Where The Ravens Go By Guinevere (bluenudibranch)

1: The Winter Run (Chapter Title)
High Fantasy (Genre)
Trials & Worth (Themes)
First Person Past (somewhat consistent)
Suspense level (🌝🌝🌝🌚🌚)

---------------- 11.24.2020 -----------

Hello

Thank you for letting me read your first chapter. Things to look for in a first chapter.

- clear genre (High Fantasy)
- clear time period (Unknown, Alternate Universe)
- clear MC (Nat)
- few characters introduced (quite a few: Nat, Bolin, Remus, Nikolai (father))
- tension / suspense (Starts High but drops)
- a life-changing event / decision (Maybe)

This story opened strong and immediately grabbed my attention. In fact, I decided to go to bed but first took a glance at it to see what it might entail for me the next day and ended up reading it without pause.

With such well-polished lore, it was easy to fall into the story from the first paragraph. We meet Natalia as she descends a freezing mounting...covered in blood. Very intriguing. We then learn that she's doing a ritual that has cost many people their lives in the past. Nice! Then we come to find that she's not the average warrior and there's something...different about her. Again, nice, nice.

The build up is great, the suspense is great. It has all the fixins I personally look for in a story. It also doesn't hold the reader's hand, giving bits of information as we go along. That was an aspect I favored a lot compared to other stories.

It's also similar to how I write.

But I learned a lot as I read on, and not about the character, but about distribution of information. The bigger chunks of the lore, I wanted to find out about little by little but personal things about the character, I really felt I wanted right away. Who was Remus, what was Remus (that can stay a mystery, but not all of it). Names are mentioned with no context. We don't know what Arryns are, or Voldaire. I'm very certain this was intentionally withheld in an effort to make this a smoother read by not bogging the reader down with too much info too fast.

Again, I like this method. But now I see that it has limitations. Each new thing mentioned needs to be defined.

Here's an example:

I picked up the Larms, squirmy snake-weasel hybrids with jagged teeth, and tossed them into the pot.

Or

I picked up the Larms, their squirmy snake-weasel hybrid bodies twisted in my fist. Their scales proved too slippery and they slid into the pot premature.

For important parts of the story (what Remus is, for example), I feel it's still all right to take time in letting us know about it. But for innocuous, everyday things, please consider defining them right away. Not only will we get an immediate visual, but we'll also know the consequences.

Take the ending when Nat is showing off her prize. Because we don't know ahead of time what it's for and what each signifies, we can't be as excited as she is. Eventually we find out, but I felt that information was too little too late.

Also, you do a mini flashback about Remus during a VERY intense scene. Imagine someone in a play dying and Kanye walks on and says, "Hold up. I'ma let you finish, but yo, this is my pet, and he's as rare as they come. Why you may ask. Well..." and as he's going on and on, that actor has to HOLD that pose...THE ENTIRE time. Then once Kanye is politely ushered off and dragged for the filth, the actor resume.

This is what it feels like each time there is information pertaining to the past that doesn't get compared IMMEDIATELY to the present.

The plot is also not clear right off the bat. I don't know what her problem is, what the consequences are, how she plans to solve that problem, and what/who stands in her way. We introduce our worlds with the first chapter and you started off doing that well, but part way through, we left the here and now and ended up somewhere else.

Regardless of those issues, I would still be interested in giving chapter 2 a try. As a casual reader, however, if nothing stood out to me or hooked me by the end of chapter 2, I would probably stop right there. But you have enough here that I'd at least give it a try.

If you found this critique useful at all, please consider giving it a shout out. Also, please check out the FIRST DATES chapter in this book. Help the first dates out there. For help formatting and editing, check out the TUTORIAL pages and FREE RESOURCES for more information.

- LynaForge