neongrey

Here's a pretty good twitter thread about handling transgender characters; it's in large part aimed at transgender writers but this is some very broad-strokes stuff that I think is good to consider.

I've yanked out scene 1 of chapter 5 since the whole of my revisions are there, and mostly in the first half of it; this is just a spot cleanup rather than a draft iteration. Please do consider it in relation to the original version of the scene if you read it, and to how it affects the negotiations in 6. 7-8-9 are to be very short, single-scene chapters (in truth, they do have a linkage in theme so they *could* all be the same chapter but people seemed to have trouble with demarked POV shifts within a chapter last time around) and 7's done, so I've included it also. If all goes to plan I will probably pair 8 and 9. 7 introduces our last planned POV, giving both 'halves' of the story a primary and secondary. I think it also fails reverse Bechdel, which isn't a thing that exists, but that just occurred and made me smile. I think I've smoothed out the 'mysterious people talking mysteriously' aspect of the chapter but since both characters involved have a fairly strong sense of opsec they are being kind of oblique. In this case, 'I don't know what they're talking about' isn't so helpful so much as 'I don't care what they're talking about' and 'ugh this just sounds like you're witholding information'. Anyway, 7 is a scene of sexual harrassment. Heads up.

Oooh, look at you, all lah-de-dah and exercising lol

Wowie, doing good.

I am going to skip the prologue entirely. I'm seeing a lot of stuff I'd mark for improvement on the first page, but I also know you've been spinning your wheels on it for some time, and I don't want to contribute to that at this point. I would not call mechanical issues a reason to stop, and that's most of what I am noticing. My honest best suggestion there is give it some rest, keep going, and when you come back to it, don't even revise it, just keep it open and one eye on it in a separate window as you start over. I've really always found this to have the best result for deep revisions. Either way, don't let it hold you back for now. P.11 Your epigraph feels a little obviously constructed, I think. The big trick to concocting in-setting documents is to have as complete as possible a notion of what it is you're 'excerpting'. In this, I think you're encompassing too much and the dramatic trail-off shows your hand; if I wanted to get away with minimal changes here, I'd slice off the first and last sentences. You're not losing any significant meaning but you're also not deflating the tension. Don't give away the farm; epigraphs let you be at once oblique and extremely specific. Also, you're gonna want 'circa' rather than 'approximately' on the attribution. Chided is pretty implied by the statement. Second paragraph is way telly. I would straight-up cut. Oooh, this last paragraph is... The first sentence is quite literally nonsensical, it is kind of all over the place. The second one is just, you're cramming too much stuff into it at once. The rest of it onto the next page is expositing way too hard. P.12 You've got POV violations (the assumed was probably is, in addition to being clunky, just a figleaf on doing something the character can't really know. if you must have a character supposit something like this, and you're in pov, it needs to be actual surmise) in the first paragraph, and again, you're expositing way hard here. The bottom half of the page is better but you're still saying outright what he's feeling. Don't tell me how he hates it, don't tell me how it chafes, bake that into every sentiment, bake that into your viewpoint character's perceptions, let it colour what we the reader take away from the scene. p.13 Honestly, I know I'm only two pages in, but it's after three in the morning, I'm gonna break here so I don't lose anything. Right now too I feel like a lot of what I have to say is going to be along the same lines, and that's only so useful to hammer on in this format. If I can get back to this I will but that's kind of where I'm at on this, crit-wise.

Let's see, I'd like to get in for the 12th while this last chapter's still relatively fresh. Just spot mods to one scene but I think it cleans it up immensely. Might squeeze in 7 too, it's real short, i just need to clean up the 'mysterious people talking mysteriously' vibe I think it's still got before I show it off.

P.1 Lovely opening line. I feel like you lose it a bit as the page goes on-- I haven't read the previous version-- but I feel like you're explaining a bit too much already. Feels a bit clumsy; reaching a little too hard for an anchor, given the subject matter. P.2 Better here, and better towards the top of the page. Sort of I feel like the last line of dialogue on the page is a bit redundant; I'd cut, I think. P.3 Good, much better, but I think the language is feeling a bit too precise, too grounded in place. 'it was likely tinged', 'three out of seven', etc, but I think here most of the issues are just some style adjustments. Too much simile throughout the page though. Dreams aren't the place for simile. P.4 The shift in style going into the description of the blond man is jarring, and I'm not loving the descriptive phrasing in general here. Canteloupes is a weird comparator for arms, a beard covering the lower half of the face is a fairly ordinary thing for a beard to do and doesn't actually tell us much about what the beard looks like (it rules out a couple styles but that's about it) and describing skintone as a degree of shades of colour really only makes sense, I think, when you're talking about what foundation one uses. And that 'however' sentence is trying a bit too hard to cram setting info into a place where it doesn't belong. P.5 You're losing me here and kind of fast; it feels like you're giving me the reader information. p.6 Like, this conversation has potential, but it's so clearly working towards a goal, an authorial goal, that it just feels way too constructed. And breathe, not breath, though I'm sure someone's caught that already. P.7 Yeah, see, I think your stronger paragraphs like the last one really just show the contrast of when it doesn't work. I think you could still be a lot looser with your description and it would be better, but it's really nice down here. P.8 'fighting with extreme pole dancing' is such a scene-breaking sentiment though, it's almost heartbreaking how much that line doesn't work for me. This conversation flows more naturally but I also don't think it's a great fit for the prose styling you've had when you've really got it going. In this, it's not that the dialogue isn't believable or even that it's bad; but it is, I think, too conversational, too grounded in up-to-the-moment vernacular. It's of our place, not this place where dreams must be defended against. I would say that goes for pretty much all of Sofia's internal monologue, too. P.9 Again, the prose styling is at its best when it's not making comparisons, when you're avoiding these likelies (and the way you use your 'likely' just feels like a cheap workaround on your POV; it's a little hat on the fact that what the text really wants to be doing is saying what's inside this other character's head. I'd advise snip-snip) I feel like 'originated' is not a word that has any place in any dream. P.10 This paragraph is, I think, a little too clinical. I think the big thing here for me, overall, is that you're grounding yourself too much. Tell me it's a dream, tell me you're working with dreams, and I will run with it, I will run with what happens. Tell me what the viewpoint character does and that this is dreams, and I will take whatever you give. Everything else is just chaining you down. This has potential, but away from the individual moments, away from attempts to contextualize, away from the conversations in a vein that one might overhear walking through a mall.

Similarly, but I tend to go in with even less (that said, doing it entirely off-paper means that there's always more associated mental baggage). Like, what I had for my 5, originally, was more or less: Lasila and Iluya meet up, drop more context for the contract terms; we find out Adrichel's getting in on the action. Awkward family scene. Lawyer battle; Adrichel and Eshrin are introduced. Now, as we can see what actually happened is that she didn't make it to the meeting at all in 5 and I devoted basically the whole of 6 to it. Part of it's that I wanted that scene at the end of 5 but a lot of it's also that a lot of the context I wanted in 5 ended up not making it in (and then I edited more back into 5 the other night). Or like my notes for 8, the one i'm about to start, pretty much solely comprise 'savae gets commissioned to make earrings, decides to make MURDER EARRINGS instead, kathalania is uncomfortable with this in some way; savae don't care because savae don't care (keep this to 1500 words or under gdi i need to do like three chapters in the space of one)'. So, like, I know who's involved, I know where it is, and I know what needs to get done. If I need to get something else done that I didn't expect, I reshuffle. As a rule, if it's identical to a thing that exists as we know it, I feel like you should just call it what it is. The reader knows what you mean and you don't need to explain it then. Etymology is inescapable in any language, and with writing any fiction in general and speculative fiction in particular the goal is less for something to be real than to feel real. Usually this means using words that wouldn't actually etymologically fit. Sometimes it means not using words that would. (I had this struggle with rayon, of all things; it sounds ultimately too close to nylon which is a very famously fabricated word even though the word rayon well-satisfies my standards for acceptability. see also very antique words like mascara or descriptive words like eyeliner, which i always feel a bit odd using; I do avoid 'lipstick' and 'nail polish') But I'm kind of rambling. The gist of what I'm getting at is for me, it's a) don't obfuscate meaning, b ) if it feels right, do it, c) if it doesn't feel right, don't do it, but look to a) first and let that be your deciding factor.

My general thought is if you get bogged down in revisions you're never going to get forward motion. It's never really going to hurt you to make spot edits going backward but if you're continually rewriting a chapter you need to pick a version, let it fall as it is, and keep going. Once you've got more written down, you can better see the big-picture stuff that's affecting why you need to overhaul. I outline, or I say I outline, but what works for me is a loose practice of knowing all my plot points in general and the specific route to the next one in specific. I know what needs to happen in a given chapter when I start a chapter, but I generally don't nail that down until not long before I start. I know when x, y, or z is going to need to happen but that's about it, and things can change when I get there. Other people do it differently. I've got a friend who writes totally non-linearly and if she tried to start writing at chapter 1 and stop at chapter end, she'd never get anything done. You're not writing in front of an audience (ie, in serial), so you don't need to treat everything you've written as set in stone. But you do need to pick a point where you stop looking at a given slice of the work or else you're not going to have larger components to look at, and since greater sections of the work have different sorts of problems, you need to have them done to be able to look at them. I dunno, sometimes the right answer is to toss things (said the person who threw out a good fifty thousand words a few months ago) and sometimes the answer is to pause midway to revise, but if you're sitting and doing and redoing the same piece of the puzzle, you're never ever going to move forward. I will say that outline or not, you do need to know where your story is going, more or less from the start. But 'where your story is going' is a pretty nebulous thing.

Ah, well, he's on the clock. There's time for that to ratchet up, lol.

FWIW, I have a thing where looking people in the face is super uncomfortable for me. I do a lot of slightly looking past people or vaguely in their general directions. So lack of facial description isn't what's killing this here for me so much, but I'm also not a great gauge on that.

Yeah, that would help; never really occurred. But this is the sort of exchange between characters where I've had difficulty both here and in other pieces of work where I go into it just knowing stuff's gonna not work out. But it seems like I may have come off here better than I feared. Yeah, my fault for not matching terms here. A bit sexist is probably about right; less so than his cultural norm calls for which is still a bit sexist on our end. A fair reading; I'm possibly overstating based on things that aren't discernable. One of the things Lasila proposed on her own was one of the things he was specifically angling for. Either way, sounds like he is coming out roughly on target for where I want him. Just out of random curiosity, on a scale from 0 to this gif, where's he landing at? (should I be ashamed of saying I'm channeling two different anime characters on him? nah) look when you're wanting both 'yellow' and 'fluid' and Iluya's already got a lockdown on sunlight imagery for her hair... Yeah, two standardized sets of plumbing, three primary social distinctions, though the third is a minority. Can probably smoothe that some though if any line should be confusing it should be that one; it mostly exists to lay down 'there is a lot of complicated accounting math going on here', Thanks!

Yeah, I suspect the answer to 5 is to do more of it in dialogue, then, and I think that'll help with some of the issues in this one too. I wanted to avoid that originally since I don't think a blow-by-blow is super necessary, and I didn't want to get repetitive, especially since the meeting with Adrichel was intended to be the back half of 5 when I laid out the meeting with Iluya. But there's Things I Can Do. Yeah, I'll call that a me problem, referring to characters by given name; Lasila pretty consistently refers to him by title-housename. He's introduced by given name in the summons he sends to Lasila but she wouldn't even thnk of him by given name. I'd say his actions at least in the negotiation are benevolent, yeah. He's not terribly interested in taking Iluya for a ride, and he was after some specific things out of this, so no need to push back harder. (and if it does leave you surprised at him not pushing harder, that's just fine) I mean, in this sense one can't legally obligate two people to attend an event together. And there's a line where 'undertone of creepy' crosses over to 'actually being a creep' that I'm not terribly interested in having him cross, at least in this way. This one's not really a question that can be answered yet, but the way in which people find it unanswerable is helpful. Yeah, some cleanup should take care of these. (It's Iluya, who is nobody's sister, who took payment for geometry lessons with kisses, and eshrin, who is master linphori, who lasila is provisionally allowing to stay on the grounds that on duty he's covered by every kind of NDA possible) Sounds like a lot of this can be done as chapter 5 cleanup then. Division of kids between the houses can be done in more detail there and left brushed over here, and we can go over the thing initially calling for three there too. Hmmmm. Yeah, this is one of the things I was not expecting to be a real stumbling block as such. I mean she's saying outright that in such case there would be no bastardry because Rienri be considered the father regardless. By and large this is a case of the appearance of things mattering far more than the reality, and it's the sort of clause that would come up more frequently in contracts where it's expected there's not actually going to be children at all between the married parties. Basically she's tracking house continuity here rather than actual relational continuity. This is actually Lasila showing her social standing here because it's far more common lower down classwise, and she's not in a position as yet for this to occur to her, and Adrichel's not going to help her on that, beyond his notation that this would be more okay at a lower class. So that's not really going to be coming through in this scene. But really when you start stripping away stigma against extramarital interaction, at least some of the stigma against extramarital parentage goes with it. Here, in both cases, it's the appearance-focused nature that's holding it back. And, I mean, Rienri trusts Iluya. But you can't do a legal agreement based on 'I trust you, hon'. That said, if it does seem excessive it probably should; Lasila's intentionally overreaching here because she's expecting to get walked back. Probably shouldn't seem that far over the line though, so I'll take a look at that. failure to prevent pregnancy. I think what 5 need then is Iluya stonewalling on her wanting to not have to reveal who it would be, but generally being flexible on the kids-related subjects. Iluya very much does not want Rienri to know who she's with, which is in the realm of what's considered reasonable. But then so is him at least knowing who she's with. Without kids involved there's not a huge reason to compel her given basically that Rienri trusts Iluya, but with them, it's harder for Iluya to object. The trick here, the as-yet unknowable trick, is that Adrichel knows why Iluya doesn't want Rienri to know, and Lasila doesn't. It's not deep mystery stuff, it's next-chapter stuff, but yeah. And, I mean, yeah, she could get pregnant by whomever she pleased, though there'd be breach of contract involved if there weren't actually contraceptives being used for her PIV interactions. There's no particular reason to do so intentionally. Mostly, it's ensuring all bases are covered, on account of accidents happening. She could breach her contract, sure. Anyone with a motorcycle could drive it down the sidewalk, mowing down pedestrians. Which is an extreme example, but, you know. Gonna be honest, I sort of find the notion of 'if she gets pregnant he's legally the father no matter who it actually is' being considered more extreme than 'if she gets pregnant and he's not the father, she has to abort' to be a little... not what I expected, even with my notations for backpinning it in. Big difference between openly acknowledging what you are, and coming off low-class. But if it's not clear that her concern is how tacky that sounds... I dunno. I like the entrenched classism of the original sentiment. He's definitely going over the line on this. Lasila's going along with it because she feels like she stands to have a net gain, but if that's not coming through so much, I can do more with that. Eshrin's very much not happy with this, and that's going to be duly factored into things. Got a fair bit to go over, in this one and the previous now, so, thanks! Yeah, I don't think the first scene needs nearly so much work, hence why I directed attention where I did. No need to abbreviate characters; we're still basically first draft and I don't have a publisher. In this case though it's a lot more of him giving less ground than she does, and coming out of it with more of what he wants. But it shouldn't necessarily be unambiguous, especially not knowing what he went into this trying to get. Yeah, I mean they don't know each other but it's also not being presented as, like, a personal thing. All they really need to do is, as stated, look pretty with each other for a little while. But as above, I can do a bit more with this being, basically, a calculated acceptance based on, you know, a quick cost-benefit analysis. No, no, it's fine, every bit of eyes helps. Thanks!

I mean, that's your perogative. I'm saying it's the sort of thing that factors into me putting a book down (stopping watching a tv show, complaining about a movie on the internet, etc) before ever reaching that point. Otherwise, none of the rest of what you're saying now is making it onto the page.

e: nm, ugh, sorry for double

That's actually a pretty key component of fantasy name syndrome, to be honest. There's always a critical backstory reason why the name is like that. In the mean time, the writer's asking the reader to endure a name that doesn't sound right in the vague hope of some sort of payoff. If I as a reader am rolling my eyes from nearly the beginning of the book at something that's going to be around the whole book, does the inevitable 'no no it's really cool actually when you find out' sound all that compelling? Yeah, but that's not the issue I'm feeling here; it's not that the character is coming off childish; it doesn't even read like they're intended to come off childish. His phrasings and in particular his punctuation have a sort of style you tend to see in children's creative writing. Too many exclamation points, a sort of over-explanation on these lines, the priorities of speaking. I'm not describing a character problem, I'm describing a style problem. And of course there's a reason for him having a diminished mental capacity. A dark one. (this, frankly, worries me from an ableism perspective, but cross that bridge when we get to it) How do you as a writer intend to make the reader care? It's not that it reads like you don't know your characters, but the narration reads like it's being conveyed by someone who knows all the details but has zero connection to anything that's going on. There's never any reason given for the reader to care about anything. I feel like, by the way you're answering some of these crits, that you're expecting that the promise of explanations for what you consider to be key character mysteries should be sufficient to engage the reader but you're not doing the work of investing the reader. It reads like you didn't enjoy what you were doing; the prose is laborious, agonized, like it only exists because it must to carry things from point to point. The biggest word cut from my initial response about the style was 'joyless'. There's no sensation of what I as a reader should be feeling about anything going on here; if your respone to this is to consider 'deep emotional dialogue', I have to stress: please read more. Please read more emotional prose. I mean really; this is a steampunk book about, like, airship privateers and the only thing you do to introduce the airship, glorious in its hangar, is 'yep, that's an airship all right'

P.1 Your first paragraph is very... workmanlike. Dealbreaker workmanlike, if we're being honest. The way the first sentence is constructed is just weird, the way it so painstakingly avoids any sort of action by any person at all. And the rest is all very mechanical telling. He's whistling in appereciation of something you've only cared to describe with a single word. I don't know why the POV character thinks this thing is impressive, and I don't know why I should care. The same goes for the rest. I don't have enough context to care about who or what he's looking for and just dropping a name does not create interest. Both prose and dialogue are completely wooden the rest of the way down the page. I'm not feeling it, and it doesn't read like you're feeling it. P.2 As above (I'll mention if I feel that change), and you're expositing way too hard here in the dialogue. I'm already not interested, and this dialogue is very... laboriously cramming information in. You've also got a pretty nasty case of fantasy character name syndrome coming on here with K. Like clearly they're of some significance accounting for the fact that their last name is in the title, but I'm feeling a pretty noticable tonal mismatch here. p.5 Your description is incredibly focused on just telling, but you're not even telling very much. 'a weird glyph' is pretty meaningless. The 'when you say anarchists' line is, again, pretty maid-and-butler on outright telling us about this, and, like, I dunno, I don't expect characters to be super duper precise, but I know I don't associate 'anarchist' with 'intends to establish a totalitarian state'. p.6 Anyway, this dude just walks in, starts getting this sensitive operation info basically immediately? I don't buy it. Especially since this group is theoretically pretty selective. P.7 I don't want to put it like this, but I legit don't know any other way to put it, but the line starting with 'that's not true' is really childish, and I don't mean in the sense that the character is behaving like a child, or in the targeted-at-a-young-audience sense of childish. This particular style of basically randomly shouting with the sort of stilted phrasing is very... it's a very young conception of how adults argue; the sort of thing I would expect to see written by a kid. I'd really recommend you read more (outside the genre, preferably) stuff with strong dialogue, or tv with really strong character interaction. Really look close at how characters talk to each other, and really deconstruct what makes it feel real. p.12 'looked stunned' is pretty not-great description when it's describing people the pov character is observing (again, it's telly); when it's describing your pov character, that's kind of into what I would call a POV error. One does not as a rule describe oneself as looking stunned. And again, S is getting way too welcomed for me to buy any of this, and this entire dialogue is still serving to flood information at us. P.13 This is not believable dialogue. The 'I am D...' line just does not scan; you're subordinating believable flow to shoveling information at us. If the name of her mother is that well known (and indeed it must be to get a literal dropped jaw, which is kind of cliche at best), that 'the legendary', it just doesn't work for me. 'looked hurt' is... this text is so averse to description. I don't know what it is that he's doing that's making him look hurt by this at all, and his dialogue, again, does not scan. It seems like the goal here is for the character to seem off-kilter but I don't think that's working at all here.This doesn't read like character traits. p.14 You've really got the opposite problem of what people who worldbuild too much do-- that sort of writing is in love with its own conceits so much that it ignores the fact that the reader doesn't have any reason to care about the minute details that are spewed forth. This narration feels like it's coming from someone who doesn't actually know any of the characters involved and isn't really invested in what's going on. It's all this-happened-and-then-this-happened-and-this-happened-and-this-character-looked/experienced-emotion. There's not much actual feeling being conveyed. I'm actually gonna stop at the end of this page here; this feels like it's where your chapter break is, and I honestly don't feel like I'm going to have anything particularly new to add beyond this. I think I've probably been a little too repetitive as it is. I'll be more than happy to read subsequent subs but I think here's about the limit of my being able to be helpful on this one is.

The motivation here, that Lasila doesn't mention because she doesn't consider it as having any real value, is that birth rates (and the population in general) are way down and have been declining for some time. So he's considering a contractual obligation or, failing that, encouragement, to have more children to be in line. This is something that could easily be reframed, too. The specifics of where he's coming from on that one aren't super important to be conveyed, but if it's seeming nonsensical that's trouble. Oh, hmm, then that's not clear enough. In the event of a third, Iluya gets the money no matter what, but Melqueth's willing to let it be the higher amount for the fifty-fifty on it being a Linphori. If they end up deciding 'nah two's enough' the money goes to Rienri. Inheritance is pretty much solely by designation. There's restrictions on women actually making money (either through the workplace or otherwise) but not on them having money, and most of those restrictions are fading at this point. Social stigma against women of Iluya's social class doing much of anything is still pretty strong though; given they're a social class that's only on the fringes of confronting the potentiality of anyone having to work in the first place, they're much further behind people who need to do it to live. So it is theoretically assigning a less potentially valuable child to Judessa though in this case I'd say there's an awareness that by the time this matters it will be even less of an issue. And it is, of course, only by the first assumption of gender, which is probably the least important one. It is mostly a coinflip, and to keep from having to wait forever. Hmmm. Creepy I can do with, though I'd prefer a bit more leaning to menace. But undertone is about exactly where I want it. So that's good. Lasila doesn't do badly here on the relative scale, but he still metaphorically beats the crap out of her. So there's certain ways I want that to seem and certain ways I don't, and a character who you want to seem that sharp is always tricky... nothing worse than a character enamored of their own cleverness, except perhaps a writer enamored of their character's own cleverness. Sounds like it's going okay so far, at least. Thanks!

Chapter 6, Lasila 4. I suspect the second scene is going to prove impenetrable for people; what I'd like people to do is go through it as best you can and be as specific as possible with what's losing you, where, *and why*. This scene's thick with plot, other detail, and foreshadowing, but it's no good at all if you only get the best bits out of it on the second reading. There's things that *need* to be laid out here, but I need to have attention for it. This *is* a fight scene. Other things I'm looking for: Adrichel's a type of character that I personally consider brutally hard to get right, in any form of media. I'd like three things about him, please: - your overall impressions of him as a person and character; - what you think his goal was in these exchanges with Lasila, - your guess as to what his role in the overall story is. The usual's fine too. But I do need you to please dig deep when I inevitably lose you in the lawyer battle. Previously: Lasila learns that she'll be facing a new and formidable lawyer, whom her client Iluya fears is too skilled to succeed against. On her way to the meeting, Lasila is accosted and injured by a mugger and drives them off, inadvertently tapping into the dark magic Maranthe spoke to her about. This time: Three people in a room. One person leaves having gained exactly what they wanted. Next time: A new POV; next three chapters have a target length much shorter than the others. But probably next sub is 5 again; I want to clean up the exchange with Iluya once I have what I've gained from this in hand.

oooh, yay!

I think at the rate I'm going I think I can finish for Monday. And this has problems and I'm going to need opinions to figure out how to go about cutting this down. So put me down for the fifth, tentatively. e: woo, finished. LAWYER FIGHT

P.1 You`re starting off pretty rambly, and I'm not loving it. Going for the second-person-directly-addressed-by-the-first-person-narrator is really dicey at the best of times; you need to be really flawless for me to buy in and I'm not sold here. The meta stuff too, yeah, that's a me-putting-the-book-down type moment. There's few things I like like less than gimmicks but self-aware gimmicks are one of them. Feels like more the focus is on how clever a notion it is to do it like this when it's really been done before enough times to be tired. It's possible to address the reader from first person without falling flat but this, I think, is not succeeding. I would probably cut the whole first page, to be honest. P.2 I feel like here you're sort of hitting the heart of why prologues can be such a problem. You're making efforts to gussy it up with a solid voice and once the meta stuff is out of the way the voice is reasonably readable but this is pure, undistilled exposition. As it is it's not hugely interesting to read about but it also sort of makes me wish I was reading the incident being described instead of this. P.3 As above, but your direct-address is a bit better to the bottom of the page and onto the next. P.4 We're four pages in and this is the first moment a thing currently happening is described. At this point the 'it's like this but' is starting to feel more like it's an attempt to avoid actually describing things. I was willing to give it a bye as being a vaguely novel quirk of voice the once but coming on it again, I mean, you're at this point outright telling the reader to evoke their own imagery; the impression I take away from this as a reader is that the writer doesn't know what they're doing. P.5 Only here is really where I start feeling like there's anything interesting going on. P.6 Still kind of rambling, but you're holding my attention through here. P.7 Hmmm p.8 -- p.9 Huh. p.10 And you've lost me again with going back harder into the going-to-tell-a-story stuff again. Of course the story will be told because that's what the book is for. Like, I dunno, I think this is some fairly solid concept work but I also feel like this prologue should be, like, at most, your back-of-the-cover-blurb. The whole thing is just explaining premise and almost wholly devoted to saying 'welp this is what you're going to read'. I'm not loving that.

Okay yeah, I think that's not quite the phrasing I would go for internally but that really helps me narrow down the problem. And with cleaning that bit up some I should hopefully make it be more interesting. This is one of those things that's just super important both plotwise and characterwise to nail down; the iluya-eshrin subplot requires it, and character-wise... for whatever reason cheating is one of those things that always gets a really harsh negative reaction about a character. So, nail down early, nail down hard that whatever Iluya's doing, it's not cheating... won't solve every perceptual problem that way, but, y'know, all i can do is lead the horse to water. Okay, hmm, thanks. That helps some; it's not how I read at all so sometimes I find myself scratching my head at how you arrive at some of the takes that you do. I tend to pick up a whole paragraph at a time and read back if I feel like I missed something. (which is probably why ginormous paragraphs are such an issue for me to read)

Yeah, one thing I do regret is losing the scene that was there before, but I think I ended up coming down on it not actually adding all that much, its point having been lost since Lasila's going to get her escort in a different way, and ultimately, it not being all that important to Lasila what he thinks. So I dunno. I think it stays gone. Oh, goodness no, it's not a break at all, hehe. Yeah, I'm satisfied with that change, I think. There's always people who don't like present tense and will always make sure you know how much they hate present tense but whatever really. Hmm, is that how it's seeming? She was bleeding, a surface cut but quite a lot; there was blood that she both felt and saw. And the blood stopped... oh, right about the time she blinded them. In theory it should be guessable that there's a relation between the two before Lasila puts that together; I don't mind if the reader doesn't guess it on their own, and it is out of place that she's not bleeding, but if it's seeming like a contrivance so that she gets where she's going without apparent disturbance...

That's... not a legal phrase at all, actually; that's a relationship phrase and not something that occurred to me as being obscure in the slightest (especially given surrounding context; serious question because I'm not sure I understand how you're reading: do you habitually stop mid-sentence or mid-paragraph and move downward when you're reading?); Iluya's putting her foot down on requiring an open marriage. Hmmm. I mean by and large I'm ok with some jargon that needs to be picked up via context clues but if it's something that basic, hmm. Yeah, I think the thing to do is do the next bit and use that to backpin in for clarity. Thanks.