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I am looking for people to critique the whole novel, parts of the novel or just the first 13.
The novel is broken into 4 threads that are interleaved. Threads can be read on their own, each being about 90 double spaced pages. There are 16 chapters (4 per thread) plus an intro which these 13 lines are part of. Chapters vary widely in length from 5 pages to 30ish.
If you wish to read an internal chapter, I can give a quick rundown of events leading to the start of the chapter.
Thank you, James
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The Weaver's Thread On the planet Yau, deep in ocknid territory, far away from any human outpost, a group of primitive hunters brought down their largest game, the trumpeter. An important kill, the meat would feed the village for months. For the village weaver the kill meant something more than meat. As the villagers set about butchering the giant beast, the weaver carefully scraped the animal's thick rusty wool from its back using a flint scraper. He placed the wool into a pit, along with water and caustic soils. After three days sitting in the hot Yauan sun, the wool had turned off white. He transferred the wool to a second pit, to which he added a variety of colored soils, bits of crushed plants and the ground-up bodies of certain beetles.
Here are the tinkerings: Are the ocknid an alien race? If so, capitalize. I'd move the point-of-view character into the first sentence, especially if this is the first appearance for him in the novel. Do humans factor into the scene? If the hunters don't know anything about humans (they all appear to be from the same alien village) I'd eliminate the human outpost reference to streamline the first sentence.
On the planet Yau, deep in Ocknid territory, the weaver waited as the hunters brought down their largest game, the trumpeter.
The word "rusty" implies that the animal's wool is metallic -- which on Yau might very well be! -- otherwise, rust-colored wool will be clearer. The words "off-white" s/b hyphenated. I'm interested in the beetles. Maybe instead of "certain beetles" they could be "his own, specially-bred beetles." That tells us a little more about the weaver as a person.
Just a lot of nit-picky stuff which may or may not be useful. I am captivated by the premise and would like to read more.
I think that is the procedure. I'm sure someone will tell us if that is not the case.
The icons at the top of each forum post link you to the user's BB profile (the face and question mark) and e-mail and post editing tools. (Someone had to show me too...) Now if someone could please clue me how to employ UBB Codes so I can use italics instead of quotation marks for the titles of things, I can at least pretend not to be such a noob!
In any case, my e-mail is kincastelmare@gmail.com and I'd be happy to review chapters or your complete novel. If you'd like to read mine as well, I would love the feedback.
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Kin, when you go to type a reply in a topic, you type it into a reply box.
If you will look to the left of the reply box on your screen, you should see a link that says *UBB Code is ON. Click on that link and it will take you to a page that shows you the code for italics (which is i inside [] to start the italics and /i inside [] to end the italics), plus the codes for a bunch of other stuff you can do in your replies.
By the way, you can click on the edit icon for someone else's post and see what they typed in. That way, if someone does something cool, and you'd like to see how they did it, click on their edit icon. You can't edit their post, but you can see what they did.
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