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Would love some critics as far as grammar and detail or am I on my way to a book as is?
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© 2014 - 2024 Quindalas
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TheScienceNerd's avatar
Spotlight Very long comment, hold onto your hats I'm so sorry!Spotlight 

So, story-wise, what you presented here was pretty bangin'. I could groove to it, it had a nice sense of character and tension was built up strongly enough. For the most part, all the story aspects of this were really interesting. But there are a few things I would like to bring up...

First off, this was immensely descriptive. Too much so? That's a concern of style and I don't like to discuss that hullabaloo. I will say, though, that nearly every sentence is a descriptive one, and the action-oriented sentences generally had at least some tidbits of visual, aural or olfactory indulgence. Something to think about.

Now, my real concern is just how confused and wonky the grammar all throughout this piece is. This is riddled with fragments, bizarrely malformed clauses, mismatched ideas and all sorts of syntax confusion. It is to the point that I legitimately don't know where to start on discussing how the grammar is... not necessarily wrong but... just... strange.

Okay, yes, it's bluntly wrong in some places such as "A soft scraping sound as the carbonite glove adjusted on the door." (a sentence fragment), but for the most part there aren't any clear and identifiable grammar smashers. All I can say is that it was just... confusing... The way you put sentences together with tons of strange clauses all bubbling around in clunky and seemingly random ways, how you jumped from idea to idea so quickly that my head nearly flew off I mean it was just almost awe-inspiring actually. I had several moments where I considered if it was just that your style was so unconventional and I wasn't used to it...

But then I realized it was still very, very confusing, and a confusing sentence is a bad sentence. Like, I didn't even know what was going on half the time and I had to read several sentences twice or tens of times over to understand it. I don't even know where to start! So here is a solution:

I can't talk about anything but the actual form of these sentences, not when there is a Goliath of befuddlement staring me down. So I want to go through just the first few lines and how they did so piledrive confusion deep down into my poor soul;

"
It was a deep green color of dense liquid..." Small mistake, but dense liquid doesn't intrinsically have a green color. It should be put "It was a dense liquid of deep green color..." to avoid confusion. Off to a start not quite bad, but a little bit messy,

", slime that was slowly rolling down the polished oak." Wait, what? Okay, so I've worked this out to be some sort of dependent-clause-y description type thing referencing the dense liquid mentioned before but... why? Why not just say the dense liquid was rolling down some oak? It would be so much easier that way. This is needlessly obtuse.

"A soft scraping sound as the carbonite glove adjusted on the door." Sentence fragment, mentioned before.

"Qentaris (Ken-tar-is) watched the slime roll for a few more moments before pushing himself away from where he had been leaning against the latched door" So, the order you introduced ideas into this story: Mysterious slime first, main character second. A bit strange, but I can dig it. 

"
This night he had become a demon..." Oookay, so the slime is something to do with that? Got it. What does it have to do with it, then?

"
, and for what reason other than one man's greed and another's lust for power."

I have to stop you here. No other men have been mentioned in this story, so this means nothing to me. I have no reference to what this greed or lust for power are relative to whatsoever. This is somewhat alleviated as the story goes on, so there's something to it, but hell there isn't even a setting yet! All we have so far is a glimpse of something like an inciting incident to a story we don't even have any idea about! It's all so very assumptive. It felt as though you had an idea that the reader would know what is in your head already. But, we don't. You need to tell us. That's why you're here, to tell us a story!

As a further example, "Tonight he had done things to creatures of the world that were of no concern to anyone..."

We, the readers, don't even know what these creatures are yet. And I assure you, we want to know! Yes, later in the story it is discussed but we aren't later in the story! We're not psychic! We're humans, damnit! :angry: We need to be fed information or we shrivel up and die like a small grape left under the kitchen counter! :angry:  Down with the- uh- sciagarchy? Uh- umm- *cough*

Well then uh-

*ahem*

What I'm trying to say is, you had tons of perfect chances to dish out information to the readers right in that opening paragraph, but you just didn't take them. In fact, you did this time and time again as the story went on. Rather than saying, "He had done things to the creatures," Why not say, as an example, "He had done things to the spooky space aliens..." and BAM we instantly got some information and we only increased the character count by literally just a couple!

Tell us what we need to know now, and we can coast smoothly on that information later. Rather than exploding straight out the gate of your story with a nebulous mosh pit of not information and "boy I really wish I knew what this narrator was talking about", try to give an opening that sets in stone exactly what we need to know and why we need to know it. And then keep doing it.

And then, yeah, the rest of the story was pretty great. Just give it a once-over, maybe give it a twice-over but the second time read it sentence by sentence, but backwards (this lets you better catch grammar mistakes, as your brain will be diving into the text itself rather than sailing on the idea sea that your story knits). Fix up the many muddled ideas, try to get everything to gel together and all. You have something with a lot of potential here, but it's potential hiding behind a thick stained-glass window of grammar. Readers love for their windows into your story to be clear, so they may enjoy exactly what it is you are trying to say.

For real, though, bein' straight with you here... I just wanted to get you back for all the time I spent reading something so long >:C

Toodles~ :ahoy: