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« on: August 16, 2011, 04:47:02 PM »
Chaos really hit most of my points right on the money, so I won’t rehash them all. I don’t want to sound harsh, but I didn’t really enjoy most of what I read. Most of the chapters is you telling the reader about Serra and the setting. The start was good, with the first sentence of her burying her father. It’s a strong introduction to her character, immediately creating a good ground for conflict now that her old life is gone. Unfortunately you don’t do much with it, I don’t feel much connected with Serra. Yes, she’s sad, yes, she’s alone, big deal.
Part of the way she tries to cope is by not thinking about her father, so she focuses on her surroundings instead. This to me feels like an excuse for you as the writer to info dump about the setting. And throughout the chapter you give out a lot of information, but nothing else actually happens at all.
I don’t like her way of talking to herself much, it feels stilted, with sentences like “Hello Serra. Hello, myself. My, those trees look...uh, putrid.”
I don’t see enough justification for her to go into the Aberrant lands and I don’t know enough about those lands yet either to buy that she’s panicking the first time you mention she’s panicking. You’re telling us how she feels instead of showing the reason. She handled her father’s death a lot better than some rotting plants. Later you tell us it’s because the Aberrant Lands cause panic, but again, it’s you telling us and not showing.
When within the Aberrant lands if she feels like she’s being watched she wouldn’t start talking more, she’d go quiet, looking for a place to hide. Isn’t she supposed to be a young child? Her father told her a lot of things that don’t fit with what you’d tell a young child, she also knows things that you present to us through her viewpoint but which don’t make sense for her to know, such as the prayer comment.
Writing wise, aside from the massive info-dumps, Serra’s stilted speech, and being repetitive in what’s going on, the big problem is that you create distance between the reader and Serra by using a lot of passive words. I counted a hundred instances of ‘had’, which is just far too many for only 17 pages. A lot of them can be scratched right away without changing the rest of the sentence in order to make it feel more immediate.
You also use the word ‘then’ a lot, especially in the prologue. And then she did this, and then she did that, and then she went on to do something else, and then etc. In chapter one you do the same only with ‘still’, she still did this and she still did that, she was still sad and so on.
On the whole the prologue and the first chapter are bigger than they need to be. Given the first chapter the prologue is mostly unnecessary, there’s nothing in the prologue that the first chapter doesn’t cover and vice-versa. By the end of chapter one I caught myself skimming instead of reading; this morning, that night, this morning, the previous day, that night, bla, bla, bla, she’s still walking, bla, bla, and so forth. Nothing happens but her walking and being overloaded with setting information. I’ll grant you the setting can be interesting, but not in the way you present it. Serra comes across as an excuse for you to expound on the Aberrant Lands you thought up, she doesn’t have conflicts, she doesn’t have a problem since she’s getting through the Aberrant Lands just fine. Even before the prologue was finished I stopped caring about Serra, wishing her to get eaten or something so at least something happened.