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Messages - Asmodemon

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46
Again I like this chapter more than I did the previous, just like chapter one was better than the prologue. Not because the writing has improved as such, since I still see all the same issues, but because the new character is more enjoyable and feels more fleshed out – like you’re learning with every character point of view you write.

Lorn has a lot of problems on his mind and while the prologue hinted at the fact that he and his men are not simple it’s good to see this is actually the case. He also wants to do something about those problems, which is better than Ciera’s avoidance of confrontation and Destra’s mindless hating.

Now, on to the issues. The passive voice: “He had targeted”, “had been a gamble”, “he had done this”, “had lost”, “had failed”. These happened in and around a single paragraph right at the start. I can’t stress enough that passive voice weakens the power of your writing. As the writer it can be hard to detect sometimes, but it’s well worth the effort if you can weed it out and believe me there’s a lot to weed out.

Again you use ‘loose’ instead of ‘lose’. Loose is the opposite of tight, it’s also an adjective. On the other hand lose is a verb for suffering loss or to miss. In general you’ll probably use ‘lose’ a lot more than you do ‘loose’. Case in point, every case of ‘loose’ in your work up to this point should actually be ‘lose’.

The chapter also feels more bloated than it should. The first four pages of the prologue were mostly exposition, while Destra ran for her life. The first four pages here are exposition on what’s happened before while Lorn lies in bed sulking and planning. Sulking and planning is not interested, executing the plan (or doing anything at all really) can be interesting.

As such the chapter gets better in the latter half, starting from around page six, when Lorn starts doing things and interacting with people. We just had five pages exposing his guilt through telling, while the better option would be to show us the guilt he feels through dialogue with his friends/culprits.

47
I like this chapter more than I did the prologue, even though technically even less actually happens. Ciera, with her phobias, somehow earns my sympathies and I keep hoping she’ll do something to get past them.

There are still a lot more words here than you actually need, I think. Summary, Ciera goes to work. Do you really need 3300 words for that? Aside from showing us Ciera’s frightened disposition and her mental friend, this chapter doesn’t feel necessary at all. If you start in the library Ciera will be just as frightened and Onmk will still be in her head.

Now, while I find Ciera more relatable than Destra, both women can be defined with a singular description. Destra hated men, Ciera is afraid of people. They follow those baselines so rigidly it’s all they seem to be; Destra hates, Ciera fears. This makes them feel, to me, rather one dimensional.

What I noticed most is mostly technical in nature, and since you’ve said English isn’t your first language I’ll spent some extra time here. You have a lot of long sentences.  The first two together clock in at 87 words! You focus a lot of these sentences on Ciera being afraid, doing things because she’s afraid, a mention of work, then another thing about why she’s afraid. And the majority has you telling us this instead of showing it.

Some grammatical errors, I don’t usually mention specifics unless they’re consistently used wrong. For instance ‘loose’ instead ‘lose’. You also did that mistake in the prologue.

An odd construction of dialogue attributions is when you have “wanted to say Ciera”. Very Yoda, it is.

Still a lot of passive voice, “hands were clutching” instead of “hands clutched”.

When you have Ciera and Onmk (such an unfortunate name to have to pronounce) talking to each other you mention at the start that she’s replying mentally, rather than verbally, but the distinction becomes lost quickly. Especially when you have Ciera, the driver, and Onmk speak.

All throughout the chapter you use colons where you don’t need them, I counted a full nine occurrences. I’m hard-pressed to remember a book that had colons and/or needed them. A period followed by a new sentence is all you need, or if you must some dashes or semi-colon.

I think you could probably cut this chapter and present the reader with the salient points elsewhere. Remember, the first chapters are especially important to grab the reader’s attention. This doesn’t mean it should be full of action, but it does mean what happens is meaningful and draws us in to the characters. I can’t stress this enough, we need to feel for the character and get to know her. While I am a little sympathetic towards Ciera you don’t flesh her out much – she’s afraid, has a voice in her head, that’s it. For 3300 words, that’s not much at all.

Other than that, try to watch out for passive voice and using too many words. If you feel you have to explain something or clarify something, look again to see if you really need the explanation as much as you think you do. I think you’ll find that most often you don’t actually need it.

48
I don’t really have any more to add to what’s been mentioned already. There are some good things here you can work with when you rewrite the prologue.

For a prologue it’s a bit on the long side. Normally this isn’t a problem for me as long as sufficient things happen to justify the length. What you’ve got is basically pursuit, hide, escape. For the first four pages Destra is almost caught, but with the way you’re describing and having Destra think about everything she sees, hears, remembers, etc. nothing actually happens in those first pages.

What I suggest is that you cut out a lot of extraneous information, some of it is explaining things that don’t need explaining. There’s a time and place for everything, but all this information has no place in a chase sequence. It saps all the tension and immediacy from the piece. Your sentences, like Destra, have the tendency to keep on running. You’ve also got a lot of passive voice slowing the piece down. The passive voice is insidious, so it’s a good thing to be aware of it early and keep a look out for it.

49
Reading Excuses / Re: RE-3/28/11-MannyBrainpan-Untitled Fantasy Serial
« on: March 29, 2011, 08:47:40 PM »
The chapter is bigger than the last, but I’m not sure it’s much of an improvement. You’re trying to introduce more of Vara’s past, giving her some mystery. I’m sorry to say it’s not having the intended effect on me.  She’s not mysterious, she and her magic and the setting are confusing. Her past, in the way you present it, reads like you’ve realized we don’t know enough about Vara and now you’re applying emergency patches. I think this sounds harsher than I intend, but bear with me. I think that the short format you’ve got going makes it hard for me to get into the story and the character(s) – in other words, to find the good parts – and easier to see the flaws.

Here we still have odd dialogue, both in the way you write it and what the characters are actually trying to say.
For instance, Leo says there’s a dire need for her to know as much as she can, then he goes on a tangent about food. She’s homeless and scavenging – the lizard can see this. She gets it where she sees opportunity. So why bring this up, is there another reason food is important? Because the setting as it is doesn’t specify anything of note about food.

I like that Vara doesn’t let the lizard walk all over her, but then she says something confusing. “How did I defeat a mob of people!?!”

She did not defeat a mob of people, she ran from them. All we know, and all we saw, was a cloud of dust when she ran and a crater when she came back. That’s also what she should know of what happened.

Then back to the food issue: “I-- know that, if I can reach this fruit--- I won’t be so heavy.”

What? What does that even mean? She gets lighter when she eats fruit? So now we have a magical lizard, magical dirt, magical water, magical hair, and magical fruit? I get there’s magic in this setting, but it doesn’t make sense.

I really don’t want to sound harsh, but when I read dialogue like this: “All true, again. But there is a world of untapped skill and power that is open to you”

What I think is: “Use the force Luke. It’s your destiny. You can’t die, I love you. Blah, blah, blah.”

Good that Vara doesn’t like it either, but it’d be better if Leo spoke like an actual person, even if he is a lizard.

Satisfied with the food knowledge Leo turns to her childhood, and Vara tells us all about it. Cry me a river, but I’m not sympathetic to Vara’s abandonment. We’ve been hopping all over the place, and after a miniscule rump on a rooftop (which, since the crater is in front of the butcher’s shop, didn’t actually go anywhere…) Vara’s done nothing that makes me connect with her.

This information is simply an info-dump telling us we should care about this tragic young woman, damn it! Again, I realize it’s hard with this format, but you’ve got to show us she’s someone worth rooting for, not telling us she’s got a tragic past.

Vara also gets a little teary eyed thinking of her past and, of course, fights it so she doesn’t seem weak. All of this is pretty typical fare for a young female character. Every urban fantasy book I read had a character like Vara, so, yeah, she’s a bit on the cliché side.

Also, the hard girl, who shouldn’t be in a position to trust anyone, if the villagers are that rabid about her, instantly falls for the lizard and thinks him her friend.

Too typical and too easy. What I see is the young heroine with the special powers and the wise mentor slash magical girl cute side-kick and mascot character.

What would help, I think, is that you read some of these dialogues aloud or if you have the opportunity let others speak it aloud. I think you'll see that this isn't the way real people speak. Also, when you try to put information in don't do it as an info dump. If this was a larger chapter you might get away with a bit of dialogue exposition like that, but in this short form it stands out too much.

I also have a small request. Could you put the chapter number in your files, email subject and topic header? For me that makes parsing all the topics and files a lot easier.

50
I agree with the others that the dialogue could be better. And since the majority of the chapter is dialogue it’s important to look at. To me it feels stilted in places, in part because of erroneous commas, partly because the dialogue feels like I’ve seen it before, but also because there’s a lot of passive voice usage in this chapter. It makes it seem that we’re one step removed from the story.

There are a lot of sentences like: “Vara was now putting her goggles back on.”

This is passive voice and reads slower than “Vara put her goggles back on.”

The same message, but more immediate in tone and in pacing because there are less words to stumble over.

The passive voice can also be found in dialogue, such as with:  “I’m suspecting that you are surprised.”

A less passive variant: “I suspect you’re surprised.”

This has the added benefit that it doesn’t read oddly, as the first version does.

Passive voice and adverbs should be avoided as a general rule, but especially in this serial format it’s important to scratch as many unnecessary words as you can so you can fill the remainder of your allotted number with meaning, action, and character. It’s hard to feel for Vara with such short chapters, don’t make it harder.

What I also see is that aside from bloating up the text with adverbs and passive voice you also go about certain descriptions in a round-about way. With so many commas and long sentences it takes longer to process what’s happening. The last big paragraph, starting with “Vara pushed a branch” is a good example of this.

I rewrote the paragraph to a more direct approach (if it was me I’d cut it even further, but I've been in a cutting mindset lately), with only a single comma. That’s not to say you should do it this way, but if you look at the difference you see it’s the same information, presented in a shorter way and closer to home (Vara).

Vara pushed a branch out of her way. She could hardly believe it, there was a crater in front of the butcher shop. Her landing spot? Ripples of dirt emanated from the impression she left behind.

51
Part three, where Vara is going to land where a mob is gathering. Right, why is a mob gathering for Vara again? Yes, she’s a thief, yes, the butcher called her out, but she’s on the roofs now, running, while the butcher has to move through streets with enough people to form a mob. She should be outpacing him and the people should be a little slower in responding. Again, this may be the society, but in my experience people aren’t eager to get involved in such scrapes and with a lot of people around most will wait to see who is going to act first.

Vara then disappears into a cloud of dust. Given what you’ve said here on the forums I gather this is the magic system, some form of displacement through dust, but there’s nothing in the chapter itself to make this clear. From the chapter all I get is that she lands on an overly dusty street and runs from a mob, with an unclear purpose, without any trouble at all.

When she’s clear you make an odd jump with “it was a new month”, slipping into passive voice as well. It makes me feel more time has passed than it actually has. For someone who was just in trouble it’s odd she immediately wants to bath. My response would be to stake out her home for aw while to assure herself no one followed. When Leo speaks up she reacts far more passively than I expect, I’d expect her to do more than try to draw him out by speaking. A flight into a tree seems more likely.

The following sentence is really awkward: “She removed her goggles, letting her dark hair fall to her shoulders, I wonder what color my hair is.”

Her dark hair falls free, so she knows what colour her hair is. Another hint of a magic system, so now we have dust, water, hair; not seeing the overall connection yet. 

52

Short chapters, I’m surprised no one critiqued these yet.  With the chapters being so short it’s hard to get a good grasp of the setting, the plot, and the character of Vara. I don’t dislike her and you could have something good here, but it’ll take more writing to actually figure this out.

That said, what you have right now does have some points I want to address.

You start off with a spoof in the opening. Personally I’m not a big fan of not only such a blatant parody, but also of breaking the fourth wall so blatantly. The second person perspective you’ve got going in the first paragraph rubs me wrong. That may be just me, so mileage may vary indeed. For me the opening doesn’t exactly hook me.

What I will suggest is that with this kind of opening I expect humour, further parody elements, and basically a story that doesn’t take itself seriously. That’s the promise you’re making to me as the reader and if that’s not what’s going to happen you might want to reconsider the opening.

The rest of the chapter worked better, but it’s short so I’m still in the process of forming an opinion on the world and the character of Vara. When you mentioned she lived in a tree I expected an elfish fantasy, but the butcher makes me think of a more modern setting. Either one might be interesting at this point.

As for Vara, with her sensitive ears I’m thinking some form of elf, but again, not enough detail to know for sure yet. I liked her fear of a simple lizard though, it’s a defining character moment and you need those right now.

As for chapter two, I get that a butcher has a lot of knives, but the way he throws them around makes me think he has too many. Also, my first impression is that he’s far too eager to cut off her hands.  Maybe that’s the times, the society or the culture, but I know nothing of those yet other than that this ‘isn’t a galaxy far, far away’.

You have some odd things here too, such as ‘wood splintering’. What from? The butcher is throwing knives, not axes.

Your math is also off. If three digometers equals four meters, than one digometer is 1.33 meters. Which means that one hundred digometers equals 133 meters ( (4/3)*100), not 101 meters. Also, the world is called “Dig” and they measure in “digometers”. Really? Is this the comedic element because, while I am laughing, it’s because this is remarkably bad. I’m sorry, but it is. Digometers add nothing to the setting and have no clear meaning. You know this since you put the ‘real’ distance in brackets. This is not a good solution.

53
Again I liked the excerpt from Memories of Myself, though parts read a little confusing. I’ll go into that in a moment. The chapter’s basically three sections, the reprimand, the stables, and Jin’s downtime. The reprimand shows Jin’s relationship with his exasperated father very well. I don’t really see much point in the stable scene, other than have Jin suffer. From what I remember of your writing you don’t need to spend extra effort now ;)

The chapter wanes until we get to Jin overhearing the girls speak. We get another new word, Pai'asie. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. On its own that’s fine, but you already have a lot of new words that need to be understood. The last scene I liked as well, though Chalinae’s challenge seems foolish, but she’s not much older than Jin and kids will be kids.

Some further remarks, some of what you write is pretty confusing, you seem to change your mind halfway through a sentence. Two ways of saying the same thought in one sentence doesn’t really work. I think I’ve mentioned this before. The first example in this chapter is:

Quote
She strung a veil of black silks was placed over my face and all the light was now gone from my world.

The two variants I see are:

Quote
She strung a veil of black silks over my face…
And
Quote
A veil of black silks was placed over my face…

Something for the proofreading step to fix perhaps, but it might be a good idea to pay a little more attention to it since it happens fairly often.

You write very descriptively, I know I do the same, but I’ve found I often have to cut out a lot of nicely worded descriptions because it brings the pacing way down. Especially when the descriptions occur between parts of the same person speaking, for instance with the couch part at the start of the chapter. I’d cut that description off after ‘going over scrolls and tablets’ and get back into the dialogue. At this point we don’t need anything more than placing Jin’s mother on the couch, the rest of the information isn’t pertinent as far as I can see.

About Jin’s glasses, I don’t remember them from the last draft you did (which is fine) but I also don’t remember them being mentioned in the last chapter (I checked, and this is not fine). Jin notes things there as if he can see everything just fine, but here he can’t see the writing on the papers clearly without glasses. Maybe his eyesight is only a little worse than normal, but it momentarily takes me out of the story so you may want to clarify this.

Another thing I thought of when Talvin was reprimanding Jin is that Jin was easily confused for a slave. For a society that spends so much import on Free Men and slaves, you’d think they’d either mark the slaves VERY clearly or/and have a clear way to signify a free man from a slave, either with a marking or a badge or something.

Quote
But then . . . if they really do fall into that category . . . I should really start moving toward that demographic then.

I don’t think you need to move or change the story to a YA demographic. Sure, your main characters are young, with Jin being ten years old, and young protagonists are often seen as a sign of YA, but by that logic with a ten year old character this story is also middle grade ware. I agree with you that the Painted Man is not YA, not by a long shot, and neither is this.

54
I know what you mean by being dissatisfied with what you’ve written, it’s why I’ve been rewriting “Citadel” rather than post chapters I know are substandard.

I like the way you start this chapter with an image (the file size really surprised me before I opened it), it fits with what I remember of Jin from the previous draft. I also enjoyed the excerpt about Sin a lot. The backstory there is very intriguing, though there were some grammar/spelling issues.

Then you take us right back to the harsh society in the Hellfane, and at first glance it’s a little milder than it was in the previous draft. That’s good, since I thought the society was too hard on the male slaves before.

It’s nice to see Jin again and I’m curious to what you have in store for him this time. I also like Chalinea, she’s works really well with Jin.

Your sentences miss some punctuation or a word here and there. And there are some sentence structures where I had to think before I understood what it said. A comma or a dash could help in those cases. An example is in:

Quote
The chains on my wrists, bronze as few were stupid or proud enough to grant me iron, rattled as I shook them.

The chains on my wrists, bronze – as few were stupid or proud enough to grant me iron – rattled as I shook them.

Or perhaps a reordering: The bronze chains on my wrists rattled as I shook them. Few were stupid or proud enough to grant me iron.

Another issue is that parts of sentences are missing. In the following example you make mention of Jin’s body, before going into a spiel about his clothes and his sweat darkening said clothes. But you don’t return to the original point about his body.

Quote
The heat of the day was overbearing and Jin'Cathul's body, despite the silk coat and brimmed hat, sweat darkened the blue dyes to the color of a murky bucket.

I’m a bit confused about Jin’s height – you say he’s ten years old and that he’s tall for his age. It surprises me that people ignore him, even on the ground, so easily and that they step over him without notice.

Aside from these issues Jin’s first chapter was very enjoyable.

55
Last chapter I found the order to capture one of the enemy flyers, given the trouble the army is in, a little odd. Now it really sinks in that three high ranks have been sent to do something that should have been left to a single, low rank, squad or team. This doesn’t seem tactically sound at all, though perhaps that’s your way of showing that the new commander is a far cry from the old. It’s good though that Jhuz wonders the same thing.

There’s a lot of passive voice in this chapter, slowing down the urgency of the fighting in the descriptions. You’re also explaining why certain things are the way they are – for instance, you don’t need to explain to us that captives don’t want to be taken alive, we can understand that well enough and we already know this through the boarmancer two chapters ago.

I’m also not convinced by the dialogue during the fighting. It’s like I’m watching a shounen anime, like Bleach or Naruto; one of the characters makes a move and then talks incessantly about what the move is, what it does and why it’s going to win the battle. Zaisha does this and Jhuz for example explains to his prisoner how the women in his army do their magic – what? And then the prisoner gives away her army’s techniques – what?!

The Legion’s officers are also fighting each other again, right in front of the prisoner – again, this is just not done in a professional army. All these occurrences should have been nipped in the bud already rather than let things deteriorate this far.

So, it's good you're getting into some action, but the reason for the action seems misplaced.

56
I liked the way the dialogue worked in this chapter, especially between Zaisha and Jhuz.

The way the battle went in the last chapter I’m surprised at the numbers here, only sixty attackers and a loss of twenty men. This seems too little given the last chapter, since one of the medusi tossed a dozen men around and at the end of chapter four, with the boarmancer, that one soldier Jhuz talked to made it seem he lost his whole squad.

So Gaitu did die of illness. If the leg was so bad it would have been amputated already, so I’m finding it a little hard to believe he died this way. There is talk of plague, but if targeting one person with plague is impossible we’re left with regular gangrene and gangrene doesn’t work that way. This is an interesting mystery, but perhaps some foreshadowing about the oddness of the condition in the last two chapters might help in creating a firm basis for the mystery around his death.

During his ceremony we see that is indeed something very odd. It’s good to have a mystery, but then you do something very odd. The jackals start to eat from Gaitu’s diseased flesh…I’m sorry, but why would those animals eat everything, including the rotting leg? The look of it, the smell of it, would set those animals back at once. And on the side of the army, the moment they saw his rotting flesh, mushrooms and all, they should have paused the ceremony, do some investigation, and then continue. Though I don’t think the animals would eat diseased flesh like that anyway.

Jhuz is naïve, all right, I can see that in light of the last few chapters. Strange that Gaitu, as commander, didn’t know. And if he did, that he didn’t tell the other officers so they understood Jhuz better. I still think this plan is madness, by the way ;)

57
Reading Excuses / Re: January 24 – Hubay, Lord Domestic Ch4
« on: February 28, 2011, 05:29:58 PM »
This is nice, some political upheaval to threaten the army that’s already in trouble. We’re also getting some action by Jhuz, finally. In all I liked reading this chapter, but there are a few points I wasn’t particularly fond off.

To me the message is unclear. “The Empire can afford no soldiers at this time”. At first read I thought this meant the soldiers were all getting sacked. But the next line says there are other threats, so I take it to mean that the empire can’t send new troops. I think you should clarify this section more.

I’m also unclear, given the message, why Pentus Arilu thinks the emperor thinks the army has rebelled. The empire is in trouble and can’t send new troops, doesn’t mean the current army is rebelling. The emperor is disappointed, which is natural since the empire is in trouble and the army just lost a battle. The empire outlaws two cults, because the two cults have been doing things – that doesn’t mean it’s an act specifically against this army, just against the cults.

Ah, we get an explanation for the ‘rebelling’ bit later. Perhaps this should be made clearer before, because from the information given I didn’t think the talk of rebellion before Gaitu showed up made any sense.

I’ve also being reading about Mejj for a few chapters now, but I’m still not really clear on what all the different Mejji actually are and do. You’ve explained these when you posted the first chapter, but in the story itself the differences are not immediately clear and the terms are so many they blend together.

Jhuz suddenly goes on a killing spree and while I’m all for him showing some backbone it seems a bit too sudden given what we’ve seen of him before this – he even thought he was a coward, he was surprised he could catch ballista bolts from mid-air, but now all of a sudden he uses these powers of his as if he’s born to them.

The plan to get Jhuz to fight is another example of the rather wacky way you go about discipline in your army. How can any commanding officer hatch a plan in which it’s required of the soldier to break the chain of command and break an imperial edict, all by his own will? A will that is, apparently meant to be broken for him to function as a soldier – broken soldiers, whether in mind or in body, are not good to have in an army. Jhuz could easily have snapped in a different way, causing the army untold trouble.

58
Reading Excuses / Re: January 10 – Hubay – Lord Domestic Ch3
« on: February 28, 2011, 05:26:05 PM »
You’ve lessened the exposition a lot in this chapter and this helps the pacing greatly. The descriptions of what the characters are doing are good, in my head I can see them doing those things, only they do it in a void for the most part – a little more setting the scene would help a lot. Jhuz also finally shows a little bit of spine and skill at the end of the chapter, I like that.

Now, onto the slightly more negative aspect of this chapter, which is the discipline of your military force, or rather the distinct lack of discipline anywhere. Why are the officers telling the servants all about the reduced rations solely on the basis of a rumour? Servants talk, the presence of spies amongst the servants is not unlikely, so they’re broadcasting their wretched state to everyone.

I also noticed that the servants, as well as seemingly non-commissioned personnel like the bodyguard Ezlio, have a surprising amount of freedom in terms of speaking their minds and being privy to what I consider confidential information.

Another issue is Terze and the Jackal showing their mutual loathing in front of their lesser – subordinates and servants alike. The officers may not like each other, but to show this in front of others is just not done. What will the squads think if their officers want to see each other dead? Will any squad come to the aid of another? This is completely devastating to morale and troop cohesion. Let the officers duke it out in private, but it should never be done like this, in front of servants and lesser ranks.

Another issue of this is when Zaisha says she wants to convince the infantry to use ‘manuballista’ and Jhuz is very derisive in saying she’ll never convince them. She’s higher in rank, she doesn’t need to convince them, she needs to order them and the infantry had better get used to it. And if the infantry is not hers she should go to the infantry commander and let him give the order. Soldiers want to live, I find it hard to believe they’ll decide not to use a weapon if it means winning a battle.

I do find it interesting that soldiers won’t use ‘peasant weapons’. From what social class or caste are soldiers drafted? Usually the peasants form the body of armies.

All of this sums up to one word: discipline. If I’m to believe this is an actual sophisticated military force and not a ragtag bunch of barbarians I’m going to have to see some discipline.

59
Reading Excuses / Re: December 27, 2010. Hubay – Lord Domestic, Ch 2
« on: February 28, 2011, 05:22:51 PM »
Don’t get me wrong, I’m going to be giving you a lot of things about this chapter that didn’t resonate well with me, but overall I did like reading it and I can see the potential going forward.

The start of the chapter is a very passive read with too much telling instead of showing. We are told the council is different, while we could also have seen the difference through Jhuz’s eyes when he’s called to attend. The mood of the camp is also described in a very detached way. Here I’d give the same advice, have Jhuz see what’s happening as he’s heading to the council location (for example) instead.

Also, there’s too much ‘was’, ‘had’ ‘had been’ and the like, which slows the reading down and lessens the emergency of what you’re telling. The fact that Terze has a mouse for dinner is a big show of how dire things are in the army, but the impression I had while reading it lacked that dire sense because the passive voice took away the urgency.

I found the mention of petty officers a little jarring. LTU already mentioned the two different ways of reading it, and I read it in the latter way as a military rank – to me it sounds too much like the modern navy and not a term that fits well with the setting, which is funny in a way since the rank has been around for a few centuries already.

A thought occurred to me that having Jhuz fly to the meeting is a little odd. It’s known the enemy has flyers, it’s also dark so visibility is low. The guards at the meeting though do nothing when someone just flies in, nor does anyone in the camp when Jhuz gets low enough to land. He could have been shot at, and perhaps should have been shot at.

I’m getting the picture that this army is lacking in discipline; the way lower ranks talk to Jhuz, the way they do ‘pranks’ on him without reprimand, little to no awareness towards flying elements. Is this a correct assessment on my part?

I also wonder at Jhuz’s insistence that he’s a coward because he’s under orders not to fly – this is not his fault, and a military unit with knowledge of these rules might begrudge him his ‘safety’ but not call him a coward. In the first chapter Jhuz had to restrain himself not to get into the action:

Quote
“Rim above. Jhuz itched to fly. The female fliers swarmed towards the infantry, and he was helpess to defend them.”

This is not the way a coward acts, so he shouldn’t think himself one. In that light that he puts up with such nonsense by lesser ranks is even odder.

I’m not going to mention the odd grudge bodyguard Ezlio carries towards Lhuz, since LTU already did so, but I will say that in the first chapter and the second you’re trying too hard in giving Lhuz conflicts and angst – things he should overcome in the story – but at the cost of suspension of disbelief. Right now I don’t believe this is a proper military organization, or that Lhuz’s conflicts are actually grounded in reality.

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Reading Excuses / Re: December 20, 2010. Hubay – Lord Domestic Chapter 1
« on: February 28, 2011, 05:16:33 PM »
I had actually forgotten I already had a written up critique for this chapter – stupid of me. For the most part I’ll echo the others, there's a little too much exposition, which would be far more effectively handled with speech or action, but otherwise not a bad beginning.

There's also some redundancy, for instance when you mention women soldiers. We get that in the Empire it's unheard of through the narrator and then we get the same thing said by Lhuz.

I'm interested in the tactics of the two armies. For one, landing flyers, which puts them at risk while they could strike from the air. A flyer with a crossbow, or a group of flyers carrying pitch to throw on the commander's tent, would be far safer on the part of the attackers and harder to counter by the defenders.

Which brings me to another tactical issue: the ground forces have no defense against flyers. Attacking the flyers from the ground can be a problem if the flyers stay out of range, but defenses against air attacks should be easier to fashion. I'm thinking of phalanxes carrying interlocking shields above their heads. I'm thinking of great wooden platforms under which the soldiers could hide.

With such air supremacy the existence of sappers and miners might also be explored. If the ground is not safe from flyers, going underground could be a viable alternative. Armies and soldiers aren't stupid, individuals may be here and there, but on the whole they are very good at staying alive and they will adapt to the situation.

I've found that when it comes to armies and their logistics and strategies Sun Tzu's “The Art of War” can be really helpful as a guide. I've got it in book form but there are free translations available on the web. It’s basically a set of rules for commanders, given certain situations, and the strategic ways of thinking one might employ in those situations. It’s a pretty insightful look into a commander’s mindset.

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