Published November 25, 2012
Prologue Part 1: A half moon glowed on smooth granite boulders, turning them silver. Silent rain fell upon the forest and covered it in a canopy of mist. The silence was broken only by the steady thumping of paws on the dead ground. The fog seemed to shudder, And then parted to reveal a she-cat loping along the flat ground carrying a small black bundle of fur. Her breath came in short fatigued gasps as she continued bounding along the rocky terrain, Occasionally leaping over small boulders or other nuisances. Eventually, the crystalline luminance of the moon brought her to a halt in front of a forest. She gently set down her burden, And lingered at the edge, scanning the forest as best as she could through the heavy rain. Dark shadows in the forest began to tease her imagination and pricked at her nerves. She did not like traveling by night, ever since she met him. Him. She was Suddenly flooded by images of hungry flames and rivers of blood that swept over her mind like a veil of despair. The Black Warrior, That was what she called him, For she could no longer say his name, Just The Black Warrior. The Black Warrior with an even blacker heart. The Black Warrior she had given herself entirely to, The Black Warrior that enjoyed feeling the life fade out of his victims, The Black Warrior that had brought an entire Clan to it's knees, The Black Warrior that had taken away everything that she cared about. Everything, except for the ball of black fur that she had been carrying for almost a moon, Just to keep it away from him, And the blood and destruction that always followed him. His sickly sweet voice rang in her ears. She did her best to shake away the Dark, dark thoughts and took a deep breath. She had to focus on the task at hand. The she-cat tenderly picked up her bundle, and leaped into the forest before she could think of hesitating any longer.
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138,455 Literary Works • 672,123 Reviews
Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night(whichever one it is in your part of the world),
Hi! I'm here to leave a quick review!!
Anyway let's get right to it,
Hmm, well, this was a really interesting piece here, it looks like we have a rather powerful prologue going on here, with what appears to potentially be our protagonist there trying to run away from or somehow fix up some kind of pretty dangerous sounding situation that was brought to this tribe here.
We can certainly see a lot of emotional turmoil on the part of the main character there, because it looks like they ended up falling in love with whoever or whatever was that caused some sort of major chaos to their tribe and seems to have caused quite a bit of death and destruction there. It creates a really powerful effect there to see the effects that these past actions seem to have on our protagonist here, and through all of this you get a really good sense of how horrible this person must have been here.
All in all, it ends off a neat little cliffhanger too there, and as far as I can say, this seems to be a pretty intriguing and pretty effective little prologue here. It covers pretty much all the basics that you want from a prologue, and overall, it was a pretty interesting read here. It certainly makes you want to read on and find out more here.
Aaaaand that's it for this one.
As always remember to take what you think was helpful and forget the rest.
Stay Safe
Harry
Shows great promise. I have problems with random caps as well haha. I read the series way back when and enjoyed it. Everyone loves a case of 'evil father' if that is in fact what that little bundle has. one thing to clarify is whether she'd been carrying the bundle like she is, in her mouth, or in her belly. one month old kittens are still at a stumble-y age but are starting to be playful. My mother cat had trouble moving them around at that age but you mention she was fatigued so yeah... I'm very interested in the progress of this story, since i do enjoy cats...they remind me of myself, how ironic my last names Howle.
Hey there, MichaelRanOutOfUsers,
So, I reviewed this piece earlier today, and then the site crashed and took out a massive chunk of database, so here I am to review it all over again! Because of this, I apologise if it seems a bit rushed at all - do feel free to message me for clarification on anything. You say in your blurb bit that you're looking to improve your writing, so I'm going to try and focus on things I think you could make better, and also how you can do that.
The first thing that strikes me about this piece is that it's all one big block of text, despite the fact there are a lot of things going on in it. Paragraphs would be a very good thing here; not only do they break the text up visually (which is especially important on a computer screen, where walls of text are hard to read), but it breaks it up semantically, so your reader is subtly warned of changes in the story. As a general rule, you should start a new paragraph when you change time, place or person (by which I mean the person who is the focus of the writing at that point). If you'd like me to come up with some examples of that, just drop me a message and I'll try to think of some illustrative ones.
The second thing I notice is that there a lot of random capitals in here. I don't mean the ones on "Black Warrior" or "Clan" - those are clearly supposed to be names of specific things, so that's fine. But elsewhere, you have capitals on words like "Occasionally" and "Suddenly" in the middle of sentences, and that breaks up the sentence flow, making it harder to read. You don't need to capitalise after commas, just after full stops (and exclamation and question marks).
Finally, the last thing I'll talk about is 'info-dumping'. Info-dumping is where you tell the reader all the information all in one go. You've done this a bit, especially in the second half - you tell us what the character is thinking, and who the Black Warrior is, and why the character is running in a small chunk of text. Info-dumping is a bit overwhelming for the reader, and often makes them stop reading. What's better is to give only what's absolutely necessary at the time. In this case, I think that you could leave things out to great effect - if you don't tell us straight away about the Black Warrior, you can build up a great deal of intrigue in the reader's mind. "Why is she running? Why is she scared?" This will encourage the reader to keep going, and you can bring up the information later on.
I think that's all I have to say for now; if you have any questions, or if you'd like me to do a spelling-and-grammar nitpick, please feel free to drop me a message and I'll see what I can do.
Cadi x
Amazing! I've been trying to write a "Warrior Cats" story myself but, this has to be the closest thing to ever touch the series. I really think you have a great path as an author! Check out my stories if you have time. Amazing, again.