Quote:
Originally Posted by ASparrow
I've always known about the benefits of letting a manuscript rest so that a writer can see what they actually wrote on the page and not just what they imagined they wrote.
But, man oh man, I've really had my eyes opened to the power of letting works lay fallow. I just tried submitting Page 99 of Xenolith to Page99test.com and what I found there made me queasy -- stilted, confusing dialogue, unintelligible descriptions. Not everywhere, but common enough.
My reviews on Smashwords have been much too kind. Some reviewers have hinted at the inelegance of my writing, but I think I deserve a much more solid thrashing.
As a result, I'm going through Xenolith for the umpteenth time to hunt down and destroy these clunky passages. I've killed (elucidated?) three already in the middle chapters, but I'm just getting started. I expect to release another update soon, for my own peace of mind.
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Xenolith actually had me hooked. I was interested. Into the story and wanting to know what would happen next. Then I got to Chapter 6 and you introduced a new point of view character. And at that point I stopped reading.
There's some "rule" about point of view characters and setting up the pattern early. If you're going to have x number of point of view characters, then they should appear early - or, alternately, you can add one relatively late into the novel (perhaps a third of the way in) when the reader is firmly hooked.
At the point where you introduced Gi, I wanted to know what was happening with Frank on the river, and what had happened to Liz. I figured Gi was some sort of Amazonian, but I'd already been taken through a frame from the present, into a backstory, the present of the novel, and then had a mystery set up - Liz disappearing, and then Frank was in the river. That was where I wanted to be.
If you had set up Gi earlier - even if we'd had a small snippet from her perspective, then I probably would have read on.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. I didn't have any problem with your prose that I can remember. I thought it was quite good.