Sept. 7 - Recovering Cynic - Oathbound - Ch. 1

[Recovering_Cynic]

Well, here it is, my first chapter of my first attempt at a novel.  Enjoy.

Warning: Gore and Violence.

[Chaos]

Totally copied the name of my short story. Haha, kidding, of course.

On the title alone, I shall read it! (Tomorrow, that is)

[Frog]

Oathbound... didn't I already read that story? It has come back to haunt me!

Thoughts While Reading:
Well, I can't say that the first bit grabbed me. You spend so much time in internal infodump mode that I was a little bored by the time we got to the hound. There were some good details there though.

Why would they exile them and at the same time promise protection?

I may of missed something when you explain some of the exile mark significance, but I don't understand why the knight's touch would have effected him the way it did.

You use 'Eventually' twice to start a paragraph.

I could just be me, but it seems like there are more 'pieces' of Cammil then there ought to be.

It's always depressing when the MC dies at the end of the first chp....

Overall Impression:
Mostly, I thought it was good. I would cut down a lot of the internal thought and let some more of the action stand alone. I think we need more world building stuff to understand their situation and relation to the other groups, but it could have been sufficiently been in the prologue or be clear enough in other chapters for this one to be fine as is. I also felt that you delayed a lot of your details and played up a false sense of suspense a few more times than I would have liked. Meaning, you didn't tell us he had a family until you put them in danger. You didn't tell us about the knight's bell before he had already decided to run for it or any of their potential plans for hiding Marshell until he crossed them off one by one. It just seemed a little like you were making this all up as you went along, and since I kind of figured the family was toast from their first mention (maybe just because I figured you would write it that way) it seemed to draw things out unnecessarily. That may or may not make a lot of sense, but none of these are major problems.

Good work! 

[westwriter]

Really liked the first chapter!  I don't mind the info dump at the start, as long as you are revealing character.  Maybe a mention of why he was exiled and what his life was like before the exile.  That would help me feel more for the MC and want to root for him.
I am, likewise, curious about the knight's touch.  Just some indication as to whether the unconsciousness was brought about by a power the knight had or something else.  Was the hole in the glove significant?
I get that the MC wasn't killed, but we don't know that till ch. 2.  It seems there was no hope for anybody in that chapter.  Lol  That won't make me stop reading,  but I personally like to have somebody to root for early.
Those are small things.  I liked the story, so keep on writing!

[Jexral]

Wow... Chapter one is awesome.  An interesting beginning. 

One small thing I thought about... it seems like the hound would have smelled him in the beginning.  I dunno. 

[RavenstarRHJF]

A good beginning!  I thought you handled the thinking to himself very well- but I agree that we need some mention of his family before you tell us they're in danger.  From the way you introduce him, it sounds very much like he's a lone bachelor, not to mention a very recent exile (as in, within a year- rather than a two-year veteran).

If the knight bell is so important to survival, wouldn't all the homesteads be more or less clustered around it?  I'd also think the exiles would band together in groups for mutual defense and go out to farm the fields or whatever, instead of living apart from each other.  Seems to invite attack, living alone the way they do.

And I, also, thought he was a goner at the end of chapter 1.  It's very hard to survive a sword in your gut at the best of times (which this is not)- not to mention the horrifically deadly beast drooling on him.  Probably need to make that transition a little clearer here, or at least explain it later on.  However, at the beginning of chapter two, his exile mark seems to have disappeared, so perhaps he survived by going through some kind of, I don't know, reanimation process?  Kind of like Gandalf? "I've been sent back to complete my task." (horribly paraphrased, so don't eat me)

Speaking of the sword in the gut... you said the wildman stuck it through his back?  But he was rushing out of the house at the time... seems the wildman should have taken advantage of his forward momentum and stuck it through his front instead.  It'd be hard to get it all the way through from the back unless he also grabbed him.

Anyway, good beginning!  One more thing- I'd play up his attachment to his family a little more- at the moment it seems a bit bland, like my feelings for my cousins whom I didn't grow up with and don't really know.  Yeah they're my family, but I'm not sure I'd take up a quest to avenge them should they be murdered.

[Hamster]

A really good first attempt at a novel, way better than my first attempt by a long shot.

Overall, there's not really any specifics I can give for improvements, so please forgive me if I'm rambling and vague.

Raven is right, why is the bell so far away? You made it sound like the bell was the farthest reaches of the frontier, which makes no sense, because it should be closer to them, and closer to the Holy Empire(I think that's what it is..) so the knights can respond quicker. Maybe you have a purpose for that though.

Until he discovered Marshall's death, I wasn't feeling the love of Jarl for his family enough. You kind've tell us that he's important, and couldn't live without him; which is fine, because he probably would be thinking along those lines at the time, but I wanted more body language to show me how he felt. Up until he discovers his death, then it's portrayed much more passionately.

By the gods I am going to put an arrow in that thing if I have to do it from point blank range. 

I'm not really an expert, but would the term "point blank range" be in use in this time period? It jarred me out of the story a bit.

And why were the wildmen and the Hound waiting at the house. They had been there for well over an hour after killing his family, were they just waiting for him? Because that seems out of character of dumb and unsophisticated wildmen, when they couldn't even have been sure of a male who lived there. And if they were waiting there, they could have taken him out before he got inside the house. That part doesn't seem  to be entirely realistic,but I can forgive that, because all authors do that to some extent, or maybe it's more complicated and we simply havn't read enough to understand it all. Either way, good job overall.


But this chapter is a good hook, well written, good characterization and some worldbuilding without giving a massive infodump. And the sneak peak of the 2nd chapter looked promising. I will eagerly await your next submission!

[Recovering_Cynic]

Totally copied the name of my short story.  Haha, kidding, of course.

On the title alone, I shall read it! (Tomorrow, that is)

LOL... so I just now saw your post for your own story by the same title.  I had no idea .  Sorry for the stealing, but, um, right now, I can't think of a better title for mine.  This one is bitingly ironic once you know the whole story.

[Recovering_Cynic]

As to a lot of the other comments and feedback, well, you all have a lot of questions, some of them I intended you to have, others symptoms of bad writing.  I'll be applying patches to the first chapter, so please let me know if they will fix your concerns.  Here are my planned fixes:

1) Jagoth mentions his family instead of "old timers" when he is talking about being new on the frontier.  It lets you know he's a family man in first few paragraphs.

2) Indication that the farmsteads are designated by the empire.

3) Indication that the exiles are used more as a cog in the empire's early warning system, an expendable cog at that.  Exiles know this, but they'll ring the bell anyway--it's their only hope.

4) The wildman now grabs Jarl's shoulder and stabs him in the back.

5) Jarl goes after the hound with a dagger, a weapon he is more familiar with.  This becomes important in chapter 2.

6) Indication that there are multiple warning bells spaced at regular intervals.

7) Indication that knight used holy magic to stun Jarl.


Hmm... I think those are all of the patches I was planning on making.  Did I miss anything?  Some of the questions you all raised are there on purpose to keep the reader reading, and I hope that by using the first line in Ch. 2 to show that Jarl lived through it (well, sort of, RAFO), it tempers any harshness.  Let me know.

[Silk]

I didn't have a great deal to say to this chapter, I'm afraid; I never do at the beginning of a story. I thought that the sequence with the hound, in particular, went a bit overboard on the description. (I'm not saying that I thought it was excessively gory. I just felt at points like I was getting repeat information.)

I didn't have a problem with the knights promising protection to the exiles, or the knight's touch affecting Jarl the way it did. Both of these things will need explanations at some point, but I'm sure there's plenty of time to do so.

As Frog said, don't be afraid to let some of the action stand on its own. I didn't feel bogged down, necessarily, but I was also not quite as into it as I maybe wanted to be, and cutting right to the chase--er, so to speak--might be what it needs to pick things up. Don't worry too much about explaining things, especially this early. Readers are smart, patient people. They'll figure it out and wait for the rest.

Actually, the one thing that had me MOST interested was Jarl's relationship with Cammil... and then you immediately killed her off. I'm not going to criticize you for it, not now, because there's still plenty of potential to see that dynamic come through in the story, even if it's just through flashback. This is obviously going to be one of Jarl's main motivators from now on.

I don't think we need to know why Jarl was exiled right in chapter one, necessarily. For me it was enough that he was exiled at all. I can wait for the rest.

Jexral makes a good point. Shouldn't the hound have smelled him?

I also have to agree with Ravenstar's comment that it seems that he's a very recent exile. Of course, you don't have to change that entirely--maybe he still feels like a newbie (or whatever) even though he's been here for a couple of years. That might be more interesting than just plain new, even. Her point about the way the exiles live scattered to the four winds is also spot-on.

That's about all from me, I'm afraid. Guess I might as well start chapter two now.

[Flo_the_G]

Don't know why I waited so long to read this, but it was definitely worth the wait. Oh, right, I probably thought I'd read this Oathbound stuff already.

The only real issue I had, apart from some very minor things, was that the chapter didn't manage to establish a clear image of the world in my mind. The hunting made me think of a European-style wood, if only because that's my default wood type. The fact that the protagonist has a Norse name reinforced that notion, as did the doe.

Then you mention that Jarl is wearing moccasins, which made me think Indian. That, in turn, was sort-of reinforced by the bow and the mention of the very American piranhas. I was still uncertain, though, because there was no definite way to know.

The mention of a "frontier" cemented the Wild West-iness of it all and I thought I was good to go - then the knight traipsed in.

That said: great opening, good writing, pacing and whatnot. Having read half of the next chapter I can also say that it's a good setup for what is to follow. Carry on writing, I'll definitely carry on reading.