The Tides of Netheros

Hi James, Ross again. Have now read all the uploaded chapters. The story is moving nicely and the ideas you have are excellent--i especially like the rarety of letters, given that the written word carries such power. The characterisation is good--the inquisitor especially has promise.
some style points, if you are oK with that. I wonder about the use of kender. My only experience with kender is in Dragonlance, where they are a chirpy halfling surrogate with a knack of annoying people. Its quite a leap to psychopathic knife totting torturers. Where I'm certain it won't be a breach of copyright (I don't think kender was tm'd or copywrited in the modules) it may produce confusion amongst readers. I wonder if a swift rename is in order? Think Drow would be OK as they crop up elsewhere and Gary Gygax probably stole that one anyway.
There are several point of view changes in the text which detract from the writing. When the kenders arrive we shift to the exterior, to their POV and away from the adjudicator's. We then move back inside. I'd personally put a scene break in. In one scene in my book- a battle scene--i had three POV characters. I rewrote it from one paragraph where we bounced between heads to a series of short punchy scenes, seperated by scene breaks (which i do with *** centred).
the Queen's empathic power is better shown rather than described (similar point to your prologue). Changing via scene break to her POV and perhaps describing how she feels the emotions and controls the effects on herslef would be better. The inquisitor is a great character but rather than lay all your cards on the table at once build into the story aspects of him, so as to promote the drama and the tension.
All suggestions only. The best purchase i ever made was Self Editing for the fiction writer by Renni Browne. It changed the way i wrote (well, the way i altered my writing after). Offer for proofreading/edit is still there if you wanted.
cheers
ross

Thanks for taking the time to read, and write such a motivating crit. It has given me many ideas for how to move forwards......the prologue saga continues :)

I'm going to hold off on rewriting the prologue until I have the narrative at a higher standard, and also get more feedback on it, but liked the suggestion of wording it as a lesson. I need to sleep on it for a while and decide how I want the book to open.

Hi James. Have read chapters 1 and 2 (well prologue and chapter 1 to be precise). Thought it a good stage to comment, although I plan to read the rest soon.
Your premise is excellent and original. I've read fantasy for thirty years now and know it's difficult to be original in such a saturated Market. However the scribe becoming reality idea is potentially brilliant...how brilliant will depend on the execution of it.
So to 'chapter 1.' prologue or preface or background information at start of RPG module? What is the best way to go with this? Prologues are a love-hate thing. David Eddings used them to provide a background mythology in the Belgeriad. Got pretty dull. Erikson used them to recount events years (and in some case millennia) before maim story- work brilliantly. But a prologue is a narrative, a story, told with reasonably similar voice to the rest of your book. So is yours a preface? I suppose it is- the best example I can think of is Tolkein's 'concerning hobbits' preface, which works reasonably well.
Can you do it another way? You could have all that info in an appendix, put some in a glossary when you finish your book, or you could weave it into the narrative. My opinion, for what it's worth, would be to rewrite as a prologue, set a number of years before, perhaps with a scribe explaining various things to a novice, or even at school with tolmek getting his knuckles rapped for getting some of it wrong. You don't have to cram all the facts in, your restricted POV in chapter 2 would allow some more to sneak in.
It's acceptable to treat your readers with some intelligence. Your book is only going to appeal to fantasy readers and most of us are comfortable about the world being gradually revealed: in fact it takes Stephen Erikson three books before you work out what the hell's going on in the Malazan series and George Martin a similar while to flesh it out.
Chapter two is good. Great ideas again, excellent to cut straight to the action and drama. It's a witty idea having his mother there and clever solution. It needs a good hard edit, the tension drifts a bit due to your paragraph length and sentence constructs.
This has great promise, so keep at it. Your first 2-4 chapters will determine your readership so need to be slick. I took about five edits of my book before I self-published it ( and yes, it has a prologue, a glossary, a character list, a timeline, maps and is unashamedly a product of my adolescent love of D&D!!!!). If you wanted a look at the maps etc then you can download a free sample via Smashwords or find it on Completelynovel.com. The text is on Authonomy, but the site is a bit restrictive regards images and add-one like glossaries.
If you want me to proof-read/ edit I'm happy to help out: just ask.
Cheers, Ross (dreams of darkness rising)

Thank you to you both for those great comments, I will work on your suggested revisions, although I have to get 2 or 3 more chapters out of my head first before they start shouting at me for not writing them down.

James,

I read some of your book because I was intrigued. Not my usual choice, but I was interested to see how you told the story.
As the previous comment says, very weel constructed, but I wonder if it might have been better to build this knowledge for the reader as the story unfolds, and as it is necessary for the good understanding of the story.

Best regards
Warrick

A fascinating piece of worldbuilding in the old tradition, with a clear goal, distinct possibilities for good and evil, clearly drawn positions for the bad guys and a distressingly large conundrum (The Golden Flux - Peace or War, Good or Evil--all that) for the protagonist.

A milieu is evoked vividly, populated by an intriguing take on the usual suspects.

A work in progress, so I won't get too precious about punctuation, inconsistency of spelling (Tolmek/Tolmak) and other apects of the MS that will get picked up by proof-reading or line editing.

I do find that there is an unevenness of tone, as the narrative voice wavers between a contemporary and a Tolkienesque faux-archaic diction. Voice is probably not as important as Story, but it is close, and is the medium through which Story reaches the reader, so a clear Voice is very desirable. The clarity of Voice is often closely related to the clarity of intent. A little thought, and perhaps a little discussion to elucidate and illuminate may pay dividends here.

There is some work to be done here, but it looks like it is worth doing.

Keep it up, and thank you for sharing.