Title: War of the Misread Augury - Chapter 60 Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Jan 4, 2018 Author:ghostdogtxn Post Date:2018-01-04 10:13:49 by ghostdogtxn Keywords:None Views:387 Comments:6
My only complaint is that it ended. Great work, thank you.
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ~ H. L. Mencken
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson
Ghost, here is one thing I seem to encounter a fair amount that throws me off a little bit. It's the transitions between scenes. Here is an example:
She pulled a pillow over her head and tried not hear the sounds coming through the thin walls from the adjacent room. She heard them just the same.
Yset had not exaggerated the Ghoulslayer’s charms to the little thrall. She had perhaps neglected to mention a few things, like his thick and pretty hair, the softness of his lips or the strength in his legs....
The issue is not the storyline. That's great. It's just the transition. In this case, in the first sentence we are in the room of Limme, as we have been since the start of the chapter, and then in the subsequent paragraph, we are in the other room with Yset. But that change was not obvious. As I started reading the second paragraph, I had no clue that we had departed Limme's room and entered Yset's. There is a small clue with the ref to "little thrall" at the end of the first sentence, as Limme wouldn't call herself that (or perhaps she would in some disparagingly hopeless way), but in my brain that didn't trigger, and it took me pretty much the entire paragraph to realize the scene had changed. If the paragraph had instead began with something like "In the other room Yset had not exaggerated..." or something similar to that, it would have broadcast the change of scene in advance of the description.
I suppose this is something an editor would notice and patch up. Certainly in your mind as the author, such transitions happen seamlessly and there are no need of such announcements, but for a reader experiencing the story for the first time, I think perhaps they are very helpful in keeping the reader (or some readers like me, at least) immersed and uninterrupted in the flow of the story.
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson
I had thought before that perhaps some kind of separator might have translated into the chapter postings. Yes, "whitespace" characters like spaces, tab and carriage return are all compressed into a single space.