually correctly show awareness of what's being apologized for. So, that being said, no, I don't accept that apology, because either you don't know what the problem actually was, or you don't care, and both are a lousy foundation for apology.

they're twenty-seven, and definitively not a girl and the text hammers and hammers and hammers the latter in and states the former outright. The age thing I think has been discussed fairly thoroughly as something that's seeming off to people right now but the thrust of your assumption is such that it requires ignoring a significant portion of the text and doing the very thing that the main character makes clear is highly distressing. also tying this sort of thing to deception is a major contributor to real-world transphobic violence jsyk

That's pretty usual, at least.

yaaaaaaaaaay! But why are the ebook and print separate listings entirely?

It's an affectation that's been kicking around for about as long as I've been using the nick. But it is, strictly speaking, an affectation and little else, so nbd lol. (start of the sentence capitalization is fine lol)

Joseph Boydon is white, actually, and has come under a fair bit of fire lately for having straight-up lied about it, which, given his work, should be no surprise. But yeah whiteness is the unifying thread between those authors which, unfortunately, is to be expected. grey, but thanks for noticing that I don't capitalize it. That said, I pretty recently gave a fairly decent introductory list in the reading like writers thread, so, uh, I'm not gonna go too far here but going by authors, off the top of my head, NK Jemisin (Fifth Season at the very least, it won that Hugo for a reason), Aliette de Bodard, Cassanda Khaw, Saladin Ahmed... Goodness, the only time I would recommend these is if I somehow heard the phrase "I've been thinking of reading fifty shades of grey..." I like them for what they are, but what they are is softcore BDSM porn. And they get increasingly white savior-y with each successive book, each more ludicrously than the last. You can tell the author became aware of it by the end, but her 'solution' in that last book was... yikes. Even that aside it's absolutely jam-packed of that sort of well-intentioned not-thinking-about-it racism. Nothing ill-intended, no, but...

It's not the responsibility of marginalized people to do emotional labour for the privileged, though, and I mean-- just think about that. For someone who's already marginalized to be told that no, what they're going through somehow doesn't count fully unless they also educate the people who are marginalizing them. Thats contributing to the problem, not alleviating it. It's continuing to cater to privilege. People who can and do educate are valuable and their efforts must be respected, but it's wrong to require the person you're harming lay out the minutiae of the damage when they ask you to stop. Someone who is hurt is not obligated to the person who hurt them. And you know-- I'm pretty sure Kaisa's going to let this one pass, because she's generally more forgiving of constant microaggressions than I am, but I'm not going to. As you say, one must, at times, "speak and keep speaking". Yes. Yes, it was on purpose. You may not have purposefully caused harm by doing this. But words did not magically happen when you started typing. They were not formed out of the ether. The words you used were chosen by you. You did a pretty specific thing after it was made clear to you that doing this was harmful. You need to take responsibility for what you say, and don't just wave it off as 'it's not on purpose' with the assumption that this will make everything okay. Also, for eff's sake, read a book by someone who isn't white, and read more women. And don't say people of colour and women aren't writing the things you like to read; that's categorically not true especially since you're citing a list of chart-toppers. You're selecting the most heavily-marketed things, and it's not wrong to enjoy them, but realize that your selections are not per se coming from you. Though if you're reading Hobb and haven't somehow noticed that her books are in large part about gender, I'd also advise paying more attention to what you read.

Anyway, re abyss, and sorry for double posting, what you're describing is by and large how find-and-replace curses work, it's not really how expletives work, linguistically speaking. Sure, there could be circumstances where 'abyss' would scan when used as an expletive, but what it doesn't do is scan when used exactly where one would use 'hell' in English-- as you're using it, it reads like you're straight-up substituting 'hell', it doesn't feel like a natural usage.

that final clause is not modifying Clupean, it's modifying his curses. Curses do not have trousers or ankles.

Almost, but I've got some revisions to make before I move on first-- mostly cleanup on Savae's stuff. Their story is, at the moment, kind of a mess and I need that cleanup done before I can progress it. Lasila seems to be in much better shape than the last time we hit this part of it. More as in plural; just a phrasing issue, I think. Should feel a little bit ambiguous; Lasila and her brother can't afford to maintain the whole house so a lot of it is shut up. It certainly would be sufficient, if they could afford to keep it up. Of course, Lasila's not about to admit to any of that. Lasila's nearly five eleven, Iluya a little over five five, so yeah. It's a gender crack, is what it is. Lilune loves dichotomies. Maranthe's making a largely reductionist crack about Savae being an ungendered priest of a goddess who loves duality. Savae is taking it as more a comment on their own statement being reductionist than for its literal meaning. Also, it is a statement on the fact that the particular moon/blood/goddess sort of thing is generally associated to we the reader with certain antiquated but still in recent memory breeds of feminism that focus heavily, heavily on anatomical concerns as being the strict definer of womanhood, and has taken a hard turn toward anti-trans bigotries in recent years. I like the imagery, and in this combination, therefore it is critical to hammer down that no, that's not what's going on here. (also, it can only refer to Savae here, not only because Savae is a priest of the moons-goddess, but also because by this point Maranthe's been using the masculine to refer to her god) I actually don't do this at all; I can't, that sort of verbalization makes me wildly uncomfortable. My sometime-collaborator (nobody here has really seen his hand on much, outside of dialogue massage on Eshrin) does-- not just the dialogue, the whole thing. But he doesn't have my neuratypicalities. There's any number of complexities to it, and I wish I could say I did it through the hard work of keeping in mind each character's goals in a conversation or how they feel about what they're saying or to remember that people talk past each other, not at at each other, but the sad truth of it is that it's like falling off a log and comes entirely naturally to me. I more or less have a sense of perfect pitch for dialogue; dialogue that's out in the wrong way is literally physically painful to me. Which is not to say that my dialogue's always right, obviously, any more than someone with perfect pitch always hits the correct notes. But it changes the sorts of issues that come up. probably not, if they're out flat but I've been glossing over them in description a lot, I should work that more, yeah. The rule in the sense in which you are using it is of course always irrelevant so long as the result is intelligible and the usage is appropriate to the context. In short this follows a a descriptive grammar but isn't adherent to perscriptive formalistic grammar. So let's talk about usage and flow of a conversational sentence here. Because both the dialogue and the narration are written in a conversational style-- they're following the speaker/narrator's train of thought. This means that while I the writer have control over the complete sentence, in most cases the speaker has not decided the words that are going to be used before they are used. They know the meaning of what they are going to say but the words have yet to be set in stone. This means that one word must flow naturally into the next. In practice, this is a large contributor to why you should always use contractions unless you're going for specific enunciations. So, let's look at half of the sentence or so, and let's read every word there. Aloud, if that helps. And let's say it as we would if in a conversation. "There's hundreds of regulations" places the stress in this part of the sentence on the first syllable of 'hundreds'. That "there's" is a sort of conversational schwa, fading into the background; it is not important part of the sentence. Compare to "There are hundreds of regulations" and feel where your tongue is in your mouth, feel how it has to move between that 'there' and 'are'; there's a forcible glottal stop there. It's, physically speaking, a little difficult to say; the flow of the sentence is thrown off-kilter because of it. It's not a natural usage-- I would absolutely nail someone for pulling a 'there are' in dialogue, and possibly in a narration, depending on the tone of the narration (as sometimes that does shift to a more precomposed form) So conversationally it's correct, Cambridge dictionary backs me up, I don't mind you bringing this sort of thing up because I love discussing descriptive grammar (which indeed does not mean everything I write is per se correct, because i get way repetitive a lot and have a bad habit of finishing different sentences than the one I start, and, hell, sometimes I'm just not paying attention), but you really get a little bit condescending when you get on the subject. If it makes you feel better, consider it a contraction of 'there exists' She needs a contract lawyer with the capacity to work the magic because she needs someone who can can draft contracts with demons. that they're similar in age, yes, but it's a different honorific if he's older than her. this would be a typo. yeah, I feel like most of the length is feeling that way from considering it as a separate unit (ie as a unique submission). There's possibly other ways to break all of this up but the big thing is that I don't want the final scene of this and the opening scene of the next in the same chapter. So I think this is good for now, and I'll see if it feels overweighty within the whole. Thanks!

tbh yeah, i kind of object to the change on this sort of ground; it being fantasy doesn't obviate technical language being created by technical people; I like a measure of fuziness with stuff like numeric precision, certainly but in the case of 'this is the word for the thing', that is the word for the thing, and it seems to be lowering how aware the character themself is of what they're doing. Is S going to be viewing the work in the creepiest possible way? On the other hand too-- clearly S is also dealing with non-technical people, and pyridine is going to mean literally nothing to them. If S has to describe it that way to other people for clarity's sake...

Savae is the only POV character who's per-se intentionally cast a spell on the page right now; only one of the four is outright incapable. But the entire economy is based on magic. It's in literally every chapter in some regard. There's been multiple conversations about it, Lasila's been researching laws, it's a daily fact of life. I get that somehow this isn't coming through on your end but I'm not sure how to reinforce this more thoroughly without having people basically be astounded by light switches, so to speak. I'll keep an eye out when I go back for rework but I'm still not convinced that in this regard I'm delivering anything other than what was promised. I'll keep an eye out but she's not even worried about what she did (or terribly concerned about repeating it, though the fact that she might accidentally might be a concern to work in, even if it's not actually going to happen); there's a fair bit, here and there, about the cut on her arm and how that went away without a mark, and that she doesn't understand/is kind of weirded out by. She doesn't have a framework for blood-as-power, so there's that. So, I mean, I dunno; at present there's no notation about her being unable to do it again either; I am honestly not sure where you're getting any of this from and it's kind of concerning because it's pretty antithetical to the story being told and the character telling it. I might just grab another set of eyes to look for that because I have no idea where this is coming from.

shudkathra magic is in many aspects blood magic but slightly more pertinently here and working back into pretty much all of Savae's stuff, Savae's goddess is big into blood. One thing I lost a lot of that needs to be re-worked back in is Savae working on this mask; it's briefly brushed on by what Ka/thalan/ia delivers and then never again. That was more present in the first draft, should be. The motive is not something we have, no, though Savae's dismissing it as generalized thirst for power, hence why they don't feel it's worthy of specific comment. But it's been knowable since about chapter three that Maranthe's the one who had the goddess killed. They, please. Not in this draft, it's another thing that needs to be done when I go to fix the Savae stuff. The how doesn't need to get more than brushed on but they have ties to the shudkathra occupying Var Bandor to the south; this is relevant a lot to the Varael stuff; with Maranthe they're mostly just hired as a translator. Maranthe only takes Savae's goddess seriously when she has to, as this bit kind of indicates, and doesn't much like when she does. This story plays a lot with magic-as-mundane and has since page one; this current scene opens off with Lasila casually using a magic pitcher that's chilling water as she pours it. So, no, there isn't, but I don't think the story is setting any expectations that there should be? (if it is, do you mind pointing out any places you recall it? I should look to them) It's expensive, but not unusual. This is not a story about let's-explain-how-magic-works-to-an-unfamiliar-character in any capacity; there's always that aspect of authorial wow-look-at-how-clever-I-am-and-let-me-show-you-by-having-my-authorial-construct-be-amazed-by-it that I find insufferable. It's definitely not an unknowable in this story; it's not a blanket replacement for "science!" but it's categorically not an unknown quantity in anyone's lives here. This is kind of like expecting fear or awe from someone who can't afford electricity being presented with a light switch. That said, this and three will need to be looked at in tandem, I do think it's losing a fair bit in this case by letting Lasila have too much control over the conversation. Maranthe's, as I mentioned above, more of a mystic and she will take a different angle on things if Lasila's not talking all over her. Some of what Lasila says needs to be in here though, it pins up a lot of what she's been doing in the background. Just needs more iteration, I think. I mean, not quite so much hints as been noted as 'this power is the weapon of the enemy' repeatedly since about the first chapter; perhaps not quite so thoroughly reinforced elsewhere that the aelin and humans' own magic is used as their own weapon in the war, though I wonder, because arcanists getting sent off to the war comes up a fair bit... I'll keep an eye out as I go back over everything. It's a gun that only takes a specific type of bullet, which has only ever been fired at Lasila's people but guns themselves are a general fact of life, in this analogy. That said, we're definitely losing a lot of the other things that can be done with this, which again was present in the original; more iteration will deal with this, I think. The broader potential implications are a big draw for Lasila here, far more than being able to blind muggers. After all, fire's heating people's houses in the winter, rather than only lighting shudkathra on fire in the war... I wonder if part of the solution here is to just show how Maranthe arrives, because she sure doesn't use a door... Where/when? I absolutely, 100% must purge even the slightest suggestion of this anywhere it appears in the text. She doesn't know how she did it, couldn't repeat it yet, but what she did (and the fact that she's bothered more by someone trying to rob her than by what she did) cannot ever be the slightest bit in question. She lays out her exact train of thought in that paragraph. Do you mind pointing out which aspects seemed disconnected? The fact that shudkathra silk is spider silk maybe isn't quite reinforced enough, but it's been noted as contraband since Iluya's entrance on the first page of the story. I'll make a note to fold that in a little better.

Mostly it's because of the next one that I arranged it as it is; there might be more sliding around I can do, but mostly I don't want the bit with Irahi in the same chapter as what I'm opening off the next one with. amazing what slapping five years onto a character's age and some shuffled context does; I remember this didn't fly nearly so well before, lol. tbf, there's also no prior employment arrangement, too, hehe. Thanks!

P.1 Prose is a little mushy throughout; you're pretty good about cleaning that sort of thing up on redraft so I'm not going to come down too hard on style notes here. Character seems knowledgeable, educated; I think you're going a bit more precise than I generally like (it's the centimeters doing it more than the wood stuff) but that's not per se a problem. Having a concept of sterility in this sense is interesting. P.2 Definitely still not there yet on the prose; I'm going to avoid commenting further on that unless something changes. Apprenticeship-at-the-fair thing is a little bit cliche but not so much so that I'm going to sweat it too much. The 'careful about the extract'/'didn't need to be as careful' sticks up some. Voice is a little bit mechanical though; I'm getting some stuff just based on what the pov character is doing and interested in, but beyond that I'm not getting a huge sense of them as a person; most of this is straight I-did-this-this-is-what-happened. The pride in the work is evident but that's about it. P.3 Some of the information being presented on this page I can recognize as being important to know, but I don't know that it's very gracefully done. As above on the voice though. P.4 This one seems to be going on too long for what's actually being said here. P.5 Getting better over here though. P.6 Getting a better feel for the character over here as you're starting to hit your stride. P.7 More interesting, but I think a little bit too bulky still. Nothing too serious. The parrot's an interesting locational marker. P.8 -- P.9 Complete/not finished is I think not the most clear of distinctions. I appreciate it but I think it might be a detail that's mostly obfuscatory. p.10 -- P.11 'fistful of crotch' is, I think, perhaps a slightly awkward phrase. p.12 -- P.13 -- P.14 -- P.15 Better again over here, most of the non-noted pages above were just more of the same in re clunk but you're picking up again over here. P.16 Oh, yikes. p.17 Twenty-seven? That feels a little old for the previous context, especially in terms of seeking out an apprenticeship. Not entirely so sure at the expectation that the killing here should be old hat or just plain ol' normal; it being expected to be necessary for someone in such a clearly stigmatized line of work is something I can run with but otherwise it's a bit much, I think. I see S isn't about to shake it off though, so it's mostly the perceived expectations of others on this that need modulation, I think. p.18 Disposing of the body's not going to be occurring? even if it's dismissed -- Overall, yeah, the prose definitely needs work and the initial framing of the apprentice-at-the-fair thing was kind of old hat but it seems that this is going in a different direction so I'm not going to sweat that. Framework's pretty interesting to start; the alchemical stuff here is really interesting and I appreciate that you're going about it in a way that it's clear that someone familiar could get more out of it, without really losing stuff to the reader who isn't familiar. There's a pretty big pop-culture tendency to use alchemy either just a fancy hat on straight-up magic or to beeline for lead-to-gold transmutational stuff which I think is a disservice to both, and really neglects the ways it predicated modern chemistry; there's a lot you can do with the actual concepts as a basis for branching off, and I think you're working that potential pretty well to start.

P.1 This is a lot of unvarnished will-you-explain-x-yes-i-will back and forth; it's not terribly interesting. P.2 Wrong 'capital'; Otherwise this page is better than the last. P.3 Though I have to say, 'nether' sounds a bit unfortunate, given how much it's been co-opted by bad sex writers for half of a euphemism. I think you're probably spending too much time on the description, though, it's kind of getting old by now. P.4 Your description on Lobath is pretty fatphobic; all of it is devoted to describing his weight and how his weight is what makes him look unpleasant. Surely, if you wish him to be both fat and unappealing to look upon, and viewed by someone who doesn't like him, you can find a more creative and less marginalizing way to do that. Otherwise you've still got an issue with direct handouts of information both in dialogue (at the top of the page) and in narration (at the bottom). P.5 There's honestly not much difference in narrative voice between your POV characters and there really ought to be. If you're in POV they really ought to be sounding like they're different people in capacities beyond what information they're needing to witness and are able to convey. If not for the fact that Origon knows who these people are and is explaining them (a little heavy-handedly), his narration doesn't really sound any different from Sam, in terms of things like word choice, sentence structure, diction, etc. They're very different people, clearly, but that's not in the POV. P.6 "de'Eden" as a name is awfully on the nose. Also it doesn't really follow any orthographic convention that I'm familiar with; if you must, either "d'Eden" or "de Eden" would be correct, but honestly, this is the sort of name that hearkens back to my days in high school when every name of every character I invented needed to have some deep and portentious name. It reads on about that level. The argument here really loses steam because it keeps side-tracking to add in more information. P.7 As above, but your attempts to do dialect subtly are really starting to fray here; I let Origon slide before now but as this is coming up more and more, but you're kind of pulling a Robert Jordan with this and the result is pretty painful. That double copula sticks out like a sore thumb. I would either take some time out to research how dialects form and work and can be eased into a text not written in that dialect, or dispense with that and just have the characters actually speak distinctly from one another in terms of actual phrasing and structure. P.8 You're doing a lot of this thing that I really hate in fiction, which is referring to characters by epithets; traditionally you see things like 'the big man' but here youre doing it by species. I get the notion is trying to avoid repetition, but it sucks the life and distinction out of characters by reducing them in this way. the message here is that the primary distinctive feature of Freshta, eg, is that she's a pixie. Once or twice it's not gonna hurt a lot but the whole scene is laced with these and at this point and used in this way the message I take away from this is that none of these people are important in any meaningful way. P.9 Origon might be holding his breath, but I'm not-- the way the scene has been structured (see as above) and with how this has been shotgunned there's no real tension here. p.10 Nothing new, but my previous comments stand. p.11 -- Overall, I mean, I'm not finding much if anything to sink my teeth into here. There's a ton of stuff being told to me but not much for me to do with that information. The characters and POVs are very indistinct; Sam is a little bit better but mostly it seems like the primary means of conveying his discomfort through dialogue is that 'Oh'; otherwise there's not a lot of distinction between anyone. This feels pretty muddy to read.

P.1 Ooh, so this is the actual opener? Not a huge fan of this first paragraph, it's a combination of assuming the reader already has information and shoving other information at the reader. Reads clumsy, and it's a waste of a potential hook; the start's a crime scene but you're opening off with navel gazing. Otherwise, the page here is pretty by-the-numbers, which is fine for what you're doing; the bit describing how Probitus bends is a bit awkwardly-phrased, I think; i think the trouble bit is 'simultaneously bend his good right leg'; simultaneously is a bit out of step with the register of the surrounding, and while i'd take bending a leg as a thing for a broader action, when it comes down to this fine a grade of description, going for 'leg' instead of 'knee' doesn't quite scan. p.2 The remainder of the scene is telly, but otherwise fine, though I note that paint wouldn't really hide a lot of distinctive scars; if there's any physical bump there it's going to still be detailed by the paint. I'm always a bit wary of simple declaratives of 'x hated y' 'z loved a', etc; most of the time they're redundant and they're not very respectful to the reader and I think that's true here as well. You're pretty clearly detailing why Probitus hates this; show some trust that the reader's going to pick up on this. P.3 Your fantasy swears are suffering some find-and-replace clunk here. Abyss doesn't really work as a universal synonym for hell as an expletive; it's breaking up your sentence flow. I'd either stick with hell, or if you must have a nonstandard equivalent, use something that carries a similar 'mild swear' connotation that's not more than one syllable. Especially with swears, you want to map to social connotation, not to literal meaning. P.4 Yeah, see, it works a little bit better here; it's not strictly being a functional substitue for hell. Basically, mix your curse words up. They're a very complex and, dare I say, articulate part of language, but they're oversimplified in ways that makes them fail to ring true a lot of the time. 'stated with a nod for emphasis' is a lot of clunk for one little sentence. If water clocks are the norm, I wonder if 'bell' is the right descriptor; certainly it feels off in this sentence. Spell out numbers, don't type the number. P.5 Not bad, but I think your description here is trying to explain too much. I feel like you could cut this page down by half and not lose any of the intended takeaways. P.6 As above, this feels pretty inflated; you're explaining a lot and it doesn't feel either interesting or important. The little greeting-ritual, too, I think, is a very flimsy sheet over giving out the 'known each other a decade' thing; P.7 As above, yeah, mostly the prose just feels unfocused, I think it's nothing a really thorough edit can't chop down. P.8 As above, but the last sentence also just does not function correctly. Overall, it's not bad at all, really, there's just so much meandering prose here and so much effort given to hammering in information that doesn't need to be done. Olyve continues to look like a typo; I truly honestly don't see why you can't just call it an olive. Functionally and socially they are 100% identical, and if you feel it critical to make it clear at some point that it's a similar fruit that comes from the sea, that's a literal one-sentence thing that can be folded in trivially.