posted
Keagan pushed himself away from the building and walked over to Sol, grinning, “I see you’ve woken up on time for once, a wise choice. You know the harvest is going to begin soon, and Merron won’t be putting up with any of your laziness.” Sol chuckled, “yes yes, I was informed of such last night by one of our lord’s guardsmen.” “Were you now?” Keagan’s eyebrows rose in surprise, “and what were you doing up late enough to catch one on his nightly patrol?” “Had another one of those nightmares…” “Again? Sol that’s the fifth occurrence in the past two weeks…perhaps it is time to tell someone other than me. Maybe you should see the priestess about this, it could be a sign for something terrible.”
The first book in my five part series [which I have yet to name] is called FireFang. Each book centers mostly around a single main character, though the other characters will be present in the continuing books as they begin to gather, and are named after the weapon which they will come to wield. The story is a simple one: an evil overlord threatens to return to power after a crippling defeat and the descendants of the four people originally responsible for his downfall must recover the weapons used to defeat him in order to do so again. It is my hope that I will be able to tell a good story despite the cliche.
My hopes is that I might interest some into reading the bulk of it, which at the moment sits at 41 pages, somewhere around 20 thousand words. What I'm really interested in are comments and critiques on how it's actually going. Is it confusing? Is it too cliche? Is it easy/hard to read? I find myself staggering to move beyond the point I am now at and hope to find some guidance for continuation.
I will be more than happy to send anyone interested a word doc. copy via e-mail upon request, and it would be greatly appreciated.
-Halcyon
[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited January 27, 2011).]
[This message has been edited by HalcyonDays (edited January 28, 2011).]
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posted
Well, it definitely FEELS like it's from chapter 7 and not chapter 1.
I wouldn't recommend using this as a beginning because, while action-packed, it's meaningless to readers. I don't care about these people. Is Sol a man or a woman? What's at stake? "The Disaster" is vague, too vague to pull me in.
Use your beginning to introduce me to your main characters. It doesn't have to be action-packed to be interesting. I'm a reader, give me a bit of credit! While my attention span is short, it does exist. I like being introduced to new people, new situations, new worlds. Take the time to make me care, then your scenes of action will have me at the edge of my seat
posted
haha I fear you may be right, forgive me. I have revised my initial thirteen lines to something out of chapter one, a couple paragraphs into the introduction of Sol and his best friend Keagan. Hope this is better!
Posts: 10 | Registered: Jan 2011
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posted
I would say there's too much description. As mentioned above, we don't really know the characters yet, so it's a little hard to keep them straight and visualize them. Of course I always have a hard time visualizing characters, and tend to skip descriptions and make up their appearance to suit my own imagination anyway. So for me as a reader, I might skip this whole paragraph, which isn't the best thing for a hook.
However, the relationship between these characters is intriguing, and how the opposites in their personalities work together. I liked the line about the women wondering who would make the better lover--that line was as much description as I would want at this stage, and it was cleverly done: description with context.
Consider starting with a scene in which these two characters interact, either with each other or with some townsperson.
The first line tripped me up just a little. I wondered on first reading what he pushed off the building.
One of my most recent grammatical pet peeves rears its head. It should be "you should tell someone besides ME," not "myself." "Myself"--or any reflexive-- is only correct if the subject is the same as the direct object, the indirect object, the object of a preposition or some other grammatical player in the sentence. examples: I'll bake myself a cake. I'll do it myself. He's gotten himself into a fix. We all lie to ourselves. The pro football player embarrassed himself by stating on live television that "Coach and myself believe this will be our best season."
Back to the story: the action is better, and I can see a bit of their personalities peeking out already, shown not told, so good job. We also wonder what the dreams are about, and what kind of work they do. Good hooks.
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