NotAlice
Scribe
*returns* It's been so long...
Posts: 667
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Post by NotAlice on May 12, 2010 15:17:56 GMT -5
I kept my end of the deal!   Your turn now Kaez xD Basically, 'twas awesome =] There were a few bits that got a bit confusing towards the end of part two I think it was... There seemed to be two different battles going on at the same time between loads of different groups of people, me thinks - and I think it's the jumping between them at each chapter change that confused it most XD I'll be nice I wont go throught it and quote every time you used road instead of rode, but basically, it was a fair few times! You only used rode about twice and that was on the posts on this page ^.^ Action packed and full of conflict =] Me likies =P Pity you're not planning to do anymore with it concidering all the effort put in. =[ And how the heck can you write without editing for 30 days and not have loads of crazy overlaps and mistakes? XD Mine is insanely full of mistakes (Which you'll see when you keep your end of the deal ) Three words: A great read =] |
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Post by Kaez on May 12, 2010 15:19:20 GMT -5
I can't believe you read all of that...
... and I -really- can't believe that I used 'road' instead of 'rode' many, many times.
Either way: thanks a bunch :]
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NotAlice
Scribe
*returns* It's been so long...
Posts: 667
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Post by NotAlice on May 12, 2010 15:28:57 GMT -5
I can't believe you read all of that... ... and I -really- can't believe that I used 'road' instead of 'rode' many, many times. Either way: thanks a bunch :] Hehe Couldn't resist once I remembered the quick way to find them I was right, it equals about road 7:2 rode  |
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Post by ASGetty ((Zovo)) on May 12, 2010 15:29:38 GMT -5
You kinda did. . . I've been trying to ignore grammar stuff, but that one keeps popping up and it's pretty distracting. |
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Post by Kaez on May 12, 2010 15:30:33 GMT -5
The first one is used properly, thank you very much!
... the rest... *ahem*
Wow, that's all kinds of terrible.
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Mena
Scribe
Posts: 667
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Post by Mena on May 12, 2010 16:24:19 GMT -5
I lurved it, even if you can't differentiate road and rode. /snicker
/tease
Seriously, I thought it was great. It flowed well and kept me interested, which is a big plus these days for me. Keep up the good work and I hope you continue writing.
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Post by Kaez on May 12, 2010 17:50:09 GMT -5
I lurved it, even if you can't differentiate road and rode. /snicker /tease Seriously, I thought it was great. It flowed well and kept me interested, which is a big plus these days for me. Keep up the good work and I hope you continue writing. Aw, thanks, Mena. I'm really glad you liked it :] |
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Post by ASGetty ((Zovo)) on May 12, 2010 18:05:24 GMT -5
I'll probably finish the first third tonight and I'll get you a review of that.
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Post by ASGetty ((Zovo)) on May 13, 2010 0:43:09 GMT -5
Alright, here goes. . .
Let me preface this by saying that, Kaez, you have an impecable knack for setting a stage. All of your scenic descriptions are vividly detailed and leave little room for confusion in the readewrs mind. I could clearly envision Natha, and the cluastrophobic confines there in. Your landscapes come alive in prose and should you ever decide to write for a traveller's guide you could easily pesuade me to pack my belongings and go just about anywhere.
As noted I've only read the first part so many of these things might be addressed in the coming pages; however, I think it's good in a piece this long to get an idea of what the reader is thinking at different intervals along the way. Additionally, I'm going to write this as a review of a work in progress; not a critique of a finished piece. Despite your statement of having no interest in writing fiction at the time being, the sometimes distracting grammar errors (see above) lend me to believe that an edit is in order anyhow. Anyhow, on we go.
I'm going to admit right off that I had a hard time getting into this. The first couple fo chapters just didn't grab me which is strange considering that it's non-stop action right off the bat. Perhaps it was me, or maybe what you've created simply isn't what I was expecting so it took me time to adjust; but by about Chapter III I was in and cruising.
There are some things I would work on; first would be dialogue. Something about the way your characters interact just seems off. Your guardsmen talk to their superiors (Wilam excluded) in a very lackdaisical way, with alot of "yeah" and "alright" and questions when they should just be waiting for orders. It gives the Northern forces a feeling of being very disorganized. Yeah, it's a peasant rebellion, but they can't hope to win without tightening up and I really just couldn't take the Guard seriously. Now, if this was intended, it might be worth noting in the text somewhere that the North kinda needs to get their shit together so that it at least makes sense; if it wasn't, I'd suggest tightening it up. Give those men a little more snap.
Second is plot details. This is similar along the lines as the sword thing I PMed you about. Little details which seem to be forgotten along the way. Denis escaped from the barracks through a window onto the "snow-laden" ground. And then the snow disappeared from the story. The whole time they are chasing him I kept thinking, "Why is there not a clearly defined trail of footprints in the snow?!"
Denis took a horse from the guard he killed on the trail. Why, in Ava, didn't Wilam or his men check the stables to see if Denis had even stopped there? Why didn't they question the stable-hand in regards to who dropped off the horse? Why wasn’t more attention paid to the dead guards? Why do the Rosian spies in the Northlands have a more efficient system of communication than the people who live there? “Wings are faster than hooves” of course, why instead of taking all his guards on an hours long chase to Ava didn’t Wilam send one or two back to have a message sent by pigeon alerting the guards in Ava to Denis’ eventual arrival? Why are there so many spies and what makes Denis so important? There’s more, but I think that’s enough for now.
Finally, the story, thus far, is very streamlined and very formulated. Wilam chases, Denis runs, Wilam chases, Denis runs, etc. There isn’t a lot of variation in the story or development of plot. I’m over a third of the way through the story and other than the chase, I don’t even know what the story is about. There is a rebellion, a spy, and a guy chasing a spy, and a pile of red-shirts that keeps growing. Sadly, there’s really no allusion to anything greater than these few points. Going into part 2, I don’t feel as though the story is getting more complicated, or that I’m going to be introduced into richer more complex plot that I’m eager to explore; I feel as though I’m going to continue to read about Denis repeatedly escaping Wilam by the skin of his teeth.
It might be a product of the mentioned abridgement that sub-plots and foreshadowing got cut out, but those things serve a purpose. They both keep the reader from becoming weary of your characters by changing gears every so often, and draw the reader forward. . . making them want to know more about what’s going on. Somewhere around chapter 14 I would love to have a little flash of what is happening to Ricard now that he’s been captured; or maybe around chapter 7 we get a little taste of exactly how Miller knew Wilam was coming after Denis in the first place; and maybe what’s become of Miller. Just little hints that let us know that while Wilam chases Denis to hell and back, there is still a world and a war going on around them.
All that said, as a work in progress I’m enjoying it, and I really hope you take the above in the spirit it’s intended. I want to be honest with you because this story has potential, but it needs work to be really interesting.
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Post by Kaez on May 13, 2010 9:45:06 GMT -5
Alright, here goes. . . Let me preface this by saying that, Kaez, you have an impecable knack for setting a stage. All of your scenic descriptions are vividly detailed and leave little room for confusion in the readewrs mind. I could clearly envision Natha, and the cluastrophobic confines there in. Your landscapes come alive in prose and should you ever decide to write for a traveller's guide you could easily pesuade me to pack my belongings and go just about anywhere. Thanks :] It was intended, and I do think that it's addressed -somewhere-, if not early on, then later. I can't imagine I went without making it plain at one point or another that the north, being the peasant rebellion that it is, is rather informal and not particularly well organized. Perhaps I just made that assumption because I covered it in the Project Fantasy pages for Rosia and the Empire. At least -some- of those, I have to imagine I considered and have a reason for. At least some of them were organized in the way they were on purpose, and either I didn't write it out properly or you missed something in reading. The communication system is a good example --- Ava is a straight line away, and a very small hamlet. Not only would a bird be barely faster at all from that distance, but it's very unlikely that such a small settlement would have an organized 24/7 pigeon system. But with that many plot faults, some of them certainly are ones that I simply overlooked, you're right. I really think that by part three, that feeling should be gone, but perhaps not. The scale increases, morality comes into the mix, but ultimately it's not about large scale war, it's about how three (or, as is finished, two) people are affected by something much grander than either of them. That's unfortunately a product of the abridgement. Miller and Ricard both play big roles in the third character set (the sets being 1. Wilam & Co., 2. Denis, Morgan, & Co., 3. Ricard, Miller, & Co.) which was simply never written. It was an addition I was putting into place because I realized that just the two, going back and forth, was lacking -- but by the time I got around to reformatting the novel to fit that third set in, I'd lost interest in ever writing it. Anyway, I really do appreciate this kind of feedback. It means a lot -- even if this thing never gets finished, to at least have some input on what I've got so far is really great. |
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Post by ASGetty ((Zovo)) on May 13, 2010 14:38:25 GMT -5
Happy to help.
Planning to move on to part 2 today, I'll provide feedback for that as well when I'm finished.
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Post by ASGetty ((Zovo)) on May 17, 2010 22:49:06 GMT -5
Review Part 2:
Well, well, well. . . part 2.
I must say I'm impressed. I ran across a few grammatical things (which, like I said, I'm not going to correct) there wasn't anything terribly distracting that I noticed. It flowed well and it flowed fast, and before I knew it I was at the border of part three.
Certainly more depth in the section of the book. We get to know more about not just our main characters, but also those around them; the kinds of people they are working for and working against. It did a pretty good job of clearing up a number of the plot issues I had mentioned in my first review as well as expanding on some areas I was interested in learning more about.
I noticed you shifted some of yourt landscape detail onto your characters very much making them the focal point of this section, whereas I felt more like the places were the centerpiece of Part 1. I find I've grown somewhat attached to both Boyle and Morgan; though sadly I still feel distanced from Denis and Wilam. Something about the two of them I just can't relate too.
I liked the way you explored the two factions through the eyes of their opponents; Dines with the Northerners and Wilam with the Rosians. And I -really- liked the twist at the end with Rael. It was getting to the point with the Rosian knights' cruelty that I was like, "C'mon Kaez. . ." It was interesting to find that such isn't the standard and that Wilam might have them wrong as well.
There were one or two naming confusions where character names became mixed up with the actions; I think in Chapter 1 Vaesar kicks himself in the ribs. . . But other than that, my only real gripe about Part 2 is that it makes me like Part 1 even less.
I've seen now what you're capable of as a story teller and really wish I hadn't been forced to wade through Part 1 in order to get to the good stuff. If you were ever to revisit this (and you should) it would simply be a metter of formatting. Move bits of 2 into 1 and expand on some the areas I mentioned.
Any publisher is going to tell you that you need to grab your reader right off the bat and keep them interested. . . Part 1 doesn't really do that. When I finished it I little incentive to move on to 2 and did it more because I promised I would than because I wanted to. Honestly, had it been a book I'd borrowed from a library or a friend, I probably would have given it back beofre ver getting into Part 2.
But Part 2; really good stuff. I'm actually looking forward to Part 3.
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Post by Kaez on May 18, 2010 10:10:38 GMT -5
Yeah, I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but I pretty much expected this review to be what it is: if you didn't like Part 1, Part 2 was probably going to make you like it less.
This is mainly because almost the entirety of Part 1 was -already written-. It had been planned and formatted a long time ago, and when NaNo came around, I rewrote it -- six months later. I'd developed as a writer and a storyteller, but I was telling an old story. By the time I did all that rewriting, I got around to expanding on it with what would become Part 2: which, along with the (relatively brief) Part 3, is the "original writing" of Wolves and closer to what I called my 'pride and joy'.
I'm sure it's not free of errors, as you said. But in expanding out and showing the larger scale of things, in putting more focus on characters and subplots, in trying to show the morality of the war from both sides of the conflict (the real point of the story, honestly), I think this part definitely is closer to what Wolves was supposed to be than the first. If I ever were to go back to this, I definitely think that Part 1 would undergo a complete revamp, I agree -- it doesn't do its job of catching the reader's attention. It's my Phantom Menace... >.>
ANYWAY! I really appreciate the feedback. Part 3 is pretty short, and it'll probably feel like things suddenly got cut off, because... they kind of did. But hopefully it's still solid.
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Post by ASGetty ((Zovo)) on May 18, 2010 14:50:58 GMT -5
Yeah, I recalled you saying at the beginning of NaNo that you were giong to work on a piece you'd already started, so I kind of assumed this. To say you'd developed as a writer and storyteller is a bit of an understatement. It's like the two parts were written by different people. Consider it a very productive six months of development.  |
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Post by Kaez on May 26, 2010 19:44:41 GMT -5
You know, I was just having a discussion with Coorash that went thusly:
Coo: I need a title for my story.
Me: That's for later. Would you name a dog before you saw it?
Coo: Good point...
Me: For example: Wolves in the Dark. It started out just about a spy running away from where he was caught. But it soon developed into two characters, both very skilled warriors, finding themselves on opposite sides of the battlefield than they started on. Hence they were "Wolves in the Dark".
It was somewhere between starting that reply and ending that reply that I realized how incredibly well the title of this story actually works. It's magnificent. And yet we entitled it Wolves in the Dark before we had -any- idea where the story was going. We literally hadn't planned ahead at all. The characters joining separate sides was something I added myself, long after the original Wolves was written.
Pretty cool :]
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Your turn now Kaez xD
