Yes, the formatting remains a tough point. It’s really hard to keep things interesting and flowing well with only some 500 words per part. That’s really only half the difficulty your piece has, the other is continuity, as Akoebel mentioned.
It seems you don’t have a grasp of what you want with the story. In some cases, like the very first sentence, as well as with the concept of digometres, it seems you’re writing a parody. But then you seem to forego that for a couple of parts and write something serious.
The first time we meet Vara we’re in a story that’s about a girl persecuted by her village. Then out of nowhere we get a talking lizard. Out of nowhere we get strange instances of a magic system. Suddenly nothing of the previous troubles matter anymore, the focus on the irate butcher now seems completely superfluous. Then Vara discovers she has magic too, but a part after that discovery she suddenly uses that magic as if she’s born to it and she follows the lizard to another place entirely. And in that place is swamp with a barbarian. Consider that the story is not that far along, yet you’ve been changing things around so much already. Every part introduces something so different from what we’ve already seen it’s impossible to form expectations and get a handle on the type of story you’re writing.
Take this chapter for instance, a water beast with a gaping maw tries to eat Vara. She get in her boat in time and from that moment the water beast is gone as if it never existed. It’s gone from this chapter and, getting ahead of myself for a moment, the next couple as well. Continuity, where is the water beast? You can scratch the water beast and still Vara would’ve acted the same to miss the swamp water and get in the boat. The beast doesn’t add anything to the scene, but once it’s there it should do something.
Getting back to the barbarian issue of last chapter, you make it clear that Vara doesn’t know about the barbarian, stating she heard just a bit from the village children. I’m guessing the barbarian lived pretty far from her tree, otherwise she’d know about a swamp and a character with enough of a reputation to be known by the village children. It’s hard to judge the travelled distance when Vara jumped from branch to branch last chapter.
Some odd physics happen with the boat. Vara overshoots the boat after jumping four digometres high. Since the distance she needed to travel is horizontal and not vertical her leap will primarily take her forward. The fact that her trajectory is four digometres high should mean she exceeds that distance horizontally by quite an amount. Yet she twists in mid-air, can suddenly see far enough ahead in the fog to see the boat, and then manages to both grab it and drag herself in without touching water. This seems more than a little unlikely to me.
Vara’s question when the boat is pulled along isn’t the first that would come to my mind in her position. Asking why the lizard talks is secondary to what the shapes she sees are and what the noises mean. These are things that can potentially, and for her perspective most likely, take her life. Just second before she was almost eaten by a water beast.
I think it’s a good thing you’re going to work on consistency and continuity, since its lack is starting to hurt your story. And perhaps you might consider changing the format. I know you said to your friends you were writing it this way, but you’re the writer, you can change anything if it betters the story.
