April 25th - akoebel - The Fifth Compendium, Chapter 4

[akoebel]

This is the fourth chapter from my first novel, The Fifth Compendium.

Last time on "The Fifth Compendium" : Destra, throws herself into the river to prevent Lorn and his men from taking away the book she's carrying. Ciera, a librarian, discovers the book while doing inventory and finds an old friend in the process.

Chapter 4 : Lorn explores the riverside in a desperate attempt to solve his problems

As always, comments will be greatly appreciated.

[akoebel]

Thanks to LTU for emailing me this while the site was down :


"He had been unable . . ." - Should be fixed.  That "had been," is like a big rock to trip over.

In fact you seem to use "had," a lot.  I recommend you find a better way to say things without resorting to that word.

One of the things about this story is how much I'm expecting something grander then "I've got to find the book."  That, is all honesty, is probably me just wanting things to be bigger.  But then . . . your story spends a lot of time wondering the plot of "find the book, save the boy." It feels like there is a major climax coming now that he's aware the book is still in the library.  Because I don't think the whole thing is going to be ten chapters or whatever, I am sitting and expecting something much bigger to come out.  And that expectation is leaving me a little impatient.

Now "slow" does not mean boring.  I'm not saying the piece is slow.  I, personally, feel like I'm just waiting for something to happen.  Your story seems very plot driven at the moment.  Not a bad thing, please don't misunderstand.  It is because it is plot driven that I have the above expectation.  Like something is going to explode and everything is going to go really really really really really wrong.  And that anticipation is both enticing and annoying.  I feel inclined to read more, but I feel cheated at the same time because the carrot in front of my face keeps moving.

[Asmodemon]

I concur with LTU, there are too many instances of ‘had’ in this chapter, double as much as in chapter three and for a relatively short chapter this makes a lot of the narrative clunky. You’ve got a whole cluster of them in the third paragraph for instance.  With most of these instances you can remove them as is without changing anything.

For some reason this chapter feels slow, like not much is happening. This is odd because on the whole not a lot happened in the last chapter either, but that one didn’t feel slow. Thinking on it I think it’s part because the many instances of ‘had’ make it less immediate and in part because there are many hooks here for things to happen, but they never do.

For instance, there are magistrates about investigating the break in of the library, but Lorn has no difficulty with them. Another moment is with Destra’s corpse. The river runs through the city, there are promenades and bridges nearby. Why hasn’t anyone found her body before Lorn does? It feels convenient. Then I expected him to be caught while talking to the corpse. Nothing happened. He talks a little girl into revealing where the body can be found; nothing happens.

I’m not advocating  you put this full of action, but despite him feeling supposedly anxious and taking a risk in finding Destra’s body I never feel he’s actually at risk.