Timewaster's Guide Archive

The description of the ache in Aermyst's chest, but compared to that the "it restricted his breathing" in the sentence before stands out as a bit bland. I also missed a reference to the time of day in that passage. I don't know why, exactly, it's quite clear that it's in the morning, after all.

Risk gnawing at his lower lip "worriedly" is a (minor) slip into his POV.

"His ability to finish the sentence" wasn't interrupted by "the fact", but by "the sword".

Speaking of swords, how is it that Aermyst, in an apparently very violent world, keeps forgetting to take his with him?

Shouldn't Marlin be putting the shoulder guard on the shoulder of the arm that's not holding the sword? That would usually be the one facing the enemy. The guard on the other arm would also restrict the mobility of his sword arm.

You have another slip of POV when Marlin kills the warrior.

The transition from Aermyst being outmatched to him bleeding from a lot of small wounds is a bit unexpected. Until you mentioned those wounds, I had thought Zael were simply fending off Aermyst's attacks.

A minor point: "From where Aermyst sat on the ground, the two were perfectly silhouetted by the twin moons, glowing purple and pale red." <- that second comma needs to go, for obvious reasons.

You also need to decide whether Tristan is armed with daggers or knives, you alternate between the two.

Overall, I think there were too many changes of viewpoint character. You need to find a system that works for you. Either you change POV often as you did in this chapter (which you do well, I think), or you concentrate on one character only for longer periods, as you did in the first few chapters. Constantly changing the rhythm is... well, irritating is too strong a word, but it's definitely strange.

I'm not sure if it's the best chapter we've seen (if only because it's been a while since I read the others), but it's certainly one of the best. The general style seems more refined, the many POV changes work a lot better than the occasional ones you had before, and swordfights and dying people always help to make me enjoy what I'm reading. Making each character's section shorter as the scene progressed was a nice touch, you should definitely keep going like this.


Having glanced over the other comments, I'll add that I, too, wasn't really sure who Zael was. Seems not to have been a problem for Hamster, though, so it's probably only due to the interval between the two chapters.

Got it.

This chapter has a very good opening, especially when compared to the prologue. It introduces characters, setting, adds a bit of tension, dangles a few things before the reader's nose that are explained later on... nicely done indeed, as is the rest of the chapter.

I sometimes had the impression, however, that some of the sentences were a bit too short. A few times I expected a sentence to go on when it didn't, which created a contrast between the pacing of the action and that of the prose.

I would have expected Ana's uncle to need more convincing before he trained her, because you described him as being "incredulous" at the proposition.

You should mention earlier that it's nighttime, as is I pictured the scene to take place in broad daylight at first.

It's already been said that the transition from the dream to the present is clumsy, that probably is because the scene before is written like a memory, not a dream. A dream would have less detail, and Ana would have no control over her actions.

The part where she's buried didn't entirely make sense, to me. Wouldn't the first thing you notice be that you're upside down? I think it takes more than closing your eyes to fool your sense of balance, and you'd also have all the blood rushing to your head (which you feel pretty much instantly if you so much as bend over) and I assume you'd also feel the weight of your body pressing down on you. I believe practical experimentation is in order.

(guess what I do for a living.)

You're an accountant?

I'm still sort of figuring out what my writing process actually entails - i.e. I've spent the last couple of years testing and discarding various methods while beginning to write and discarding various plots and ideas (none of which were really any good, fortunately). I'm fairly certain that I now know the method that is ideal for me, though, that has to count for something.

What it boils down to is essentially the vague idea of a setting and one or two characters in that setting. The characters aren't developed in any kind of detail (I actually called them A and B for quite some time...), I only have a general impression of how they'd act in certain situations. Then I consider the implications of the bits and pieces of setting I have, do a bit of research, and further develop the world in the process. The setting of the novel determines the setting's history, which in turn influences the setting again, etc.

I end up having written a few chapters worth of notes, having read a lot of articles about the feasibility of directed-energy weapons (and, usually, also a number of articles about dinosaurs, viking longships and a bunch of other completely irrelevant junk) and find myself in the posession of a document full of cool ideas that all need to make it into the plot. Commence the outlining, which is what I'm doing right now. When I'm not writing term papers, that is.

For the actual writing part I want to try doing a quick and dirty revision of everything I wrote the previous day, before continuing the story, my reasoning being that revision is easy, so it'll quickly give me the impression of having got some work done. So I'll always be in high spirits while writing, because I'll know that the boring part is over and done with.

I'll let you know how that works out.

I have a tendecy to want to respond to everything too and they haven't thrown me out yet...

Oh, did we forget to tell you?


The main thing that's off about the prologue is that the beginning and ending seem to lack a connection to the (very good) middle part. I think the middle could stand very well on its own. The beginning in particular is highly confusing, especially because we don't really need to know most of those names to understand the rest of the text. You could do well without that info dump and spread the little bit that we really need to know out a bit, and add the rest in the first chapter(s).

Taken by itself, I think that the dialogue doesn't need a lot of improving, if any, you only need to begin and end the prologue differently, somehow.

"Well that's the interesting thing," Laudney said, coming up right beside Aric. "There's nothing to be seen on the horizon." He directed Aric's spyglass to angle upwards to a point somewhere above the horizon line. "Look there."

That passage pretty much made it obvious, I think. I might not have known that it was floating, but the fact that he couldn't see the mountain on the horizon and then raised the spyglass at least made me think "so is it floating, or what?" - the following dialogue then reinforces the impression and makes it seem as though Aric were a tad slow on the uptake.

Someone suggested that fog could obscure the lower part of the mountain, that might work. Or, what just occured to me: the upper part would be visible above the horizon long before the lower part, right? You could have them see that, let Aric look through his spyglass at the top of the mountain as the fleet moves towards it, more of the mountain becomes visible, he moves the glass down to see how large the mountain really is and then sees that the expected lower part is in fact missing.