Merran can deal with bedbugs. She's a sorcerer.
She and Jamen can't deal with notoriety, although they'll get some as they go along.
She and Jamen are skipping town anyway, fast. Nor do they look like the pair in question. And the little bit of story checks out, sort of.
What Merran cannot do, unlike Amy_s's Katerin, is reweave her clothing with the wave of a wand.
You declare your sturdiness, but you haven't responded to my last couple of reviews. Am I pounding you too hard?
You've got at least one place with both olde and nuiw text, a big section.
WordPerfect here. Characters come out fine but paragraph breaks come out as question marks. I guess the ASCII gods had to taketh from somewhere
Not ASCII. Word processors use extended character sets which should fit somewhere under, I think it is, ISO 646.
It may be a character missing from the local copy of the character set. It might be an ambiguous coding, which is supposed to be illegal and should be removed to prevent security holes.
Also, MicroSlough uses some characters illegally, including 'smart quotes'. (They also violate the rules for HTML in their HTML encodings.)
Each gets its subset, except in the case of Unified Han. Chase the WikiP links.
Word processors and such work from a standard palette of symbols. There are three basic levels: the 7/8 bit set, the 16 bit set and the 32-bit set. The difference between the 16-bit set and the 32-bit set as that in the smaller set (Unicode/'Basic Multilingual Plane') a number of languages have to share characters in a pool with the Chinese languages ('Unified Han'). There are also ways of coding the longer sets in varying numbers of bytes.
Just about any modern word-processing system should support all the Roman-derived characters as well as Arabic and several other writing systems. (Also Greek symbols.)
I don't recall all the names offhand. Look up Unicode on WikiP and chase links. This is big-time International Standards stuff.
Well, start with the 'Fishing in the Catacombs' chapter. After you read that, even with the review, you'll owe the author!
How do I get you to review 14 chapters? Holy moly! I'll buy you some American wine:-)
Get them hooked with a few of your best chapters, like Fishing and the chapters around Alina's duel and Katerin's promotion..
I'd say a long break in time, a big change in ensemble, or a strong change/break in the story such as creating the problem vs. solving it.
Now, taking EQ's The Finishing Stroke as an example: the section I'm calling a prologue is quite long and a small story of its own. It takes place something like 20 years before the main body of the story.
One more thought. I'm not very far into Randall Krzak's Bedlam but I'm left wondering how much the characters of the first chapter will figure in subsequent chapters. If the answer is 'not much' or 'not much, except for one of them' I would suggest calling the chapter a prologue, simply because the different characters make it a different-but-connected story.
I saw it. Review this evening.
Another oddity: when I enter an in-line comment on an italicized word, the comment shows up italicized. I suspect that you want the comment in the same base font and style as the main text body, but it would be nice to use the base style info from the paragraph as a whole, or from the work as a whole.
Fine-tuning, I know.
You meant the opening crawl? I don't know that I'd call that a prologue, and it took an outside editor to cut it down to size.
More practical, sometimes.
PoV is a part of How the Story is Told.
What presentation best engages the reader over the course of the story? What best presents the story as the author sees it unfolding?
Forget this and all is lost.
Is that so much to ask?
If you have to ask, you know that someone will give an answer you don't want.
I understand and use the term to mean a break in the story that moves back in time to present something that came before the time of the story's opening, followed another break that returns to the point where the first break occurred. This may be a character's memory, or the events that a character is remembering or recounting, or something else.
The lack of the leading break is why I don't think a story opening, prologue or not, can be called a flashback.
Prologue as flashback is a contradiction in terms. You haven't yet established a present, so you can't flash back from the established present. A prologue used that way is history, a part of the story occuring some time before the rest.
True, it's framed by Harry's dream. But within the frame we follow Frank's PoV.
Yes, cobber, Harry is strictly limited POV. All from Harry's. Rowling did a good job with that. The only scene not in Harry's POV is in one of the later books in the chapter "The Other Minister" where she tells us all about the havoc Voldemort is causing when he comes back.
Also the scene with Frank and Voldemort opening, I think, GoF. When you protagonist is not in the scene, he can't be your PoV character. Look at the very first scene of the very first book.
It can be done well, though. You can change PoV from chapter to chapter and scene to scene, and even within a scene if you are deft. C.J.Driftwood does it here in some of his most powerful scenes and it detracts not one whit.
It's also an accepted part of the Romance genre, or so I am told.
I think that the key is that the prologue has to be story, enaging story, rather than just an info dump. It can be the part of the story that sets up for the action, so long as the reader can feel strong potential in the setup. But if it's a story in and of itself, so much the better. I'm thinking now of Ellery Queen's The Finishing Stroke, which may have been meant to close the series.
Compare that with the J.J.McHugh intros in the early Queens, especially The Chinese Orange Mystery.
When I try to get to it, I get the other chapter. Or are you suggesting on the multi-stage dialogue? Okay, yes, it does come up.
Sigh. Your design is based on scenarios first and data second. That means that little-used scenarios are hard to recall. Base it on data that is always used and the scenarios are easy to find and follow. Not the way you design an ATM, but an ATM has a small set of transactions that are shallow to the user.
Anyway, it's done. Thanks for the reminder.
Sol, I have a belated auto-renumbering problem. I didn't catch it earlier, and I can't fix it myself now.
The Sorcerers Progress: Children and Beasts has two Chapter 21's. The second, Lunch at Logchem's, should be number 27. While it might be possible to fiddle with other numbers to make this one accessible, I'm afraid of making things worse. Can you set it right?
