Aden lay sleeping at a large oak desk, light streaming in through curtains set dust motes dancing about him. A bell rang as the door to the shop in which he was sleeping opened. Way too late for customers, he thought to himself in his half asleep state. "Aden it's time to open up shop." A booming voice called out. The shop Aden worked in was a three story building, and while the bell was rather loud he doubted he would hear his fellow manager calling for him from his apartment. He slowly began to lift his head and noticed his surroundings he wasn't in his apartment but at his research desk in the shop.
"You could have woke me up before you left last night you know." Aden called to his co-manager.
Jamie, Aden's co-manager, walked up the stairs to Aden's desk as Aden wiped the sleep from his eyes. "I would have, but you closed last night remember." Jamie didn't look like he managed a bookstore he looked more at home in a metal band or on a motorcycle. Covered in tattoos with a shaved head a bookstore is the last place you would expect to meet him. "I'm just glad you remembered to lock up before dosing off." He looked at Aden's desk and the books, scrolls, and notebooks covering it, "I wish you had locked these up before falling asleep though." He picked one up, "doing a bit of light reading?"
"Yeah just more study and research, town history and genealogy stuff mostly a few family journals as well." Aden stretched and blinked his eyes a few times waking up more fully.
"Well get them put away they've made a mess of the shop." Aden looked around, he wasn't joking spirits were hovering about looking lost and ambient magic was making things float and tilt in bizarre fashions.
"I'll get right to that sorry." Aden began carrying books back to their respective cases locking each case, and placed the scrolls back in the tubes they came from sealing each one. As he went the spirits began to dissipate, but objects that shouldn't have been floating still were.
Jamie looked disgruntled at Aden, "get yourself cleaned up, then I want you back down here asap to sort this out." Aden nodded to Jamie and ran upstairs taking them by two not wanting to test Jamie's patience. Jamie was on the short list of people who's patients Aden had no interest in testing.
Aden's apartment above the bookshop was sparse, it had all of the necessities he needed but little else, aside from a few paintings on the wall. He had little need for extravagance as he rarely hosted guest. Aden made a short gesture towards his kitchen and a kettle filled itself from the sink and set itself on the stove. With another gesture the stove lot it self and a box of tea sat down on the counter next to the kettle and stove. As this was done Aden prepared to step in to the shower. After getting cleaned up he made a few more short gestures and bread flew in to his toaster and the toaster turned on. Aden threw on a pair of green pantaloons style pants, a white button up, and put on a pair of grey slip-ons. He grabbed a portable cup set a tea bag in and poured in the water from the kettle catching it right as it started to whistle. As he let the tea steep he got out a container of half&half and some honey. Aden smeared honey on the toast as the tea finished steeping, and after adding the half&half and honey to the tea headed down stairs chewing on his toast and sipping at the tea.
"Took you long enough didn't it?" Jamie was working out the till for the day, trying to remain unperturbed by the candle that kept floating into him. Aden chuckled at this as he whispered a disenchant and caught the candle before it came crashing down.
"Sorry it's not a good morning without a good breakfast." Aden set his mug of tea down on the counter and picked up the paper Jamie had brought in this morning. "I can't believe the Renaissance Faire is only a couple of weeks a way." He folded open the paper to the life section, "30 years the faire has been going the newspaper has had something in life practically everyday about the people involved." His eyes scrolled down the page reading the article.
"Yeah I've noticed," Jamie said closing the register. "They even want to do an article on us seeing as we're a local shop and we're regular vendors at the faire." He turned to look at Aden, "but if you're quite finished keeping up with local news we need to put things back to normal as in not floating and bumping in to me."
Aden set the paper back down on the counter, "well if you insist." He and Jamie stood apart and turned to face each other. Each stretched out their right arms and touched index figures. Speaking in unison in a sonorous tone, "clear this place of magic clutter, from the floor boards to the shutters." As the spell was spoken every floating object returned to it's proper placement in the store, and the dim glowing fog that seem to fill the place cleared out. "Rhyming spells seem so dumb, especially when it's a forced rhyme and doesn't even describe what the spell does. Plus the two people having to do it rule? Totally idiotic." Aden said as he and Jamie set their arms to the side.
"Hey, we don't get to write the rules the boss lady does and she'd have your tail for saying that sort of thing." Jamie casually said as he strolled behind the counter to organize items in the display case. The shop in which Jamie and Aden worked was unique for the area. All outward appearances would lead one to assume it was a simple book shop with certain assorted curiosities. In all truthfulness it was a magic shop. The store was a simple three story building with a brick front nestled on a corner next to a bar. The Book Shop as most people called it as they couldn't read or pronounce the name set above the simple moniker of book shop, as it was written in a combination of languages. Was located in the city of Florene, Alabama a quiet college town on the shores of the Tennessee river. The shop was often busy through fall into the spring with college age magic users, happy to find a place sympathetic to their needs.
Aden was once like them but found a more permanent home at the store as it's researcher and artifact tracker. The shop wasn't owned by either Jamie or Aden, but by a mysterious Fae woman who also used the shop as her sort of home. Jamie had been working there for longer than Aden could remember. Aden had been working in the shop part time since he was sixteen and full time since was eighteen a total of six years seven at the end of the month.
Aden reflected upon all of this, like a personal narrative in his head, as he climbed the stairs to his research desk. As he reached the top stair Jamie called up to him, " hey don't forget those genealogy reports and the artifacts with them the three you're supposed to have done today. They called about them yesterday, and you promised you'd get them done by 3:00 today."
"Yeah yeah I'll get it done," Aden called over his shoulder. "When have I let a customer down before?"
Jamie stood up from behind the counter, "do you want the list? Or can I trust you've learned and will get it done?"
"I'll get it done," Aden said in a mildly offended tone. Strictly speaking he hadn't been the stores research and artifact retrieval guy for long. Point of fact his ex-girlfriend originally held the title before she ceased working at the store. As Aden rounded the corner to walk to his desk he saw a rather tall seeming man with goat horns and a goatee reclining in his chair. Gregor the pooka a great informant as he was a shape changer and a fae. "Good morning Allen and how does this morning fare for you?"
"Ups and downs Aden Ups and downs, but can't that be said for all of life?" Gregory stated. Gregor was an odd pooka, even by pooka standards. With a penchant for waxing philosophical about life before giving any news.
"Hm, indeed," Aden nodded in agreement. "A cup of tea for your morning? Or perhaps you would do me the honor of joining me in enjoying this delightful new pipe tobacco flavor? It's a mint chocolate and I find it to be a deeply relaxing way to start the day."
"I will offer a hearty yes to both." Gregory took a pipe out of the long coat he was wearing. Aden strode over to his desk and removed the long stem pipe he used while working and a jar of tobacco. He filled both his and the pool as bowl before setting a kettle on the wood burning stove settled roughly ten feet from his desk. Aden snapped and the wood of the stove lit.
Points:
Time spent:
IP address:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
141,610 Literary Works • 675,143 Reviews
Allo allo. I am Gryph, and I shall be your reviewer this evening!
If he's sleeping at the desk, I think he's sitting. Otherwise, it totally sounds like he's just kind of laying across the top of the desk, which is hilarious to me, but I don't think the image you're looking for. Also, I'm a bit confused by the second half of that sentence. I think it's literally just due to a typo - "set" instead of "sent"? But as is, it sounds like light coming through a set of curtains.
The way the dialogue was formatted made it kind of hard to follow sometimes. You wanna bump the each new person's speech down to it's own line. Makes it way easier to follow when someone says something.
For example:
See how much easier it is to tell who is doing what?
Another thing to keep an eye out for with dialogue is where to put the commas. So when, you have a line of dialogue with a dialogue tag (she yelled, they cried, etc.), you have put a comma inside the quotations and the period at the end of the full sentence.
See here:
Note where the comma is? As well as the period?
Now, if there's a full sentence going on after the dialogue, swing away with the periods.
These just help a lot for folks reading through, as they create visual shortcuts as to what is happening.
Ooh, nice reveal of some interesting stuff happening. I like the way it was mentioned like it ain't no thang, making it that much more believable as part of the world that the characters would barely notice.
I think you meant "patience" there, since you had "patience" earlier in the paragraph.
While I admire your sneakiness at getting this bit of worldbuilding information into the story, this particular line was a bit clunky. Presumably this is something that they do quite frequently, and they've done it quite a few times before, so I feel like this conversation would have happened much earlier in their workings. This kind of came across as an "as you know" situation, where one character talks to another character about something they both know, just said out loud so that the audience can get some insight. Maybe putting it down as something Aden thinks about as a frustration, but for him to just make a point of saying it out loud kind of pulled me out of the world.
I'm already liking Gregory. He seems like he's gonna be a cool dude.
All in all, I liked this set up. It really seems interesting and I'm excited to see where it goes. I will say there's some punctuation things that could be cleaned up, moving the periods and commas around to their proper places, and maybe a read-through to catch the typos here and there (mostly just the wrong word, probably autocorrected.) But I thought this was some good stuff here!
~Gryph
I like it so far. You need commas in some places but other than that, I like it.
hello. The genre of your work interests me, because "Realistic" and "Fantasy" tend to contradict each other. It'll be interesting to see what you pull off here.
Right, well if this is past tense, I don't see why he'd question whether or not there were customers that time of night. A better way of writing this would be:
So, after reading through this: I will say that the concept is pretty interesting, you definitely have good material to work with. The main character's narration is pretty fun. Sadly, however, this is rather poorly written. Your grammar and styling is quite shoddy, I suggest looking up stuff on comma and sentence structure, or at least use something like Word's grammar checker. Read your writing aloud to make sure your sentences flow together. Not a fan of how quickly you introduced the backstory instead of spreading it out, you really sort of clumped it together in three sentences. You can also do a better job of describing actions -- like instead of just saying, "He went upstairs", say "He marched upstairs, the wooden steps clanging boisterously with each step." Give us more details of what the characters are doing. Overall, it's a nice, interesting concept, but it's not fundamentally sound enough to invoke a strong narrative.