Timewaster's Guide Archive

Hey, another Loganite (Loganian? Logander?). Enjoying the cold weather? I'm up here too. Welcome to the group.

Ah, yes, KE=(1/2)mv² (superscript is that little icon that says "sup" on it, or you can use ^ to mean power). Either way, if his velocity is already high, he can directly impart that to the ax by stopping himself and letting the ax continue forward with momentum. It makes sense, where stopping does not. I concede this point and will change it.

Being stronger does not allow you to put more mass behind a blow, though. A 500 lb. fat computer gaming blob has more mass than a 260 lb. body builder, but the 260lb body builder will hit you harder with a weapon any day. Now I *could* say that he infused his arms with more mass, but the amount would likely be inconsequential in the equation. It's far better to just go faster (because it's squared).

And I'm not saying that there's absolutely no defensive possibilities of an overhead strike... just that it leaves you really wide open and is fairly predictable, which generally reduces its effectiveness in battle.

And amen, D&D rules make absolutely no sense if you're going for realism. If you want that, go for Rifts, or GURPS. Or better yet, invent a time machine and go back to the 1400s. You'll just need to make your own magic.

What about my other question, regarding the tension? I'm less concerned that you don't understand the entirety of my magic system by page 8 (with regards to metal holding runes better), and more concerned with your boredom in the Prologue (where I need to get you hooked).

Okay, I'm going to start playing catch-up on critiques....

There are a lot of new "characters" introduced in this chapter, namely all the voices in his head that weren't present before (I'd guess from his little incident at the end of the last chapter). However, all these come as a bit of a shock to me as a reader. Echoing the rest of the posts, I would also recommend that you put this at the beginning. Here's why:

1) You don't have to explain how he managed to miraculously avoid death from something that really should have killed him. Being possessed does not usually save you from a perforated kidney, so I'm still a little WTF on that.
2) You have a lot more action with a definite goal, and I just kept on reading it, unlike a lot of the other chapters, where I was struggling with "what's the point" at times.
3) Your time jumps up 'til now have been very spastic and unpredictable. If they all became flashbacks, it would make more sense to me, especially if you were able to orient the reader to what time it was. "Baltier thought back to his release two years ago..." or somesuch.
4) You don't have a bunch of extra voices just appear out of nowhere. You instead introduce him as this odd possessed schizo right from the start, and the flashbacks end up showing you that he was "normal" at one point. You have external and internal conflict right at the beginning of the book.

Otherwise, I thought it was a pretty good chapter. I could really see the maniac running around gleefully hacking people to bits... although his exact movements from person to person were a bit shrouded, which I'm not sure matters to most people.

I have a few nitpicky things, but I'll send those to you in line-edits.

To respond to other comments: I count four daggers that he lost; one to the lieutenant, two to guardsmen on the other side of the portcullis, and one in a guard's ear. He had at least six: one in his hat, one in his sash and "He had five more tucked into the folds of his shirt behind his back." (direct sentence) Also, there were 7 guards and 4 "servants" killed in the instant, so it was right (not all of them are explained, though). In total, 10 guards were killed (the lieutenant was the eighth, and the two guards on the other side of the portcullis were 9 and 10). I'm kinda picky about head counts, so I might have picked up on it a bit from my OCD.

Enjoy and eviscerate!

Overall, I liked about half of this chapter. The other half... well, it's been mentioned before--the frolicking about just does not fit the scene we came from, nor the scene we're thrown right back into at the end of this chapter. It feels like you want to show that she's living a normal, somewhat happy life, but you quickly change to show that no, she's not. It makes me wonder what point it serves to have her get warm fuzzies from Mel. Perhaps this is just the pessimist in me speaking, because I know I certainly wouldn't, given the realities of the world pressing against me.

Okay, on to the specifics (all in my not-so-humble opinion):

The first sentence - This really has to go. At least the first part of it. "Fifty-six years... " you're directly talking to the reader. I know it might be vital information at some point, but why does it matter as the first three words in the first chapter? Your POV is different, and the subject of Cien being the grandfather is brought up, so that illustrates that two generations have passed. An exact year is likely irrelevant to the reader. If it needs to be known, I'm sure you could find a good way to show the reader, through dialogue, journals, etc.  Also, it bears no connection to the second half of the sentence, describing the Weeper trees. Did they just now start reigning over the swampland? Took them 56 years? Why haven't they always been there on top? Too many questions immediately popped into my head that are very likely irrelevant.

Your description is holding up well, compared to the last chapter. It's very vivid, easy to picture... okay, I'm going to comment on this a little (almost thought I'd have pure praise there... can't have that). You use "like" a lot. I know the similes are part of what gives your description such vividness, but I count 32 times in 3000 words. Sometimes they're very close together, too. After the first dozen or so, I start actually looking for them. "Ah, another thing that's like something else," I say as I spot the next twenty. You only have two places where you use "as" in the same way. One of them is sing-songy: "as rich as rot". I'm sure other people will probably disagree with me on this, but I've seen you use other methods to describe things, and most of them flow better.

If your linen skirt manages to get caught on a thorn while you're running and drags you to a stop, it's very likely going to: a) rip the skirt immediately, b) disrobe you, or c) rip the thorn off the plant. This is assuming your linen is not some sort of super-material. I know that I've ripped shirts before running past sharp hooked things (nails in trees, for instance), and I know I've brought home a collection of twigs and those blasted thorny seeds from weeds adorned to my clothing, and none of them stopped me. Staggered, maybe (in the case of the nails), but never stopped. If she's running helter-skelter, no wimpy bush is going to stop her.

There are a number of places that you stop using italics for thought-speak, which makes it very hard to spot sometimes. I'll try to mark them up in my line-edits.

Most of the encounter with Baeratia I had no problem with. It had some tension, which is good. One thing I was a little confused about: why would a Twilight Person use a greeting like "The sun rises"? To me, that would be a negative thing for a Dark Elv. Perhaps you mean it to be negative, but then why would Rachell repeat it? Does she have bad news as well? I would have expected something more like "The moon rises" or "The sun sets" or "The stars shine brightly". Something to do with night. Dunno.

And the chapter ends. With nothing really happening.  Hrm. I'm left with a whole bunch of questions. What happens to Shaeradis? She just got dismissed, even though she's bleeding profusely. From the way you wrote it, she was already on the verge of death. Can she really wait for Baeratia to deliver the Dreams? What are the dreams? What made the Elvs go to Ravke to find Rachell instead of either finding her themselves, or finding her father?

This whole chapter seems like it's leading up to something, and then just stops. It's great for a cliffhanger, but especially near the beginning of the book, you need lots of hooks (which I should know having just been ripped a new one for the exact same problem). I know that something is up, but I have no idea what. Some people may enjoy the mystery, but to me it's a little odd not to know anything about what's going on. Granted, I likely wouldn't put the book down, because it takes a special kind of suck to get me to do that: only Christopher Paolini and J.K. Rowling have managed that so far.

And to answer one of your questions about the Elvs: I don't particularly have a problem with your explanation, but unless that's made clear somewhere early in the book, you're going to get punished for it. Writing fantasy where technology has devolved has to be done very carefully. Anne McCaffrey's Pern series does the same thing, and some of how she does it is very... distasteful to a lot of readers. Without any back story or revelation early on, your book clearly falls into the fantasy realm, and inserting science fiction elements later on makes it look like it was an afterthought, even though you've already demonstrated that you thought of it well in advance. One way to get around this is to have Ancient devices (working or not) that point to there having been high technology at some point.

One really bad problem with your Elvs, Lomari, and Humans is that they just about exactly mimic Elves, Half-Elves, and Humans in D&D. Light and dark elves (wood/high elves and drow, respectively) both exist, and are very similar to your concepts. Half-Elves consider themselves superior as well, but everyone hates them. I don't know if this is an intentional comparison, but I can see it.

I have little to complain about your prose, though. Your sentences are generally very tight, and you've removed a lot of early-draft cruft.  Oh, and you don't post often enough for me to read further.

I'm a little confused by your argument, Silk. You say that you don't want to move RE away from TWG because people can pop in and contribute who aren't members, but I don't really see how that's possible, if they aren't getting the material. Sure, there are a few scattered threads that don't pertain directly to submissions, but those are few and far between. The bulk of the threads here are on submission critiques, which no one but those on "the list" can really talk about.

As for the ability to get older submissions, you state that people prefer knowing who their work is going out to, but in essence, a new person could get added to the list with only you and Chaos knowing, and then they get all new material without others really knowing (unless they first post in the welcome thread and people read it). I'd actually prefer *not* to have to dredge up material to resend to someone who's new to the list. If they were accepted to the list, someone trusts them to get my material anyway, whether I like it or not. I can't choose not to send to a new person simply because I don't know them. A more fine-grained permission system would notify existing group members when a new member was added, and optionally have an opt-in system for that new user to see existing users' works, on a per-user basis. This would prevent old users who no longer wanted to have their works available from having to worry about them being made so--of course, they could also just cancel their account or mark all their works as private and go invisible, too.

Honestly, without the TWG admins' support and their contribution of an API of sorts to access the data in the forums, there's no way to set up anything easier and more streamlined without moving it all off of TWG. Or, they could actually implement a document submission system of their own, but either one requires significant coding on their part (the site I'm working on to act as a full group critiquting system is already over 2k lines of code, and that's just the PHP, not counting the couple dozen HTML templates and stylesheet files).

If we just want a front-end for a door mat, I'm not really sure it matters. The whole point of RE is submissions--the forum does a pretty good job illustrating that.

Heh, I'm a graduated business information systems major by day (slacker), web developer by night (I work better then). I've actually written my own framework to use for the site, already (I can't stand existing frameworks; they're too bloated). I'll let everyone know when it's... field testable. Unfortunately, it's a little lower priority than my normal work, but I build things from time to time for my clients that I end up able to migrate over to it, so I get paid indirectly for it.