CHAPTER ONE
You start life mewling and your parents’ first goal thereafter is to shut you up. Absalone couldn’t help but feel that was unfortunate. Sure, the noise was terrible, but he was quite tired of being surrounded by stone automatons. Then again, his parents died a gory death while taking the town’s taxes to the baron when he was young. Their cart slid off an incline, ending with his parents impaled and mangled and him only bruised and covered with blood, an inheritance of only two lame horses and a shack as insult to injury. His parents didn’t quite have time to insure he didn’t mewl like a babe when he was stabbed, literally or metaphorically, or otherwise harmed.
He didn’t know how old he’d been when his parents died, but he’d probably been three or four and, yet, he remembered the fall well. He remembered it as vividly as he remembered almost starving on the streets afterwards; living off of food and coins tossed at him and the kindliness of his neighbors that insured he didn’t lose his meager inheritance. He’d always be thankful for the people of his village, even if one of the few things he’d forgotten was all of them. He’d always remember eating the stallion his parents had left to him, only to be blessed with the mare he’d put off eating dropping two fine gray colts in spring. He would remember building a cart from scrap wood and making tack from the horse skin he’d kept from the stallion and stolen metal from the blacksmith. He remembered slaughtering the mare, salting the meat, and keeping her hide as a cover for the cart. He remembered hooking up the colts-turned-stallions to a macabre cart half-formed with the hides of their parents, driven by the man who’d killed them, and filled with the salted, hacked muscle and bone of their mother’s carcass. He remembered leaving the village of his parents, never to return until the name of it blurred in his mind like something seen in murky water. He remembered being stabbed in the back by a road-robber, and slitting the man’s throat, and crying over the would-be thief like a babe.
He certainly remembered realizing he hadn’t used a knife to kill the man.
He remembered that night, more vividly than anything else, with the sky starlit above him, the forest floor dappled with moonlight, and his horses, now white as the moon and tied to a tree, sleeping on their feet, the one he called Crask talking in his sleep as per usual. He could remember sleeping under his coverlets of badger and rabbit fur and horse skin and the lanky silhouette of the robber, what he thought to be an illusion of nighttime shadow. He remembered hot breath on his neck, the harsh burn of the knife, and then the oh-so-sudden feel of slick blood on his hands and the taste of it in his mouth.
He remembered killing a wolf the next day with a wave of his hand.
He remembered being picked up by an old wizard, that name lost to him now as well. He did remember the wizard was a man with gnarled hands, a white beard, and words that almost always made no sense either out of a forced enigmatic nature or them being spoken in an unknown dialect. The man had claimed to be drawn to Absalone because of the strength of Absalone’s magic.
Absalone remembered learning a few things, and then leaving the old wizard when he saw him turn a young girl into an apple tree for a fee for a peasant family with too many mouths to feed.
The rest of Absalone’s life had mostly been spent the same way. It had insofar been patterned by tragedy, his own soft nature, and running. Running until he was bought by House Amondsham, bought by the betrayer and brother-killer, Lord Amondsham, and kept as a pet, no different from the jackal, the hot-blooded fine horses, or Roshanak--all bought from across the sea from a country of barren land, each horse costing more than the dark beauty, Roshanak, Lord Amondsham’s imported wife. And probably more than Absalone himself, he supposed.
All in all, it left Absalone sitting in the tavern, knocking back ale and wishing what he drank was far stronger. He’d lived for maybe twenty summers now; he needed it.
Hi! My apologies for taking forever on this. I've sat down and tried to write at least two times now (this being the third) but at least it means I've thoroughly read the piece so I should be able to give you lots of advice!
I think the casual use of 'sure' to start the sentence is really at odds with your language, such as 'automatons'. You've also got the double uncertainty with 'quite' and this uncertainty contrasts with the certainty of the previous sentence! A little is okay but a lot is too contradictory.Specifics
1. That first sentence is clunky. I like the thoughts behind it, but as it stands it's not working so well. It may be the use of mewling or the uncertainty of where 'you start life' could be going. I don't know. But something's off in that beginning part.
2.
3. Absalone vs he. You throw his name in at the beginning there, but then he's he for ages with no reminder of his name to the point I forget. It's a hard name. Then when you bring it back in, it's in nearly every sentence. You need to work on getting a better balance.
Style
This one's going to be a long point so get cosy and listen up. There's a lot of telling going on here; I'm sure I don't have to tell you that. Sometimes this style works. You grab a character and you spend a chapter telling us who they are and how they came to be. But. More often than not it doesn't either because the character isn't of enough interest or the style isn't engaging enough. At the moment it feels like you're piling information up on my desk and I didn't come here for a history lesson. Why do I care about these horses or the parents?
I like some of the details here. I like the wry humour that the last horse gave birth to two colts so he's glad he didn't eat her. But! I find little of interest in the magic when it's introduced or more than a passing curiosity for anything because I feel like you're trying to teach me stuff. Like I've come in a day late on a film marathon and now you're telling me what I've missed. And it might have been the best day of films ever, but an hour's conversation won't make me love it because I wasn't there.
I hope this is making sense! Basically my number one tip for this chapter is to decide which parts you can't live without and then give us them in a more dramatised way. Either have him telling someone about his early life so we have some extra action going on and we can have interruptions to build suspense - if you've ever read The Princes Bride, that book's an awesome example. The other option you've got is to murder the persona's voice. And I mean in a good way. If you've got a strong voice, something that melts butter on the tongue or has so many barbs I can't get disentangled - then you've got me. You can give me all the history lessons you want and I'll stay. The dark and gritty voices work well for this, with just enough cynicism and hint of something good to come that you'll stay through the back story.
Basically, be careful about giving so much backstory in your first chapter. This is your only opportunity to grab the audience because if you don't grab them now, they'll be gone by the time the story gets started. Later a reader is more inclined to accept a paragraph or two of pure telling, but be careful in the beginning.
Overall
I could probably say a couple more specific things. One of them would be to give Amondsham another name because when you're using unusual names, people will be thinking in their heads 'that A-something dude' for at least the first chapter or two. Having two that start with the same initial introduced in chapter one is tough on them. Let them get familiar with one A-name before you give them another! You're not the only one to make this mistake. Published authors do it all the time and it's not a deal breaker. I spent at least a couple of chapters confusing Egwene and Elayne in the Wheel of Time series. Maybe that's why I liked Nynaeve best right from the start; she was easy to distinguish.
Alright! I'll read the next chapter soon and hopefully build on my thoughts as I go
I'll be in touch again soon (hopefully sooner this time)
Heather xxx
Hey Cas!
~ People tend to use 'feel that' as a phrase. "Absalone couldn't help but feel that he was a target", for example. But he feels "that was unfortunate", so you need to 'that's.I thought I'd attempt to return the favor of your review, now that you've posted a piece that is not completely outside my range. I vaguely remember giving you a poetry review, and, well, it was probably pretty obvious that I am naive when it comes to poetry and poetry reviews.
~ I'm not sure what you mean by this. At first I thought you meant that you'd castrated them, and then used an improper term (correct being gelding, of course), but once I read it a few times I thought you might mean that the colts grew into stallions. You should rephrase to make your meaning clearer.
~ The horse was *talking* in his sleep? O.o
Maybe nickering, or something would be better...
~~~
Okay!
I liked this chapter of your story. It was a bit short, but it was a nice start. It was nice and simple, no fancy imagery, and showed a brief glimpse into your character's past. I would like to see a bit more about Absalone, but you've succeeded in capturing my attention. I am already intrigued with this man, and I intend to read further.
Keep writing!
~Shady