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 Review #4519365 |
 Welcome to WdC from the "Newbie Welcome Wagon"  Good morning, BXC  , and welcome to WdC. For the record, my real name is Jack Tyler, and I am a former steampunk author who has transitioned to horror, but I try to review a wide variety of styles and genres. While I have a few books in print, I am neither a famous author nor a renowned critic. I'm just a guy with an opinion that I'm here to share, and if you disagree with anything I say here, remember that the only opinion that matters is yours. I should explain that I use this review template in which I discuss my views on the important areas of quality storytelling, then compare your work to my own beliefs on the matter. As I said, I'm no authority, but hopefully my comments will give you some ideas to take your writing in directions you hadn't previously considered. Let me just drop a warning here, and we'll get started. THIRD-PARTY READERS TAKE NOTE: SPOILERS AHEAD PRESENTATION: This aspect deals with the first impression your story makes when a reader clicks on the title. Call it the cosmetics. I'll be looking at abstract items from text density to scene dividers in a effort to ferret out any unfortunate habits that might cause a reader to move on without actually reading anything; before you can dazzle him with your show, you have to get him into the tent!   I'm not a fan of WdC's default font, though I certainly won't deduct rating points for your use of it. It makes for a very dense wall of print, though you've broken that up well by double-spacing paragraphs. I would still recommend that you shift to a clean, modern font (my favorite for stories is Verdana), and increase the size to 3.5 as well. There are a lot of older eyes on here, including mine, and I have heard without corroboration that some reviewers just won't tackle a story if it's in fine print.There are three scene or viewpoint changes in this piece, and they are only marked by an extra line space, making them easy to miss. This breaks the reader's immersion, which I'll discuss in more detail later, but pulling him out of your story to reread is never a good idea, and everything in your presentation should be carefully crafted to avoid that. The way I mark off scene changes is usually just to center an asterisk, or an emoticon if it fits the story. I'm sure you'll find your own method, but mine looks like this:  STORY: This is really the basic element, isn't it? If you can't tell an engaging story, it doesn't matter what else you can do, because nobody's going to read it anyway. You should note that if you're reading this review, it means you've garnered decent to high marks in this category, or I would have moved on to something more engaging. I will try to explain aspects from characters to grammar, but I don't know how to teach someone to have an imagination, so congratulations; you've done something well already. Now let's examine the individual parts of the whole and see what makes it successful. We'll begin with the story itself, the theme, the flow, the impact, to see what made me stay instead of clicking on to the next one. This is specified to be a Prologue, so the first thing I did was go and scan the first chapter to see whether that's what it really is. A lot of authors write a scene and call it a prologue when it's really just part of Chapter One. As soon as I saw "Twelve Years Later," I knew it was presented properly. I'm not going to tackle a novel at this busy time of year (we still have two birthdays and an anniversary to get through before Christmas), but my quick reading suggests to me that these children, now 17, are going to be the main characters in a Saving Civilization story. That's a powerful theme for a big story, and while it's been done before, as has pretty much everything, all that matters is how you do it, and you're off to a good start here.CHARACTERS: This section discusses all aspects of the characters, the way they look, act, and talk, as well as the development and presentation of backstory. Allow me to present "Tyler's Axiom:" Characters are fiction. Rich, multifaceted characters with compelling backstories will seize the reader in a grip that will not be denied, and drag him into their narrative, because he can't abide the thought of not knowing what will happen to them. Conversely, lazy, shallow stereotypes will ruin any story regardless of its other qualities, because the reader will be unable to answer the second question of fiction: Why do I care? Despite the resistance soldiers in this opening scene, we don't really have many characters to look at. The children will obviously figure later, but describing a pair of terrified five-year olds who have yet to grow into their calling would be pointless, and you've rightly refrained from doing that. Terrace Larsen, then, is our main focus, and he is almost a figure from Central Casting. He is familiar to every sci-fi/fantasy reader as the renowned hero who's been through the mill, is tired to the bone, and is going to sit back and let someone else risk it all from now on. I'm not going to deduct any points for this guy at this point. There is a serious danger that he could slide into a cliched parody of an action hero, but that will depend on your own skill, and how you apply it to what you plan to do with this guy. There are no problems yet, and I only mention it here to make you aware of the care you need to take in order to ensure that this guy remains a dynamic, three-dimensional character throughout. As he is presented in this prologue, good work. By the way, I read his name as "Terrance" until I was halfway down the page. Do with that bit of information what you will.SETTINGS: This section deals with the locations you've established for your action, the ways in which they affect that action, and your ability to describe them clearly and concisely. You could say that this aspect answers (or fails to answer) the first question of fiction, What's going on here? Setting can be used to challenge a character, to highlight a skill or quality, to set the mood of a scene without overtly saying a single thing about it, and a host of lesser impacts too numerous to mention. You might think of it as a print artist's equivalent of a movie's "mood music," always important yet never intrusive. All in all, a pretty big deal, then. So how did you do? Well done. This action could only have been set on a still-smoldering battleground, and you've described it well enough for the reader to picture it without pounding it until it overshadows both character and story. I don't have much to say here; this is just excellent.MECHANICS: Whether you're writing fact or fiction, prose or poetry, the "holy grail" that you're striving for is immersion. This is an area that no author, myself included, ever wants to talk about: I've done all this work, and you want to argue over a comma?" But those commas are important. What you're really doing as a writer is weaving a magic spell around your reader, and your reader wants you to succeed. He wants to escape his mundane world for a period, and lose himself in your creation. Errors in spelling and grammar, typos, "there" vs. "their" issues, use of words inconsistent with their actual meanings, all yank him out of his immersion while he backtracks to re-read and puzzle out what you meant to say. This is never good, and this is the section that deals with that. I don't have much to offer here, which is a good thing; I often go on for a dozen or more lines pointing out errors. All I have for you here is the scene changes that I mentioned above, and your use of a hyphen - in place of an em-dash — in a couple of places. One is It was the voice of a young boy- quiet but still audible. That particular hyphen would read more smoothly as a comma, but that's a nothing point. What I want to suggest is that you make yourself a private item called "symbols" or something similar, and every time you need a symbol that doesn't appear on your keyboard (copyright, fraction, or whatever) that you Google it and save it to your stash. You'll then have it available for use from that point forward.Bottom line is that you've done very well here, at witness the fact that you aren't seeing twenty lines of blue print. Good job! SUMMARY: A tiny nick for the items mentioned, and that's just my opinion as a professional nitpicker. You've done a fine job here, and I thank you for sharing. I sincerely hope that you can keep the quality up all the way through. Writing a novel is a marathon, and complacency and burnout are the two lurking monsters waiting to ruin your efforts. Challenge yourself to make every scene better than your first effort, and take frequent breaks to do something else you enjoy. It will take you longer, but you'll end up with a finished product that will shine with the WOW factor.I hope that I have presented my opinions in a way that is constructive, and that you will find helpful to your endeavors going forward. It is never my intention to belittle anyone's efforts or discourage them from following the dream that I have found so fulfilling for the last six decades. In any case, if I can leave you with one thought to take with you, let it be this: Don't forget to have the fun! So many young and/or beginning writers get so caught up in the daily word count, the quest for publication, and the often conflicting advice of other writers that they forget to enjoy the journey. You may or may not become the next Big Celebrity Author, but you will always have the experience. Make sure it's a good one! Read well, and write better, Jack Did you find my opinions useful or interesting? More are available for consideration on my blog,
 My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
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