frostweaver said:
(sorry but going to double post, because my previous post is rather completely unrelated to reviews you know? Plus I'll need the space XD)
@ The Road to Palantria
-now why would your neighbours complain about your music if according to the setting earlier, houses are an acre apart from each other?
-I'm personally not so thrilled with such a long chapter with absolutely nothing but character description, and further bored if there's 3 consecutive chapter of absolutely nothing but character description of the same character. Not that having so much character description is bad as you can never have too much of it, but I definitely recommand you to rework the whereabouts of those paragraphs so that they come in different places. Notice how the battle scenes at the end of ch.2 got all action and no description, while ch.1 got no action and all description. You can insert part of the description from chapter 1 into the battle scene to blend the description a little bit.
-and the above also talks of a bit of lagging issues... though I personally didn't get bored, I'm sure that somebody out there got hypnotized and fell asleep at the length of the first chapter and the lack of action in it
-I actually CANNOT find grammar mistakes O_o;
-now generally the diction is quite ok as it's very consistent regarding the tone of voice, but then no one can be perfect with diction, yet I'm too lazy to flip through the whole thing just to check diction... blah
-nothing other negative to comment on (so good for you as I already ran out of bad stuff to say evne though usually I can find 10 for every fanfic XD). On the other hand, a good reason for that is because the plot hardly advanced so far, and that I can never comment on character description as being "wrong" or a "mistake" unless it contradicts or something (this means that the whole chapter 1 is pretty much forced-flawless)
Hmm, actually I've never had a review point that out before on SSP or PE2K. To say the least, I'm glad you pointed that out. Yet, there is a reason why its like that, and I'm hoping you can see what I mean.
In a sense, the first chapters are mostly exposition, and I usually set aside the beginning chapter for describing what the main characters look like, as well as the surroundings. Often, early battles leave readers confused as to what is actually happening. I've seen it done in movies before, and the viewer often has no clue as to who the characters are and why they are fighting. I've seen the Matrix start off with Trinity escaping from the agents and the beginning of Gangs of New York, and in both movies, I had no clue as to what was going on the first time I saw it. I've seen the same thing done in stories, and its even worse when you can't see what's going on. Sure, you pull the reader in by having a battle, but the cost is potentially leaving the reader in wonder about what happened and who was involved, forcing the reader to have to read (or see) that same part over again. I'd rather not have that happen. I had to watch the Matrix at least three times to fully understand what was going on, something I'd rather not force my readers to do.
On the other hand, you're probably wondering why Chapter 2 had more action yet less description. The reason is that during a point that has action, I want the story to keep moving at a continous pace, almost like in real time rather than stopping and slowing down the pace of the story to put a very descriptive paragraph about what an attack looks like. Usually, I'll just describe how it happened, what it looks like, and the effect that it has, and usually not much else just to keep the story going. Usually, attacks are very fast. Even a character in the story wouldn't have enough time to really sit down and tell word for word what every attack looked like to the finest detail. Everything is happening too fast, and I feel the story should at least attempt to try and match the pace of what is happening as if it was real life.
Anyway, I thank you for leaving a solid and constructive review of my story. I'll keep in mind to leave character descriptions apart for each other to keep the story moving along rather than stopping to go over each of the characters involved. Other than that, I hope you see why I did it in that particular way, but nonetheless, I did get a different picture on how my story is seen from another person's standpoint, and that will help the next time I start a story.
