Attention! I will start every chapter with a quote and whoevers perspective it is in!
Chapter 7 - Muluth
“Me, I’m dishonest and you can always trust a dishonest man to be dishonest. Honestly, it’s the honest ones you’ve got to watch out for because, with an honest man, you can never predict when they’re about to do something incredibly… stupid.” -Captain Jack Sparrow
Thank you @Feltrix for the quote! If you have a quote, go to my forum Quotes!
“You need to relax Muluth. She is fine. She has Auggie and Claric, J and Sully.” Gram said while eating a tart.
I sat in front of her, the both of us still in the sunroom. My eyes frantically searched the room, hoping for some sign that either one would appear. Either Jesse or Nat.
My long nails picked at the cushion, the fluffy stuffing coming out of it in big chunks.
“No.” I snapped back while I continued to pick at the cushion.
“Yes. You are my daughter, Muluth. I cared for you, I always have. But you, after Jesse died, you were never there for your own daughter. Ever. At least Mack didn’t live long enough to see you fall.”
I sat on the small chair, fuming silently. My father was human, my mother is a meta. I knew from the beginning Nat would be one because of Jesse. He is a full meta-a dragon, like her.
The sound of bare feet entering the room made my head up. I saw Auggie walk through the door, his face showing worry.
I ran toward him and without warning, slapped him.
With shocked eyes, he spoke. “What in the Keeper's name was that for?” He said while prowling around the snapdragons.
Tilting my head, I picked a flower. It screamed in response to dying. I only smiled.
“Why are you smiling?” Auggie asked, rubbing the side of his face.
“It screamed,” I said while gesturing to the flower.
Gram slowly shook her head.
“You promised you would wait another year, until she was twenty. But no. You and the other Keepers allowed her Calling day to come sooner. And all of you guessed about her being a full meta. All of you.
“I wanted this hidden from her. She already has been through too much and now, now she has a whole new world to deal with. She doesn’t know that Jesse is still alive, does she? And no, I do not know where he is Augustus.” I lashed at them, Auggie’s eyes widening in response to me saying that Jesse was still alive.
“But you know, don’t you?”
He cleared his throat, his knuckles whitening. He slowly shook his head.
“Fine, be that way while your niece is falling apart!” I screamed at him.
Auggie’s head snapped toward me, his face now inches from mine. His breath was hot and smelled of sweet wine.
“You know nothing about your daughter. Nothing. At least me and Jesse have been keeping an eye on her since you sent her to that prison. At least we know to let her grow, to let her know what she and Claric will become. At least Jesse made sure that she would have a safe place to be.
“And Ripper? When Nat comes back here, if she ever wants to, we will protect her from the people there at all cost.”
Auggie stormed out of the room, Gram staring at me in disappointment. Then she got up and followed Auggie.
I ran my hands through my hair in frustration. This wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t. It was Gram and Auggie's fault. They were the ones that made the decision behind my back to let Nayleth go to that world. She shouldn’t be there. She should be here with me, happy, calm.
I loved Jesse. I never will stop and I know why he can’t come back, why I can’t go there.
Auggie and Gram were talking to one another. I could see through the glass. Auggie was mad and Gram was keeping her cool.
Then, after about five minutes, they came back out.
He sat in front of me, his head between his legs. His breath was ragged and he seemed sickly. He needed to head back to Intermundos.
“Fine. Say hi but nothing else. We have to go soon, this world is taking its toll on us. ” Auggie whispered ever so slightly.
Before I could answer, hands lifted my face up and I saw him.
“Hey Love. How you been?” Jesse said, his classic smile as bright as before.
I wrote this rather quickly and I am deeply sorry if there are a lot of mistakes but I wanted to get this out and I ran out of time, as my mom was picking me up.
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140,533 Literary Works • 673,403 Reviews
Hi, Flumadiddle. Happy Review Day to you! What a perfect time to get up to date with this story.
Blue text = suggested changes.
Nitpicks
Commas! Before! Names! I will nag about this for however long is necessary. The problem with missing out the commas is that it causes confusion. Compare the meaning of these two examples:
"Will you help Jenny?" = Asking someone if they're going to help Jenny with something.
"Will you help, Jenny?" = Asking Jenny if she will help with something.
I'm not just trying to get you to follow this convention for the sake of it. Missing out a comma can drastically alter the meaning you're trying to convey. In this instance, missing the comma out makes it seem like they're asking someone else to help Muluth relax, not that they're telling Muluth herself to relax. It changes the sense. So remember your commas!
1) Here comes another routine nag. What have I said before? No closing dialogue with full stops. If you've got a dialogue tag after it, the speech should be closed with a comma, or an exclamation mark or question mark if appropriate. You make this error throughout the piece, so I'll leave it up to you to correct.
2) You've just mentioned that she's picking at the cushion, so there's no reason to say it again. It just feels repetitive.
If you're going to slip some exposition in here, you need to do it more smoothly. This feels disjointed. There's nothing really to prompt her to bring it up.
You don't need to say 'he spoke' when you say 'he said' a line later. Try not to surround your dialogue with too much information. It slows it right down.
Who is 'he'? Auggie? Why has he got his head between his legs? That's a very strange image.
Overall Thoughts
1) I've not been as thorough with nitpicks as I might have been, purely because this piece is going to need quite a bit of revision. Getting into the nitty-gritty of grammar isn't really that useful until you have the shape of the chapter down. You do stumble on expression a lot, and you're still making routine dialogue errors, so try and pay attention to those.
2) It does show that this was written quickly. It's really quite rushed, and I was very confused for most of it. I've gathered that Muluth is Nayleth's mother and she's apparently worried about Nat discovering the truth about herself, but characters dart in and out of the scene so randomly that it's hard to follow the main thread of the chapter. I don't understand why Muluth yells at Auggie about Nat 'falling apart'. I don't get why Jesse shows up so suddenly after presumably being gone for about a decade. It's all much too sudden. It needs a much longer build-up. The reveal that Jesse is alive should be a real plot twist, but it's introduced so clunkily that it didn't really resonate with me.
3) You often forget to put dialogue tags on dialogue, particularly towards the end. This makes it tough to follow who is saying what.
4) I'm quite intrigued by Muluth's character. She seems unsettled and sadistic (the exchange about the screaming snapdragon is probably the best bit of the piece), but she does also appear to care about her daughter. It's an odd contrast. A more gradual chapter would allow for much fuller exploration of her character. Everything happens too quickly for me to really get a hold on her at the minute.
5) As I've mentioned in previous chapters, you never seem to change your narration style with each different perspective. Muluth tells the story in exactly the same way that Griffin and Nayleth do - there's nothing about how she writes that feels unique. Mastering different voices is a really difficult part of multi-narrator stories, and it can be very exposing of a writer's limitations. I want to see you put a lot more thought into differentiating your characters' writing styles, because when they all speak in the same way, I wonder what the point of chopping between them is.
I'll call the review here. Not your best chapter, but that is to be expected given that you wrote it so quickly. I'd definitely recommend returning to this, slowing the pace down, and allowing for a much more gentle development towards Jesse's appearance at the end. The chapter has the potential to be a really pivotal moment in the story.
Keep writing!
~Pan
Jimmy here.
Yo.
Thought I would pop on by and give this work a little review.
So, I did a quick read over your previous chapters before reviewing this, emphasis on short, so if I make any egregious lore errors, please forgive me.
Before I get going, my disclaimer. I have the grammar talents of a boy raised by wolves, so if you need help there, I'm afraid I can't help ya. Also, somewhere down the line, I lost the filter that is supposed to go over my mouth, so if I say anything offensive just ignore it.
Time to do this.
1) Sadly, it seems I started on a kinda transitionary chapter, so I don't know if there is a whole lot of significant issues to point out. However, my first suggestion is one you probably already are doing as I write this, but add a little more detail here and there. It was written quickly so I'm not saying this to make ya feel bad but I would have loved a little more information about the scene and what is going on.
2) Now, no doubt I am missing a lot of content coming into the story this late. One thing I did pick up on (and I don't know if any other review covered this) was what exactly is "The Ripper"? It sounds like it is a personal name or the name of a machine, but I gathered it was some sort of asylum. My advice is to add some tag that makes it easily identifiable as a location or institution.
3) I liked the early interactions between Gram and Muluth. I would love to see that dynamic expanded on, be it here or somewhere else. The mother who is conflicted between love and disappointment at her daughter like Gram can add excellent depth to the character
4) One of the things I noticed overall in each of your works was how fast the pace moved. Important things seem to happen one after the other with minimal downtime. I would slow it down a little, have "uninteresting" things (relatively, of course) like dialogue or actions that aren't directly related to the story or something. This makes the more important moments, the ones you really want to have an impact, come out more by contrast.
5) Names. This is a personal thing, but it always bothers me when a plethora of the main characters all have incredibly unique names, and the rest of the world doesn't. Don't get me wrong, I love the names, but I would go all the way if you want to do crazy names. If everyone has crazy names, then everything wild fits better. I mean, nothing screams "Hi I am the main character!" more than a crazy name. (Besides anime characters with crazy hair who sit by the window.)
6) You mix exposition and internal thoughts a bit. In an ideal world, this doesn't happen cause the character knows these things already, but this is a book, and it would make no sense if that were how the story worked. Instead, it is best if you can mix internal thoughts and exposition in a way that gives the illusion that the two are the same.
Basically, what I am getting at looks something like this.
"I sat on the small chair, fuming silently. My father was human, my mother is a meta. I knew from the beginning Nat would be one because of Jesse. He is a full meta-a dragon, like her."
Everything after "My father" seems likes it is just explaining things to the reader rather than giving the reader a peek into Muluth's mind. You want to phrase this not as if she is explaining it to someone but more as if she is talking to herself. For example,
"I sat in the small chair fuming silently. Just cause Dad was a human and Mom was a meta doesn't mean he has anything to do with this. It was inevitable that Nat would be a meta, just like Jessie is. Now she had to be dragged into this world too. She's not ready."
Something like that sets up the following actions Muluth takes and still has the same effect of transmitting the information to the reader, but in a such a way that they may not even notice.
7) On that note, humanizing your characters via internal thoughts is an excellent way for the reader to learn more about who the character is as a person; what they think, what they worry about, how they react to different things, etc. That is one of the perks of first-person. Abuse it.
8 ) Adding more dialogue would be great, but that is a personal thing. I usually do script writing, so I deal in almost exclusively dialogue. I find that it is a great way to build more character development between different characters at the same time. Even if it is a few more back and forths, more dialogue would significantly increase drama and the such. Plus it is a great way to get the characters shoes.
Welp, there is not much more to say. I hope I didn't piss ya off in anyway, but sorry if I did.
On to some positives,
1) You got a good idea, and are doing an excellent job executing it. Despite what it may sound like, I am incredibly impressed with how mature your writing style is. If your bio is correct, then it is some of the best work by someone so young that I have seen. Far better than I could've done at that age.
2) Metas, Dragons, and the like! Not usually something I am super into, but I find your story quite engaging! Keep it up! And please please add more lore! I want to learn more about the world these people are in.
3) There is so much potential here! You have a good setting, good characters, and a limitless potential for character development. I am interested in reading more.
Alright does it for me. As for a quote, hm.....
May I recommend the quote in my pic?
"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes." from Catcher in the Rye. I know it seems silly, but I always find meaning in it.
I hope this all helped, even if just a little. Let me know if you want me to do any further reviews or when a new chapter comes out (or both), so I can keep up with your progress.
再见,
Jimmy
A laughing man
CATCHER IN THE RYE IS MY FAVORITE NON SERIES BOOK. Using that quote for chapter nine. I am just about to post chapter 8. I would love for you to follow along with Nayleth and Griffin! And thank you, it did help!!
@DemonGoddess @LordTachanka @DarkPandemonium @Irislillygray @Steggy