Timewaster's Guide Archive

No critiques after almost two months? I'm ashamed of myself. 

Anyway, I enjoyed this Black rose chapter, but I also feel a little lost. This could be the writing group problem, with my reading of these chapters spread out over months of time, but I feel like I missed something. I don't get a sense of Black Rose's motives at all—she's helping the invaders, but why? I don't see Sericea in her anymore. Kind, loving, self-sacrificing Sericea became ice-cold, heartless Black Rose the moment her imprisonment was broken. Is the woman who cared for Rosalin so tenderly really the same woman who gazed dispassionately at the carnage left by a raging Shifter?

Maybe if we knew more about the person she was before she was imprisoned. We know she gained a forbidden dark power, but we don't know what drove her to it. What was she trying to accomplish then? What is she doing now? It's not quite clear.

Maybe if we knew why she was who she was in that town. How does she have a sister, when she's over 400 years old and apparently hasn't aged a year in all that time? How did she keep people (and most especially, her sister) from noticing this fact?

The one viewpoint per chapter system is working well for you. We got a good solid chunk of story instead of a lot of bite-sized ones, and it's more satisfying. Your descriptions, dialogue, action scenes and the flow of the chapter are all well-written. My main gripe here is the character who at this juncture doesn't make much sense.

Just one. He's gone on to try and spread the love, but so far has failed.

I'm not sure we'll ever find out. Here's a guess, though.

The monkey is headless so they can send sensory data from the monkey's body to the victim in the jar. Torture the monkey, torture the victim. This could get really nasty since it's no big deal if the monkey dies.   

This is one of my favorite chapters so far, perhaps because you pulled a lot of irons out of the fire on the Ellie plot. Bloodbath and Malik are no longer hanging in limbo, waiting for Ellie to figure out how to do something about them. Yay for the awesome way it all played out!

I'm particularly pleased with the way Ellie's suicidal bravery carried the chapter. You spent a long time building it up, and that buildup created a certain amount of tension. We know that Ellie is going to rush headlong into situations she's not prepared to handle, and that makes us worry for her safety.

The combat in general worked well. I have but one quibble, and it extends beyond this chapter. The Sigil Knights rock the socks off everyone they meet—except Kail and Ellie and Kajsa and Malik and Bloodbath. This in and of itself is no problem. The issue is that I don't get much sense of scope from those fights. The epic grade-A awesome Sigil Knights fall like butt-stomped goombas when faced with certain combatants, and instead of getting a sense of high-level combat from those fights, they just feel like ordinary fights where the Sigil Knights happen to be weaker than normal.

Sorry for the short critique, but I can't think of anything else to say. Nice work.

Hey guys,

So, I was thinking the other day (a dangerous pastime, I know) about how really awful the Star Wars movies are in so many ways, and how I love them anyway. The world is so rich and varied and deep and generally awesome, and the writing is atrocious.

Then I realized that there are a boatload of books set in the Star Wars universe and not written by Lucas. I've avoided them on the principle that movie to book adaptations are never worth reading, but maybe I've been wrong in this particular case. Are Star Wars books worth reading, and if so, which ones?

How awesome is the mix of superheroes with fantasy?

You say that like the two are different.

Well, the way they work in The Wheel of Time is that they're vague and have to be deciphered. Nobody quite knows what they mean, when they're supposed to happen, or even if they've already happened. They also don't happen all the time, and cannot be summoned at will. Dreaming, the Foretelling, Min's Visions.

Yes, but only sometimes. Sometimes people know exactly what those things mean, like Min having a vision and knowing that someone will be killed by the One Power, etc. Thoracious had the equivalent of Min telling him that Dalrymple would shoot at him, but that it wouldn't kill him.

Trinnium actually ties in with Bending, and its absoluteness is a consequence of the way it works. Also, I made it that way to avoid infinite recursive loops, which is always a danger when foretelling the future.

Or have the Trinnium stolen. Nothing more fun that forcing your characters to give up a crutch and watching them try to stay upright.

I can neither confirm nor deny this baseless speculation.