Workshop: When you care not where you roam, every road will lead you home. (solo)

[SirArtemis]

Story
Storytelling, Setting, and Pacing

I think in general terms this was an enticing premise and could have gone into a much more in depth and engaging narrative, but it felt too brief to allow a thorough investment as a reader. The pace, though it didn't feel particularly quick, did end up almost implying a certain rapidity due to the brevity of the thread. The setting remained mostly a forest, though when you drop snow into the mix I got a bit suspicious. With a canopy, and a freshly started snow storm, you're not going to get any flakes hitting the ground. So the setting perhaps was more sparse than originally implied. That sort of disconnect is something I think best avoided. I will also note that the time you took to acknowledge the strangeness of a wolf hunting alone was a bit disengaging as well. I had expected your character to think and note that sooner, as I did as a reader, and the latency of expressing that left me frustrated.


Character
Communication, Action, and Persona

The other little snippet of the story that took me out of the narrative was the magic your character used to conjure the mist. I had to go back to figure out what was actually happening in that scene with the mist. Sometimes just describing the events leaves me wondering, and perhaps this was on me. Retention is a derivation of presentation, so it is something to keep in mind. Remember, I don't see what is in your head, so you have to ensure you provide me enough context to know the important bits, and fill in the blanks with the irrelevant details. One thing that isn't irrelevant, which I'd like to know, is WHAT DOES YOUR CHARACTER LOOK LIKE!? I just know he has a suit. Hair color? Eye color? Did you mention? I don't remember. Is he old? Does he have a beard? Wrinkles? I dunno. I will say though, my favorite part of your persona, was the lack of fear and the almost numbness as a result of your magic and relationship with these bizarre and unique creatures. Which still shouldn't be capitalized.


Prose
Mechanics, Clarity, and Technique

Ok. So this is an area I can focus on and try to give some insight. I'm going to do my best to offer constructive feedback that I've learned along the way based on what I saw of your writing.

The first thing I want to note is consistency in you style choices. In the first post, you say stage-coach, stagecoach, and stage coach. Pick one.

The second thing is trying to use active language. For example, when you say "he decided to attempt knocking on the door," I don't know if that's what you mean. Did he attempt to knock? No. I think he knocked. Just knocked on the door. What did he attempt? Possibly to draw the attention of whomever lived inside. So word choice can change meaning, and you want to be concise when storytelling.

Third, advice I offer to most people I give workshop feedback to, is to read your work aloud. You could catch things that sound wrong. For example, "Upon only hearing only one voice." You would have caught the redundancy. For example, if you had read this aloud: "a practiced grace that comes from constant practice," you would have probably opted to change that up a bit. Here's another good example: "All that stood were two shapes in the ground, and there small white shapes. He walked over and picked up the shapes." This happened more often but you get it.

Fourth is homonyms. You did not wrap on the door, you rapped on the door. If you have even the slightest doubt that you're using the correct word, double check on any dictionary. It doesn't hurt. You also said doubled his wait instead of weight.

Fifth is about dialogue. Never have two or more characters dialogue within a single paragraph. It's poor form. If another character is going to speak, that should be in a separate paragraph basically always.

Sixth is stray capitalization. You randomly capitalize letters. This can be a stylized choice but that's generally only meant to draw attention to things. I personally would discourage this style and recommend sticking to the rules. I also don't think you should have capitalized Grym.

Seventh is punctuation after speech. If you want to do a "Sketch said," after dialogue, or a "he said" after dialogue, then end the dialogue with a comma, not a period. Also with dialogue, ending with a ? or ! is treated as a comma, and the following word is lowercase. You also want to put the punctuation within the quotation marks, such as "strange." instead of "strange".

Eight, keep an eye on tense agreements. Don't switch between present and past tense in your narrative unless there's explicit reason to do so (there usually isn't).

Ninth is apostrophe usage. You need to revisit it's versus its. You wrote arm's instead of arms. Read up on when possession or contractions are required and when they aren't so you can avoid these silly and simple mistakes.

Tenth is a simple enough one. When wanting to use quotes within dialogue, I recommend single quotation marks, such as right at the end when she speaks her name.

Eleventh is a huge one. You have a toxic relationship with commas. You need to come to terms and let it go. Let me show you a few little samples here.

• Sketch always tried to be careful when it came to injury, he’d heard many stories about campers getting into dreadful situations just because they lacked the basic common sense to not run around the woods bleeding all over.
  
• He helped himself to the food on the shelves without much guilt, for he would either leave enough coin to cover the cost of the purloined food, or this was a trap set up by the Grym, in which case he’d deal with the situation and leave nothing at all.
  
• The first picture held a scene of a happy couple under a trellis, the sillouette of a woman in a wedding dress, with flowers in her hand, stood opposite of that of a large man wearing a suit.

Those are all one sentence long each. That's a lot. You should work on breaking up your sentences with periods rather than so many commas. Think about the function of a comma, of a period, of a semi-colon, a colon, and then reflect on the structure of a complete sentence and what comprises one so you can avoid fragments and run-ons.



Wildcard

"Why was he in his underwear?" That was a thought. I had to go back to see the super quick passing reference of you saying "clothes drying by the fire" because I had no memory of him setting them out. Sometimes implying this is good, sometimes it leaves things forgotten. Overall though, seems like a cool character and you have a lot of storytelling potential. Stick with it and let me know if you have any questions. Hopefully that helps.