Short Story – Pushing the Limit
This post was unfortunately erased but I still have it in a separate word document. If you want to read it you should countact me.
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I’m doing some adjustments to the text right now. Adding some here, removing here and so on. I will soon be finished, but as you know some parts of the text will change during this period.
Just wanted to say that I’m finished with my own corrections.
Ok, phew I will manage to atleast give you some feedback although I will probably read it again tomorrow and see if there is anything else I can give you feedback on.
Anyway.
Events: I think most of the events actually were pretty
good in terms of lenght and understanding , except for the battle with the two seats , for some reason that part felt hazy and abit sloppier , but that might be because it was fighting which you said was youre biggest flaw in writing.
Otherwise I only think that maybe the beginning could have been abit more detailed in regards to the other characters , but I understand if you want to make the group abit mysterious.
Characters: Okay this one was pretty pale if you compare to the other stories actually , but it might be because the focus wasnt really on the characters , but even so I think abit more detailed PoV from “Reds” vision early in the story could have made it abit more interesting, and you didnt really get a feel of any of the characters personality , but in my oppinion the characters wasnt really the big point of this story(if you wanted their personality to show more I think you should have made the story even longer or cut it into two seperate topics.).
So , abit more PoV in my oppinion would have been great.
Other than that I think the characters were okay considering the amount that was put into the describing of the characters.
Style: I think the style of the story is sometimes abit too fast and repetitive especially in the fighting scenes except the first one with the two guards although that wasnt much of a fight , but the one im thinking of is the one with the two seats , there was alot of “he did , he jumped etc” I think you should try to write in a more fluid motion, I cant give a really good example at the moment but I think you understand. Other than this fight the style was entertaining and only some small grammar mistakes ,
Although I just(1:57 , started this 00:15) remembered a thing which I think could have been changed into maybe something more suitable , and that was when he(red) thought to himself “Oh shit , I hate these things” I dont know about you but the Oh shit part somewhat takes away some of the feeling , for example in WoT they seem to use alot “Light” etc, I dont know how religious characters are and such in nianze but maybe “Oh shit” could have been “By, Gude” or something , just to suit the atmosphere of the world more.
Speed: I think the speed of the story is good and keeps a nice tempo , except the fight with the two seats(again) which feels abit fast for me atleast , alot of stuff happening very fast. ofcourse the story is action you could say so fast descriptions might be the most suitable but as I mentioned earlier… in a more fluid motion.
Grammar and Spelling: Here I only noticed a few spelling mistakes , but they mostly looked like sloppy errors , although one thing that you might improve on is to use less “simple” words and more advanced words..I think by using more advanced words you can give a bigger picture with shorter sentences and it will be less “he/she did that etc.” Anyway , everything was readable and I understood most parts , except the air part(as mentioned above).
Anyway to sum this up I would say it was a good job with the exception of certain things.
Too improve/think on:
more fluid descriptions
less simple words , more advanced
more PoV if you are aiming to give more feeling and life to the characters/surrounding.
Anyway I really gotta go back to work now , although I feel some of the “review” of the story was abit sloppy by myself but I felt abit rushed =) anyway ill look it through again tomorrow.
And as always , Keep it up , right up!
practise makes perfect
//PB-“chan”
Ah bleh , I see that you have made some changes on the stories.. I hope my comments arent too outdated.. *sigh* anyway ill check the changes and re-read the story tomorrow
Well Í re-read ít now , and I see the improvements already , and I noticed I made a mistake earlier its not Red its Cerulean fighting those Seats and also you see some of the characters thoughts and emotions which is nice , dont know if that was added later or I just missed it somehow.
Anyway.. the second version so to speak is better =)
Heh, thanks for your feedback.
Yes, fighting when every minute is valuable is very hard for me to do in English. I have an inner vision of the events and knows what happens and try to put it into text as lucid as possible. Though the fight with the two Seats were supposed to be really fast, but well, I’m not tha good on that and I’ll try to improve on that part.
As for the characters in this story, it really couldn’t be helped. They were a crew of people setting up for a job, they didn’t know each other and wasn’t supposed to be so much personal, more professional. Even so I tried to give them as much characteristic as possible. Cerulean was one of the more professional of the nine, with an exception to Red. But I tried to make as much personality I could fit into both Cerulean’s and Tamil’s PoV. But the main focus wasn’t the character, that’s right, it was the event.
The Seats was the most complex fight, which Cerulean actually wasn’t in control. He just tried to adapt to the situation and react as fast as he could. This is most likely why this fight is the one with the biggest attention right now. But I’m not quite sure how to improve it, not yet anyway, and still keep the pace.
Here I have to disagree with you. Oh shit! I hate these things! is not inappropriate I think. Even if you are religious this curse actually is suitable in every perspective. And this also tells us that this character has temper and isn’t a Holy Warrior of some kind. Also know that in reality cursing with God’s name is considered an even worse curse than using the Devil’s curses. Here it’s almost the same, you don’t curse with gods, at least that’s my vision even though I haven’t realized it yet. So when you use the gods in your curses it’s more like an desperate prayer. Oh Mars, help me! I don’t want to die!, something like that.
Yeah, most spelling mistakes are most likely words that I didn’t see. In word, most misspellings are marked but those misspellings that actually is another word, aren’t.
So all in all I need to put some more detail in the situation and give at more fluid tempo. Well, I’ll work on that, even though I’m not sure I will write another action story soon.
BTW, if you want to help me find these errors, I would be glad if you somehow marked them, hopefully by writing the comments and adding the words in their context so I could find them easier.
I’ve now made som secondary corrections.
I hope that would fix some of the problems with the text.
Okay well for once I see that you havent fixxed on of the spelling errors:
“Cerulean was sitting in the corner, heavily wounded and Red was dying on the floor with a whole in his chest.”
whole is a completly different word from the one I think you are looking for which is hole =)
“The whole body was bruised and battered when he was done” just an example
Although Im quite sure it was two places with “whole” instead of hole but it seems you have corrected one atleast
Oh well except that I see you have done alot of corrections , like descent , red and such.. and I didnt find any new ones.
Oh, I didn’t know that…
Anyway it’s fixed now. As for the changes, did they change the text anything?
Yep , the text became more vivid and clearer , making it a much more entertaining read.
And the added thoughts were a great improvement.
And now I cant really find any errors at all , atleast that I can find.
Well. This is good, really good. Of course everything can be done better, but this is actually very good. Did I mention that?
Let us just state the obvious, I am delaying the criticism as long as possible to enjoy the atmosphere that this story created in my mind. In my humble opinion this felt like taken from a book than a short story written as a hobby, except maybe after a while when some things felt a tiny bit repetitive. But the repetitiveness I think consisted of reused words. Try to vary the language more, use more advanced words like PB said. But also building references to other parts of the story.
For example:
can be changed into
A very small modification, but it removes a lot of repetitiveness.
Another example is
Where you again tell the story about a hole through a chest… I would say that you should either say something about he also having a hole through the chest – like Red. Or use some other body part, there are lots of them and lots of ways to describe about the same area. But don’t use the same body part with the same description again without backward reference. This is something that I reacted on at least.
I like the style of description, quite a lot of information there. But there is something that I missed and that is some more information on the characters. Like stated earlier they are supposed to be strangers, but it would still be nice to maybe get some grasp of their looks. Like for example why he does not know why Magenta is male or female and also the size of people, slender short and so on.
I think the pace of the story was good. Nothing in particular to comment on there.
There were not a lot of thoughts on the characters part in this story, but it all a kinda high speed fighting scene so I don’t think there is anything wrong there. The thoughts are very objective centred, they have a mission and we get information by the thoughts of the ones carrying it out. The characters seem vivid enough.
I think that you should avoid footnotes within your stories. I am refering to your reference to the description of Slim Swords. I say, either put the description in the story or leave it out. Footnotes belongs to nonfictional litterature and it is simply confusing an breaks the pace of reading. Since either you have to stop reading the sentence and look up the word, or you have to read the whole sentence and go back afterwards.
On to some typos and stuff:
heir should be her…
“We” seem malplaced here – try ‘he’ since that is what you would have used anywhere else… You change the perspective.
This would seem like someone actively stopping him from thinking – I think “He didn’t have time to think” would be more suitable.
Since we still think of the attacker as a shadow, ‘it’ would be more appropriate.
Either I am missing something or it should be “though she was stunned by fear for her saviour.” And when we are at it, why not say “for the glowing man in front of her.” Saviour seem like something you are not afraid of, so there would be more feeling in something less precise.
At
Maybe saying something like “Sitting in each seat were a soldier”. Just to make it clear that it is a single soldier in each one. Since you might not be familiar with the thing. Better to be precise when it does not disrupt anything else.
As usual I don’t take notes from the beginning. Maybe I should do that so I think I have found but forgot a few more of these. But now I feel like I should relax, and I think you might know why…
Long story short. VERY good story in my oppinion. Keep it up! Atleast I liked it and I wouldn’t have complained much even if this came from an established author… Like I say, lately I have been referencing well done things with things you can expect from a book…
Over and out. /Ankan
If I didn’t state it clearly enough, the text can be improved by creating more references to other parts of the story. The easy part is to compare to the things that you have already written. Like for example those laser beams and the chest. The hard part is to reference into the future without giving away too much.
This actually brings up the memory of a slide that was displayed in a lecture today. Not that I study to become a good fictional author, but it has some resemblance to Multimedia systems, which is a course that I am taking right now.
The slide described the transfer of information, of thoughts from an author to the reader. The mind stores information in a strange way that has references forwards and backwards. Forwards since the future as seen by the event has already occurred. But text is very linear. The work an author need to do to transfer the thought is to linearise it. But into text. The reader then has to de-linearise it to understand the message of the author. And now I don’t simply speak about understanding the text, but what the author meant with the text. The reading between the lines and understanding the situation the character is put in. To visualise the story we need to de-linearise it.
This was just to give some perspective to my never ending blabber about backward references.
And the result of this would be to make the story less linear and dynamic. Less of he did this and he did that.
I am done now. Promise, I think. This is one of the times an edit-button would have been useful. But I stand by my earlier recommendation. It is not needed.
_More_ dynamic. Sorry.
Hum much information indeed. I will need some time to process it, but I do see your point though I’m not sure that I’m able to do everything you ask for… I’ll try…
*Going through the comment and post again*
Just one thing I wanted to add for the future…
I prefer if you try to comment the same thing a bit more… cronological. It’s easier to process when you try to fix the story. Or adjust it like I’m doing right now.
I’ve not done too much yet, but I’m processing it. One thing that you always can count on when it comes to you (Ankan) is that you always provide good feedback. And even so I also feel like your skills in English far proceeds mine… but then again you actually did something in High School while I didn’t… =)
I’m changeing quite much right now but I can only say this… I’m unable to get much more information about the other characters into this story. For one, their outfits are completely covering their body (if this were a book you should have been notified by this earlier), and the person in the PoV wouldn’t think too much about things he consider obvious. That’s something I’ve learned while studying Robert Jordan as well as other authors writing styles in PoV. I will try to add some more, but I can’t in only one PoV, where you aren’t supposed to know who the others really are. Tamil’s one exception.
I want you to read the changes later, some of them aren’t really what you marked out, but most of them are triggerd by the thing you said with variation and more advanced words. I even went so far of using a word that is new to me in the text. Though I haven’t yet come to the fight part… *Shivers*
Well, I better continue…
So, now I’m finished with the forth revisions… I think it is.
I changed something here and there. Much more than that I don’t think I’ll be able to change the text. Sometimes you might come to a point when changing will destroy the text and I think that changing it more than this will destroy it, giving it too much or too little and unstable information…
I tried to take all things you both said into account and change it as well as I could. I even saw some more typos that you had missed.
Some things though I just couldn’t change. Some information is avaiable to the characters but not to you therefore the PoV becomming strange sometimes when things like Saviour can sound strange… but I said that before.
Very interesting way of putting it, this slide-thing. I think that I would benefit greatly from taking a couple of courses like that sometime. Learning more about this with writing and touching an audience both with verbal words as well as text.
However, I now consider this part finished, though you might add your new observations if you find any. So I will take this to the next level… speculations and observations from a worldly-perspective. This I think, only my players and people interested in this world (like you two) is able to do.
I will answer some questions about this whole event, but not everything.
So what do you think they’re doing there? Who are they? Do you recognize all the skills they used? Who are their foe and who are Tamil’s saviours? I like to know every speculation and more store-involved feedback now when you helped me refine me work!
Ok , well lets see..
I think that they are there to disrupt something important of the magistrate and who they are well I think they a group from the 7th Arcane(tigers island) , and Tamils Saviour(s) atleast I think one of them is David Tiger.
Now about the foe.. well I had two thoughts first atleast and that was Death or a Demon Servant although both of those were not true.
And I dont think its a god. it seems unlikely but who knows?
And the last part “Three large powers clashing together” really is confusing =) But I guess its supposed to be
First of while reading it I will make notes of more small typos and stuff so you can correct them.
Sorry if I get you to go back into the story, even though what you now request is questions about the event and so on.
“to the tip of the obelisk”?
“ent here”.
change into
You already mention see, once is enough.
Try to remove the second “passed each other”. Or maybe only having “passed” there… Or maybe something like “but just in that instant,”.
Would be good with a comma or an “and” after “sudden flash”.
Seem strange with the second “and”.
I: am
He, she, it: was
We, they: were
each would fit better… Okay, it is kinda obvious but I am automatically interpereting what you are saying into there is one soldier – split into two parts with one part in each chair.
held backwards
A comma would be good in there.
“seat” with small ‘s’ here, everywhere else with large.
roof of the
The last part, “having the visor shattered by his Ironfist”. That is written as if PoV is a bystander, or he has hired a worksman to shatter the visor for him. Since he is the one shattering it, I think this should read something like “shattering the visor with his Ironfist”. Don’t really know actually, it might be okay gramatically to write it like you are, but I am not sure.
To take off – not takeoff. Takeoff is a noun, take off is a verb.
An alternative is “the other Seat’s takeoff” where the noun is appropriate.
You are changing the tense in the middle of the sentence. clutching to tried (instead of trying.)
Another comment. Do you really want “cluthing to his” and not “clutching his”? With “clutching to” it is like the sword is the only stationary object in the world and he is clutching to it by all his force to stay alive. You might want that to show that he is not in control like you said earlier. And then it is a good thing to write like this.
Isn’t there any synonym to beam you can use?
missile
Try “the neutral voice” – to keep in gender neutral.
Still more gender specific stuff. Try “threw fireballs all around towards four”.
intuition
Volted backwards. or “volting backwords while” Tempus again.
Also: “at he same” -> “at the same”
She
Well, if I don’t remember incorrectly it should be “there were” since “lines” is in plural.
Wait, shouldn’t it be “Seats’ and Spheres'”?
Well. I didn’t plan to make it that much, the main part of the comment comes now.
Well, one of the saviors seem to be David Tiger and the group seem to be from tigers island, at least according to the war cry.
Since the enemy is obviously something/someone strong, and it seem to be at least rather evenly matched with David Tiger. Why not the David’s counterpart? The dark knight or what he was called. Can’t remember his name right now. He was at least in the same league as David.
There you have two powers, but I can’t come up with the third.
If it is David it would also explain why she is so sure about the saviour part.
As for the mission. Could it possibly be the dragon eggs? That is a kinda big job…
As for the skills. Lets see…
I am guessing that Tamil is a kremis and her invisibility comes from there.
Cerulean’s speed boost should be connected with meditation. Most likely he is also a Teckan, by the way he is fighting.
Well. Finally done, hehe. It took a while to write this. Hope it is not too much of a problem with all those corrections and stuff at the beginning.
Okies, I will look at it later, not right now.
Yes, they are from the Hamlet Island and their saviour is David Tiger, correct so far. As for the Dark Knight, Roichad, he was defeated at the Tiger Stronghold, where Celivielin also “died” her first time.
No, they aren’t there for the dragon eggs, it’s already happened about five years prior to this event. And that was a joint operation with the Birds of Prey, Aguin and 7th Arcane… This is only a 7th Arcane operation.
Tamil isn’t invisible, I don’t know why you thought that… she’s far from it and she isn’t a Kremis either, she’s a warrior, thus her dashing (Språng) to increase her speed.
Cerulean is Tekkan, right… though his speed boost are connected to the human racial skill Skilled, which is a rare skill, his ironfist however is a combination of the Ability Ironfist and the Tekkan unarmed ability.
Well, I don’t really feel like correcting right now. Maybe play some WoT or read WoT or maybe something else entierly.