november 16- recovering cynic-oathbound-ch. 2 re-write

[Recovering_Cynic]

enjoy

[Frog]

Well, I liked the concept of this chapter, that we get a clear sense of Bal and his connection to Lucard. Unfortunately (and a lot of this could be a reading group problem or because I'm just a little slow) many things of this chapter confused me to the point that it was harder to get through. I didn't understand a lot of the magic, creatures or who was on whose side. I got the basic idea (Bal and his brother-who has some type of scrying magic, try to loot a building during a siege. Lots of running. Brother gets hurt, Bal goes to the 'good' guys for help and gets put in prison instead) but that is about it. Because so much of it confused me, I really don't know where to go with this critique other to generate some questions and see if it helps.

Who currently owned the building they were going into? What were the wards and how do they work? How does Jake's magic work? Does it have something to do with his pinky signal or his good luck charm? What exactly where they trying to get? Were the siegers with the knights and the king? How did they just suddenly appear? Are the wildmen/hounds on a certain side, or just run about randomly causing trouble? What about the constructs? What are the constructs? How did Lucard know he was a looter? Was he just guessing?

Like I said, so much of it confused me that I am really wondering if I somehow lost track of the story and missed something, which is entirely possible. I am not the brightest person out there by any means.

Some other minor things. I have to say, that I think I liked Bal's old name better. Not a big deal though. One thing I might be concerned about is that he does have a very uncommon name and pairing it with his brother's very common name doesn't fit so well. It think you are overdoing the semicolon and there were a few transitions that seemed abrupt.

Good luck. Keep it coming.

[Andrew the Great]

I love the pacing of this chapter. Very good, made it keep moving along very quickly, but doesn't feel rushed.

I agree with Frog, though. Much of this is confusing. At the beginning of the scene, I didn't realize it had happened before Ch 1, which confused me to no end. I'm going, "Wait, when did he get free? Who's this Jake guy?" Maybe it's just that it's been a week since I read Chapter 1, and missed something at the end of that chapter that queues this one up, but there were other clarity issues too. Frog covered those for the most part, so I'll just stick with her stuff.

I also wasn't completely clear on why Baltier runs to the knights. Is it just because they're the enemy of whoever is attacking him? Is he somehow affiliated with them? If not, how does he know that they're there/have healers with them, and what makes him think that they'll help him?

It was very well done though. Overall an excellent chapter. I happily await the next installment.

[lethalfalcon]

I would second Frog's questions. A lot of those would really enrich the chapter in general.

The biggest beef I had with the whole chapter was that it took me a second to figure out whether this was after he left the prison, or before. It wasn't until the end of the chapter that I had a better idea, and even then, it wasn't really a clear cut move. I really like flashbacks (and tend to overuse them), but they need some sort of transition.

Overall, though, your writing is very good. You have lots of description in here, and it flows really well. As of right now, I have no line-level edits for you, but I may scour it again to find something. If you could get those questions answered and find a way to get us into this past event without losing us, I think you have a really great chapter.

I'm waiting for more, too

[Jexral]

I didn't really find it to be too confusing, myself.  It seemed like there were some things that you were leaving unexplained (for example the scrying, or the constructs), but would explain later, in a way that wouldn't make it feel info-dumpy.  I liked this chapter.  I have some thoughts about where you're taking this, and I'm interested to see if I am correct.  Seems like you're setting up an interesting story.

Keep it coming.  : )

[LongTimeUnderdog]

It was exciting, fun and enjoyable.

Questions though:  How common are constructs?  From what I gathered they were pretty big.  Why didn't the siegeing side have constructs too?  A big metal machine with a big metal mace is going to do alot more damage to a wall then a ballista.  What about siege towers and such?

The Knights need more explanation.   god flash when his armor was struck, cool.  But before that the knight is being played by Jackie Chan, flipping and rolling.  Now I know full plated, particularly the later models, is very flexible but considering with all the layers of armor (the leather underneath, the chain coat over that, then the plate) they are actually quite heavy.  So of course he must be using magic armor . . . can we get some more on that please?

Really those are just nit pickings over a very enjoyable chapter.

[Recovering_Cynic]

Thank you all for the critiques!  I will work on making the transition a little clearer, but I think the confusion may be at least in part due to the week's wait in submissions.  At the end of Chapter 1, Baltier is looking out the side of the prison cart at Direthune and the siege camp.  The chapter ends with: "Direthune, the last place he'd been free."  That still might not be clear enough for a flashback jump though.  I was considering having him remember the echo of the falling boulders, the crash of battle, etc.  How blatant should an author be in tipping off his reader that what they are about to read is a flashback?  I should probably go pull a book that uses them and see, but if you all have any suggestions on that, I'd like to hear them.

Anyway, many of the other questions you have were intended, others need to be answered.  I probably need to create a better picture of the setting before I focus in on Baltier and Jake crawling down the hole; that would fix some of the problems, but at the same time, might make it even more unclear that it's a flashback.  It's a tough nut, but I'll work on it.

As to the monsters/magic/battle-quirks, it's difficult to explain those without info dumping in chapter two.   Some of it does need better explanation.  The scrying, for instance, needs to be clear in this chapter.  It will be important later, but won't be getting any screen time for quite awhile.  The rest will be answered in due time.

[RavenstarRHJF]

See and here was I thinking that all this was happening sometime after they reached the frontier as exiles.  I assumed Jake had been exiled sometime before Baltier and they managed to meet up somewhere.  Apparently, I was wrong. 

Still, great chapter!  I wasn't unduly confused by anything that was happening at the time, and I think we're getting a better sense of character for Baltier than we ever had when he was still Jarl.  I really look forward to his transformation...

I will agree on the slight incongruity with the knight's armor, but other than that, I have no complaints.

[Andrew the Great]

As to how to do a flashback, I would just say alter your phrase slightly so that it includes the word remember or something equivalent. It tags the reader for a flashback. Alternately, you could use italics to set it apart, but for long sections of text this gets really annoying, so I wouldn't do it here.

[lethalfalcon]

The only way italics would work is if he was retrospecting while still traveling and it kept cutting back to the present.

We did some stuff. It had seemed such a good idea at the time. Oops, we got caught. If only I'd been paying more attention.

That sort of thing (but in third person, or you'll have thought italics mixing with flashback italics).

Alternatively, there's the blockquote, but for a whole chapter, there really isn't much point except increasing page count.

[Chaos]

This was a fun chapter! Just like chapter 1, your description is spot-on, and your prose flows quickly. I can picture the scene visually extremely well. This feat should not be understated, because usually, I don't really worry about visualizing the scene in my head (I think this shows in my prose ). So really, I'm jealous of your skill in this regard. I can tell it's the strongest element of your writing.

The scene moves along nicely, but the fact that it was a flashback was not clear enough for me, either. I'll admit I cheated and looked in the topic to get a better footing Or at least, confirmation this scene was a flashback.

Who currently owned the building they were going into? What were the wards and how do they work? How does Jake's magic work? Does it have something to do with his pinky signal or his good luck charm? What exactly where they trying to get? Were the siegers with the knights and the king? How did they just suddenly appear? Are the wildmen/hounds on a certain side, or just run about randomly causing trouble? What about the constructs? What are the constructs? How did Lucard know he was a looter? Was he just guessing?

I don't think the questions about magic really matter at all to the scene at hand. That said, I'd actually like some more concrete description about what the constructs look like ("massive" is a great adjective, but it could imply these are Godzilla type creatures or they are a mere twenty feet high. Specifics, please!), and especially the hounds. I want to feel the fear Jake and Bal have towards these hounds, especially if twelve hounds are worth sacrificing three Godzillas.

The pinky thing confused me at first, but once I figured out Jake had that charm, my questions were alleviated and it worked nicely. These questions about magic don't matter to this scene.

However. We do need to be set in the scene more effectively.

The fact that it's a siege, or a battle is constantly raging in Direthune (as seen in the second segment of the chapter, lots of battling) could be shown better earlier in the scene, because it seemed a little random later, but I went with it anyways, mostly because your description is awesome. Though I have to wonder. If this is a raging battle, it seems like an awfully poor time to go steal some moollah. 

I'd also like to know more about the macro-scale of the battle, because it's not entirely clear why Baltier would rely upon the knights. I got the impression Baltier was doing things the knights would not especially like... Also, the wildmen need a bit more background, because it doesn't seem reasonable for them to outrun a horse. If there's a magic-related explanation for it, cool, no need to explain that, per se. I would like to know, however, what side they are on, or if they are just random people in Direthune.

It just seems like if Jake and Baltier are planning a heist in the middle of a battle, there should probably be some reasoning as to why they are doing the heist right now, as opposed to tomorrow. The artifacts aren't going anywhere, after all. So it seems to me that Jake and Baltier would want to know as much intel upon the tide of battle, to maximize their chances of success. And if it matters to the characters, it matters to the readers, too.

Good work! That's all for now.

[vegetathalas]

So...yeah. I'm a month late with my critique, but late's better than never, right?

I have a pet peeve with common modern names in fantasy, they just don't feel right (especially when they're jewish, like Jacob, and the rest of the names don't reflect the same culture) so I'd rather see Jake as Jaske or Jac or something. Small complaint. On the other hand, I do like the name Direthune. Nice and...dire. I'm neutral on Balt. Oddly enough, I really like Tree as a name, but since it isn't really explained...I find myself wondering if he really is a talking tree.

As I've mentioned before, I'm a description whore, so I want to see more details--what color was the stone of the ruins, what did the wind sound like, is the ground blackened, is there a looter camp nearby, etc. Anything you do to raise your description from common to uncommon is going to generate interest in me, especially if it builds tension. [And you'll get more money for it in the auction house! Haha. WOW humor.]

Hmm--I'm a little confused too, as last time I remember Balt was strangling people in a prison wagon. ah--it's a flashback. Definitely needs to be signaled better. I have a hard time with doing this right, too.

Some of the action is a little confusing--I feel like there might be some subtle POV violations, where we jump to what Dokes or Jake is doing instead of what Balt is seeing him do--narrowing the focus might help (Balt felt hands on his back and had just enough time to to see Doke's face twist in terror before the stones began raining from the sky...). Hound and Constructs should probably be proper nouns. Maybe wildmen, too. If you're going to mention things like sacrificing hounds for constructs, you need to make the magic of them a little clearer. Though I don't know why you mention it at all if it doesn't matter to the problem at hand. My advice is yes, info-dump...but make sure your characters are interesting enough that readers will put up with the info-dump, and that the info-dump is necessary. For example, I don't know if any history of the imperial ruins is necessary. I'm also not sure that information about the hounds and the constructs is necessary until we meet them in real main-story time. A throw-away line like "the magically-enhanced hunters of kingdom X, who followed their prey with a dog's tenacity and a man's cunning"--would probably be sufficient for now.

What's the point of this flashback? What are you trying to communicate with it? I think to have a flashback this long is unusual and it would throw me off as a reader. Unless there's something about this moment in time that the reader MUST know or else your plot falls apart, I think you should maybe use more tell than show (maybe reveal via dialogue in the prison wagon). If there is some essential info, ie, Jake turns out to be the villain or his stone saves the world, then condensing it to a half-page dream sequence or something where you a slice of the important moment out of context ["Leave me!, Balt's brother cried, blood rushing down his scalp. "Never!" "You must!" "Okay!"] and Balt wakes up in a cold sweat with his brother's voice in his ears. Something like that might be enough to communicate what you're trying to get across without things getting so convoluted. It would also provide a touch of mystery that will help drag me on through your story if I only get Balt's backstory in bits and pieces.

Does the whole wall fall away or just part of it? Seems odd that it hasn't fallen all ready if it was ready to go over with a push, unless Balt needed to lean on it for support.

The whole 'no, brother you must leave me and live' thing seems cliche to me. Any way you can put a new twist on it? Especially since leaving in this case seems awful callous--I'm not feeling any immediate threat, since no one came to investigate the sound.

Why did they unbridle/unsaddle their horses in the ruins? They didn't plan on being there to loot for long, did they?

The Constructs' appearance needs to be described better. The first thing that comes to mind are the AT-Walkers from Star Wars.

Is Balt left handed? If not, why isn't he trying to help the knight who rescued him? Because he was "too dazed" lacks a certain...heroicness.

Still, I'm interested in the world and looking to read more, even if I feel much of this chapter is unnecessary verbiage.

More specific comments on this should be on your way to your inbox.

[Silk]

Wait, what? Last chapter Baltier and a bunch of fellow criminals were being thrown into exile. Now he's leading a raiding party with some guy named Jake, sure. But now Jake's his brother?

I think that was my biggest problem with this chapter; I didn't know where to place it in time. If it was a flashback, which I started assuming it was, I had absolutely no indication of whether that was the case in the text. I waited for an explanation and didn't get one.

While that got in the way, I did enjoy the chapter. I think a lot of the points Frog made are valid. I didn't really understand what the wards did or what their significance was, though I'm not too sure that's an immediate problem; that could come up in more detail later and I would probably be willing to wait for it. I wondered about the scrying thing, too. That might be harder to explain since Jake is, presumably, dead now.

(And, as LTU points out, some of my questions about the magic were in regards to how magic is integrated in your world: How common are constructs? What about the wards--what are they for and how far do they extend? That sort of thing.)

I felt some definite confusion about who was on what side, though; I don't know who the constructs and the trebuchets were attacking. The raiders? The wildmen? Were the knight and his patrol the ones responsible for throwing them? If so, why did it take them so long to get to Baltier? Wouldn't they be on their way to aprehend them (since it seems to be fairly clear to them that Baltier is a criminal)?

I also don't know what Jake, Bal, and Co. were after. I know they're after money and... that's about it. I'm guessing they're trying to rob some sort of sacrosanct ground or something, since apparently even the King hasn't touched this supposed wealth and robbing it is worth sending one guy to the stocks (and ultimately exile, or so it seems) and another guy to his death (though I'm not sure how much stock I should put in Lucard's reaction, because he obviously has a stick up his - ahem - bottom).

Now, I can start making some sense about some of these things if I think about it, but they're all guesses, and I don't think making your reader guess serves your purpose here. We need to understand more clearly what the crime is and what the stakes are, I think. Otherwise we don't really know the significance of it, other than the fact that it got Baltier thrown in prison.

I like Baltier's new name, though it makes me think of the FFXII character. Pairing Baltier up with Jake does seem a little odd, though. Not too sure how worried about it I'd be, but it's there.

I didn't have any problems with the pinky signal, by the way. It was fairly clear to me, even the first time around, that it meant "OMG HOUNDS!"

I could be wrong. It seems like a couple of people are associating the pinky thing with Jake's charm, which didn't occur to me at all. I still think my way makes more sense given the material you've given us. XP

Oh. Which reminds me. The acrid scent that you mention seems pretty distinctive, in that all of the raiders seemed to recognize it. Since the hounds are pretty nasty enemies, why do Baltier and Jake just toss that aside? What makes them so sure that there aren't any hounds? I don't get so much as a hint of worry from either of them.

I didn't have a problem with Baltier running to the knights, since they're pledged to offer protection and all that... wait, actually, I don't know how much of that I'm extrapolating from your current draft and how much of it I'm just remembering from your last draft. It may help to clarify that.

The transition from the last chapter might be enough for someone reading this one chapter after another. (Especially since my first impulse, at least, is to flip back a page when I feel like I've missed something.) You could probably make the signal a little clearer with a word like "remembered" or something like that. You could also, perhaps, leave the end of chapter one as is, and further signal the transition with the use of the past participle in the first sentence of chapter two.

 I would like to see a little more emotion from Baltier when he thinks he's killed his brother. I won't say that I got the sense that he didn't care, because I didn't, but I think that you could go a little farther with it. Maybe afterwards, too, though with the way you've constructed the story that may not be possible.

Speaking of contruction, one more question: Why is this a flashback? If it's important enough to justify spending an entire chapter on it--and I'm not saying it's not--why not just start there and move forward?

Of course, I have no idea what your master plan is, and it could be you've got something very definite behind this construction. Even if you don't, I'm not entirely sure that it's a problem. But it is something to think about, perhaps.

Good work, though.