Fantasy feedback

[hankstr]

I'd love to get some honest criticism of my first ever story. I have wine and valium at the ready, and am thus prepared for criticism

category: sci-fi/fantasy

Reenah faces a difficult decison when her squad of scantily clad, neophyte archers encounter pirates on a remote beach. The temple of Eros must be defended. Are they up to the task?

http://www.literotica.com/stories/sh....php?id=470568

I hope to post another story eventually, and can really improve with help from the community.

 

[Darkniciad]

http://www.literotica.com/stories/sh....php?id=470568

You must have copy/pasted your link from another post somewhere, because this is the cut off form that the forum software displays as the visible part of a link.

Let me provide a working one for you:

The Pirate Raiders of Eros

I'll give it a read here in a bit. Just thought I'd make it easier for us lazy souls who wander the feedback forum to find the story for the moment

 

[Darkniciad]

This is probably going to come off as harsh, but remember that I'm more or less hitting on the points that are critique, rather than what I liked. I may mention a few of those things, but I'm going to concentrate on tearing things apart *laugh*

Don't let it discourage you, and remember that I'm just one reader.

Right off, many of your paragraphs are too long for online reading. Reading on a computer screen is much harder on the eyes than reading something on paper. Once you get past 6 or so lines of text, its easy for your eyes to get lost when switching lines. That pulls the reader out of the story.

One way you could correct that, and punch up the story, is to break it up a little by having the characters interact. As it stands, a large chunk of the story is simply placing everyone here. We don't really meet them.

Rather than just telling us about her company of archers, have one of them ask a question about those sails on the horizon. Then have her explain what she knows. Give us a little window into the individuals. When you switch paragraphs for the speakers, that will automatically provide a lot of breaks for those long paragraphs.

The sudden point of view shift from her to the pirates threw me off when I read it. There should be a scene separator of some kind there.

* * * *

That's an indication that something is changing. The point of view, a jump in time, etc.

There's another problem right in this section, too. We go straight from a long description of her into the pirate lord on the boat. There's no closure to her scene at all. Moving the description to before the previous line of dialogue would have helped this a bit, but I think it would still be a bit weak without getting deeper into the character's thoughts.

Show how nervous the untested archers are. Show that she's nervous too, but maintaining because she's in charge. Things of that nature.

I have the same thoughts once we switch over to the pirates. Get inside the heads of those murderous dogs. Let's hear the salty language of men sweating as they keep their ships on course. Give us a window into the anticipation of the raid that's certainly going to grow even stronger when they see who's waiting for them on the shoreline.

Now, the shift in the narrative did give the feel of this. The harsher language set the atmosphere quite well for the pirate side of things. I rather liked that. It just needs some more interaction between the characters to spice it up.

The sex is a little quick and dry, and the ending is really too much of a "To be continued" for my taste. If this was listed as a chapter 1, I could accept that. When presented as a self-contained story, it leaves the reader feeling a little let down and led astray.

The temple was something else that made this feel like a chapter 1. Why does it need protecting? That's mentioned in both parts of the story, but never resolved in any way.

There's potential to expand this into a longer story. I think it's almost a necessity considering the way it ends and how much you leave unresolved. If you dig deeper into these characters, I think you have some good protagonists and antagonists to work with.

You have the immediacy of escape in the short term, and the larger goal of warning/defending this mysterious temple in the long run. You've got some potentially wonderful scum to oppose that, and you've set that atmosphere pretty well for me with how you wrote that section, as I mentioned earlier.

That's just what ran through my head as I read. Hope it's of some help, and that it wasn't too discouraging.

 

[bwallard]

This reads more like a background study than a story.

Pull a story out of it.

 

[hankstr]

Wow, excellent comments, all! Thanks! They provide me as the writer other points of view. I will certainly take these critiques to heart in my next story.
I'm not discouraged as this was my first attempt and I expected a lot of room for improvement.