neongrey

P.1 All right, you've got some buy-in from me on the epigraph, though I think the actual phrasing could use some smoothing. I feel like if you're going to use a word like seductively here, you're going to need to be a little more lush with your descriptions right out of the gate. You're not wholly coming up short, but I think if you took the space that you're devoting to meandering in your prose and just sank it into really layering it on here, you'd probably sell it better. You don't need to do a lot more here, but I think a bit more would make it pop. I appreciate a main character with a disability, particularly one where it's an actual impediment to the things they want to do. I'm hoping this comes out well. P.2 Skint is, I think, just uncommon enough a word that seeing it so many times in such rapid succession is a bit odd. Might change it up a little. You've got a good feel going on here otherwise though. Very fluid. P.3 Yeah, you've got me on this. P.4 Your prose is getting a little bit more awkward here; 'Till didn't like being touched' is telly and probably cuttable with only minor adjustment to the following sentence, discernable from context. The description of the Surr's robes feels kind of off, too, that whole half of the paragraph. Am I intended to be reading attraction from the way Till's describing Surr? I like it if I am; would call it a selling point. I could ship this. P.5 Ohh, please don't do mirror descriptions. I think you've got a solid chapter close at the end of the last page. P.6 The first paragraph after the epigraph here is pure clunk. Starting too many sentences with conjunctions successively in the second, too; I'm far from a stickler on this but if you do it too much in rapid succession it makes sentences feel disjointed. I think some smoothing up here would help out the bottom of the page too; it took me a bit to figure out what was going on with this. P.7 Yeah, I think part of this is that so far I don't know why I care about these people. This is just a list and you're doing some decent work to make them ominous (though the 'Just look at the Shriek' sentence near the top is, I think, not entirely sensical) but none of that... ominosity is landing. I don't know why these people are not to be trifled with aside from that the text is suggesting I should have that takeaway. p.8 I could ship this, too. P.9 Okay but I don't feel like this chapter actually accomplished anything. I'm enjoying reading, and I don't mind things taking their time, but this chapter was pretty much entirely 'Till walks into a room. Till looks around that room and catelogues the people within that room.' P.10 Yeah, I feel like you could cut that whole previous chapter to a few paragraphs, a page tops, and just led right into this and there would not really be a meaningful loss. P.11 DIscreet, unless you're going for the pun, which I think you are not. That said, this page has the feel of information being witheld. I really, really, really don't feel a need for extra worldbuilding to be shoehorned into this (via prologue or otherwise) but right now this feels like your POV characters knows pertinent things that he's not sharing with the class, so to speak. To wit, it seems like this thing with a stolen word is something we should already know of, or we should have already had Till surmise by now. Little over-explanatory with the dialogue to the bottom of the page though. P.12 Ayami's sounding a little stilted on this page, especially her big paragraph. I realize some of this is a mandatory formalism, but it still feels a bit out in spots. P.13 On the one hand, I like the ramble that this ends off on, and I like the cadence you've got here. But on the other hand, I don't like how it doesn't really fit well with the rest of the text styling previous. p.14 Just generalized prose clunk here, nothing I'm going to sweat over. P.15 I feel like your shorter sentences are your weaker ones, on the whole; they're coming out too uninflected, procedural, blah. This happens then this then this. The few following 'he unsheathed the sword' are in that vein, not loving that. P.16 Littttttttle too maid-and-butler on this. Some of this is good, but some of this smells too heavily of explaining things both parties already know and don't need stated. P.17 Same here. Talking a bit too much, going on a bit too long, I think. P.18 But this is good. Overall, barring the misstep that is the second chapter, I'm feeling a good overview, a good introduction to what I expect are going to be our main players here; this doesn't feel so much like a self-contained vignette so much as establishment of the playing field. Don't worldbuild more, don't throw down an explanatory prologue. You're breadcrumbing setting pretty well throughout this, don't go back and pin in hand-holding. I like this, it's slick and clean for a draft and it's got a personality to it. This is better by far than the prologue from before.

Her exact environment should be a little obscure, yeah. Part of it's of course that she doesn't see anything, and part of it is that she's defining it based on the fact that she's here regardless of her will and she can't leave, and not by the fact that it's a nice cozy set of rooms that are quite pleasant, really. It's a deliberate choice of word that is very intentionally being used despite the mismatch between connotation and the appointments of her situation. Things like the closet, and the clothes, and the open window with a tree within reach certainly should narrow some things about the nature of her confinement.

Yeah, it's not much to go on, but hey. I think I will sound out the story here, finish it off. Probably send out the whole thing when it's done, then maybe shop it around some once I've got it cleaned up. I can think of a few markets it might fit for if it does come out suitably standalone. If nobody bites, I can hold it in reserve until the whole thing's done.

P.1 I feel like your opener, through the first paragraph, falls into a family of prose that tries for beauty but falls short of having much meaning. It's not actually saying anything. Otherwise, this is a pretty solid start, though I feel like 'the cold elements' is kind of an awkward phrasing. P.2 'heavily unused' is not really a phrasing that goes well together. The anarch's dialogue is pretty stilted, but this is a good scene so far. P.3 Yeah, both parties' dialogue is weirdly stilted here; it almost has the feel of translation. The prose is much more fluid, it's got a good feel to it. P.4 As before, you're stronger when you're more nebulous; toward the top of the page I think you lose a bit for being a bit overly specific and definite. P.5 A bit of an anticlimactic solution, but we're early on, things should be easy, I'm not going to sweat it too much, just, I dunno, shooting the dream monster with a gun just feels sort of unsatisfying to me. Its dispersal is a little bit sudden too, I think. P.6 Dialogue is very consistently your weakest spot in this sub. It feels like you're trying for formality, but it's coming out just bulky and clunky. The voice on the second half, too ('amused, feminine', I think is too many descriptors) is very... expository, in addition to that clunk. P.7 We're pretty solidly into cliche territory with this particular interaction, and you're not really bringing enough to the table with it to keep me engaged. This is a very by-the-numbers exchange, and it coming in after such a solid previous scene doesn't help a lot either. You had me at the start here but you're losing me fast. P.8 Sigh. It's not so much that the dead family is bad as a motivator, exactly, it's just a really common one. p.9 I... just don't think this is very interesting. P.10 It's a very mundane conversation, again, very high school, and I'm not sure why they're focused on hiding this and to be really honest if the slime is that toxic there should be at least some concern that it was disposed of safely. I'm really not sure why these characters so aggressively don't care about something so dangerous. P.11 -- Overall, I mean, this has potential, and there's parts of it I like, but it keeps getting brought down with inanities and really weak dialogue writing. These pretty much never feel like real people talking. In conversation too, I'm generally finding character motivations as either really standard, or generally nonsensical. I'm not really buying in on any character.

Ultimately, if you're taking the question of 'why is this character behaving in a sexual manner toward her brother' as being a shortfall in your character, that's not something I can help you with. The comment was framed in the way it was because a) I was assuming that it was not a point of authorial intent that this be taken in this manner and that b ) it seemed to me you had not actually considered the physical motion involved (which is to frame a secondary sexual characteristic with one's arms, drawing attention to them). Male gaze doesn't, as a rule, concern me nearly as much as it does @kaisa but it is something that, if it's going to be present, you need to be aware of it, and you need to be considering how it comes through in your work. This is not unique to the gaze you apply; there's all kinds of inevitabilities that need to be accounted for (the inherently political nature of art is a common one) but in all cases you work with them in pretty much the same way: by becoming aware of the preconceptions that drive them. Like if I thought the time I sunk into this wasn't worth it, I wouldn't bother-- and like i've said, this is the place to be doing things that need fixing, but I frustrate very easily and I don't people all that well. I'm only so able to mitigate that.

Might be a thought. It's pretty much well-buried by now (it did, after all, happen in 2009) but it's worth looking at. I'm heading out to a movie in a bit, so maybe later on this evening.

Nah, Racefail was a big, hmm, to-do in fandom/the writer community. Here's a decent overview with some links to some more in-depth recountings. Considering it now, it's probably worth going over for a lot of us here, it covered many things that we end up covering here.

I would like to read more of Nnedi Okorafor's stuff, yeah; YA and MG don't really do it for me, but I should at the very least pick up Binti. Who Fears Death was really good, if not the easiest thing to read. Elizabeth Bear though... man, I don't believe so much in holding people to things that happened years ago if it seems like they're actually doing better, and it was 2009, but I do remember Racefail, so I always feel a bit awkward there. I don't consciously avoid her stuff but I don't know if the fact that I do avoid it is a result of that or not.

Based on the fact that you were doing this with a character whose every line, mannerism, and bit of behaviour was some form of really hackneyed 'evil woman' cliche. As-written, she's not even a character, she's a cardboard cut-out presented for we the reader to go 'she's a bad person' at. Like, I don't know why you don't know how to create a character who's unlikeable or an antagonist on their own terms rather than falling back on these things, and ultimately, I'm not here to work that out for you. I can, and have, pointed out where you're doing it; when writing gives me a certain impression I try to work out the source of that impression. Beyond that, I'm only so willing to go in depth with prose style (which is probably where you need the most work), especially in a format like this one, but given that you tend to fixate really hard on one or two things out of a crit and ignore all the rest (eg, fixating on 78 words of a 654 word crit), I am not sure the problem here is people not giving you broad enough critique.

Given you directly lifted one of the most notoriously awful phrases from a very famous series of books, I would not chalk it up to your previous submissions here being what called attention to it. I'm also gonna point out, again, that the usage of the word 'breasts' is at best tangential to the actual issue here. And honestly, I'm gonna throw this one out here: a) perhaps it is not on you to normalize how society sees breasts and b ) even if it were, that surely was not what was happening here. Myself, I am not concerned about male gaze per se but what you do with that gaze, and I am not entirely certain you currently have the tools needed to apply it in a way that isn't going to be tiresome at best. So, yes: I am not joking in the slightest when I inevitably end up begging you to read more. It's very, very clear from your writing that you've restricted yourself to a very narrow slice of literature and it vastly informs the style with which you write. Please. Read more. Read more women. Read outside the genre. Read women outside the genre. Read writers of colour. Read LGBT writers. All of that.

She's shudkathra, yes, and I am aiming somewhere on the spectrum, yes. Which is something I feel a little bit awkward applying in this way given that here it's a result of a very different set of senses rather than per se any neuroatypicality, but, well. We always do apply our own standards to things. Lamina relates to their perceptions, yes; they have basically no perception of the visual spectrum whatsoever. They are aware of something other. Iluya will touch on this more when she comes more into her own in the text; she is somewhat of an expert... in the aelin sense. If she weren't wholly confined and basically unwililng to leave (her presence would be the reason why the bigwigs are certain the peace talks are legit) I'd actually consider swapping someone out for her, but with a target of 120k, four povs is already pushing it. Interludes, maybe. But Ilnathoa -- or any shudkathra, really-- has access to certain information that I'd like held in reserve until the second book, and the first is not per se about them. I think this is a short. Gonna keep going forward on this, I think; I think I've teased out a bit of an internal plot on this. A little break from 7-8-9, at any rate, and even if this isn't usable exactly it should be a helpful exercise.

This is a single scene. It may just be worldbuilding cruft and only usable for my own reference. I may expand and repurpose this into an interlude or a standalone short or something like that; this is not a POV with a real place in the main novel for reasons that might or might not be obvious. You may or may not remember this character appearing as a one-off in a Savae scene in the original draft. Mostly it's for curiosity's sake that I'd like people's eyes on it. It is a rather different type of ownvoices writing than we usually discuss, in addition to other constraints of the POV. Mostly I just want to hear what you all think. Not looking for anything too intensive here. e: I think this is the first scene of a standalone short. I think it's romance. ... sort of.

I'm gonna tentatively say I've got something I'd like eyes on, too. It's not a chapter per se (but is related to the project) and I might not finish (but work is dead as a doornail so I should have time) and it's not even necessarily somethng that is 'for' anything other than my reference, but that makes it a decent fit for a week when people might be bogged down with other things.

The thing of this is really-- even if you don't intend there to be this connotation, it's definitely there. Like, if you are a person with breasts, and you are crossing your arms under them, this is going to physically push the breasts up, causing the weight of the breast to rest upon their arms, and emphasizing them because this will push them up and forward, and this is why this particular motion is a sexualized one-- not because it uses the word breasts. It's an act that emphasizes the actor's sexuality. It's not nearly the 'I'm showing you how stern and grumpy I am' motion that it is if you don't have breasts-- not to say it's never used that way but it's far less common and there's baggage just because of the physical nature of the motion. You don't have to mention cleavage-- this is an act that creates and emphasizes it. Robert Jordan was a lot of things as a writer and he was generally entertaining enough that I put up with his foibles, but he was a terrible writer of women-- a decent writer of men's impressions of what women are like, but those are a dime a dozen. I'm wary of anyone saying they're emulating Jordan in anything but especially in this, which is one of his most roundly-mocked common lines. The fact that Jordan did this as a descriptor for women should be a suggestion that you should stay away rather than that it's okay, to be honest. In this and things like this it's far less a point of offense and far more one of exhaustion. In this I don't blame you per se so much because it seems-- with all due respect-- that you've never in your life interrogated where a lot of these notions come from before. And I mean, I won't say that's okay, but what it is is perfectly normal. And the fact that you're not flipping tables and going on twitter harrassment sprees (eg) when confronted by them does go a long way in terms of being able to keep discussing the subject. And the fact is this is a pretty appropriate enviroment to be shaking these things loose from, so, you know, whatever. I mean, now's the time to look at this sort of thing, because it's not contributing to anything yet, so hey. There's no shame in something needing to be worked upon while it's still being worked on. Thanks. I worry; my intent is to be helpful but I've got such an iron-clad divide myself between critique of a work and critique of a person that it makes it impossible for me to gauge where other people draw their own lines.

Oh, congratulations! I'm glad he's doing well, that's a really scary situation. My stepsister's got the same birthday too, it's a busy day.

P.1 I like having fun with the format, but I'm not sure what's going on with the fade. I really feel like you're outright saying too much of what's going on for this to really feel appropriate to this being some sort of dream magic. Feels like wasted potential here. P.2 This is okay, though the dialogue is a little prosaic. P.3 Dialogue seems a little bit like it's retreading what I recall of last chapter, too. I'm gonna call out a specific line here though: "Back when he and Sofia lived in their parents' cottage, they were always left with figments to play with, and that led to a lot of fond memories." This line kind of pulled me up short. It's such a perfect example of a bit of prose that just does not have any life to it at all. It's a procedural point a to point b sentence and you're you're not doing with it. Like ok. Ellis has some fond memories of playing with the very stuff of dreams. And that's it. What am I, as a reader, supposed to do with this? P.4 I mean I dunno. It feels like you don't know how to take advantage of the concepts you're working with; it feels like you want to actually do something much more mundane than the enviromnent you're placing it in calls for. This dialogue would be appropriate to, like, a high school hallway. P.5 I mean maybe I'm being a bit too hard on this? Hoping it would be something it's not? I dunno. This page is all right so long as I look at it by itself and try not to conceive of what a battle against nightmares with weapons of dream would be like. P.6 I'm not sure what the chapter accomplished beyond a general day-in-the-life sort of series of vignettes though. P.7 This honestly reads like it's out of a completely different story. This is... pretty bog-standard stuff, and I'm never super into characters who are all 'combat! eff yeah!', but, I mean... P.8 Yeah, I mean, I don't love this, but if I wasn't reading this in conjunction with the other stuff, I'd be fine with it. P.9 Kind of expository but not so as to make an issue for me; it's fairly contextually appropriate. I mean straight through to the end, I'm all right with this-- some repetition of the same issues, like with the dialogue, but nothing worth going on about-- but this just does not feel like it's at all a part of the same story as the rest.

Savae is a they, please. But yeah, that dialogue between them and Kathalania is where it falls apart. Otherwise, FWIW this is a follow-up on a previous scene so I'm hoping that helps on the backgrounding. I'm hoping that in a proper readthrough it won't feel as far apart, though I have concerns they'll forget who Senator Riruna is. Yeah, Savae is somewhat distinct from a character like Lasila, who will, brick by brick, lay out their every perception, pick it up and rattle it a little, and put it back down. They're not per se impulsive but they definitely wish to be perceived that way. As a person they're far more conflicted than someone like Lasila, but not, as a rule, moment-to-moment. Their plot's got... issues. It's definitely a case of 'there's no one else who could have done it'. Regardless, excessive is pretty much exactly where I want that. If you're stopping entirely on that, that's about what I want. Yeah, this seems to be a problem line here. Which is not the one I would have picked for tripping people up, so... hey, that's what getting eyes on it is for. Their, please, for Savae. I do like this bit; there's a lot of cliches I really don't like surrounding 'this thing is outside of the current style' and related cliches about the people wearing them; I didn't want Lady Riruna jumping on something clearly ugly either for the same reason... I think it worked out, in this respect. Oh, definitely. But Kathalania's not great in three-dimensional space. Savae read it as earrings because they're a jeweler, and Lady Riruna read it as earrings because they were expecting jewelry. But the picture's tattoo flash. Can probably space out the exposition some by working in what it actually is, now that I think about it. Hmmmm. Yeah, I can look at that. Thanks. Yeah, ultimately this bit is... less important than it seems, beyond that we know Savae certainly intends murder. I think I like it as-is, but this can probably be shaved some. Yeah, it probably wasn't. I do that sort of thing. Thanks!

P.1 I think you probably need a more thorough line edit than I'm really able to give right now; your sentences are kind of disjointed. They're all over the place and don't necessarily join up well. Your first sentence here is a pretty solid example of what I'm talking about. I know you need to establish something about the eye, but it doesn't belong in that sentence. I'm going to avoid mentioning sentence-level issues as best I can, because honestly, there's way too many of them. That said, this page feels really repetitive. P.2 Ehh. I'm not feeling this, Lillian is whipping back and forth here. Pick an emotional radius and stick within it. P.3 This page is really kind of meandering, and honestly, you're really compartmentalizing the emotion here. You've got a couple paragraphs about how Maykin's sad, but it's mostly about the narration telling us he's sad and I'm honestly not actually feeling it anywhere here, either in the telly parts or in the rest. The moment you know you're going to spend some time literally saying what a character wants is where you lose it. P.4 that's twice in a row where the only descriptor you've applied to Lillian's voice is 'delicate'. Because it's across two different POVs this is the sort of thing that makes me side-eye a writer when I encounter this sort of thing in commercial fiction. It's playing to what the writer finds appealing and it never looks good. And, again, tell tell tell tell tell, you're straight-up telling information and emotions. P.5 nothing here I haven't said before. You're really expositing too hard for me to be all that interested, though I've got to wonder how an apparent slave economy is existing simultaneously with robot butlers. Upper echelons of society or no, if you've got an underclass who have no acknowledged personhood there's no particular reason to develop that sort of thing. And 'dregs', really? P.6 Oh, for god's sake, do we really need a scene where the sweet, delicate woman gets lectured by the more morally upright man with whom we are intended to sympathize? And do it in the form of really heavy-handed exposition? P.7 We're really in the realm of 'cartoonishly evil' here. And "arms crossed under her breasts, leaning against the door with a self-satisfied smile on her pointed face"... I scrolled past some space given to the arms crossed line but I'm going to ask you to think, very carefully, for a moment, about what a person with breasts crossing their arms under them will actually do to those breasts, and I'd like you to ask yourself why Nessian is hiking up her cleavage at her brother and sister. And of course she's got a pointy face, that's how we know she's evil. This is beyond cliche at this point. p.8 There's really nothing more that I can say here that I haven't said already. P.9 Like the couple of sentences about 'never seen hair on myself' are entirely unnatural to the POV and serve no purpose beyond just shoveling information out. I hate feeling like I'm harping on things, but it's like the only way you know how to convey anything is to just say it's happening. I'm begging you, please read more, please read outside the genre. I can't. I kind of skimmed to the end but I've got nothing further I can say that's new. So, to answer your questions: You're spending too much time on the really heavy and direct exposition for any tension to exist, pacing is pretty difficult to discern because of this, and Nessian is a collection of 'evil sexy woman' cliches. I'm trying here, I'm really trying, because you're sincere enough and I don't wanna, like, crush you or anything, but I honestly do not know how I can help you, and I mean that as much on my own end as yours.

Chapter 8, Savae 2 (Red side 3). The dialogue between Savae and Kathalania here is criminally expository. Some of these lines are probably good but what I need on this please is which of them are the worst. I think we're fine up until Lady Riruna leaves but after that... It's been some time since we've seen this half of the story due to my own gaps in submission; there's only been two chapters since we saw these two so I think the actual gap isn't as bad as it feels right now looking. Previously with Savae: Savae Alevrin is a priest of the human goddess of the moons. Generally unwelcome in Ilidria, they find themself beholden to the crime boss Varael Ashana, who demands that they assist in a scheme to murder one Senator Riruna, using their position as a jeweler to gain a moment of access. Savae's other work in the city interferes before they can accomplish anything: a young woman claiming to have murdered the goddess Alia stumbles into their shop. They learn shortly thereafter that s/he is too called upon by the Lady of the Moons, and swiftly 'recruits' Ka/thalan/ia to their aid, though they don't exactly provide many alternative options. This half of the story is a little 'behind' the other half; we're still establishing action; it also escalates differently so I'm not too worried as yet, and it hits its 'second act' at the same time as the other so I think it'll work out. Last time: Eshrin is disgruntled with Adrichel. This time: Savae is disgruntled with Kathalania. Next time: Lasila is disgruntled with Varinen.

Boo, hope you get well soon, if you're not yet. Unrelatedly, here's a good post-- it does have spoilers for Rogue One, if you're planning on seeing that, but it's also nothing you wouldn't know if you know the premise of the film as to how it relates to the rest of the series.

Boo on the delays, but hey, close enough to my birthday for me to count it~ The state of things these days though... geez. Like I am hopelessly cynical at the best of times and these are not the best of times.

I might as well put in 8 too, I wanted to do it and 9 together just for size reasons and I'm still missing, like, a title and all that, but this dialogue is criminally expository, might as well get some extra eyes on which lines are the worst and resub a fix with 9.

In this I'd rather not, but, oh, we'll be back to both these subjects, lol. (Adrichel's literally breathing in Eshrin's ear, interlacing their fingers, and there's literally a line of narration where eshrin goes, basically 'i'd be reciprocating, work or no, if i could still trust him', I'm not sure I could hammer it more without including a sex scene, lol) Hmmm. I'll give it an eyeball. Thanks!

When's it coming out again, anyway? I've had a few people asking for recs in a vein that AxD falls very neatly into, but I keep running up against forgetting when exactly people can expect the first one.

So Evernote backed off on their privacy policy change. Still thinking of changing if only because onenote doesn't paywall being able to access previous versions of files. Been super tied up this week though, hoping to actually make more progress on this week's reading sometime this evening, lol.