(Plan8 Slaves) - Rayner Jamie Ye (Page 1 of 2)

Hi Rayner, you are on my reading list, but I've been struggling with getting through my reviews so do accept my apologies! I will shunt you up the list now you are here... (after Kdot and njc who will have my guts for garters if you jump the queue..) Good to see you here, they are an EXCELLENT bunch.

Oh, Kdot, you like YuFu, don't you? Maybe I shouldn't kill him off at the end of the book, then... It's a shame it dries out after the first few chapters

K is a bloody-minded author.  Very few are as ruthless as him.

What makes the best story?  Is the death purposeful or purposeless?  What does that say about the story world?  What does it say about life?  Does it reward the reader for caring or mock the reader for caring?

If it mocks the reader for caring, why should should the reader come back, or recommend the book?

You can put smilies in, unless you hsve them turned off.

Ned Stark's murder/assasination did two things: it removed a powerful good guy, and it told us that this would be a desperate struggle: venality to chaos to existential threat.  How long before the fighting fools realize their ship is burning?

Just reviewed Chap One. Oh, I do like this one! Great characters, and I love how the story is set up. Such imagination. I shall go and cry into Izzy's coffee now and feel inferior again

Make that a forty-hour review backup.  Rayner, I'm working on yours.  Four hours so far.

I put the review up a couple hours ago.  It's a monster.

Akachi might be compelling. Your unfortunate job is to sift through his soul and find why. Then help us see it.

Also if Bex won't be back, consider stealing his name from him and just make him "under-thug" or "collector". Otherwise people like me will award him entries in our spreadsheets.

Ms. Ye, in response to your last review reply and your difficulties in writing action,

You're going to need some action to establish jeopardy.  It's a skill to be learned (says the guy who's facing a big hurdle of the same sort soon).  In the visual arts, artists do studies, trying out a technique, effect, or tableau  in isolation before incorporating it into their planned work.  M.C.Escher left a huge number of studies, now in museums and private hands, for his major works.   And the first couple of chapters I put up here were studies to see if I could reach some minimum standard.

People are attracted to YuFu's chapter, I think, because there is physical jeopardy involved, and because disaster has befallen at chapter's end.

I offer you a suggestion--or a challenge: Take YuFu's first chapter and rewrite it with just the action and implied jeopardy, absolute minimum of character and near-zero background--but with elements establishing the danger in that chapter.  Put it up as a short story with an appropriate title and explain what you're trying to do.  You can even put a barely illustrated outline up first.  I promise to review at least three revisions.  I think you'll get other reviewers as well.

I'm guessing that with some practice you can get the action and necessary background/milieu down to about 600 words.  But a good first try might run about 1,300.

It's the engineer-tinkerer in me.  When something works, I want to know why.  When it doesn't, I also want to know why.

Experts have been trying for over two hundred years to understand why this works  They've got some interesting theories.

YuFu gets into physical jeopardy faster.  Strengthening Aedre's conflict doesn't mean turning it into yelling, screaming, and insult.  It means making the reader empathize with her.  I can't give you much help, since I'm working on it.  Maybe help the reader hope what,she hopes, and thus fear her failures?  So maybe she needs to plead to us, as it were, before she pleads with her father?  Help us share her feelings, even abbreviated and frustrated, about her father?

This might mean slipping the physical setting in with fewer brushstrokes, and spending more on what things mean to her.  Not in so direct a way ... her past with her mother, the bond of 'secret' language ... what does that imply for her feelings about her father, and his about her?  You can tell us a little when you're with Aedre and mother ... but when we're watching Aedre and father, you should show us.

Example: Was Aedre ever Daddy's Little Girl?  Is she now?

Matt Bird: Irony is the source of all meaning.

And irony seems to require layers of meaning.

Thank you for the lesson.