Workshop: The Mountain and The Trial

[Philomel]

Thread Title: The Mountain and the Trial
Name of Author: Flamebird
Type of Thread: Quest
Post Length: 13 posts
Feedback Rewards: (Post Length of Thread/10) * ((EXP Needed to Level)*0.05) EXP
Date Closed: 22th of July 2017

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[jdd2035]

Hi Flamebird! How are ya. I'm your friendly neighborhood workshop writer. You'll be happy with the review I give you.

Story:

Storytelling:So right story telling. The question is did you write a story that engaged the reader and kept them reading throughout. You have done this remarkably well. But that being said my one tiny little gripe is that you started off with something more of a diary form of story rather than the cold opening but then you shift gears and started writing in third person where as logs, journals, diary's and so on are written in first person. For example "24-June-2017: guess what log I sold two stools today" VS On 24-June-2017 jdd2035 sold 2 stools. You're still talking to the audience but one you're actively taking part and the other you're letting the reader what you already did.

Setting: The setting was spot on.

The sky was clear, with a beating sun pounding it's rare rays down upon the bare boulders and snow.

You could be talking about me a few years ago when I was doing a above the timber line hunt. But the question begs how does your character know that you are 7000 feet in elevation? I get that you the writer is telling me where you are at but it breaks the immersion and that can give the reader blue balls so to speak. Might I recommend something less specific? Like "nearing the edge of the timber line" or some such.

Pacing: Ah pacing your pacing on my barometer that ranges between Michael Bay directs Dragon Ball to Stanly Kubrick directs Gatica. You range right in the middle Peter Jackson directs the Dresden Files. It was not slow and ponderous nor was it break neck fast speed. There were times how ever where the pacing slowed down I.E drip drip drip.

Character:

Communication: You write very well. Your use of italicized font for thoughts and quotes for spoken parts was pretty good. Though might I say that when one reads rather quickly such as I do the eye tends to gloss over subtle things like italics. Instead would you rather use the squiggle I don't know what it's called but it's this (~).

Action: You had some very good action bits in your flashbacks. The descriptions of the violence was not gratuitous but just enough to let every one reading know that violence has taken pace. I have read threads where the write describes in every gory detail just how much damage their body has taken. I have no complaints for the action though there was not much aside from a few scenes in your flashbacks.

Persona: A solo is nothing but persona. I got very easily that your character was alone even alone in a crowded room. But what else was she feeling? You mention it from time to time but the most I got out of it was that your character was alone but was she also pissed? Did she have to pee? Details, details, details "She was pissed!" "Her face turned red as heat bubbled up to her ears and she gritted her teeth anger welling up inside her." I can not make bricks with out clay!

Prose:

Mechanics:(17:56:48) Flamebird: Dang my mechanics in this was horrible... I am woefully not qualified to judge this. If I was to judge this I would be a total hypocrite to you. So in short...me fail english thats unpssible.

Clarity: As stated in your communications part you write very well. There was not one point in your thread where I was confused about what was going on. So I'm just going to move on from here.

Technique: Oh now here is something I can talk about. Your repetition of specific thoughts, and verbs. I get it, it drives the point home I use it sometimes in my writing I think every one does. What does stand out though is the shrinking fonts. I get that too it's trying to show the ever deepening feeling that your character is feeling. But it reminds me a lot of Dr. Seuss except with out the spiraling all over the page as the font diminishes. Might just stick with the repetition.

Wildcard: I like the picture at the start.

[Eteri]

Once again I am doing a post by post read through as I am experimenting with my workshops. If you have any questions please let me know. As usual, if I have nothing of real value to note, I won't write it under that post.

Post 1
Few spelling and grammar errors that can be easily fixed with a proof read.

I like the initial setting, and how she interacts well with the scenery, painting a clear image without just listing information

Post 2
Again, a few easily fixed spelling errors.I like the wit and humour in the first part of this post. The second part was quite description heavy, and unlike the first post where it flowed nicely it seemed to drag on, only slightly. You had already described a few things in the first pots and whilst its good to recall back to or make mention of them again, it felt a little too soon.

Post3
More spelling and grammar errors, 'town' instead of 'down' etc. I like how we are slowly beginning to see what is happening in the story. Her blood history coming into play.

Post 4
The start of the post bothered me with the slight change in past/present tense so quickly. (I'm totally guilty of this too, so I'm one to talk.) you go from' the darkness was getting warmer' to 'the water dropped.' I know that was in this instance, can work in both ways, but something about the difference was off putting to me, personally.

Beyond that I actually really, really like how this post was written.

Post 5
More typos! beep beep typo police!

Finally, looks like we're getting somewhere with the content. I liked the exchange in words, but I felt that adding more to the dialogue could have really set the scene more. Was the voice of Ashwa stern? Caring? Condescending? I don't know. I want ot know though. In my overview I touch on that the thread overall is lacking a bigger emotional response. This single post had that, and I wished I had seen more of it in other posts.

Stuff like this, fantastic! I want to see more.

She could taste the salt rich liquid kissing lips. She was not dreaming.

Post 6
More typos, 'P'ease stop'
they threw 'atones' instead of stones (unless they were throwing atonement at her? But I doubt that)

Post 7
More emotive responses, this is better. I'm finding Felicity more likeable now. She's not so stoic as I found her in previous posts. Still a few typos.

The elements of the voice and the bubbles, and the glass are adding some mystery to the thread and making the pacing move faster, as its giving me more content to invest in and want to read. Yay.

Post 8
Glasses or grasses? (Typo?)

Post 9
I really like the way this is written. It's emotive, and the short, quick succession sentences make a powerful response.

He coughed up blood. Red blood. Crimson blood. Her own family blood.

I also see why loneliness and being alone was mentioned constantly at the beginning, I was wondering if there was a correlation or a tie in near the end, I believe this is it. Yay, tie ins. Eteri like.

Post 10
I think one of the best written posts in the thread, however I am not sure if it were a typo, or something else but the female voice then turned to a male? Re-reading it a few times I think it was intended to be Felicity.

"I believe not," he responded, "Your very own abilities say otherwise."

Post 11
I am being super nitpicky here, but I don't see how smoke can rise to the air from the flames if the entirety of them is covered by a thick glass?

I do like how this ended, but I Feel a tad more clarity was needed - which I wrote in the overview below.



Final notes!!

Story:
Story was a little slow at first, but built up. Around post 7 ish, we finally got to the whole strange bubble thing, that began to give Felicity (and the reader) insight into her troubled past without it being an information dump. I did like that the information was broken up by posts, and actions rather than all at once. I appreciate that, its less heavy on me as the reader.

Setting: Overall setting was pretty descriptive, there were some parts I did admittedly glaze over because they had already been described once in the post and it felt a tad repetitive. I feel other areas took a back seat in place of setting, which can be both a good and bad thing, I know a lot of people always say that posts and threads need more descriptors for setting, and more involvement in said scenery, you didn't have this problem. You painted a very vivid picture.


Pacing:
Pacing was slow, and it took a little too long to get into the main thick of the plot. Once things started happening it moved at a decent pace, it wasn't fast nor slow, and it didn't end with an abruptness either, everything rounded off nicely. I didn't feel cheated when finishing the thread. It had an end, which lead into future possibilities.

Character:
This is hard to do in solos, especially in solos with so few NPCs. I felt this was lacking, I had no connection to her, barely knew her name or her real motives for what she was doing. There was a lack of emotion and emotive responses behind her actions in most of the posts. Maybe throwing in some inner thoughts or dialogue would have added more depth to her. This changed when we started seeing snippits of her past, and the bubbles, the way you wrote this was much better and if you had written the entire thread with those sort of responses I wouldn't have any issues at all.

Persona:
I feel that persona, and personal feelings took a back seat to describing the settings and scenery. I know this is a bit of a hit and miss, since a lot of people always go on about setting. I think you got your setting down pat. Just don't sacrifice other things for it.

Mechanics: Your posts were dotted with a few spelling and grammar errors, they were small, but they were noticeable. I counted at least one in every post. Another quick read-through, or even getting someone else to read through it would help.

Clarity: I think this ties in with Mechanics, there were a few times where I was confused and had to re-read things due to typos. I think this also falls with story, but I am adding this here too. Right at the end, its heavily implied that the glass, the fire, the bubbles were all an illusion, or a trial of sorts set by the Peridot witch. Whilst most people could come to this conclusion I feel it'd be good to make some sort of mention of it, for the sake of clarity.



The thread, whilst slow at first, sped up into a good read with interesting insight to how Felicity is as a character, and how she deals with her own struggles. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the future.

[Zook Murnig]

STORY 18/30
Storytelling 6/10
The story is a fairly simple one of finding inner strength in the face of adversity, and finding your long lost people. I hope to see whatever comes next for Felicity.

Setting 6/10
Excellent opening, setting the scenery. Very realistic, and very well put across, between how it felt, and how your character interacted with the seemingly contradictory weather. This level of quality mostly maintained through the thread, though it dropped off during the memory sequences, when establishing setting wasn't as important as establishing character.

Pacing 6/10
This thread was fairly well paced, which means I have next to nothing to say here. It wasn't an action-oriented thread, though, so all it really needed was to remain steady.

CHARACTER 16/30
Communication 5/10
I'm not sure if the mispronunciations Felicity exhibits are meant to speak to her being childish, which I'm not seeing any evidence of from her actual behavior, or if it's meant to be a speech impediment. If it's the latter, I'd recommend not treating it like an accent that you can represent phonetically, and instead describing her speech as having a thicker quality to it within the narrative. It's the difference between listening to a child mispronounce things and Andre the Giant rhyming at you with his deep rumble and heavy consonants. Plus, phonetically representing affected speech like that can make things really confusing for the reader. For example:

"What is 'is?" She whispered.

This is difficult to parse, especially since it seems like a shift in representation of the accent/speech impediment.

That said, there's not a lot of communication in this thread, since it's mostly Felicity interacting with memories and ghosts from her own past.

Action 4/10
"Starting to cautiously climb town" aside from having a misspelled word in town instead of down, has some weak action verbage. To strengthen the action, try phrasing it more like "Climbing down cautiously, ..." This cuts down on the qualifiers and makes the action verb, "climb," stand on its own intead of hiding behind "start." This, and similar issues with weakened phrasing, account for your score here.

Persona 7/10
I got a pretty good idea of who Felicity is, and what she's about, even without any actual other characters to interact with. She's indomitable, willful, but emotionally fragile. She's haunted by people she feels she has failed, as well as by people who feel she failed them. There's real turmoil, especially, I think, when it comes to her loyalties to Eiskalt, a nation that apparently doesn't want her or people like her.

PROSE 11/30
Mechanics 3/10
Misspellings that wouldn't be caught by spellcheck. Proofreading will help with that. Some wonky phrasing early on with "Great struggle was with her left hand," and I'm still not sure what that was supposed to be. Sentence fragment, caused by using "Although" as an interjection, where "However" might have better served. Some repetitive phrasing, such as "Pulling the small satchel made of animal skin over her lap, she pulled out a book bound with more animal hides out."

Hmm... "some kind of shield for protective" instead of "for protection" is an unusual mistake, but it can happen. At a guess, I'd say English might not be your first language, based on this and a few other peculiar errors. Which is fine, but being that English is an ornery sonofabitch of a language, having a native speaker proofread for you will help until you become more familiar and comfortable. If I'm wrong, and English is your native language, ignore me, I'm an overanalyzing idiot, and just proofread because mistakes like that won't be picked up by spellcheck.

Be careful of run-on sentences.

Clarity 4/10
A bunch of wonky phrasing affected this, though usually your meaning could still be discerned from context.

Technique 4/10
There's a lot of clunky overly-verbose phrasing, which makes your sentences unwieldy and sometimes hard to follow. In this case, sometimes less is more. Find ways to simplify your sentence structure, with less repetition and unnecessary clarifying prepositions and adjectives.

With that being said, your opening post was very strong with regard to technique, particularly in setting description and interaction. You just need to find a way to maintain that beyond the first post.

WILD CARD 8/10

FINAL 53/100

[SirArtemis]

Please don't hate me. =) Let me know if you have any questions.

Story
Storytelling, Setting, and Pacing

I'm admittedly still trying to connect the dots with the elements of the story here, as it seems to jump into a plot-line that is already 90% of the way done in a sense. You are climbing a mountain, get to the top, and tell me you're there on a mission because of a massive magic reading. Then you go down into a cave and it felt like after a few minutes you were already wrapped up in a spell. Another couple minutes of bubble visions and tears and you're on the ground with an old woman saying she'll take care of you. In a sense, it just feels too brief and disconnected from anything of larger scope to feel like it can land for me as the reader. It leaves the pacing feeling quite accelerated and the context absent. I think it would have been more engaging if you had a flashback to the mission, or a prelude that showed why they chose her or that conversation. Perhaps more time to develop the character and make me care about her magic vision experience. You threw me into an emotionally traumatizing experience for the character and forced me to witness her breakdown, but never gave me reason to give a damn that she was going through this in the first place.

For the setting, I will say I appreciated you trying to integrate more of your characters reactions to the world around you and using smell as well as sight. I would have liked more regarding sensation and maybe adding a bit more ambiance where possible.


Character
Communication, Action, and Persona

This is difficult for me to speak to for this particular thread. The character being a sixteen year old girl, I have a hard time mentally imagining how one would truly act given the circumstances being so extreme. To have gone through such tragedy and loss seems hard, but I would imagine someone's psyche to either find peace with those events, or bury them in a dark place that they can't be found. With the latter, if the magic brought them to surface, I can't imagine how a mind would react to those images. Would it simply be open wounds and crying? Would it be more distress? Would it start to cause a serious mental breakdown? You hint at insanity, but it didn't seem like anything she was expressing or experiencing as a character exhibited true insanity other than the notion of hallucination (which is justified by the magical trap so to speak). This sort of ties together all three elements of character and my experience of her.


Prose
Mechanics, Clarity, and Technique

There was a substantial amount of mechanical errors, from typos to missing quotation marks to sentence structure and fragmentation. That's something that I think comes with time and experience. For the most part, I will say your writing is clear, and I didn't really have a difficult time following any of the events.

With respect to technique, there are a few comments I wanted to make. The first is your choice to add the note at the start of your thread regarding day, time, and that she was hungry. The only other time you make such a note is post 4, and the format is different. From that point on, you drop the mentions. I just don't feel like those elements added anything to the story, and you could have integrated those commentaries into your narrative more effectively.

The second thing that I'm not a fan of, and this is certainly my own preference, is using conversational language for the narrator. For example, when you say "hooray" as the narrator or when you say "First the claustrophobia, then whatever the opposite of claustrophobia was?" Personally, I experience a narrator as an entity separate from the character when writing in third person. It gets a bit jarring when the narrator is speaking with personality rather than objective observation. A narrator, to me, is more proper (when not first person). It also gets jarring when the narrator asks a question on behalf of the character when they are not the same entity. For example, when the narrator asks "Was this some form of magic?" rather than insinuating that this was a question of the character herself.

My third and last comment for you on this is related to word choice in your story. At times, it feels like you are simplifying or complicating your word choice in strange situations. For example, saying "for an elongated time" just doesn't sound right. You can just simplify by saying "for many moments" or "for a long while" or something. At the same time, saying the stone steps were wet is quite simple and could be strengthened by saying something to the effect of "the stone steps were slick with dampness" or something to that effect.


Wildcard

I think you have the ideas in your mind, but putting them down will always be the challenge. In the case of your writing, I think focusing on brevity will be an important element of your growth. Try to ask yourself what purpose anything serves in adding it to your story. Was describing the outfit of Felicity in the various visions of her life, including the colors of things, very important? Now she's in a red dress over a white dress. Now she's in pants. Great. What value does this add to the narrative? Is the color of her clothing symbolic or relevant? Did I miss that? Her hair was up and messy first. Now she undid it and put it up in a ponytail. Great. Could that have been combined into one sentence and conveyed the same meaning rather than a paragraph or two apart? She undid her braid, half unraveled from the climb, and pulled it up into a simple ponytail. Done.

On one unrelated note, I'm having a hard time imagining a 5'3" woman that is an active wanderer and climbing a mountain to weigh 209 pounds. That's pretty heavy for an active warrior. Also, not sure a halfling is the same as a half human half neanderthal.

[Breaker]

This workshop is now closed. Rewards will be added shortly.

[Rayleigh]

Workshop - The Mountain and the Trial

JDD receives 390 EXP, 30 GP, 4 AP.
Eteri receives 140 EXP, 30 GP, 4 AP.
Zook receives 350 EXP, 30 GP, 4 AP.
SirArtemis receives 910 EXP, 30 GP, 4 AP.

[Rayleigh]

All rewards added on 4.0!

Congrats on the level, SirArtemis. Your rewards for the next workshop will be calculated using your new level.