Isekai, which means literally "different world" is a genre of fiction in which a character is transferred into a different world, often by being hit by a truck, but sometimes in other ways, such as being kidnapped, or stuck in a video game.
In this contest, interested parties will write up to 10,000 words of an Isekai story with a female protagonist (IE, a woman is transported to another world) and an original setting. This can be a work that's complete in itself, or it can be the start of a longer story, that's up to you. After all submissions are in, a poll will open and everyone can vote on who is the best. The winner will then receive cover art which I'll commission from a commission artist of your choice to a maximum value of $100 dollars.
Submissions close in a month, Midnight GMT on the 21st of May. Please include a title, so that your work can be easily put into a board poll. Please also include a rough genre.
In order to prevent this becoming an immediate popularity contest, PM me and @meloncan your story, and we'll submit it to this thread where all stories can be read. Also, don't tell your friends which story is yours.
WINNER: Falling Far (From The Tree Is Fine, but This Is a Little Extreme)
Full Score Sheet
Falling Far 72
Record of the Inherited Memory Girl's Efforts 50
Hereafter 33
All the Stars in the Sky 30
Travel 29
The Urban Barbarian 23
Love and Cats 22
All Roads 19
I am the human! 19
Blooming Afterlife 15
Lonely Dreams 15
More Sophisticated Magic 14
Chrysalis of Capgrass 14
Work Hard, Play Hard (I reincarnated as a living doll?!!) 13
So this is my life now, being a living battery in an unknown world: 12
Return from Isekai: A blade in the dark – Emma 9
Death Maid of the Revolution: 9
Afterlife 7
Ushinawareta Shoujo Sophia 6
Shiny 5
Harvest of Heather 5
Princess and the Student 4
Scars 4
Almost a Nightmare 2
World 2
Everybody Wants to Rule the World 1
Voting will end on the 19th of June
This thread remains for people to discuss entry. I'd encourage you all to talk over everything that's posted, and please don't post on who wrote a story, even if you know.
FINALLY: late submission stories maybe accepted, just get them to me as soon as you can.
Congratulations on getting first place, @Lyova! It certainly was well deserved.
In any case, I'm the one who wrote Scars. I'm disappointed that I got so few votes, but not that much. It's obvious there were other, better entries that interested people more and I feel this greater level of interest was warranted. So congrats to everyone who got high places on the list!
The biggest piece of criticism I got was Aerin's characterization from @GreatWyrmGold and as I mentioned yesterday, I agree with what he said about it. I always intended Aerin to be somewhat thoughtless and callous in regards to his involvement in summoning Cassandra to Tonophria (the world's name). He definitely acknowledges that he did it, but is adamant that he only has a minimum share of the blame and that is because he's quite confident in his own magical ability, to the point of arrogance even. He knows he's good, hell the faculty (Crystal Tower) knows he's good and that colors his perception of what happened.
In his mind, he literally cannot have fucked up the Calling (it's not really a summoning, but more of a portal tear, in case somebody was confused) because botching something like that is simply something he doesn't do. That's why he's dismissive at first with Cassandra, saying he'd already apologized for that and acting if it was just not that much of a big deal.
The fact that the faculty board only kinda punishes him without giving him the harshest sentences is sort of intended to reflect that same trait of thoughtless callousness, especially since they only discuss Cassandra's presence with academic interest and don't really seem bothered by the fact that she's just been ripped away from everything she's ever known. Of course, something like that could be assumed to have happened off-screen, but I never even hinted at it, so... Anyway, I should probably have worded things better to have that point be more clear.
Returning to Aerin and his characterization, I can see that I went overboard with it, mostly because I did want him to be a bit of a callous cunt, but not to the point he apparently is. With that said, I agree that scene of Cassandra "forgiving" him in her internal dialogue was a failure. I rewrote that several times and was never happy with it.
Thing is, the extent of Cassandra's injuries is important because they leave the scars that mark her now and it's an important part of how she sees herself from now on. However, their magic healing isn't an instant thing for this level of injuries and that meant that Cassandra would be bed-ridden for quite a while. That was fine, but it forced me to speed a couple weeks along with a "and time passed" and then Cassandra wasn't quite so hateful of Aerin. It was handled badly, yes.
In my mind, I had intended Cassandra to confront Aerin at some point, calling him out on his assholery, but the word count constraints meant I'd probably end up disappointed in the end result, because it wouldn't be a short thing. Still, going through it again, it does indeed look like Aerin is suddenly (mostly) forgiven, which wasn't really my intention. Cassandra and Aerin were going to interact no matter what because her presence was a hush hush topic only known to a handful of people and Aerin was the only one that regularly visited (because he was admittedly curious, though obligation had a large part in it), so he was really the only real option Cassandra had in getting back on her feet and start to actually be able to function as an individual in the shitty situation she's in, but yeah her response isn't the best at all.
Thanks for the reviews everyone. Well, clearly I'm out of practice. Firstly, I appologise for the formatting. I should have checked what the result looked like when I copied over. I was in a rush and I should have taken better care. Sorry.
Also, as this is apparently necessary to say as I apparently gave off the wrong impression: I consider kidnapping people and coercing them to fight in a war on your behalf while implanting bombs in them to keep them compliant to be an evil act. I thought I had thrown in enough indications that Valiant was a bit of a self-righteous asshole and that his troops share the blame for carrying out his orders. They are meant to be well-intentioned extremists who are doing evil for a good cause. No, the end does not justify the means, but the end is still mean to be sympathetic despite that. Heather goes along with this because she's decided to move on from that and work towards the good end goal. I was envisioning something like that episode of The Outer Limits where a town is kidnapped by aliens for their organs, and in the end, the humans willingly sacrifice their lives and give up their organs, as evil as the aliens' actions were, they saw it as the best end result for everyone.
Also, I am actually South African. Yes, white people do complain about their jobs being taken away by black people (due to Affirmative Action and Black Economic Empowerment). Honestly, that was partly brought on by my frustration that I've been living in a shelter run by what are basically Neo-Nazis and have had to listen to their ridiculous, racist, pro-Apartheid propaganda. This was a way for me to take out my frustrations.
As for the races, yes, those aren't their real names. I hinted at that in the line where I mentioned "Humans" being translated as "Similar". (Humans is derived from Homo, which means similar. I was intending the same process to be occurring everywhere, as names for species you don't know are meaningless.)
I tried to get as close to 10 000 words as I could without ending in the middle of a paragraph. In retrospect, not the wisest way of doing things.
Characterisation is actually something my readers usually claim I'm especially good at. Guess I got lazy and overconfident there. I think part of the issue is priority. I wanted to spend more time developing characters, but I felt the need to rush ahead with the plot so that "more happens" by the time the reader finishes reading. Again, a bad decision on my part. I know I had Heather change her mind early (another symptom of that), though I did that on purpose. I guess I should have spent more time explaining why. Heather has been feeling aimless and helpless. She throws herself into this as she quickly grasped the first goal presented to her that she feels capable of actually working towards.
The reason that I had so many alien species turn up was largely for atmosphere. I was trying to convey the same feeling as a bunch of people stuffed in a container for the purpose of human trafficking (again, I was showing off how bad kidnapping someone is). Though, I guess I could have cut the numbers down without losing much of that.
Having the Initiative invade Earth would put the Settled in a more positive light, but again, that's not the tone I was actually going for. The dubiousness of their claims was intentional. (They are being truthful, but the fact of the matter is, they're trying to protect their own hides) There was meant to be a bit of moral complexity. No one is shiny white.
Though, I guess I give the author the benefit of the doubt more often. For example, in Chrysalis of Capgrass, I considered Marina to be the villain, due the whole kidnapping, child-grooming and forcibly modifying someone to be a better sex-slave thing.
As for the complicatedness of the setting and magic systems. Admittedly, I tend to like settings to go that way, though, admittedly, the psionics, at the very least, was there mostly for genre expectations and really ended up superfluous and easy to cut. There could be more folding into and cutting elsewhere too.
For the demon lord, I was generally trying to go for a very inhuman look that didn't resemble any other species introduced. Sorry if it came off as silly. I did think the threat level was not something really that important to focus on yet when the protagonist was still very much a novice non-combatant.
Ii ntend to eventually review all the stories, unless there are objections.
For now, here are a couple more reviews:
Lonely Dreams:
This was a case where I liked the protagonist and was interested in her, yet not much actually ends up happening with her. The other world is visited, but we know too little to really become invested in the plot. I give it the benefit of the doubt based on the protagonist though, and so this is one I'd like to see more of.
The Ups and Downs of a Villainess:
Firstly, there are a few grammar errors. Secondly, as mentioned by others, the ease with which the protagonist accomplishes her goals strains suspension of disbelief and rings of "Capitalism! Ho!" which makes me roll my eyes. Also, there are some unfortunate generalisations on the female gender in there. Now, the addition of characters from another game was actually interesting to me, though they are treated in a very generic way. Diversity in personality and not merely appearance would help. Speaking of which, most of the story reads more like a summary than an actual story. Show, don't tell and all that. I know we had limited words, but rushing explanations does not keep people invested. As for the ending, an ending where the villain protagonist loses everything as they were only out for themselves is not a bad ending, but it is disconnected from the rest of the story. The fact is, despite my distaste of capitalism, she was not actually acting particularly villainously, so her failure did not actually come from her own flaws like the story claims they did. It ends up just looking silly. Despite that, I actually liked the basic idea of the second half. Then again, it's apparently unoriginal, which means it probably should not even qualify for the contest in the first place.
Falling Far was mine. I hope that wasn't too transparent.
I'm happy my story won, though I have to say most of the joy has come from reading the enthusiastic reviews. Those were hella nice.
I'd like to thank the other authors for competing, the non-competitors for participating, and FBH and meloncan for organizing this. It made for a nice source of motivation, reading the other stories was fun, and I think this contest will be a valuable experience for running similar contests in the future. For what it's worth, I very much agree with @Triggerhappy's assessment on post order; I'm not sure how much of my victory can be attributed to being post #9 and not #29. What's certain is that a lot of other stories deserved more votes and attention than they got.
Hope this thread stays alive a little longer to discuss the stories some more. I think I owe people some critiques still, and I'd warmly welcome actionable critique from the people my entry failed to grab.
In my mind, I had intended Cassandra to confront Aerin at some point, calling him out on his assholery, but the word count constraints meant I'd probably end up disappointed in the end result, because it wouldn't be a short thing.
Hm...if I had to give a suggestion, try to plan a sub-storyline that would fit within the wordcount rather than making a full introduction with no idea if it would fit. Personally, I planned three chapters that would probably need 2-3,000 words each, which contained its own beginning (Sophia gets dumped into the world), middle (she meets Shou and a party collects around him), and end (they fight a monster and Sophia realizes something).
Maybe, instead of having the conclusion be that Cassandra and Aerin start working together, it's that Aerin finally understands why Cassandra has been rejecting his attempts at helping? It still leaves the story hanging, because it's not necessarily clear what he'll do or think is needed to make things right, but it's still a turning point.
Since Sereg seems to be replying to many points I made in my critique, I'm going to respond to as many of those as I can.
Also, as this is apparently necessary to say as I apparently gave off the wrong impression: I consider kidnapping people and coercing them to fight in a war on your behalf while implanting bombs in them to keep them compliant to be an evil act. I thought I had thrown in enough indications that Valiant was a bit of a self-righteous asshole and that his troops share the blame for carrying out his orders. They are meant to be well-intentioned extremists who are doing evil for a good cause. No, the end does not justify the means, but the end is still mean to be sympathetic despite that. Heather goes along with this because she's decided to move on from that and work towards the good end goal. I was envisioning something like that episode of The Outer Limits where a town is kidnapped by aliens for their organs, and in the end, the humans willingly sacrifice their lives and give up their organs, as evil as the aliens' actions were, they saw it as the best end result for everyone.
Ah.
It's probably worth considering Poe's Law. This isn't that, but it's closely related. It doesn't matter if you intend the Valiant to be self-righteous a-holes if the end product is indistinguishable from someone who thinks they're more or less justified. How do you make them distinguishable? Good question! There are probably subtler and cleverer ways than the ones I'm about to recommend, but I don't know them. I do know three less subtle ones, though.
First, you need to show Heather's thought process more. Show her being conflicted, aware that the Valiant are doing bad things but deciding to follow them anyways for one reason or another.
Second, have the side characters speak up more. The voices pointing out that the Valiant are being a-holes feel token in the story as written; they come up and are immediately dismissed, then the story moves on. Don't have them just accept the explanations the Valiant give; have them question it, point out the flaws, etc.
Would the Valiant not accept that kind of criticism? That's a great starting point for point three: If all else fails, give them one deed which breaks their facade. They claim they only cause harm for the greater good? Have them hurt someone for clearly self-serving reasons. Understandable reasons, perhaps, but ones which are completely at odds with their stated philosophy. They claim they only kidnap those who had a worse life at home? Have an alien claim they were content there, or that they'd rather die in poverty than kill for some unknown war.
(Or show an outside perspective. Those are great at characterizing peoples' self-perceptions as flawed.)
Also, I am actually South African. Yes, white people do complain about their jobs being taken away by black people (due to Affirmative Action and Black Economic Empowerment). Honestly, that was partly brought on by my frustration that I've been living in a shelter run by what are basically Neo-Nazis and have had to listen to their ridiculous, racist, pro-Apartheid propaganda. This was a way for me to take out my frustrations.
Once again, I have underestimated how incredibly, stupidly assholish people can be.
The reason that I had so many alien species turn up was largely for atmosphere. I was trying to convey the same feeling as a bunch of people stuffed in a container for the purpose of human trafficking (again, I was showing off how bad kidnapping someone is). Though, I guess I could have cut the numbers down without losing much of that.
That sort of thing works better in visual media. In Star Wars, you don't need to spend five minutes showing off each weird alien in the Cantina in detail for it to seem like it's crammed with dozens of species of weird aliens. In a book, well...you can, but it requires phrases like "each weirder than the last" rather than specific descriptions.
I wrote "I am the human!" in the middle of watching "Tiger & Bunny", and I think it's safe to say that placement on the first page helped my total. I'm used to spending months developing an idea before putting it down on paper, so I felt a bit rushed going from idea to 10,000 words in two and a half weeks.
While most critiques focused on the story hitting genre tropes too hard, I personally think the biggest problem was that I didn't give the protagonist any kind of core character. I had character traits, but I never found anything to tie them together. My personal favorite part to write was the scene of the protagonist first using magic. I rarely enjoy (but rarely hate) the use of the game mechanics in a non-game story, so I wanted to portray a very biological form of magic, if only for the first couple of scenes.
My core motivation for writing a straight magical girl/super hero story was basically the belief that the many, many parodies and subversions were starting to become cliche themselves. While my protagonist was familiar with genre trappings, I specifically tried to avoid her just snarking on everything that happens.
This biggest chang from planning to writing was to have one long, self-contained chapter instead of two unrelated adventures, which defenitely helped the pace of the segment and added a littlw more weight to the character interaction and let me cut down on extraneous characterization.
I also ended up raiding three older story ideas to fill in stuff like: protagonist gimmick power, classmates, the rival, and the mentor, albeit with changes to each part.
All right, time for the reveal! I wrote Record of the Inherited Memory Girl's Efforts.
I wonder how much of my votes were due to First Post effect. =(
Thank you all who commented on my story! I have many many replies. Some of which are quite rambling or maybe even disjointed as I collected them over the course of weeks. Some of them contain worldbuilding in which I filled in a blank spot posed by your comment.
If you see my reply contain a detail that you think should have come across, and if you want to, do reply and tell me so. I'll see if I can edit it in.
Or not read the rambles, it's fine.
Inherited Memory Girl was conceived of before I saw this story contest and hence why it is basically just a starter. The story was always going to be a series in the style of current web novels.
Regarding continuing the story:
For those who are interested in seeing it go up on SV, do you think I should do some minor edits (add descriptions, scenes, clean up grammar, etc.)
or rewrite/restart taking the comments into account.
Though small minor changes could be accommodated too, like how I'll probably edit Alice's rejection of Petra's memories to be 'softer' and make the influence of Petra on her much more obvious. Perhaps develop Petra more before her upload.
That said, I'm not actually going to post it any time soon. Much of the worldbuilding is still incomplete and arc planning leaves something to be desired.
RE Grammar:
A number of people mentioned grammar errors and capitalization, was this supposed to be for conversations?
This was the way I was taught to write a character speaking.
Eg. Petra shouted excitedly, "go here for plot hook!"
Including the comma ending, and the lack of capitalization on the spoken sentence. (unless it's a Proper Noun or 'I')
In reverse:
"Go here for plot hook," she said.
When the speech goes first, the spoken sentence's first letter is capitalized.
If the spoken sentence would end on a full stop, it ends on a comma instead.
And the dialogue tag's start is not capitalized (unless etc.).
I'm not sure if that's the error you guys are talking about.
I did go through again and find a number of errors where 'skill share' should have capital letters. Perhaps those?
Not sure how I should weigh criteria for voting, so I just listed them in order of what I'd most likely read further if it were continued or expanded into a full multi-chapter story.
Seriously though, more than a few of those left me wondering when I could buy it on Kindle.
Memory Girl in particular left me feeling put out that there wasn't more, though it wasn't the only one.
Gah, I wish I had that kind of talent. And the willpower to put in the effort to turn that talent into skill half as good as shown here.
My major issue with Inherited Memory Girl was that it read, basically, like middle tier fanfiction. The author has a handle on grammar and syntax mostly. But the plot, or what there is of it, is just kinda . . . bad . . .
Not to mention incredibly generic. It's just the reborn as a baby/childhood sequence from some of the more popular Isekai scrubbed clean of any copyright infringement and seasoned with a pastiche of ideas a fanfiction writer might think are neat.
XD Well, you got me. Yes, Inherited Memory Girl was a generic isekai in how I conceived of it. There's a minor dose of wish fulfillment in there too, especially evident in the later plot arcs where Alice escalates to power trip level.
It's sort of like Hero's War but leaning more towards generic isekai than writing a magitech history book...
Inherited Memory Girl was my answer to the realization that the way Hero's War, about Cato, an engineer pulling a Connecticut Yankee in Fantasy Land, resulted in the main character not actually doing anything that could be written 'on screen'. Because his normal schedule is divided between teaching, business meetings and spending time in the lab.
Basically, Cato turned into a university lecturer and people complained that he didn't do anything interesting.
Alice will be far more active, both in action scenes as well as pushing an agenda. Much of the reason for this is her personality being partially inherited from Petra (and thus Petra's inclination to Megaprojects that Cato is much more cautious about). As well as her "feeling invincible" that the cheat enables after the first arc.
I'm going to be honest- this was hard to read, and I couldn't get past the prologue. Tiny paragraphs combined with run-on sentences and comma splices don't do this story any favors, and the alternative mode of too-small sentences doesn't help either. Contrast is the spice of life, so you need to use it to its fullest. The mildly socialist terrorists were a nice touch, and the poetry of being hoist on their own petard was good, but in the end it wasn't enough to save it. As such, just like everything else I couldn't get through, it doesn't get a complete rating until I can stomach the whole thing.
This one starts as an interesting enough pseudo-sci-fi idea, and it's an approach to the whole zombie apocalypse thing that I haven't seen before. Pity it almost entirely glosses over the whole thing so it can introduce a science-fantasy blend part-way through instead.
There are a few technical errors that jump out - the main one is how speech is handled:
This is not correct. A new character speaking, or even any character starting a new sentence, will always begin with a capital letter. It should look like this --
-- because the speech is a new, distinct sentence, not part of the previous sentence. The only exceptions to this are when the narrative misses the first half of the sentence for some reason, or if you interrupt the dialogue and then continue it. So as examples, these would also be acceptable:
This error is pretty consistent, so something to keep in mind for the future.
On the story as a whole...well, it isn't one, is my main gripe with it. This is very obviously a set-up piece for a much longer story set in the future science fantasy society, which hurts it as an individual piece of writing. The ideas in the first half bring up a whole slew of questions - in a world where anyone can learn anything in seconds, are there still schools? Does anyone bother to teach, or is that a lost art? How is this freedom of information used, and what effect does it have on society? What has replaced school as a child or teenagers primary place of social contact? How do people learn how to use their new knowledge? Logic, safe experimental methods, that kind of thing?
I expect, if this wasn't being used to set up an another-world story, you could get a very interesting novel out of exploring the knock-on effects of a society with access to this kind of tech. Or it may've been done before, I don't know.
Now, this is supposed to be a critique of the story rather than me lamenting unfulfilled potential (seriously, whoever wrote this, an apocalyptic side-story featuring uninfected characters trying to survive while the world goes to hell around them and contrasted with the seeming-utopia they were used to would be interesting, even if it wasn't the story you set out to write), so.
Gripe number two: Descriptions. Namely, there aren't any for half the story.
I've checked the word count on this story and can see that it comes in at a little over 10,070-ish words, so granted, you didn't have a lot of wiggle room in this as-written. But there are several sections of exposition in the second half (part three, by the spoiler tag labels in the post) that simply aren't necessary for the part of the story you've got here - the one that stands out to me is the part about Alice's brothers, who don't play any real part in the story as written. That's 70+ words you could reduce to maybe a dozen and still have largely the same impact on the story.
As I noted earlier, this is clearly the introduction to a longer tale you want to tell, and presumably the sections like this will matter more later. But when you're submitting it as a 10,000-word stand-alone piece, parts that matter later are dead weight now.
So, returning to my point about descriptions, that's ~60 words you could free up in that paragraph, and it shouldn't be too hard to cut down the other exposition sections to free up more of the word count. You could then use that extra space to note some of the features of your characters - is Petra tall or short? What colour is her skin? Her hair? Is that something else that can be edited at will, like her knowledge base? It doesn't take many words to convey some of this information, and it gives the audience a better picture of the scene.
There are descriptions for Alice and her family in the second half, which is good, but I think there are better ways to include that information. I already suggested cutting down the exposition paragraphs to free up some of your word count, and you could use some of that to add the descriptions back in as part of the narrative.you could also briefly allude to Ri's parentage by noting the Earth sorcerers' hair colour, complexion, or other features using similar language that you did for Ri.
Anyway, I'm starting to ramble a bit, so to sum up - this really felt like the introduction or prologue of a much longer story, and that hurts it as a stand-alone. I also found the section with Petra more interesting than the parts with Alice, although if you continue this and develop the world properly that could change. There were several good ideas in there, though, and with some more work you could tighten the narrative and introduce a few more subtle elements that would improve the story.
Thank you for your comments. I do agree, the description of her brothers was not worth much more than two sentences (to demonstrate the naming culture). And yeah, the sorcerers and the general village also needs description.
Missing descriptions in the prologue was meant to keep the prologue short. I didn't want to have the prologue take 10k words!
About Petra's plot being more intriguing, I also agree! I had ideas for a series of interludes set with Petra leading the Skill Share team on an epic quest through post-apocalyptic land to the Database physical server, which is in another country, in order to seal it.
Except that the whole Skill Share and driving everyone insane was in fact conceived as a background story to justify everything that happens to Alice. (see next comment)
Record of the Inherited Memory Girl's Efforts: Wow, a lot of worldbuilding, but it was quite fluid. I really liked that the protagonist decided that the memories of another life do not make her that person - full agreement on that front. The immediate plot has been set up well enough. But, the nature of the cheat skill, having extra knowledge on the settings. I have seen it completely ruin stories by making out everybody but the protagonist to be completely stupid and inept.
Huh. Well, the cheat skill was originally conceived as a skill copy system, but as I expanded the 'magic system' of the whole AR and Status system, the justification for Skill Share falling into the hands of MC resulted in a single logical plot line that handled everything from the fall of Ancient Magic Civilization to exactly how the fake-litrpg system works to the whole not-reincarnation premise.
Administrator access level, in-depth knowledge of the system, etc. are all actually just symptoms of the real cheat; inheriting Petra's identity. Hence the title.
Regarding characters being stupid... I hope to avoid that.
I conceived of the main arcs to not follow a Hero's Journey type of story; Alice, with her knowledge of Petra's world, keeps comparing the difference in quality of life, justice and political freedom with what she knows is possible. And while she dreams of fixing the world, each time she falls back on Petra's (and that entire society's) penchant for using Megaprojects to do that.
> We never see this in the entry because the introductory arc, the fertilizer, was meant to establish this motivation to right an unjust world
What, did you think any sane society would have just left their entire factual education system to something not unlike a non-profit team of Wikipedia admins?
And most of the time, while her ideas are not stupid and would work in ideal conditions... people, politics and value differences causes her to fail again and again. And until the middle of the story, Alice never succeeds in any of her 'society fixing' Megaprojects despite success in her personal projects.
In terms of plot, the first section is shaky. It requires quite a few coincidences to come together: Aldar thinking the threat was a prank, the extremists' access to weapons and the Database but not accurate intel, Petra's ability to code things on the fly, the majority of the world having auto-updates enabled and no protection against brain-frying software...
Some of this is fine, because a premise can be absurd to jump-start a story. However, considering how fundamental these events are to the world-building and (presumably) the late plot, I'd have preferred something that was more believable. I do appreciate how you manage to establish a litRPG system without 'a god did it', and how the protagonist is immediately important to the story, doing interesting things.
Unfortunately, the story after the reincarnation introduces a 'new' protagonist who decides she has nothing to do with Petra's sins and characterization, and then proceeds to have a childhood full of exposition without any relevance to a plot until the very end. I lost interest.
As far as characterization goes, I have a serious issue with Petra's portrayal. I can't tell if she was intentionally written as an amoral sociopath, or if her actions are just that poorly considered.
This is her entire decision-making process before she decides that yes, handing extremist activists a program that drives people insane is definitely the best option. Without even trying to convince them it's not done yet, or stalling until security arrives, or giving them the incomplete version that displays proper error messages and warnings... how, exactly, would that have been worse?
She's smiling, as she thinks about driving people insane. She's not even framing it as self-defense either; she thinks it's justice, the best kind of justice. Do human rights exist in this setting?
The boss is apparently happy about current affairs too. A subordinate weaponizing the product he intends to sell into an insanity bomb? Is that really good advertising? Does he also think it's a good idea to drive people equipped with military-grade weaponry insane?
And Petra's still being giddy about driving people insane.
For someone who's supposed to be smart, she doesn't think for one moment that these activists could distribute the flawed product to others; they've been vocal about their anti-monopolization stance. Even without uploading to the Database, innocents could still get hurt – not just by going insane themselves, but because Petra is driving heavily-armed people insane. Does she just... not care? Or is she that short-sighted? Or did the story neglect to believably explore the consequences?
Not an ounce of guilt, but it's nice she can laugh about it. The fact the story tries to spin humor out of this implies a worrying degree of obliviousness, though.
I'm actually supposed to believe Petra cares about making the world a better place? Her entire characterization so far points at an amoral sociopath scientist: driving people crazy without hesitation, not considering consequences, unaware of responsibility or guilt. Heck, she's even mind-jacking babies.
I may be misinterpreting something, but if this is Petra's reincarnation system, and it's a known affliction even to people who live in a small backwater village of three hundred people, precisely how many babies did Petra murder? Jeez.
This is a confusing story to me. The premise is intriguing, the world-building has some interesting ideas, and the first two thousand words promised a lot. Unfortunately, the protagonist's (accidental?) characterization is then wasted, because her reincarnation decides she isn't her past self anymore, which frankly feels like a cheap cop-out. After this, the story enters a childhood arc full of exposition. Other characters that were introduced didn't appeal, the world-building alone wasn't enough to intrigue, and the protagonist doesn't regain plot relevance until the very ending.
I probably didn't outline Petra's society and culture well enough for how important that is. Part of the theme for many of Alice's plot arcs (attempts to improve the world) and their failures is Megaproject Syndrome.
Also, Database cannot fry your brain. It's cannot make you insane any more than your textbook or wikipedia can; it's 'dead' knowledge created by human hands rather than copied from human memory. Yes, you can put things in Database that COULD affect people's minds but only Database Devs can do that, and the Devs wouldn't... right?
Petra's society has a cultural tendency to build big projects and put them in the hands of a small group of people (usually the innovators), often without sufficient support beyond allowing the creator to fulfill their vision. If that vision is inspiring enough and not malicious, the society trusts the creators to stick with it and will support that effort. It's a culture-worship of the mad scientist ideal.
> Part of why the terrorists acted the way they did, and how they have a database dev with them, is that the altruistic scientist leader is a cultural icon.
> The magic system was also meant to support this but hasn't been demonstrated enough to show how within 10k. The magic system allows easy development of even complex magitech from a few brilliant people, as rapid prototyping of your magic design is a fundamental quirk of how it works. For example, during the fertilizer arc, Alice literally takes Petra's notes on the fundamental rune magic (the *actual* magic, not System and the magitech grafts) and reinvents how use basic magic, do basic enchanting with triggerable abilities, copy lifeforce grafts... within about 5 years and working by herself.
>> Though with a cheat sheet of all the runes and their syntactical rules, doing rune magic is about as easy as programming a script in machine code. So not difficult. Basic enchanting is like building small programs; copying lifeforce grafts is like making a driver interface that can hack other people's Local and copy all their code. Building something like System though, is beyond her, which is analogous to programming the internet backbone, a Megaproject in its own right.
So when Petra asks her 'copy' to improve the world, she really means, "build a magical or physical infrastructure, establish political systems, etc. that will bring back the lost glory of her civilization". And the way she expects this improvement to take shape is by her 'copy' using the inherited knowledge to essentially uplift the society, hopefully by rebuilding all the things they lost.
Petra's insanity ploy would have been considered a brilliant self-defence given the terrorists are armed. In her situation, if she was armed and heroically killed the terrorists, that action would have been praised, insanity isn't treated differently. The 'cleverness' of her retaliation and the way that it would lower casualties among her team, would have earned her extra respect over armed resistance. Furthermore, it's shown that upload/download knocks you out and takes time to resolve if you're doing it in huge amounts, so she's expecting to be able to disarm the terrorists while the system is working.
She also doesn't know they had a Database Dev, a very small select group of people. Pretty much, only a Database Dev could have ended the world the way they did.
Alternately, the terrorists take her system and run away with it to employ it within their group and once Security arrives, it's their problem. She might have been asked later to publish an announcement that the version they took was flawed. Then she would have been praised for cleverly deceiving the terrorists into letting her team go free while not giving them what they wanted. If the terrorists go insane from using a flawed system they extorted, well too bad for them.
The killing many babies thing has a few parts. First, Petra acknowledges that this isn't a good thing she's doing but she thinks the advantage of her knowledge in the event of a society collapse would be worth the 'cost' (this sort of amoral social calculation is another of the major flaws of that society). Secondly, if society doesn't collapse, then any other Admin could remove her reincarnation macro.
> RE baby death count is about 1 a year. It's only noticed as a rare affliction rather than SIDS because there's a System Download box appearing on an unregistered baby. So Petra's killed about 200 babies before Alice.
Alice herself isn't entirely unaffected despite her declaration that she isn't Petra. While she does decide that Petra's goals aren't her own, she still thinks that Petra's society is better than what she is living in. Her memories of a 'superior' society drives her to improve her own situation and the end of the entry was meant to establish her deciding that improving the world isn't a bad thing to do either.
Alice's memories of how Petra's society works thus drives her to the same flaws, namely taking on everything by herself and trusted friends, and valuing systems and resources over people. Plus a tendency to stop at "this works" rather than making the project idiot proof, much less sabotage proof.
Still, duly noted that Alice's part isn't as attention grabbing as a potential Petra story (on a Quest to Seal Database). Gotta work on that.
Also need to better show how despite Alice's determination, she's still mostly shaped by Petra.
Memory Girl is similar to Falling Far, but it gets off to a slower start. As an editor, I might suggest working more of the adult's memories in as flashbacks after establishing the main character's everyday life and the unique perspective on it that her imprinted memories give her. I also think that with more development time the author would probably have an idea for a friend or sidekick who would be a major secondary character, and this character's existence could be edited into the existing material to add more opportunities to develop the main character's personality. Another editing possibility would be to insert a smaller problem for the main character to tackle before the banquet and information about her sister. And yet another possibility would be to give the adult personality some goal or issue she intensely cared about before the zombie apocalypse, and then hint at how this inherited passion will play a role in the main character's life.
Her initial friend group is her sister and Lochar's daughter (fire girl). Actually, I planned the next chapter to be from Lochar's daughter's perspective. The two of them serve as the major driver for MC's actions in the second arc, immediately after this fertilizer arc which also serves to establish said daughter's character.
A good point about developing Petra's motivations more. And Alice comparing what she knew of Petra's world to her current situation would be better to show that Alice is heavily influenced by Petra but still her own person; while also developing Petra's world.
Record of the Inherited Memory Girl's Efforts
This is one of the ones I enjoyed more. Though, I must admit, the disconnect between the prologue and the rest of the story actually makes me suspect that the prologue would be better not as a prologue, but something uncovered later. I am in the minority, I guess, in that I preferred things after the prologue ended. I did spot an inconsistency in the description of the mother's hair colour. I must say that I liked the fact that you made the sister the one with magic rather than the protagonist. It works better that way. Though, I confess the timeline is a bit odd based on how young Alice received her memories considering the fact that her sister is younger. You'd think she'd be more aware of the circumstances of her sister's birth? Anyway, I'm happy with what you're doing with the sister in general and the fact that the family does not seem to hold the past against one another. It's nice. This is one of the stories I'd certainly like to see more of. I must admit that the magic system seems rather odd in light of its origin. Maybe that could be explored more?
The mother's hair colour inconsistency is one of those things I mentioned as having spotted right after re-reading when the submissions went up. >.>
Her colour is black, not green. I don't even know why I wrote green at all.
I did consider keeping the prologue unmentioned but given that we're following Alice around, and the way the premise was set up, there was no way Petra would not explain matters. I also wanted to introduce the concepts behind the magitech to use later in the series. Wing grafts, biological immortality, arbitrary sculpting of body features, etc. were all going to appear later as fantasy race expies.
Alice and her younger sister is odd because at the time Petra downloaded into her baby body, her sister was about to be born or a newborn baby. Yes, this puts them just about or under a year apart in age. Though its true that I should have mentioned her younger sister in the first chapter. *scribbles notes*
Alice wouldn't know the details of her sister and the past Consecration because Petra only downloaded into her way afterwards. Alice was a few months old at the time the first Consecration happened. So at the end of chapter 2, she's about five and a half.
RE magic system:
As you note, the magic system is very odd for a litrpg story... because this is not really a litrpg story.
The litrpg system is a magitech layer on top the real magic system. And yes, it has a depth to be explored that I might admit to being too ambitious.
Runic magic (the one that Alice is about to start re-learning) involves actually writing down every single thing you want to happen, defining the effect, the scope, the power, etc. You can in fact feed a sensor output (runes that query the status of the world) as the input variable of some effect to happen (eg. shoot fire output whose location input is the output of a detect magic module).
The problem is that when you write a bunch of runes and set them in motion, they upload into the boundary and begin operation. They're stuck and can't be changed without them meeting some sort of 'stop' condition or you forcibly dispelling them or writing a rune set that inserts more in. This includes things like the target, the size, etc. So if you just drew "accelerate anything put in 'this spot' to 100 m/s at this angle" and that's exactly what it will do and no more. If you want to change the angle, change the launching spot... too bad, draw a rune set to modify the first (and you have to come up with one specific to the target's rune set) or redraw everything.
Or you could make magic triggerable by some input and use that input to determine various variables. For example, anchor the boundary to some item (a rod), trigger the launch function when a button is pressed (material detection or motion detection?), determine the location of the launch field (tip of the rod) and the angle of the acceleration (direction of the rod). And tada, magic item.
Runes are a dying art by Petra's time and totally lost after the Collapse. They still exist as specialized knowledge, like how semiconductor manufacturing is specialized knowledge, but no common citizen in the society understands it.
The scope of any magic is limited by a 'boundary' (don't have a good word for this yet) which is a volume in which a particular set of runic instructions applies. Magic is powered by lifeforce, a natural resource that all humans have (and some other things), that despite the name, is not required to live. Humans also have a boundary that defines the physical volume of their body and indeed, human minds are actually not in their head, it's in the boundary and runs off lifeforce. Running out of lifeforce results in unconsciousness because your conscious thoughts and memory literally do not work, but it won't kill you and you wake up later when your body regains its power and reboots. The grafts have safety factors that don't let you do this, but you can knock yourself out trying to power runes.
Boundaries can overlap. Larger boundaries require more power independent of anything else you make them do. Lifeforce power is created by life and stored in magic crystal that grows in size as you grow in power. The crystal stores magic, the bigger it is, the more it stores. Yes, that means monsters drop magic crystal... and so do people. In fact, the result is ancestor worship as each of the families of the Clans keep a pool of ancestral power storage they can tap for power and contribute to when they die. Untrained people are basically not worth it. And yes, that also means magic items with stored power are made of dead people (or monsters).
> We see a bit of this where Alice notices how the two Palms aren't fully drained, it's because they're carrying magic crystal on them.
So lifeforce grafts are magic modules that aren't 'casting magic' so much as they are constantly 'in operation' magic, that are active within a specific person's lifeforce. Those grafts with some sort of function always have control inputs. Eg. the Fire Clan in the story can create pyrophoric not-napalm within their boundary limits. The command to expand the boundary past their skin, to select the create napalm function, specify location, etc. etc. are all inputs given by their physical actions (handwaves) and mental states (a fuzzy poor ancestor of the techniques that let Skill Share and more advanced mental magic work), which the graft can read from their lifeforce and their boundary.
Much better than inflexible runic magic but you only have what functions were prebuilt. Lifeforce grafts are essentially the art of turning yourself into a magic item. They're inheritable and the inheritance rules depends on whether they were built to do that. Some are inherited from mother only (copies to incubating baby), some are from both (father contributes a dormant copy that piggybacks off the mother's lifeforce). Whether grafts play well with each other depends on the grafts, the four elemental Alva clans were built together so their grafts go into quiescent mode if they overlap, the mother's graft suppresses the father's.
Somewhere in between a lifeforce graft and basic magic items are these things analogous to compilers which help you make more complicated magic. A necessity if you want to edit or create anything with flexible input schemes.
Initial basic magic items might be a hundred runes, doable by hand, the simplest lifeforce grafts are ten thousand plus at least. Still doable with lots of effort, better make sure you don't have typos. Plus doing it with runes is like programming in machine code.
The civilian healing and the Alva ones might be millions, like a modern software package. Most of this is taken up by I/O routines and functions to assist use rather than the business end of making things happen.
AR System and System Registration is ridiculously huge, something similar to an OS plus drivers for all the network infrastructure, a Megaproject that even Petra's civilization needed inspiration and extraordinary effort to achieve.
AR System is actually a series of self-replicating magic items that enchant themselves into the ground, and arrange themselves into a interlocking grid covering the world and transmit information to each other along a fully automatic IP address like routing system. It was built shortly after the invention of 'computer' lifeforce graft which started as another improvement to the lifeforce graft system.
The System Registration graft supports information processing like computer hardware, taking input controls like voice, physical and mental and supports outputs of light and mental illusions, plus also mediates communication with the overlapping System Network boundary. So any 'pure information' things don't need to be grafts any more, they're 'modules' you can install in System Registration (ie. your Local that Alice mentions) and update them from makers' servers without needing to get a new graft every time or travel to the servers themselves.
Plus you can send messages, pictures and audio, talk to each other, share your cat videos and general internet and phone things.
So you have things like Messenger, Maps, government messages, network fileshare, all of those app-*cough* modules Petra signed up for.
Database started as a teaching aid for unruly students and ended up taking on early mental magic inventions to create direct mental integration of the knowledge. It's built on top of the AR system, the backbone on which the curated knowledge base of all mankind is transmitted to everyone who is interested.
And Skill Share is essentially a rebuild of Database starting from very advanced mental magic instead of starting from textbooks, and distributing the pieces of mental knowledge to the main server which mediates accounts and a skill marketplace (like a phone app store). Or at least it was intended to do that.
The bits of the magic system construction I have yet to finalize and that I was griping about not having the time, is the base variables. How fast does a human generate power? How much power does it take to expand a boundary by some X size? What were the various non-human methods to gain additional power? How much power do the various physical effects take? (eg. is creating material like napalm much harder than launching an item?)
I have the infrastructure down, but not the effects. I could just borrow everything from Hero's War, I guess.
Further worldbuilding also wasn't complete, like finalizing what the fantasy races are and what they do beyond just the Alva/Clans.
There's supposed to be a more flexible attempt at making arbitrary runic magic usable with somatic and verbal components instead of pre-drawn, which is the backbone of the wizard nobility of the Magic Kingdom next door to the Elemental Empire. (national names not yet finalized)
Fairies (name not settled) also live near a metal mountain range (fallen space elevator attempt) who inherit biological immortality and wing grafts and a graft for creating magic items. Unfortunately most of them died out in the second Collapse war and biological immortality also makes them culturally very slow to procreate.
There's supposed to be a bunch of rarer 'races' but I haven't made any of them.
There's a second Collapse after Petra's zombies which killed off the last of the Administrators, this was a war between two factions of the surviving System Administrators who activated war wisp farms (cannon fodder in Petra's time, apocalypse level threat in post-collapse) and sent the results against each other. While not as deadly as the 99.9% fatality of Petra's mistake, all the Administrators and the last of the surviving knowledge post-collapse got wiped out.
The results are the war wisp farms (now known as monster domains) still waging really really dumb auto-war against each other. That's the source of the 'monsters' mentioned in passing. War wisps made to tank shots and claw your face off, some with a few magical attacks. They're basically combat drones attached to actual soldiers in Petra's time (Wisp Control module). Made to be manufactured from local materials with crystal cores grown in magical trees, the sure sign you've entered a monster domain.
Monster migrations are actually just attacks launched by a domain when the wave size counter is reached and they always proceed along a fixed path to another monster domain with the aim to kill all the targets. This never actually works since war wisps are too dumb to fully destroy a war wisp farm (chop down all the trees and salt the earth). For obvious reasons, no one lives along the migration paths which have long since been mapped out.
But the details of the war wisps? Eh, still blank.
I'm also considering developing the magic system 'one level down'. As the runes and the lifeforce crystals don't mesh very well, one is physical and one is information, an even lower level explanation would be ideal to get a unified theory.
So the reason why the whole litrpg thing feels like it doesn't explain everything is because it doesn't explain anything at all. Skill Share and Skill Analysis is three steps of abstraction away from the original base Runic magic.
So yes, there's lots of worldbuilding to get through and definitely not within 10k. I suspect even in a straight infodump, it would exceed 10k. That spoiler is about 1.5k.
The first part of the story makes good use of context clues to show the world between the pages, the problem with this is that it could get confusing for some people. The setting was unique, but it just didn't grab my attention enough to read the last part of the story. I think this would be a good read, but it isn't for me.
Eh, fair enough. I would also have liked to give more detail to the pre-Collapse world but I didn't want to spend too many words on the prologue.
Not just for the 10k limit for this contest but also in general. Much earlier in my writing, I made a mistake with the first draft of Twin Faces of the Sky and wrote a 4k word prologue that had two chapters and that was just bad. Petra's story could be an entire short arc by itself.
Yeah. I've been reading them for weeks, and even at that pace it's kinda tiring. Though it doesn't help that I'm critiquing all of them, and that so many stories have the same problems. Don't spend so much time on exposition if none of it's going to matter (and most of it won't), spend more time in the Normal World with the protagonist, introduce the central conflict(s) at some point, give more depth to the protag, etc etc.
Quick note: Double-check capitalization. Most word processors I've used automatically capitalize the first word in a sentence, but whatever you used clearly didn't.
Prologue:
The first thing I notice is that the worldbuilding is laid on thick at the start of the story. Which isn't bad, per se, but you're introducing too many details before the reader has any reason to care about Petra or her goals. It doesn't help that, aside from inferences made from Skill Share's business plan, essentially everything we learn about the characters comes from narration rather than what we're shown.
These details slow down the narrative to a crawl. The worst is probably mentioning that combat flight harnesses are useless indoors—or, on a related note, mentioning the harnesses at all when you could just have him brandish a weapon—in the middle of what should be a high-energy action scene.
The handwaves about the terrorists, both in how they were mistaken for a prank and how Petra condemned several people (and anyone they share their software with) to insanity without even a moment of hesitation or internal rationalization took me out of the story. It helps make her seem sociopathic, and I don't think that was the intent. Even if Petra didn't think they'd send it out to everyone as a patch right then and there, they practically screamed "OPEN SOURCE!" at the top of their lungs while kicking down the door—how could Petra not know they would share it?
Oh, and the standard techno-apocalypse thing of "How could they not have something in place for this kind of situation?" Not this specific situation, but if you have hardware capable of driving people insane with one bad patch, not even North Korea would be incompetent enough to not put some kind of safeguard on it.
The worst part is that the important parts seem to be just establishing Petra's character and saying the world ended after her brain scan. The second-worst part is that the following chapters are much better at communicating worldbuilding information than the first—and for the world that actually matters to the story! I would cut down on the worldbuilding, focus more on Petra, and have the prologue end after the mind-upload. And maybe reduce the details on the end of the world in chapter one, leave more to the imagination.
Chapters
#1
I was enjoying this until the huge infodump. Focusing on the mind of an adult stuck in a baby is not something you see often, despite such reincarnation showing up frequently. It was brief, but nice.
The infodump...some infodump is unavoidable at this point, but it should be shorter. Neither the reader not Alice!Petra need to know everything, certainly not right then. Maybe stick to the basics, leaving plenty up to the reader's imagination, and have other relevant details in text documents Old!Petra left elsewhere.
(Also, my impression of Alice has not improved from learning that she effectively killed a bunch of babies without any indication that she tried to reduce the chance of death.)
#2
The worldbuilding is, again, better-paced than the prologue. You aren't trying to cram as much into every paragraph, so there's room for the reader to connect to the character and the world. Good for you.
The transition from everyone coming to greet the Earth Clan to "RI!" is...nonexistent. I had no idea who's calling for her or why until rereading that section a couple of times. And on a related note, I still have no idea what about Ri standing up when some kid ran into her sister was proof of earth magic.
The conclusion is...weak. It's clearly setting something up, but it doesn't do a good job of explaining why Alice is going to have trouble with that or anything else that might make it an engaging process (beyond "yay, the character we probably like is going to be less miserable").
The Plan
I'm confused by this plan. Not at what it is or what it's supposed to accomplish, those make sense. My confusion stems from another source...if it's that easy, why hasn't anyone else done something like it?
Why are the peasants forced to do backbreaking labor if there's plenty of fertile soil just outside of town? Why has nobody else brought that soil into town...or, you know, just rotated farmland? Why keep up this method of farming that is clearly stated as inefficient?
Maybe the people running it don't care about the efficiency? Well, first off, since they're exhausting the apparent lesser nobility who are the Fingers to do so, this doesn't seem like a good way to stay in power. Second, why? If there are no other limiting factors, it's more profitable to take the efficient route. And what limiting factors could there be? It's not a land shortage like in many Polynesian societies with intensive agriculture; as I've said, there's plenty of land outside of town. Maybe it's full of monsters? Aside from that not being stated, then you would want to use your excess labor to bolster your efforts to fight the dang monsters (either directly or, if these monsters are immune to militias for some reason, by making equipment for the people who fight monsters).
Is it that nobody else can do this plan? Why? Is this something that requires a not-Earthbender, and have no not-Earthbenders ever had a bastard child before? For that matter, have none of the Palms decided to try looking for a more efficient solution? (If one untrained not-Earthbender can do this soil-moving plan, why can't the Fingers?) Or, hell, why not do something else? If the not-Earthbenders know techniques only used for luxury wines in The Past, why doesn't the Empire have access to general agricultural knowledge?
What about this plan is something that you need Alice and Petra's memories to do? It's not something that requires managerial techniques of Petra's time, and anyways this land clearly has an agricultural bureaucracy just a few steps less advanced than Egypt's. It doesn't rely on technical knowledge that Petra set aside, or some special graft that she arranged to have put on her reincarnation. It's moving friggin' dirt! If that's a more efficient way to get crops improved, why has nobody else done it? What, are the primitive people just incapable of coming up with new techniques on their own, and they need a past-person to solve their problems for them? I find this more than a little reminiscent of the White Savior trope, which is utterly moronic even with the racial element removed.
Overall, it seems like the author thought more about the world than the story they would tell in it. The world is fine, and has some interesting possibilities, but the story is not only too weak to stand on its own but actively undermines the good parts of the worldbuilding.
Grade: The prologue is a low D, but the rest is maybe a C-. It might be worth reading, but there's not enough there to tell.
Random asides:
There's already a company called Skill Share. Sadly, they're not quite as futuristic as Petra's Skill Share. (Happily, they don't have an issue of driving customers insane. Anymore.)
Describing the not-Earthbenders doing their initial choreographed greetings made me think of the Last Airbender movie, so I imagined a rock slowly drifting across the metaphorical screen.
Much kudos for this! It was very informative about what wasn't communicated well.
The prologue, given that so many other people talk about it, seems like it needs much more work. Like you said, Petra could have been fleshed out more, some of the society tendencies I mentioned in previous replies could have been demonstrated there.
I'd say, Petra is less sociopathic and more 'this is such a cool thing!' and do it without considering long term consequences, outside of whatever vision of the future she has in mind. She does also forget to take people and other perspectives into account.
At least that was how I envisioned her.
RE fertilizer:
The civilization completely collapsed 300 years ago... and again 200 years ago (not shown). Part of what is going on with the fertilizers is that the main innovation Petra is creating is to take the soil from the forest to keep yields high, because the ritual affects the surrounding forest as well.
Also land clearing is very difficult when you only have muscle power (no work animals!) and one guy able to shoot fire. I think I did mention that Lochar was clearing land with his powers. I should mention that the village land area has increased greatly (+50-100%) since his arrival.
RE greetings:
It was meant to be a short demonstration of their powers to confirm that they are a magic user. Though I gather that didn't come across.
-Start was interesting but a few typos/grammar/capitalization issues
-I guessed the dark twist before it happened. What a sad thing to destroy humanity over.
-Ohhhhh..I actually really like that this is how Alice/Petra gets OP skills. It's cause she was the original Administrator and that just works out really well. (It's a little like a nod to Kumo desu ga haha)
-Huh, I just kind of assumed that people went insane and thought they lived in a fantasy world rather than zombies.
-Zombies are cool tho
-got a little repetitive and cliche afterwards.
It wasn't actually a nod to Spider Girl. Petra wasn't originally an Administrator. Her Cheat Skill being skill copy was decided from the start and the whole Petra-End of the world scenario was conceived as a way to justify her having it.
Thanks for your comments. I do suppose Alice's story is more generic isekai... which is funny because my background justification for an isekai story is more interesting than the original story idea itself.
That's probably what they meant. In that example the G at the start of the quotation should be capitalized. (e.g. Petra shouted excitedly, "Go here for plot hook!")
Open invitation for all of the writers - if you want me to go over your work and offer some critique, just ask and I will make the time. It can be in this thread, in a dedicated thread for your story or in a PM if you prefer.
I'd love your thoughts. I've received some thoughtful feedback already, but I could use more input to gauge where I should improve.
While on the topic: thank you for the feedback and reviews, Hexxart, Sunandshadow, Sereg, Gladi, Rapey_Lemons, and Yana. (And others who offered their thoughts, however brief. Sorry if I'm missing anyone.)
Edit: oh hell I forgot the people who reviewed everything cause I was CTRL+F'ing my title. Sorry. @Andelevion & @GreatWyrmGold: you two are awesome.
I think the criticism I most powerfully agree with is Sereg's; I feel the story takes a little too long before the plot and protagonist's agency kick in, and the hook relies too much on the litRPG system and the unconventional protagonist. When I edit it, I'm going to see about making the beginning work a little harder, even if it's just through prose. Probably tinker with the humor and voice a little. Should be fun.
So, I'm pretty sure this story's premise is basically Gate: Thus the US Navy cussed there.
Why am I only pretty sure? Because the context of things is entirely left up to the reader's imagination.
I didn't really get a strong enough feel for the characters to emphasize with them, but at least they felt like genuine people.
As far as the story goes, there wasn't really one? It read more like a moment in time, a portrait of a world that could be interesting to visit if you like furries.
A bit of commentary on humanitarian aid in war-torn countries. Technically sound, but not really my taste, sorry.
Yeah, this is very much a slice of life interlude in a story, and the whole thing was the result of me looking at GATE and deciding I could do better than it, and maybe deal with some different questions (while being perhaps more accessible to western audiences than Outbreak Company's neocolonialism through character merchandise.) And then it turned into entirely too much worldbuilding.
-LATE ENTRY. negative opinion on the onset.
-this is a hilarious start. Negative opinion rescinded. For now.
-ok it's still funny and I love the idea of cat-woman courtship but something about ""I'm about ready to give up on men anyway." rubs me the wrong way. It's very..eh. Like I can dig her being bisexual, but sexuality also doesn't work based on convenience.
-but I can dig a matchmaking plot.
-also the dialogue is still pretty fucking on point. Besides that eh moment.
-I love how they're just ripping on Captain Lee. Hilarious.
-dietary weirdness! Cool Cool.
-A little too much dialogue now. Starting to slip from my interest zone.
-ok things are moving a littttttllleeee too fast. Kissing the cat lady casually Jessica? Really??? I'm be more up in arms if she didn't just have zero reaction to it. Which is eh.
-still, this was mostly cute and funny and overall I....don't regret reading this? Yayyyyy.......
This was one of the better ones. I must admit that I feared that this was going to be an example of "lesbian fetishism" as has been discussed recently, but the sexualities of the characters actually work well with the story, so consider me impressed as far as that is concerned. I must admit that I am more concerned with Sheti than Jessica though. Her plight inspires more sympathy from me. Though, why make up an awkward name for her species when something like "catfolk" functions perfectly adequately? As xkcd illustrates, it's not a good idea to invent unnecessary terminology in your prose. Another thing was the fact that Jessica and her unit's presence in this word is not really explained, so I don't know the stakes on that part. Or what's really going on at all. Nor did they really win me over in their introduction. Of course, that might be my personal distaste for the crude and militant, but there we go. Also, as interested as I am in Sheti acquiring happiness, I can't help but see this as an incredibly unhealthy foundation for a romantic relationship. The one side has started this relationship to protect herself and her child, while the other is doing this out of a sense of duty (and horniness, admittedly, but still). That's the kind of thing that results in relationships of resentment. Normally this would be brushed over and I am honestly really sick of fiction portraying problematic romantic relationships in an idealised fashion. It has resulted in a world where people have a completely inaccurate view of what a healthy relationship should be like and I blame it for the high rates of abusive and toxic relationships in the world and the prevalence of rape culture. So, I hope you address this stuff at some point. Otherwise, as I said, I am impressed so far (at least, from the introduction of Sheti).
To be honest, I hadn't even really thought about how toxic Sheti and Jessica's relationship could easily become, so that was not just eye opening, but made me change my plans a bit and that will absolutely be addressed in the next thing I do with them. Which will probably either be a couples counseling session, or dealing with the other enlisted marines' wives on base.
Aside from that, the whole catfolk/Yrcen thing came about because we did want to give them a distinct endonym and exonym because they're ethnically distinct and coded differently in their own cultural milieu (to go with the other names for three local ethnic groups.) Also, writing catperson or cat-blooded got really annoying really fast. It's like one of four nouns we cooked up for this that wasn't someone's name, and it's about where we're going to stop.
Otherwise yeah, probably not the best idea to dump what was initially written as an interlude into a competition like this.
My reply is very short? What the—oh, is it not counting the stuff inside the spoiler? Okay, this is hopefully long enough that I can post the stuff for @jseah without the forum complaining.
Runes are a dying art by Petra's time and totally lost after the Collapse. They still exist as specialized knowledge, like how semiconductor manufacturing is specialized knowledge, but no common citizen in the society understands it.
Why? Why would something as seemingly-useful as runes be lost over time? Were they replaced by something that could do the same stuff better?
Huh. Well, the cheat skill was originally conceived as a skill copy system, but as I expanded the 'magic system' of the whole AR and Status system, the justification for Skill Share falling into the hands of MC resulted in a single logical plot line that handled everything from the fall of Ancient Magic Civilization to exactly how the fake-litrpg system works to the whole not-reincarnation premise.
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Also, Database cannot fry your brain. It's cannot make you insane any more than your textbook or wikipedia can; it's 'dead' knowledge created by human hands rather than copied from human memory. Yes, you can put things in Database that COULD affect people's minds but only Database Devs can do that, and the Devs wouldn't... right?
Petra's society has a cultural tendency to build big projects and put them in the hands of a small group of people (usually the innovators), often without sufficient support beyond allowing the creator to fulfill their vision.
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The magic system was also meant to support this but hasn't been demonstrated enough to show how within 10k. The magic system allows easy development of even complex magitech from a few brilliant people, as rapid prototyping of your magic design is a fundamental quirk of how it works.
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I did consider keeping the prologue unmentioned but given that we're following Alice around, and the way the premise was set up, there was no way Petra would not explain matters. I also wanted to introduce the concepts behind the magitech to use later in the series.
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The litrpg system is a magitech layer on top the real magic system. And yes, it has a depth to be explored that I might admit to being too ambitious.
Runic magic (the one that Alice is about to start re-learning) involves actually writing down every single thing you want to happen, defining the effect, the scope, the power, etc...
...The scope of any magic is limited by a 'boundary' (don't have a good word for this yet) which is a volume in which a particular set of runic instructions applies...
...Lifeforce power is created by life and stored in magic crystal that grows in size as you grow in power. The crystal stores magic, the bigger it is, the more it stores. Yes, that means monsters drop magic crystal... and so do people. In fact, the result is ancestor worship as each of the families of the Clans keep a pool of ancestral power storage they can tap for power and contribute to when they die.
So lifeforce grafts are magic modules that aren't 'casting magic' so much as they are constantly 'in operation' magic, that are active within a specific person's lifeforce...
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The civilian healing and the Alva ones might be millions, like a modern software package. Most of this is taken up by I/O routines and functions to assist use rather than the business end of making things happen.
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AR System is actually a series of self-replicating magic items that enchant themselves into the ground, and arrange themselves into a interlocking grid covering the world and transmit information to each other along a fully automatic IP address like routing system. It was built shortly after the invention of 'computer' lifeforce graft which started as another improvement to the lifeforce graft system.
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The bits of the magic system construction I have yet to finalize and that I was griping about not having the time, is the base variables. How fast does a human generate power? How much power does it take to expand a boundary by some X size? What were the various non-human methods to gain additional power? How much power do the various physical effects take? (eg. is creating material like napalm much harder than launching an item?)
I have the infrastructure down, but not the effects. I could just borrow everything from Hero's War, I guess.
Further worldbuilding also wasn't complete, like finalizing what the fantasy races are and what they do beyond just the Alva/Clans...
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There's a second Collapse after Petra's zombies which killed off the last of the Administrators...
...The results are the war wisp farms (now known as monster domains) still waging really really dumb auto-war against each other. That's the source of the 'monsters' mentioned in passing.
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I'm also considering developing the magic system 'one level down'. As the runes and the lifeforce crystals don't mesh very well, one is physical and one is information, an even lower level explanation would be ideal to get a unified theory.
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So yes, there's lots of worldbuilding to get through and definitely not within 10k. I suspect even in a straight infodump, it would exceed 10k. That spoiler is about 1.5k.
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Eh, fair enough. I would also have liked to give more detail to the pre-Collapse world but I didn't want to spend too many words on the prologue.
It sounds like you have worldbuildingitis. That is, your constructed world has become inflamed, causing it to smother other parts of your story by diverting resources (such as mental energy and wordcount) from them. It's perfectly fine to have a detailed world and a detailed magic system; many great fantasy authors made their name by doing this! But you can't do so at the expense of the rest of your story, especially if you're not even communicating your concepts clearly.
My advice for anyone with worldbuildingitis? Write up a setting bible and post it somewhere. Maybe call it a campaign setting for D&D or GURPS or something, doesn't matter. Then write your story separate from that. Make sure to include enough details from the setting bible that people who haven't read it understand what's going on, but don't explain every little bit of history or thaumaturgy unless it's actually important.
RE fertilizer:
The civilization completely collapsed 300 years ago... and again 200 years ago (not shown). Part of what is going on with the fertilizers is that the main innovation Petra is creating is to take the soil from the forest to keep yields high, because the ritual affects the surrounding forest as well.
Also land clearing is very difficult when you only have muscle power (no work animals!) and one guy able to shoot fire. I think I did mention that Lochar was clearing land with his powers. I should mention that the village land area has increased greatly (+50-100%) since his arrival.
There are still a few problems with this.
First off, so what if civilization collapsed twice in the past few centuries? People have been using fertilizer for millennia! It's not the hyper-efficient synthetic petrocarbon/nitrogen stuff we use today, but it was keeping the soil fertile.
Second off, I know labor is expensive. But it's implied that the peasants are being forced to do work-intensive agriculture on the relatively little land they have available, which is overall less efficient than taking advantage of the land. Invest a good chunk of manpower into expanding cultivated area and
Finally, you haven't answered my core question. Why does Petralice think of moving soil from the forest but nobody else does? What insight does she possess that nobody else does? If you can't explain why nobody else can do your protagonist's job, it feels like a contrived de facto Chosen One.
If I were writing the story, I'd have her bring out some bit of advanced magitek or something. She specifically mentions that the not-Earthbending rituals being horribly inefficient, right? Maybe she has access to data for rituals which accomplish a similar effect for less energy, and tells her half-sister how to do that. It makes it easier to understand why Petra and Petra alone can provide this solution.
RE greetings:
It was meant to be a short demonstration of their powers to confirm that they are a magic user. Though I gather that didn't come across.
That came across to me; it certainly fits as a cultural thingy. It was just kinda funny to think of it as that ridiculous bit from the Last Airbender film.
My reply is very short? What the—oh, is it not counting the stuff inside the spoiler? Okay, this is hopefully long enough that I can post the stuff for @jseah without the forum complaining.
The world will never know...
Why? Why would something as seemingly-useful as runes be lost over time? Were they replaced by something that could do the same stuff better?
It sounds like you have worldbuildingitis. That is, your constructed world has become inflamed, causing it to smother other parts of your story by diverting resources (such as mental energy and wordcount) from them. It's perfectly fine to have a detailed world and a detailed magic system; many great fantasy authors made their name by doing this! But you can't do so at the expense of the rest of your story, especially if you're not even communicating your concepts clearly.
My advice for anyone with worldbuildingitis? Write up a setting bible and post it somewhere. Maybe call it a campaign setting for D&D or GURPS or something, doesn't matter. Then write your story separate from that. Make sure to include enough details from the setting bible that people who haven't read it understand what's going on, but don't explain every little bit of history or thaumaturgy unless it's actually important.
There are still a few problems with this.
First off, so what if civilization collapsed twice in the past few centuries? People have been using fertilizer for millennia! It's not the hyper-efficient synthetic petrocarbon/nitrogen stuff we use today, but it was keeping the soil fertile.
Second off, I know labor is expensive. But it's implied that the peasants are being forced to do work-intensive agriculture on the relatively little land they have available, which is overall less efficient than taking advantage of the land. Invest a good chunk of manpower into expanding cultivated area and
Finally, you haven't answered my core question. Why does Petralice think of moving soil from the forest but nobody else does? What insight does she possess that nobody else does? If you can't explain why nobody else can do your protagonist's job, it feels like a contrived de facto Chosen One.
If I were writing the story, I'd have her bring out some bit of advanced magitek or something. She specifically mentions that the not-Earthbending rituals being horribly inefficient, right? Maybe she has access to data for rituals which accomplish a similar effect for less energy, and tells her half-sister how to do that. It makes it easier to understand why Petra and Petra alone can provide this solution.
That came across to me; it certainly fits as a cultural thingy. It was just kinda funny to think of it as that ridiculous bit from the Last Airbender film.
A good analogy would be that using runes to build a magical effect is like building a computing device out of raw logic gates. You can do it, you can even build useful stuff like calculators and basic controllers like thermostats, etc.
But when the equivalent of field programmable arrays becomes cheap enough, you wouldn't draw runes anymore. (eg. magic items that insert a rune logic script into a powered and empty spell boundary, no runes even appear at all!) You'd just tell it what runes you want, and that magic item does it for you. That's an abstraction layer, it takes away the effort of drawing runes right. So now you don't need to know how write runes, you just need to be able to recognize and read them.
Eg. additive runes are drawn by adding matter in a pattern, subtractive runes are done by removing matter from a substrate in the same pattern. There's no difference in function. Basically sprinkling sand on a table or using your finger to draw in sandbox. After that invention? Nope, don't need to know that anymore. Don't need manual dexterity, don't need your substrate, don't need huge area to draw complicated stuff...
And if you keep improving and building abstraction layers on abstraction layers, and your magics get more and more complicated, to the point where writing a rune script is like writing a program in pure assembler, it gets forgotten. Outside of very specific problems, no one would use it.
I mean, the way I conceived of the magic system, runes don't provide information. There isn't a rune for "scry" to which you can describe a place.
No, there's a rune for "measure magnitude" (basic function) and a rune for "light" (a basic object type) and some logical operators, you got to figure out how to get a camera with that, how to get the camera where you want it to go, how to get the information it receives back to you, etc. etc. The runes don't even know what "location" is, just direction and distance.
Or maybe you want it to find something? Time to write an image recognition algorithm! Good luck!
Now, if you think about Petra's civilization making something like Status and Skill Share? That is so many abstraction levels away that knowledge of runes doesn't help you at all. AR and Status in particular is analogous to our Internet.
It's not "lost" during Petra's time. It's specialist knowledge that only a small number of people know and the number is shrinking because the people who know it used to live in an era when knowledge of runes was useful. No one modern learns it.
But if only a small number of people used runes in any capacity, even if anyone could visit a wiki page with runes and their syntax, then if suddenly civilization crumbles, the knowledge is easily lost.
Runes also are useful if you got nothing better. They're overpowered in Alice's time not because runes are strong. In fact Alice's rune based magic items would be always inferior to the people with a lifeforce graft of the same function. Runes are strong because they represent a complete understanding of the magic system's fundamentals, while everyone else has lost it. So Alice can build something that fits her requirements, while everyone else has to make do.
If reality is a simulation and you understand assembler while everyone treats programs like magic spells, you're overpowered not because you have better spells, but because you understand the system enough to create new ones. So while everyone has to follow known spells, Alice can *invent* OCPs given some effort.
But if equivalent of C compilers and Python Interpreters exist, and magic power taps are in your wall, who needs runes? Not even the people who service the magic items responsible for that infrastructure need to know to runes.
The runes and magic items Alice could potentially build would be considered pitifully simple by Petra's standards. An 'Alice' refrigerator might be a simple 'remove heat from here' linked to a cutoff thermostat. Maybe it has a themostat dial and a door light.
A 'Petra' refrigerator would have fuzzy logic to save power, have an ice compartment, would take inventory from the AR labeled packages (food packages are magic items too!) and call you over your AR System when you get to the supermarket to remind you your milk is about to expire. Maybe it will read your grocery list to you? Maybe it would detect hot spots and target cooling to those places?
An 'Alice' refrigerator would change her world, but it wouldn't sell in Petra's time.
Sorry if this comes across as somewhat abrasive. Magic systems pulling information out of nowhere is one of my pet peeves and I don't like it when they do that. Of course, this means the only way to get one is to write a story myself. Hence Hero's War and this.
Yeah, I do understand that.
On the other hand, I think the current prologue needs to be rewritten but the plot points that the worldbuilding has touched on don't need changing. Perhaps show more of the original civilization. Like you mentioned, more of Petra before the upload, and mention random stuff, like the wings, less during the End of the World scene.
Maybe a scene with Petra in her daily life 1 day before she goes to the office to prepare for the Upload.
Raises finger... lowers finger.
That's a good point. Especially since even if the idea of plants need certain elements in the soil is lost to the peasants, the Earth mages would know at least what they are doing with Consecration has to do with changing the ground. They would also know they're making stuff in the ground by copying a bit of soil they carry around as a template.
So THEY would know about using the forest soil.
That said, Consecration is inefficient because it creates matter. Which is supposed to be inefficient. It also functions at long range, so that's a cost too.
Hm, I shall have to replot the first arc. I'll see what I can come up with. Luckily, it's just a random point in the last few paragraphs...
Yeah, the greetings were somewhat inspired by Avatar, though I hope I managed to at least file the serial numbers off. =D
Short, sharp paragraphs and repetitive sentence structure do this story a lot of disservices, since it has an excellent plot idea and a goodly amount of mysticism. "Was it a dream?" is a fair working idea for a vingette like this, so I can't hit it overly hard in that category. More foreshadowing, though, and paragraphs with some meat in them would really help. More useful would be to balance out the rather front-heavy story would certainly be good, but there's a very solid core here that saves this from getting a subpar rating.
I've been hoping for clarification for this for quite some time now. Specifically, while I understand what you mean by the paragraphs being too short and sentence structures repeating, I'd really appreciate it if you could point to some examples. Especially the latter.
I'm not doubting you, I'm painfully aware of my issues with sentence structure for instance. However I'd really like to have an external perspective on just where this shines through the most.
Okay, fair warning to everyone. I am British, and as a rule we tend to appreciate the proper use of sarcasm, understatement and hyperbole. It's what our entire sense of humour is built on. So the style this story is in? The dripping sarcasm in the opening paragraphs? Thaaaat gets bonus points from me.
I'm also assuming that the narration, despite being third person, follows Mae's personality as well as her viewpoint. It certainly seems to, given the way it flips between stating fact and Mae's opinion without pause. Given that, Lonely Dreams gives us a really good look at Mae's personality, and does it all by showing instead of telling. We don't get told 'Mae felt X'. It's all by action, association and implication. This is more bonus points from me.
...alright, I'm going to get the gushing out of the way now. If this was the first few pages of a novel, I would be sorely tempted to buy it. I like the narration style, the character and her situation are interesting, it is good at the show/tell balance and holy Arceus above, is Mae a changeling fae princess?I want this story.
Aaaaand now we have the big negative: I do not have this story. This is the introduction to a longer story rather than a stand-alone piece of writing. It's also not much more than 4,000 words long, so whoever you are, you could have given me another 6,000 words of Lonely Dreams. Although I doubt you would have found quite as good a stopping point if you had.
...this hasn't come out very critique-y, has it? Um. Oops? I genuinely don't have any advice on which parts could be improved. Hopefully one of the others will be able to help there. But for continuing it, because I will find you and start burning things if you don't, I suggest you go for a slow burn. Don't reveal everything at once, or even quickly, and try to maintain the level of characterisation you've shown so far. Because this could be pure gold.
Also, I am never using the WYSIWYG editor for long posts again. These things are bloody useless, I'll just stick to writing in BB code.
First off...thanks :lol This review put a smile on my face for a full day. As hard as I try to keep from getting an inflated head, this was very nice to read. Thank you. Especially for noting the lack of telling regarding her personality. I was trying for just that.
Is Mae a changeling Fae princess? Well you'll have to buy it when I stick it on amazon to find out
Jokes aside, that's more or less accurate. Though I have no delusions of originality, I think I'm going with a rarer take on Fae stuff. So it should remain interesting even knowing that the other world is indeed a kind of faerieland.
I'm afraid that the next 8,000 words would probably have left you with a worse impression. Not to mention locked me into some stuff that I've since had second thoughts of due to the combination of feedback here and thinking a lot about the overall story. The main issue though was that from the point I chose to end things onwards the story gets into the proper meat of the conflict and then runs smack into the world limit. I guarantee it would have made for a more frustrating place for things to end.
It is planned for a relatively slow burn however. Albeit not full web novel levels, since I want the whole story to be 80,000 to 100,000 words. Maybe 120,000 at the absolute maximum. Most likely I'll post the rough draft version on here and SB as I write it, then submit the edited version to see if anyone is insane enough to buy my self-published garbage.
Lonely Dreams almost made it onto my "start of a long story" toplist. The main reason it didn't is simply that the worldbuilding didn't seem especially original, for either of the two worlds. Normally I prefer not to read about a modern realistic world; I don't mind seeing it at the beginning or an isekai, or in the case of a dystopian story I don't mind seeing it at the end as a safe, comfortable place to come back to. But in Lonely Dreams we get a tiny glimpse of the interesting fantasy world before (we can assume) the next chapter would be right back in the unpleasant realistic world. And the main character doesn't have any driving goal to pursue in this world; some suspense might at least distract us from the fact that the main character has apparently been put into the real world on purpose but we have no idea why. Apparently she's not here for a mission or as torture; someone as apparently high-ranking as her is probably not a spy, and I can't see how living homeless could be good for her health, even if she has some fantasy affliction that the modern world could somehow counteract.
There is no real worldbuilding for the modern world. It's our world. No tricks. I even dropped an idea from early in the story's genesis where she'd have been waking up in a different city every time because while I liked the weirdness it let me play with it completely ruined anything I could come up with for the real world plot. Except for being hunted by the government type stuff which I didn't want to do.
The fantasy world is...honestly it's still being built. I expected to have another month to work on this and am now caught flat-footed and trying to accelerate my schedule to post chapter 1 this weekend or the next. However I consciously decided against an option that would have been extremely (purposefully) unoriginal and I think the one I'm going with will at least not be overused.
The rest is pretty fair. I mean the later story will answer all of it, but I should have at least gotten some hints into this chunk and I clearly screwed up on communicating Mae's goals in her normal life, since she has a pretty urgent one in the form of trying not to die.
Lonely Dreams: This story is easily in my top ten, but it's pretty short, so I didn't find anything obvious to critique without sentence-level nitpicking. The prose was polished and comfortable, the characterization excellent. The plot feels like a prologue right now, but it accomplishes its goal in making me want to read more.
I don't really like the tone of the story, and I don't like the protagonist. But the rich descriptions of the writer and the character's thought process grabbed me enough to read until the end of the story. I would love to read another story of the writer's that has a less cynical tone.
The opening of the story does an excellent job of setting the tone. Mae's homeless life sucks, and the story is willing to delve into exactly how and why (and what she does to get by). The internal narration also makes her misanthrophy and cynicism clear as day, with the tone justifying this extreme attitude.
It also provides us with a well-crafted sense of mystery, one which provides us with questions and enough support to understand and care about them.
The second section feels abstract and dreamlike, in a way you can't really do in other media. Props for that. Despite this, it clearly communicates what's going on. The third section is...functional. It's short, has a job it needs to do, and does it efficiently without being too flat.
If I had to critique it...it cut off at an awkward point. The reader knows that there will be a conflict, but they don't know anything about what the conflict will be. I mean, aside from "probably inspired by European folklore".
Grade: B+ to an A-, depending on my mood. Good work.
I'm gonna rework the third section based on this and 7734's points. It pretty clearly ended up losing flavour in the editing. Too little is perhaps worse than too much.
You do make me wonder if it might have been worth trading a more awkward ending point for showing a little more of the setting I'm using. I'm really not sure.
-interesting protagonist to start it off.
-also interesting is her thoughts on condescension but okayness with theft.
-a little incoherent in the middle, but a change straight back into modern mundanity.
-Welp. Curious! I guess? Not much opinion on this, so its so okay its average.
I'm going for Mae's raw perspective kinda thing. So hypocrisy and self-delusion is baked into the bones of it. Hell, Mae's cynicism screwed her over almost immediately even just in this bit.
I'm curious as to people's opinions on the middle section, in no small part because I'm still deciding how weird to make those bits. Options range between outright dreamlike, and normal world but with weird shit going on.
Scrapping the extra or not, could I please read it? I really enjoyed Lonely Dreams, and it would be interesting to see what direction you were originally planning to go in.
At this point it would just be deceptive. I've been reworking this thing quite a bit.
Pre-reading about the contest it was provisionally titled Princess Homeless and had Sarah the homeless girl in Modern Earth dreaming all her life of being Sara, orphan girl in a standard very cliche fantasy world. Sara is discovered to be a secret princess and must quest against the evil lord type person, contrasted with Sarah's shitty mundane struggle to survive. Though I went back and forth between that and having Sara grow up a princess.
While I was working it into an entry for this I started having ideas for a very different fantasy world, with heavy Faerie influences and some other fun stuff creeping in. At the crunch point I decided to go with the latter idea and wrote it that way. However it was still pretty much the same plot.
Since then I've realised that the plot was missing a lot of potential and that I could do a lot more than just write another journey to defeat the dark lord. Meaning significant reworks to the setting which are still ongoing.
Hence the stuff I left on the cutting room floor isn't really a part of the story any more. Rather it's a remnant of story number two, which I no longer plan to use.
Scars
The next couple scenes emphasizing Cassandra's anger and frustration and powerlessness are effective, but otherwise unremarkable. The fact that she currently has only one goal, which she has been told point-blank is impossible, is a negative mark, but as the story isn't over, I imagine she'll get some kind of goal which makes this more than grimdark misery porn. Right?
Well, even with people saying something isn't possible, that doesn't stop others from going "fuck you" and trying/doing it anyway However, it wasn't something that was to come up in the entry at any point, so I can't really use it as my defense.
You say those scenes were unremarkable. Do you think it'd have been better if I shortened them in some way? Maybe if I cut parts of the start and kept just the core of the mirror scene? Or was it a matter of writing in technical terms?
The map's pretty good. If I were writing the story, I probably would have quickly tweaked or traced over the map to make it less obviously the product of a grid-based mapping program, but it's functional. Though I'm not sure it accomplishes a useful function...aside from being part of an infodump about a world we have no particular reason to care about. Though to the infodump's credit, it's not just an infodump; it's providing some information about the characters. For instance, it solidifies my impression of Aerin as kind of an asshole. (I might or might not think the description of "simpering psychopaths" loosely applies to a non-negligible percentage of clergy, but not enough or well enough to describe them as such, and certainly not as an introduction to the concept for someone who knows nothing of them.)
1) The map: thanks for the compliment, it was already mostly finished by the time I entered the contest so it was basically a matter of tweaking things and adding some more structures. And yeah, it was created with a grid-based mapping program. I did think about editing it to make it seem less obvious, but to be honest, the end result would probably be horrible. I can count with the fingers of one hand the number of times I've used Photoshop or similar programs (for anything that was remotely complex, in any case) so to do that I'd have to get someone else to do that. There wasn't much I could do in that regard.
2) The simpering psychopaths comment was intentional. Again, it was supposed to convey him as an asshole - but we've already covered that aspect. In any case, I wanted to start giving Cassandra a bit of a start in regards to learning about the world she's in. My initial idea was to give that through dialogue in a less info-dumpy manner, but again, word count constraints. And now, in hindsight, I realize it really wasn't a segment all that necessary to have in the story and could have been easily cut without problems.
By contrast, the bit where the two of them watch music is painful. A small part was because Aerin described playing together melodiously as something only masters do, when that's a fundamental part of group music that would render it entirely impossible if absent, but that was just a small part. A bigger part is that it didn't really do much except exposit about how music does stuff with magic in this world and characterize Cassandra as not finding it plausible that magic could let people perform incredible feats like...live despite having extra arms, despite knowing nothing about magic.
Yeah, I've got nothing to justify here. I'd say that Cassandra is still a bit in shock regarding magic, and seeing someone with several arms for real doesn't help, but yeah that could definitely be better.
As for magic and music being tied very closely with one another is a concept I found interesting and wanted to add, but it's obvious it needs a revision.
Overall, I think I'd have benefited quite a bit from having a beta reader since I didn't have anyone to give the story a go with a pair of non-biased eyes.
Scars
Okay, this one is a bit tricky. It is, as I said, an introduction to what is clearly meant to be a full novel or even a series of them, but the hook and set-up is interesting enough. Apart from the story being incomplete in itself, I think the biggest flaw here is...well, the technical skill of the writer.
There are several instances of very strange word choices that I can't help but feel don't mean what you thought they mean. Here's a couple of examples.
In both these cases, I can see what you meant with the words in bold, but they're fairly ppor English. They would read much better like this:
I've never been very good at explaining [/i]why[/i] English works the way it does, so I hope you can see where I'm coming from here.
Don't worry, I do. I thought I did a good job of catching things like that, but clearly it seems that some bits slipped through.
Now, there are also several parts of the story where you seem to just beat the point into the ground. You did a good job of conveying how rough Cassandra is feeling with her injuries and what is basically an abduction...and then you did it again. And again. You've also got a tendency to repeat things on a smaller scale as well. This is the most jarring example I noticed:
You essentially have Cassandra saying that his explanation was really simple twice in as many sentences. Either one of them would have conveyed the point on its own; using both just makes it sound off.
You're 100% right on this. It's actually something I'm aware of but I don't always manage to consciously notice it and put a stop to it. It's something I have to work on.
Beyond that, like I said, this is a fairly solid opening for a novel or series. If this was a published novel I'd be willing to give it a try, although I'm not sure if I'd buy it without knowing more.
Overall, I think the people have reviewed mostly think it's a solid start at the very least. The technical aspect of writing is a matter of proofreading and making sure to go through the content several times to spot things like the examples you quoted but it seems like the glaring issue with the entry as it written now is Aerin, which I agree with (I think jseah also said as much, but only that the character made him roll his eyes).
So it could be worse. Now that things are winding down in RL, I'll see if I can sit down and start reworking it.
Oh and if anyone wants to rip into review the story now that we know who wrote what, feel free
A good analogy would be that using runes to build a magical effect is like building a computing device out of raw logic gates. You can do it, you can even build useful stuff like calculators and basic controllers like thermostats, etc.
But when the equivalent of field programmable arrays becomes cheap enough, you wouldn't draw runes anymore. (eg. magic items that insert a rune logic script into a powered and empty spell boundary, no runes even appear at all!) You'd just tell it what runes you want, and that magic item does it for you. That's an abstraction layer, it takes away the effort of drawing runes right. So now you don't need to know how write runes, you just need to be able to recognize and read them.
Ah, I see what you mean.
...Though there would still need to be technicians who understood how to write runes (at least in theory) so they can design the next generation of autorune hardware. Or, for that matter, understand what's happening when autorune machines and/or their output go wrong. And they'd probably end up teaching it in college-level runic science courses along with other bits of runic theory. The knowledge probably wouldn't disappear completely, unless utilizing that knowledge requires infrastructure (e.g, the runic equivalent of power grids and circuit-board factories) that fell apart in the meantime. After all, even if your knowledge of runic inscription is limited to fixing the office magicom and whatever you remember from college, you're still going to try to replicate useful (if basic) runic inscription if you can. Sure, runic practice would fall back generations if not centuries, but it would still exist.
...Not that I remember if people other than Petralice had runes in the actual story.
...to the point where writing a rune script is like writing a program in pure assembler, it gets forgotten. Outside of very specific problems, no one would use it.
See, use and knowledge are different beasts. I will never use assembly language or logic gates in my work, but I've read essays (well, technical blog posts) and watched videos going over all sorts of obscure technical minutiae—how people decades ago solved problems that I can download free programs to solve for me if I ever need to. Also, in my university CS courses, we went over basic aspects of how computers work that wouldn't ever come up in the practical exercises we were doing. There might not be many (direct) practical uses, but there are going to be theorists who use that knowledge to build new theories or models with practical uses, hobbyists who do it for fun, trivia masters, etc. (And the people who do work with the computer chips/autorune machines on that level.)
What I'm saying is, if I was in a situation where improvising a NOR gate or something could help me survive and found a few other people with similar levels of understanding how computers work, I could plausibly be able to put together something basic. It would make ENIAC look like a modern supercomputer, but it would preserve basic computing techniques for future generations to re-iterate upon. And I'm not even a CS major! I'm a bio major who enjoys learning about a wide variety of subjects. I'm guessing that my CS professors and most of their students could improvise a NOR gate with a pitcher of water, a slab of rock, and a chisel within a few hours.
Glad I could help with the fertilizer plot point.
Yeah, the greetings were somewhat inspired by Avatar, though I hope I managed to at least file the serial numbers off. =D
Wait, really? I was just calling them not-Benders because of the classical-elements thing.
...Though I guess most strict four-classical-element magic systems would be inspired by Avatar these days.
@Hastur
I don't think I commented on scars, but I wanted to suggest that it would make the main character seem more likable or at least more active if there was one small aspect of the new world she was intensely interested in; preferably even before she has a working translation spell applied to her, but basically while she is still stuck in bed and furious at Aerin. Something positive or at least neutral for her to introspect about, to contrast the pain/weakness/fury/etc caused by er injuries and situation. Aside from that, I was wondering about what this world has in terms of makeup and/or illusion magic. Beauty makes money whether your customers are brothel employees or noblewomen, so I'd think that magical beautification methods would be fairly well developed in any world with fairly common magic.
I think I can give some useful feedback about the prose and plot. I'll tackle prose first.
Spelling and formatting. The former isn't an issue, I think the only typo I caught was 'shapliest'. The latter has issues, however.
"Firstly, when you split up a sentence like so," the reviewer said, "you don't capitalize the first letter of the second fragment. It's a continuation. Use a period after 'said' if you're starting a new sentence, which would get a capital letter."
Oddly enough I can never seem to find a consistent ruling on how that's meant to be done.
More importantly, hyphens.
Hyphens.
I'm not talking about how they should be en or em dashes, though they should. I'm talking about the sheer quantity of them. You have what, upward of three hundred? Almost half as many as you have commas. In addition to the correct and accepted uses (of hyphens and dashes), you use them to denote pauses, which draws a lot of attention to itself.
There's a point where stories should compromise 'real life' pauses in dialogue for what reads comfortably; you've gone past that. Also, figure out whether you want to use hyphens or ellipses for pauses because now it seems largely random.
HYPHENS! I guess when using them as pauses, they're more of a... cut-yourself-off type of pause rather than the trailing off kind of pause a ... implies? Will need to work on that.
That's all easily edited though.
A more jarring problem I had with your prose was imagery, particularly in the beginning. Some of it is inaccurate, difficult to picture. Worse, some of it is retroactive; by the time we should've been able to form a picture already, you introduce corrections. I'll illustrate by going through your story, as there were multiple points that confused me.
Our protagonist wakes up. There's a tree, the sky's blue, we're in the middle of a desert; I'm picturing lots of sand as far as the eye can see, some hills, maybe a cactus or other funky desert plant.
As we move away from the scene, we're told there was grass and dirt. Bit of a different image than my desert, but fine. Minor.
'The plateau' – what plateau? Weren't we on a gentle slope down? 'Ocean as far as I could see', even though she's describing green grass and trees?
So... what actually is it? We later learn it's a wall. The reader might assume it's a wall, but only because it's the boring default assumption, not because you've successfully led the reader to conclude it. You could make it a humongous bipedal robot and you wouldn't have to edit anything about 'gray, huge, steel, has a top that shimmers'.
There's a forest? Where did that come from? If you wanted me to picture a forest earlier, tell me it's a forest, not 'the trees were a lot more plentiful' compared to an area you described as a desert.
'The gates'? 'More like a storm front than a set of buildings' didn't make me picture any gate, personally. The gates themselves aren't exactly easy to picture either. Shimmering, opening, dissolving, pixels and flowing metal, runes appearing and disappearing across their(?) surface? It's doing a lot of things, some that seem conflicting, so I end up picturing nothing. Liquid metal alone, or shimmering pixels alone, would've made for a much more vivid image.
I have no idea where this woman is. Someone standing guard at a post? Operating the gates? Random pedestrian? Are we even in the city already? If you'd chosen more accurate words, you can imply these things.
Just call them drones? Really not that futuristic nowadays.
If you're not going to describe things in interesting ways that stick in my memory, why bother?
The occasionally confusing imagery continues in the rest of the chapter, though it didn't bother me as much later. (Partially because I stopped trying.) Mind, some of it is actually quite good. I liked the lizard body language. It's just introduced with strange timing, and sometimes it feels like you're not putting a clear enough picture on the page. It wouldn't be a problem if it's not a major focus, but you do spend quite a few words on scenery. I'd advise to simplify or find more accurate words.
*hangs head in shame* Yup. Fully agree. Sometimes when we're writing we just get so caught up in what we're doing that hwne one of us finally does introduce the scene it's like 'wait, i thought we were somewhere else?'
Let's get to the actual story rather than how you present it, your plot & character.
The story doesn't have much of a hook. The title arguably ties for 'most generic', waking up someplace unknown is bland and made predictable by the title, and I could tell there would be a lot of exposition to work through before the story created room for actual plot.
That's not too much of a problem. Elsie wants the information, so if you manage to make me empathize, I'll want the information too. This is more explicit with her trip to the Archives, which you frame as her personal plot objective.
Unfortunately, I don't empathize powerfully with Elsie. She doesn't really convince me. Throughout the piece, I missed, specifically, why she wants to go home so so badly. It's the kind of characterization that's fine to introduce slowly, maybe she has kids, parents, a lover, a career, etc. but in the words that exist right now, it's completely absent. Even a small hint would've helped convince me of, and empathize with, her desire to go home.
This in particular is problematic. It's like going home is the designated plot, the 'obvious' thing for any normal person to do, rather than something personal to Elsie. It makes her characterization less convincing (the prolonged panic attacks, extreme attachment to home, antipathy for the city and to an extent its people), and it makes the ending nonsensical.
If she's not in a hurry... then why, after not even three hours of her first day in the archives, would she willingly allow herself to get possessed? If she died, her body left behind, her current existence as close to a soul as she can get, would she really go and infect her mind with some kind of demon? As her first option?
Her reasons for doing this are shallow and unconvincing. Speed? She called it not urgent. Morale? Someone to work with? She's in a city fed by multiple worlds that she hasn't even seen one glimpse of yet, because the Archives were the first stop of her tour. And yet she sticks another mind in her head instead.
I won't say the archspirit isn't a little intriguing, but her introduction so soon (and so easily) makes no sense in terms of plot or Elsie's character. Frankly, it soured me on your plot a lot.
I agree that having a more... proactive? Is that the kind of word? LC would have probably been a lot better. These are good points that we're definitely going to try our best to work into the rewrite. I feel like having the word limit screwed us over a little because there was so much we wanted to do and it was so difficult to squeeze it all in and because of that we ended up cutting corners in the wrong places and reinforcing the wrong things.
Overall, I liked this. It has intriguing world-building, good character voices, and the prose, despite frankly inhumane crimes against the hyphen, feels polished. Sadly, the plot doesn't serve as much of a hook, the imagery confuses, the protagonist is somewhat unconvincing, and I loathe the 'ending', which feels awkwardly squeezed in for the purpose of this contest. Afterlife is still in my top ten, but it would need some work to make me continue reading.
I'm glad you enjoyed it ^_^; I'm sorry the ending felt so squished in there, but it felt like a stronger way to finish it off (with the hook of promised interesting dynamic between archspirit who apparently got out and doesnt mind being here vs elsie who really does mind being here and wants to get out) than... elsie just starting to read through the archives. It's something we very definitely plan to continue and would love to work with you on getting it right.
This is the point where I realise as much as I love feedback I have no idea how to respond to it.
Afterlife definitely needs a thorough revision due to awkwardness with the main character's emotions (insufficiently supported with info about her personal history or opinions leading to her panic) and questionable pacing in the part between the puking and the summoning. But of the four this one had the largest cast of interesting characters who seemed likely to develop in 3D ways, not as stereotypes, and this story also successfully kicked off the main plot right at the end.
Another point in the 'fix the protag's characterization and give us reason to empathise with her' bin. I'm glad you enjoyed the characters Writing Dekker was extremely fun and his relationship with Vera felt teethrottingly sweet to write.
Conflicting urges of 'be defensive! it's all you know!' vs 'agree with everything! throw praise? flail and panic!'
Afterlife
The opening strikes me as...generic. It hits all the beats. Weird stuff, assumes it's a dream, realizes it isn't, freaks out. There's nothing wrong with that structure, of course, but when it's so common, you need to do something special with it to make it stand out. At a bare minimum, you should try to establish the world and protagonist, but the most distinct thing we find out about each in the opening section is that the world has hoverbikes and the protagonist drinks crappy energy drinks.
That is a very good point. I can blame this on it coming out as a draft, though... I mean, when Hel and I are writing, the nature of our co-authoring leads to it taking us a while to... click in? Especially as we both tend to 'control' different characters (it's much easier to have two sides to an impassioned argument when the authors are also in disagreement over what's right. Leads to better conflict than the whole scene coming across as one character is super right and the other less right), it can take a while for the interactions to pick up, and the general mood of the piece to be felt. Also I absolutely abhor rewriting and getting rid of writing we've already done (horrible terrible habit, I know) in... in part because backtracking already-written character development is really damn difficult.
The ride over mentions some visuals which sound like they could be creative and beautiful/creepy/both in a visual medium, but...well, ideas are always a dime a dozen, and basic visual description in text is little more than ideas. I can't say the author should have spent enough time on describing each of the weird, fantastical critters and structures to make the artistry show, but I can't say that it would be impressive if you didn't.
The descriptions are another thing I would like to flesh out now that there's no word limit to adhere to.
The description of the gate thing is particularly egregious, since it just seems to throw vague descriptions of how it looks in an attempt to make it seem like a hybrid of tech and magic, what with nearly the entire description using technological language but the last line mentioning runes. The description of the city is similar, though it doesn't lean into the fantasy so half-heartedly like the gate did. Most of its inhabitants (mortal and inanimate) are generic, with the exception of one who is given more than half a sentence to describe him. And yes, getting more description helps make them less generic, but that's no excuse for being as generic as you are. "A knight with a lasergun," "a robot with a big sword," "a scaled slug," "a stereotypical wizard"? It's obvious you can be creative if you try, so try!
Unfortunately by the end there we were pushing on 12k+ wordcount... but now that it isn't a problem...
The rest of the story largely feels like checking boxes off of a checklist. The author is clearly trying to do so creatively, and sometimes do earn a positive reaction ("How attractive are the billionaire industrialists in your universe?" got a chuckle). But for the most part, it feels more like someone trying to do old tropes as well as they can than trying to breathe new life into them. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but it doesn't leave much room for anything new to be breathed in. I have trouble seeing anything particularly interesting in the story. The barrage of high-density exposition in the middle didn't help.
I would agree with that. We do have an overreaching plot in mind, but getting to it is awfully difficult, especially given the size of it. Unfortunately, also well aware of pacing issues, not sure how to deal with them.
The scene with the hooded guy and the second guy was clearly an attempt at building mystery. If we had more context, or any idea of what they were talking about, it might have worked. If I wanted vague worldbuilding and ungrounded mystery, I'd still be watching RWBY. (Speaking of RWBY, the relationship between Dekker and Vera, and their role in the story, reminds me of how the shippers interpret Ozpin's and Glynda's relationship.)
Uhh how do shippers interpret Ozpin and Glynda's relationhip?
Though, you are correct. There's a certain amount of animosity between the city of protagonists with nothing to quest on and the other cities, something that we were careful to have kept from Elsie. We weren't sure if we should put it in as part of the Archives information she got, or to have it come up in a conversation later and cause tension because all these people are hiding this super important stuff from her. But, yeah. We tried to do far too much in far too little room and bloated all the wrong things.
Elsie has a goal, and that's more than some of these protagonists have. But without any clue why she has this particular goal (aside from standard human "I don't want to be dead"-ness), and without any idea why she might succeed where countless people have failed, it's hard to be invested. The archspirit saying she's (it's?) gotten out before is interesting, but...again, why has everyone failed by Elsie could succeed? And what is an archspirit, aside from something that possesses people?
Short answer is Elsie's still in kinda panic mode, I guess. She did just have her entire world ripped away from her - the search for comfort of the familiar is a very powerful drive that can lead to... less than ideal descision making - and on top of that, the alternative is staying here. Which she might not be inclined towards. Now that I'm going through all this feedback, her entire character is a bit up in the air right now, so I'm sorry if I seem to be agressive/defensive about this.
The archspirit was something we've gleefully got plans to explore, including what it is and what it can do and the delightful consequences when it's revealed Elsie's its new host.
Positives: Some of the worldbuilding details were interesting. I can see this being a neat world if it had a core character beyond "patchwork of cliches"; perhaps the author should have gone with a different conceptualization of the afterlife and/or multiverse. And the bit where Elsie shows shreds of genre savvy is interesting; it gives her a character trait other than "hapless, powerless bystander". Applied correctly, it could even give her a potent tool. There are some moments which made me giggle for one reason or another, though certainly not enough to make me invested in the comedy.
Yay! We did something right! Pathwork of cliches... that's actually funny because one of the potential titles we had in mind to name the fic or the world was 'Patchwerk'.
Grade: C-. There's enough high-quality writing here to keep my attention, but without much of substance behind it, it's going to be hard to keep my interest.
Spoiler: Afterlife -oooh, fun weird setting to start us off with.
-OH SHIT MIXED UP WORLD. nice nice.
-oh man the mixed up people too. This is great!
-…I love this questionnaire. A Genuine template world citizen! Huh.
-I also like that this fuckery is the first interaction she has with her roommate.
-ooooh conspiracy? traitor city?
-Aw, Vera/Decker are cute. Opposite sides of the war and killed each other? Adorable.
-the weirder than expected dialogue resulting in a "I like her." is a little cliche lol. Just, not as interesting as it could have been.
-Archspirit possession! That took a turn I didn't expect. Kind of a weird place to end, but overall I mostly liked it? Kiiiind of incoherent, but at least there was a clear line of thought before the out of blue last part.
The most enthusiastic review. Not quite as in depth as the others, but still invaluable.
Thank you, and... yeah, I'm not sure what to say here, other than I hope when we restart Afterlife (hopefully under a better/more appropriate name), we can get your insight again as we work
*patpat* Keep calm and think of it this way - you successfully made it to the first major plot turning point, the summoning/possession. That's a real victory. The stretch between the beginning and this plot point is also functional, it just has some areas where it can get more tightened/polished/logical/etc.
...I have a feeling we should talk about this after the contest is over. I mean, I was already planning to talk to some of the people who I critiqued and as many of the people who critiqued me as possible, but this definitely sounds like something worth discussing.
Unless you're the guy who wrote the military story that focused on sex and are talking about how I dinged you for everyone being so focused on sex? I don't remember if that one landed in the hall of shame...
Nah, that wasn't me. Although, seeing as that story got a respectable 22 points, I kinda wish it was.
I gotta say, this was a bit of a sobering experience for me. I considered disavowing my story altogether, but I figure that I won't improve if I don't own up to my mistakes. So...
I wrote Shiny.
I mentioned before that I scrambled to put this together in a few days, and it clearly suffered deeply as a result.
Somewhat interesting is that various readers seem to have read things into my story that I had no real idea about. Overall, it seems that the judgement for my work is: nice prose, some interesting ideas, but terrible content.
Congratulations to @Lyova, and all the other authors who participated! I only ended up reading around a third of the stories myself, and was far too brain-frazzled to offer much in the way of critique. Sorry about that - especially to those who took the time to do so for mine!
In the interests of self-improvements, I'll try and respond to all the comments I got here:
I'm not sure what to make of this comment, either. It could be good or bad - though, in light of the other reactions I've gotten, I'm gonna go with bad. xD
I actually had no idea that death game stories were a distinct genre before this. I suppose Shiny does have some trappings of one, but it really isn't one.
In my honest opinion this entry was kind of bad (no offense to the author). It's just, well, you know, there's no sense of any sort of stakes or purpose to any of the character's actions (or any of the events in the story, really). The impression I got reading it was that it was literally just several thousand words of the protagonist running around zapping people with magical lasers, for no real reason. The protagonist doesn't really seem to make any actual decisions in the story; she's just swept up in the tide of events. And then towards the end she inexplicably decides out of nowhere that her ambition is to rule the world with the power of the magical plot rock she picked off the ground (why? dunno, who cares, got to take over the world).
Plus, there's just my general distaste to referring to the magic plot rock as "shiny". Maybe the author wanted their readers to make the Gollum comparisons, but really?
Probably the biggest contributor to this was the intentional shallowness of the concept. The idea was to ape the style of relatively mindless action flicks, in which there is just enough depth to be convincing, but for the most part doesn't ask the viewer to think too hard. Total Recall, in particular, was the main inspiration for this.
Already we see the problem, as this is, in my experience, a website that likes to think about things. And while we might be able to sit back and enjoy Arnold hamming it up and blowing away mooks on the big screen, it seems that it's a lot harder to maintain that same suspension of disbelief in an original written work.
Unfortunately, this is another place where I suffered from not having enough time to properly develop the story. The original plan called for Sarah to spend a lot more time exploring and interacting with the natives, which would've given her space to believably come to conclusions about the world and possibly even give her a stake in it, thereby making decisions both possible and meaningful. This would also likely reduce Sarah's apparent psychopathy by at least 50%.
I am not sure what is particularly distasteful about calling the blatant MacGuffin a shiny, though. Should I have called it a magic plot rock instead? "Magic Plot Rock", now there's a title that draws the eye.
Spoiler: Shiny -It's pretty charming so far. A little slapdash but cute and humorous despite the dark happenings which is fun. Shiny indeed.
-Trying to lick the blood on her hands isn't convincing me that your not the weirdest woman ever Sarah.
-You are kind of dimwitted Sarah. Or not very empathetic. Also totally coming across as the bad guy.
-You are also kind of a sociopath. Which for a magical girl in this world is apparently not that out of the norm?? Oh well.
-this conversation between Alex and Sarah is weird. Kind of like it, kind of am not sure. Return of the blood-drinking for some reason.
-oh. An ambiguous ending. A little cliffhanger-ish, but i can dig it. Overall, kind of a fun read in certain areas, but mostly mediocre.
I've gotten this reaction to Sarah elsewhere, but it's always good to have confirmation. The problem seems to be that, as written, she is a terrible character and a terrible person.
I've also gotten the suggestion to demonstrate awareness of this by having other people take note of Sarah's apparent insanity. It's a bit tricky because this isn't exactly uncommon in the world she's ended up in, but it is doable. Particularly if the whole plot ends up being reworked anyway.
The ending, yeah, that was just me scrambling to submit a finished story by the deadline. (Which apparently wasn't much of a deadline :S) Certainly, if there was actually a reason to care about this world, a proper ending with a denouement would be called for.
Also, uh, just to be clear, I don't drink blood. Probably unnecessary to say, but you never know with these things.
Shiny: Any story which treats getting hit by a car while texting as the inevitable result of using smartphones a lot needs to work hard to get on my good side again. Saying that millennials are easily-distracted by shiny things is not a good way to do that. (Even if we like Tamatoa and Captain Mal.)
I can't decide if I should go for a Firefly joke or a Moana joke…but, honestly, I don't think either is warranted. Both had a certain level of respect for their characters. And, you know, it's not a horrible problem if you refuse to take your protagonist seriously. Arguably, Sarah deserves it. (I wouldn't argue that, but she did try to loot a disintegrating corpse.) But you know who doesn't deserve it? Her entire generation. I haven't seen this much ill-considered contempt towards millennials since the Emoji Movie. It also seems a bit hypocritical; I realize that not everyone writing isekai stories online is a millennial, but they're almost certain to embody many millennial characteristics. Aside from the stereotypes, apparently.
It's a shame; what I saw of the story before getting sick of the stereotype seemed interesting. A war including magic girls has potential. The contrast between the childish nature of their powers and the very mature tasks they are being used for could be used to some effect. But I didn't read long enough to see that.
Grade: F. Characterizing an entire group with the best-known flaws of its worst members is always a bad idea...especially when that group is a large chunk of your intended audience. (But, you know, it's kind of a dick move either way.)
Certainly, I've never before been accused of bashing my own generation. First time for everything, I guess.
Setting aside the actual politics (in light of the recent mod post, I'd rather not take the risk), I guess this is the same situation as the Poe's Law stuff you told @Sereg about. It appears almost impossible to clearly distinguish between a sarcastic, self-deprecating imitation of such attitudes and the real thing in a written medium, making it a matter of interpretation. Clearly there must be some trick to it - Snow Crash managed it, after all - but I haven't captured it yet. From the methods you suggested, having it come up in conversation seems to be the most applicable... but you'd already dropped the story by then. I guess I could drop the (largely superfluous anyway*) introduction, and thinking about it, in the middle of mortal combat probably isn't the best time for political snark anyway. Even for a person as terrible as Sarah.
*This itself is another relic of the three-day-scramble and the resulting incoherence. I had absolutely no intention of taking this seriously, but the actual writing was at odds with that. This isn't the first time I've had this happen to me, either. >_<
That said, you'd definitely have been disappointed if you kept reading. There was a lot of stuff I wanted to do with the setting, including what you mentioned, but I didn't get to do any of it.
I think that about covers it. Thanks to everyone who read and reviewed my story.
Ah, I see what you mean.
...Though there would still need to be technicians who understood how to write runes (at least in theory) so they can design the next generation of autorune hardware. Or, for that matter, understand what's happening when autorune machines and/or their output go wrong. And they'd probably end up teaching it in college-level runic science courses along with other bits of runic theory. The knowledge probably wouldn't disappear completely, unless utilizing that knowledge requires infrastructure (e.g, the runic equivalent of power grids and circuit-board factories) that fell apart in the meantime. After all, even if your knowledge of runic inscription is limited to fixing the office magicom and whatever you remember from college, you're still going to try to replicate useful (if basic) runic inscription if you can. Sure, runic practice would fall back generations if not centuries, but it would still exist.
...Not that I remember if people other than Petralice had runes in the actual story.
See, use and knowledge are different beasts. I will never use assembly language or logic gates in my work, but I've read essays (well, technical blog posts) and watched videos going over all sorts of obscure technical minutiae—how people decades ago solved problems that I can download free programs to solve for me if I ever need to. Also, in my university CS courses, we went over basic aspects of how computers work that wouldn't ever come up in the practical exercises we were doing. There might not be many (direct) practical uses, but there are going to be theorists who use that knowledge to build new theories or models with practical uses, hobbyists who do it for fun, trivia masters, etc. (And the people who do work with the computer chips/autorune machines on that level.)
What I'm saying is, if I was in a situation where improvising a NOR gate or something could help me survive and found a few other people with similar levels of understanding how computers work, I could plausibly be able to put together something basic. It would make ENIAC look like a modern supercomputer, but it would preserve basic computing techniques for future generations to re-iterate upon. And I'm not even a CS major! I'm a bio major who enjoys learning about a wide variety of subjects. I'm guessing that my CS professors and most of their students could improvise a NOR gate with a pitcher of water, a slab of rock, and a chisel within a few hours.
Well, yes. It is specialist knowledge. While you (and in fact me too) know some basic theory about logic gates and perhaps electrical circuits, and in Petra's world, expies of us would be the sorts of people who would know the theory and be able to make something slightly useful, most people do not.
Futhermore, a technician who repairs autorune machines does not need to know how to draw runes or even what runes look like. Autorune machines are like printers and CNC machines, while runes are pencils and a carving knife. He would know how to read rune logic (basically read assembler) but the machines themselves don't even draw physical runes at all. A low level logic test for an autorune machine might test if its rune interpreter was running correctly (some math and functional test to use every logical function of the machine) and if it's insert function was working.
After an apocalypse level event, the number of people who actually know runes would shrink correspondingly and would be easily lost to accident, war or just due to not being able to survive without modern conveniences.
It makes it worse that drawing runes requires some level of physical finesse (not high, but something you need to practice). So even if you do remember runes, unless you're a hobbyist on the level of RL blacksmiths who smelt their own ore, you're not likely to be able to use them without practicing.
And then comes the question, is that rune not working because you didn't draw it right or because your partial memories were wrong?
Wait, really? I was just calling them not-Benders because of the classical-elements thing.
...Though I guess most strict four-classical-element magic systems would be inspired by Avatar these days.
Only the greeting portion. The actual magic is not supposed to be Avatar inspired. But when I needed something the mages would consider flashy and wouldn't take forever with each person going once, I saw the choreographed motion with multiple earth-benders in Avatar and decide to just use it.
Man I'm really sad I didn't vote for this, but after the first 3 days of the contest I had to force myself to read the rest of the stories and barely got to the beginning of the second page (mostly by going after the stories at random instead of in order) plus I had problem remembering most of the stories I read after a week. So I didn't vote, pity because I really liked "memory" and I through that "princess and the student" had much promise. I also liked the winner story but I was worried it would degenerate in an op empire maker quest type of story later on (not that there is anything wrong per se in that type of story, it just that the one I saw tend to lose contact with the characters of the story and treat them as npcs subservient to the protagonist)
Edit: maybe next time you could try an elimination style type of contest (like in tournaments), if I have to read only two or four fics every 2-3 days it would be easier to a)remember the fics and b) it would lessen the burden on the readers on reading everything.
I wrote Work Hard, Play Hard (I reincarnated as a living doll?!!)
I'm happy I even got 13 votes! (Even helped by being on page 1 as I was)
I noticed a lot of people (like, two? Three? XD) saying that they liked the concept more than how it was written, or they wanted more because it was merely a first chapter, which is totally fair. I think @Lyova said something like that? Thanks for the review, by the way, and everyone else that read my story! Also, grats on winning Lyova, please write more of the story! I really liked Voracity too
In any case, I have around 30k words written now of the story (that really need polishing), so yeah it was weird submitting what is now such a small portion of the story, especially since I had more written by the time of the submission deadline but chapters 1 + 2 was 11k instead of 10k so I only submitted chapter 1. The impression I got from the contest was that I thought it was reasonable to submit a first chapter of a long work and see if it stood up under scrutiny and if it made people want to read more of it.
Well, hopefully I can make myself write more, maybe even post it to SV or something once I make a large enough backlog...
Okay. I'll get something up...prrrrobably tomorrow, I'm working late tonight. I haven't checked many of the other reviews, so I let's see what comes up.
Thank you for your comments. I do agree, the description of her brothers was not worth much more than two sentences (to demonstrate the naming culture). And yeah, the sorcerers and the general village also needs description.
Missing descriptions in the prologue was meant to keep the prologue short. I didn't want to have the prologue take 10k words!
About Petra's plot being more intriguing, I also agree! I had ideas for a series of interludes set with Petra leading the Skill Share team on an epic quest through post-apocalyptic land to the Database physical server, which is in another country, in order to seal it.
Except that the whole Skill Share and driving everyone insane was in fact conceived as a background story to justify everything that happens to Alice. (see next comment)
The flashbacks/interludes do sound like an interesting addition to the plot. It would give us worldbuilding, characterisation, and an element of tragedy because we already know how their story ends. Maybe it's something you could work in? Straight-up interludes, Alice dreaming of Petra's life, anything like that?
First off...thanks :lol This review put a smile on my face for a full day. As hard as I try to keep from getting an inflated head, this was very nice to read. Thank you. Especially for noting the lack of telling regarding her personality. I was trying for just that.
Is Mae a changeling Fae princess? Well you'll have to buy it when I stick it on amazon to find out
Jokes aside, that's more or less accurate. Though I have no delusions of originality, I think I'm going with a rarer take on Fae stuff. So it should remain interesting even knowing that the other world is indeed a kind of faerieland.
I'm afraid that the next 8,000 words would probably have left you with a worse impression. Not to mention locked me into some stuff that I've since had second thoughts of due to the combination of feedback here and thinking a lot about the overall story. The main issue though was that from the point I chose to end things onwards the story gets into the proper meat of the conflict and then runs smack into the world limit. I guarantee it would have made for a more frustrating place for things to end.
It is planned for a relatively slow burn however. Albeit not full web novel levels, since I want the whole story to be 80,000 to 100,000 words. Maybe 120,000 at the absolute maximum. Most likely I'll post the rough draft version on here and SB as I write it, then submit the edited version to see if anyone is insane enough to buy my self-published garbage.
You're welcome, and thank you for entering. I really am looking forward to seeing where you take the novel now, and I can understand dropping the other 8,000 words. I'm also glad you're aiming for long-novel length rather than web novel length; there are a few web novels I've enjoyed a lot, but if you're not reading them as they come out it's really easy for fatigue to set in half-way through.
Don't worry, I do. I thought I did a good job of catching things like that, but clearly it seems that some bits slipped through.
You're 100% right on this. It's actually something I'm aware of but I don't always manage to consciously notice it and put a stop to it. It's something I have to work on.
Overall, I think the people have reviewed mostly think it's a solid start at the very least. The technical aspect of writing is a matter of proofreading and making sure to go through the content several times to spot things like the examples you quoted but it seems like the glaring issue with the entry as it written now is Aerin, which I agree with (I think jseah also said as much, but only that the character made him roll his eyes).
I...honestly didn't bat an eye at Aerin being an arse. I mean, some people just are, there's no reason your protagonist-y personage has to be excluded from that. Having a character flaw to work their way through makes for good storytelling, too.
Just getting a beta/editor for the technical errors would probably be enough to catch those, especially for the ones your eyes just skip right over after the fifth time checking it yourself.
I haven't got time for a full review (I can do one for you later if you want), but personally I viewed Shiny as a sort of...psychological horror, I guess? You had an apparently normal person going full sociopath at the drop of a hat, referring to this obviously-magical gem as 'the shiny', murdering people for little-to-no-reason, a significant portion of society apparently doing the same things...I honestly though the magic rock was actively twisting the people around it.
EDIT: @FBH - I read that one, and posted a coule of brief comments back on page 33.
