Workshop: Knowledge Rotten

[SirArtemis]

I will come back to this but also wanted to just slap this down for my own reference so I can do a good compare and contrast.

http://www.althanas.com/oldworld/showthread.php?32147




Story
Storytelling, Setting, and Pacing

So for this part, I tried to compare to what I wrote the prior time, and I think in many ways that not too much has changed, though admittedly from my dim memory I do think there was improvement here. The pacing seemed to go a bit more slowly and last throughout the thread, but I do think that the entire "scene" (arriving at the house, exploring, fleeing) did feel like it was very quick. Not inherently a bad thing, but did again leave something to be desired with respect to emotional investment. Adding more on the ends may have added to it. A preface even in one post perhaps. I think you did improve on the exploration of the house and you did change some elements, which I think worked well.


Character
Communication, Action, and Persona

So you did make improvements on Daugi, which I appreciated, which left me with a better sense of both characters than I had my first time around. I do still miss out on some of the background of Daugi and their history but there's enough to know that they do have an important bond. However, one thing that I noticed that was new that made me go batshit is that Fenn is about thirty years old. I have beef with this. Serious beef. Even if in terms of his kind he is considered a teenager, thirty years is thirty years. That doesn't detract from a certain level of emotional and mental development and experience. Sure, we could chalk some of it up to anatomy, but Fenn's behavior (and the narrative) do not at all reflect his real age and it leaves me super rattled. I know you, as an author and person, give off an aura that similarly reflects a younger and more innocent vibe than age might necessitate, but I assure you, as someone who is almost thirty, Fenn needs to behave and think in a more refined and mature way (in my humble opinion). If not, the 30 seems a stretch even if he LOOKS 8. Looks. But you can look 8 and have lived a long ass time and be jaded and more mature and experienced and less.... less Fenn.

Fenn is thirty. Wut.


Prose
Mechanics, Clarity, and Technique

• Keep in mind the difference between a semi-colon and a colon. For example "The source of it; thick tomes and curling stacks of paper." In this instance, I think it would be better to use a colon or a hyphen.
• I don't know what "Omhym" nest is.
• Judgmental, not judgemental
• "if even if"
• You capitalize Fae, but it should not be. It is not a pronoun. You don't say Human, you say human.
• you put the comma after the quotations by the word circumstances, which is inconsistent with the style you've opted for.
• For clarity, when you say "This is the mansion you spoke of," isn't Fenn a mute? So. How did he speak of it?
• You say "besides him" when it should be "beside him"
• You say elfin woman. Elven?
• "An distorted" - you use an only before a vowel.
• After a thread is posted and done, do a final ctrl+ f for any [ or ] so you don't have any unclosed tags
• "Fenn smile as he" - smiled
• each gasp of water from downstairs - what?
• the sound became very, very wrong. They -- you go from singular (sound) to plural (they)
• Fenn grip on the -- Fenn's
• it dropped to the knotty floorboards and hunched over -- Fenn is hunching over, not it, not the manuscript. Subject agreement
• he did not react out to her -- reach
• Naught but twitch and bleeding -- twitching and bleeding
• a foreign consciousness tried to worm their way -- again, subject agreement. singular consciousness, plural their
• this was not this same hall she had walked through before - not the same rather than this
• her air stood on end -- hair
• "Its tendrils had a grisly stretch to them similar bare tendon and muscle fiber, tapered and gaping at the ends like an eel's mouth." -- first, similar TO -- second, I think this imagery will be lost on most, and may be overkill
• Much as one would stare a cockroach -- at a
• clicks that cause her to wince - casued
• Daugi smashed into side table - into a side table? the side table?
• still in once piece - one piece
• Silence rang loud in Fenn's ear -- just one ear?

Wildcard

This is where I talk about how I feel, and you may deem my feelings irrelevant. The first is, I don't think it was worth revising this and posting again. The reason is because though you changed the outfit the story wore, you couldn't change its fundamental anatomical design. Though you made improvements, it didn't shift the outcome dramatically. And most of all, the length of my mechanics edits left me severely disappointed. If you are going to revisit a thread, even with changes, I would want and expect great care in fixing the issues of mechanics and clarity. Subject agreement. Missing words. Wrong words. Spelling issues. It is just too much and, for a second go, I don't think should happen. Whereas there was certainly enough changed to constitute new errors being created, I would have wanted you to give it a much more in depth scrub all the same. The bookends of the story were still the same so the filling of the sandwich couldn't change too much, since the position of the slices didn't move too much either. So where I did notice changes to the narrative, and did think it was overall better, I would have encouraged you to take the lessons and go create new things with those lessons in mind rather than to revise. Revision is far more difficult to get right on a large scale because fixing a story just... creates bumps.

I hope this was helpful. Please message me if you want anything further.