Warning: This work has been rated 16+ for violence and mature content.
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139,276 Literary Works • 672,524 Reviews
This is Nikayla here dropping in for another review on this lovely Review Day! I just can't stay away. You know the drill, lima bean, blah blah blah--LET'S GET STARTED.
Why do we need to know about the static electricity? Seems to be an insignificant detail and I didn't know why it's added in. Is the static electricity from his clothes? His presence? That confused me.
The line in-between the dialogue is one I found to be a little awkward in wording. Just wanted to note that.
There's a lack of the period at the end of this and the sentence falls apart in making sense at the beginning of the comma after the word 'later'.
Instead of 'but that ghost of a smile' I'd suggest 'with that ghost of a smile' or something other than that.
Point is, the diction here is a little more awkward and noticeable than usual. Not going to be pointing out every instance of this anymore because I want to talk about the content of this chapter. Speaking of the content of this chapter, I'm a fan of the sparring that goes on here. That adds another element here. In fact, tiny events that are going on or activities are often great when just developing characters. Keeps talking heads syndrome from happening for the most part because the characters are actually doing something though this isn't a sure-proof avoidance. Have I mentioned that you're awesome with writing fight scenes? Yes, but I'm saying this again. The voice in this chapter is a lot stronger than the last(?) part that I reviewed. I'm not sure which one I complained about the talkativeness in, though this does a lot better than that. The word 'had' and 'was' are used a little excessively in some places? It's not the biggest problem, I just prefer to see strong verbs used when they're able to be.
I don't mean to go for grammar again, but first of all--the first paragraph is quite wonky in wording. Second of all, in the first paragraph here, Kerani notes that the poison is a third of the way there. In the third paragraph, Kerani says that it's a quarter of the way there. Unless there's different math in Canada that makes a quarter bigger than a third, I'm confused by this part.
Second sentence should probably be in italics seeing as this is a thought unless you have reasoning not to? Overall, this chapter is a little different from where I suspected this might go! Nice job on that, though I am hoping that this is in relation to the overarching plot because we haven't gotten that for awhile.
If you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask! I hope I helped and have a great day.
Let's dive in, shall we?
I don't know if this is just me being dumb, but do you mean watched? This sentence as a whole reads a little awkwardly.
ERMARGHERD, RUN KERANI, RUN.
I kind of feel like you need being before dismissive here. At the moment, it reads a little awkwardly.
a small spark of reassurance?
Okay, so hi. Whenever I review one of these chapters, I always feel like the potato left over in a multipack that everyone left until last because it's kinda ugly, and way smaller than the rest. Basically, you always have such brilliant reviews from such brilliant reviewers! I hate just repeating everything others have repeated too, which leaves me even more potato-esque. But I whine about this, like, every time... so enough of that. You wrote this scene very well, and made it feel rushed, energetic, tense e.t.c. which can be tricky. Plus I noticed your reply to Stella's review, that the version we've got here is a rewritten one due to issues with tension. While I didn't see the original, based on this version, I think it's fair to say you've fixed that. I don't know if it was just me being over observant, but I noticed more technical errors, awkward sentences e.t.c. in this part ( I highlighted them above to clear them out for you). It was hardly a major issue, and wasn't distracting or anything, so isn't anything worth stressing over. Plot-wise, I love it. Throwing an assassination attempt into the mix has really stirred things up, and gotten me even more interested in things.
I don't have heaps in regards to critiques, particularly any new ones, though there is one really tiny (probably dumb and irrelevant) nit-pick. When Kerani suddenly stopped the fight and began sprinting for her life, what did everyone else do? I'm currently imagining them just sort of standing around being like hm, weird and just carrying on with their day. Obviously that isn't what they did, but surely some of the guards and servants (and Aryan of course) would react to her suddenly sprinting away? I'm not saying hoards of staff should follow her as she makes her way to the suspected danger, but I'd have thought they would call after her at least, particularly Aryan. We have them clear the path for her, but that's it from them. They kind of just disappear out of existence then. Having one or two run after her, calling her, asking what's wrong e.t.c could further increase the sensation of panic too. Just a somewhat small, dumb thing I noticed
I don't want to mimic the past reviews and resemble a broken record, but there is one thing I agree with that I think is important to bring up. To further my broken recordness, I've mentioned this before, but I sometimes feel a little distant from Kerani. It feels like her emotions aren't fully being explored, and drawn out as they should be. Where I tend to notice this being an issue isn't actually during events, but afterwards. Some scary-ass assassination craziness just happened, and she's just so... chill. I get that she's like that to her brother and co, but once she's alone I kind of want her to have a mini freak out. She does to some degree, but I don't really feel it, y'know?
The way you write is quite third-personesque (if that makes sense), and so when it comes to the degree of emotion required in first-person writing, you do occasionally fall off the mark. I always abide by this ideology: it's better to begin melodramatically and later calm it down, than build on indifference. When you begin with a more distant approach to emotion, everything you do thereafter to add emotion feels like a conscious effort, and it's difficult to distinguish a balance. What I'm basically saying is to just go for it. Even if it means making Kerani blatantly OTT at first, you can always tone it down a lot easier than you can build it up. Least that's how I find it, anywho!
As I said, it's definitely more of an issue when it comes to the aftermath of situations (as opposed to the situations themselves). The emotions won't be as intense as in the aftermath, of course, but they'd still be pretty prevalent.
Critiques and nit-picks aside, I love that we had some more action in this part, and it omits that little whine I had in my last review about a lot of talk with no action. It really is beginning to feel like the plot is thickening, and I'm just as desperate to know what's going on as Kerani is (okay, probs not considering my family's life isn't, like, in danger or anything). As always, you know where to find me if you've got any questions or comments regarding anything
Keep writing,
xoxo Skins
I think the tricky part about her emotions and her reacting to the scene is she's prone to dissociating out of it, so she genuinely doesn't feel anything. She has PTSD and one of the lesser known symptoms of PTSD is losing touch with your emotions. The tricky part is getting that across, that there's something there she's shoving aside, when she doesn't consciously really... realize that's what she's doing.
Trying to get that across is going to be fun
Oh I see, hm, that is tricky. As things progress and we see a pattern emerging in regards to her reactions to stress, it'll probably naturally become more evident. So don't lose all hope!
That's the thing. I don't think it will naturally become more evident. I've gotten this feedback so much that I need to fix it, because unknown symptoms of a wildly misrepresented mental illness are not exactly things you'll pick up on easily!
Hm, true true. Do you acknowledge its existence officially at any point? i.e. a doctor/psychologist/someone says something to her, even just in passing that makes her/us make a link. You could try something like that, something subtle, y'know?
She already knows about it, because the general concept of PTSD is well accepted among guards. I hint at it in 2.4/2.5, but I don't know if it'll be enough... especially since this is such an unknown symptom of PTSD, and by the time it crops up I'm 15k into the novel.
Hey, Rosey! So it has been over a year since I last reviewed Cat Steps. Oops. >> Well, I'll jump in right where I left off! So I haven't reread the reviews below me, pardon if I repeat anything they've said, such-and-such, let's jump into the critique!
This paragraph was...distracting. With how much you skip around with your imagery, a lot of your terms involving elements or parts of nature—air, earth, fog, cold-water-like—I had to reread the paragraph a couple of times to confirm that "yes, this is what the narration is saying". It's not necessarily a problem if it's spread out a bit more, but as it is now, it stopped me in the middle of working up a reading flow.Maybe this is just because I took a year off reviewing this, but coming back to it, the narration feels dry and a little stilted. I looked back over my review before this, and I had commented on this there, too, where you have a lot of "Subject verbed" sentences that really keep a flow from forming. It's especially obvious when you have shorter paragraphs, I think, because the eye keeps moving down and seeing the same thing. I've noticed that when your paragraphs start with dialogue instead of "Subject verbed" narration, it doesn't jump out at me as much. (But then again, having every paragraph start with dialogue would have me critiquing that, haha.)
I'm going to pull a few quotes from the chapter to help me illustrate a few points, just to warn you that this is going to get a little more quote-heavy than I might have been before.
Did you mean "with that ghost of a smile" here? There are a few ways you can fix this, but aside from being an awkward sentence, it feels like it was a sentence that just got chopped off in the middle. I thought I saw another like this while I was reading through, but I can't find it now; that one may have just been me. Keep an eye out for accidental fragments!
This line illustrates a bit of a larger issue I've been seeing as I go back and reread. You have a number of "inanimate object did this" sentences without giving us a sense of who is making the objects do that. Here, it's obvious that Kerani secured her daggers in their sheaths, but it sounds like she started stretching and her daggers just lifted into the air from the ground or something and put themselves back in their sheaths. It's not always a bad narrative choice, but sometimes it can sound awkward, so it might be a good idea to check for that in your writing.
Just a quick comment on repeating "smell" here.
So the poison is getting farther from the room? (I think you meant "quarter of the way from there", or something like it, haha.)
A bit of a run-on here; while I can accept it as Kerani being out of breath, it's awkward to read and pulled me out of the story more than the slightly-off syntax in the stressful narration (which I know Rache already covered, haha).
Overall—I do like what you did with the characters in this part. I like what we got from Kerani, how she interacts with different people in different emotional scenarios, and I like what we got seeing her in her natural environment, stopping poisons from getting to Bahij and his family. Most of what I pointed out in this section was syntax and technical things, so it's not like I'm demanding a full-story rewrite, I just noticed a few awkward parts that I'm worried might repeat themselves in the future.
My main takeaway from this scene was to watch your imagery and how you use it, especially when Kerani is in a more relaxed environment and has more emotional imagery to attend to, and my old friend in these reviews—watch your syntax, of course!
And you know I adore Cat Steps to no end <3 Keep writing!
so i’m a little conflicted about the opening dialogue—on the one hand, the conversation itself is a great bit of interaction and it feels very grounded and real, but the actions going on around it are… i can tell what’s going on, but i had to work to do so, and i think it’s because the ratio of magic description versus physical description was wonky. there was a lot of “empathy! magic!” stuff going on, and that did a fine job of conveying what the characters were feelings and how they were reacting to the conversation, but at the same time it felt a bit talking heads.
i normally don’t mention grammar things, but: "Ihit watch me walk out of the armoury, arms crossed, but that ghost of a smile." this sentence popped at me. a lot.
the talking heads thing ceases to be a problem after that, though, because you’re back to a good magic:physical description ratio.
kerani giving ihit privacy by not digging for his emotions made me smile. it’s not something unexpected from her, at this point, but it’s nice to have it spelled out in the text.
i really! like the descriptions of kerani stretching because they’re infused with so much sensory detail and character while remaining vague enough to not be hand-holdy and feel like padding. and acknowledging the little ways in which she doesn’t belong and GAH. likewise, the beginning of the fight itself flows well; i’m particularly fond of the repetition of “the world shrunk…” since that sells the feeling of familiarity really well.
"Unfortunately for me, those wards required a certain amount of absolute focus on the fight. Focus I could not give when my family decided to park itself in dangers’ path and I had to save them from an avalanche."
this, though… felt jarring and not in the way i think you intended? i mean obviously surprise attacks are supposed to be jarring but this paragraph in particular pushed me out of the narrative, i think because it feels like kerani abruptly stopped, turned to the camera, and went “but something completely unexpected happened!” right before the unexpected thing actually happened.
there needs to be *some* transition, obviously, but i think this one is being too blunt about it?
on the other hand once kerani realizes what’s going on and starts panicking—gahhhh. i love it. things get a little confused description-wise but i think that’s intentional, and if it wasn’t it was definitely a happy accident and um i’m having trouble wording because this is terribly exciting. but the use of fragments and cluttered mix of emotions plus this very panicked-but-logical calculating and mapping thing kerani’s doing… it’s super super effective and gripping to read.
also: the way you describe the physics of sprinting at top speed through the palace is so great, especially when kerani tries to just. stop running.
i do like that there was follow up on the earlier line about the wards requiring absolute focus; it wouldn’t have made sense for kerani *not* to end up injured by dropping everything mid-fight, and while i didn’t miss it while she was running due to panicky tunnel vision, i think the confirmation that she did get cut came at exactly the right time. and in a strangely sweet way? matul is cute.
kerani’s treatment of the servants is interesting mainly because i think this is the first time we’ve seen this aspect of her before? she’s had an emotional stake in her relationships with pretty much every other character she’s interacted with thus far, so seeing her with a pair of servants that she has no ties to and isn’t sure she can trust was… different, but not altogether surprising.
and i’ll always be here for other people taking care of kerani. god knows she deserves it already and we’re only in chapter *two*, which is both satisfying and vaguely terrifying.
*whispers* i’m going to be better about keeping up with this in the future, i swear.
As I said in Chat, I would totally crack my knuckles in preparation for this review, except the noise freaks me out. Gives me the heebie-jeebies, actually, and makes me squirm. My personal nails on a chalkboard, I guess you could say.
Anyway.
I'd say that I'm just dropping in and reviewing this independent of any other chapters or external knowledge, but that's a complete lie. I've read enough Cat Steps and chatted with you enough to know what's going on quite well, if not perfectly so down to the last minute detail.
There were a few sentences that tripped me up whilst reading. I can point them out to you if you care. But it's a rough draft, so I'm not really concerned with those.
Except this one. I must mention this one. When I see a transitive verb without an object, my heart goes out to it and my inner Linguist just goes a bit nutsy.
"Acknowledge" is a transitive verb, but here it has no object. Maybe there's one floating in the nethersphere of Implied Objects, but that ain't good enough. And no, the prepositional phrase you have ("with a wave") is not an object but an adverbial phrase modifying "acknowledge."
Get yo'self an Object.
Alrighty, where was I?
I know what's going on and know this scene from a plot perspective quite well. I know what happened, and what you were trying to illustrate. I know all that theory. But despite that, I didn't care. Or rather, I cared because I know everything going on behind the scenes. I've been watching you as stage manager run around going, "Jalil, you're due on stage in FIVE; where is Servant Girl #2 and the poison prop, hm? Places, people!" for a long time.
And despite that, I still don't care about Kerani from an uncomplicated reader-character relationship.
I read over Stellengestoppt's review and agree with a lot of what she said, particularly in regards to the above sentence. I know you've since edited. I pick out the Syntax://Category_Urgent and stuff. It's like textbook accurate, and you are very much precise.
Buuuuut, it almost reads like third person, and a removed third person at that. If you want her to hide that much from us, you might need to make it third person (have you ever thought about that? Just curious. Do feel as if I've asked this before.)
Because at 1st person, this most intimate of levels, we need to feel her feeling, even if she's feeling nothing because she's stone. Or feel her trying not to feel anything because she wants to be stone. Or feel her feigning being stone.
I want the moment where everything turns to make my heart stop in my chest. The moment where she goes from spar spar spar har har har normal day except for the shoulder to--
Trouble.
The dread, when she worries that she might not get there in time? The anger when people don't get out of her way? The nagging of Nitika and concern behind that? I want those Feels and I want to eat them for breakfast.
Characters, not their occupations, engage readers.
There's a famous quote somewhere, I think by Stephen King, about how [insert famous writer here] could make a ten-page description of 10 plumbing sound fascinating. And I think a similar thing applies here, in that you can have a character with the most boring, uninteresting job in the world (plumbing actually sounds eventful. Let's go with... tax agency data entry), but the character in that job and WHY and whether they like it or love it or want some more of it is all the deal. And the reverse is also true, I'd posit. You can have the most interesting, badass, cool occupation in the world, but without the characters (who I KNOW you've developed) shining through.... cardboard splat.
The other thing I want here is some sense of a wider struggle within her. Her struggling with her work, or her worrying she's not good enough, or her struggling with PTSD and the anxiety. Or her working on improving her counterassassin skills because of a crucial deficit. The whole fatal flaw, hubris, yada yada thing. I just don't see her struggling with anything personal in this, beyond the wounded shoulder.
If Cat Steps isn't about Kerani and her development personally--and if she doesn't have some agency in it all, even in the smallest degree within a male-and-caste-dominated patriarchy--there's not much binding the reader to her, and thus the urgent syntax, and so all your precision doesn't get to shine through.
Have you seen The Black Swan? It's an uber trippy and brilliant movie, but there's this scene. Okay, a series of scenes.
http://youtu.be/bGyEHaMX_Y8
http://youtu.be/bGyEHaMX_Y8?t=5m46s to about 6:50
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvnAz0L9AUI
"Perfection isn't just about control. It's about losing it." Embrace your inner writerly black swan. Let go. Be imperfect. Let the emotion of the characters come through. Ensnare us. Surprise us. Technical perfection is nothing without a little chaos.
It's okay. I promise.
Be brave. Let Kerani come out to play.
And then you'll have us.
Rache
I do like to read.... No to be more realistic i love to read and I said you should I didn't say you have to and how do you know I'm not 14 in the 7th grade but okay.. But like I said before your book is great and I really enjoyed it but I didn't know lidded was a word forgive me If i was wrong. But this book is really good but you should write a lot more because you are doing a great job by writing this awesome book.
There's a "reply" button under each review. You can use that to continue conversation ^^
It's great you love to read! I was just pointing out this book is meant for an age group older than you are, so I actually should not shorten the vocabulary at all based on your personal reading level. It's meant for a higher reading level in the first place.
I am glad you enjoyed it, though! And I hope you nurture your love of writing on YWS! ^^
thank you
I have a question, First what happened to her or his shoulder and shouldn't you have put stuck out my tongue I mean in quotes? Now for criticism after "I groaned" there should probably be a comma or there should be a longer sentence. Is lidded even a word? Now I know I know I'm only in the seventh grade and it is kind of hard for me to process these kind of words because like I said before , I'm only in the 7th grade so it is very hard so I think you should kinda make the words like kind of shortened or summed up. If you have any questions or concerns just please ask me
~Chanta~
Hey!
First things first, I'm not going to tone down the vocabulary. This novel isn't meant for seventh graders, so it'd be a disservice to my primary audience (14 to 18 year olds) to shorten my vocabulary. When it comes to questions about what words mean and if they're actually words, you can answer those questions fairly easily by simply googling them. If you'd done that for "lidded", then you'd see it is, indeed, a word. Reading books outside of your age range is a fantastic way to improve your vocabulary and make reading in general easier.
Second, I'm wondering why you think the last sentence needs to be longer? It's a complete sentence as it is, so a comma won't work, and I'm not sure how else to lengthen it.
Thirdly, I'm not sure why you don't know my protagonist's gender, seeing as I refer to her quite plainly as "Aunt Cat", which indicates a girl.
Fourth, this is chapter 2.2. There are six other parts previous to this. She gets her shoulder injured in chapter 1.2, a full five parts earlier. I'm not going to explain why she received an injury every single time I reference it, and when you're reading later chapters, some things are going to be not explained simply because it'd be bad practice to repeat an already very well established cause every time it came up.
Thanks for the review.
So you're gonna get two reviews here, Darlin'. First I'm going to respond to your response, though, because I smell a problem I once really struggled with as well.
Gather around the campfire for story time!
When Rachael was a wee lass, about 18, she was in her first (and only) creative writing course in college. The latter half of the course was dedicated to out-of-class-reading and in-class-critiquing of our classmates' work, and the first several classes were me (spoiled by YWS) ogling at the range of grammatical atrocities fellow students at a fairly prestigious university could commit. IT WAS BAD.
And needless to say, by the time it was my turn, I was feeling really smug. My punctuation was flawless, of course, and everyone was all, "Dang, wow." Later, I read the comments they had written and fed my ego some more.
But this one guy in my class. His name was James. He was a senior taking funsies credit. I remember this, along with what he looks like and what chair he sat in in the classroom EVEN NOW--he didn't like my story. He said why and made his case and wasn't being mean or anything at all, just honest.
But ohhhh I was pissed. And I raved at my best friend, a fellow writer, at how everyone liked it except this one idiot who just *obviously* didn't know anything. I was vehement about this because I didn't want to consider that he might be right.
Thankfully my friend gave me a virtual slap. Because a story is a contractual effort between you and your reader, and that means when your reader doesn't understand something, or doesn't like something--it means you have to consider, truly consider, the possibility that the reader is right. Even when it means swallowing your pride.
It never commits you to taking a reader's suggestions, particularly one reader's opinion, or saying that said reader is right. But you do have to consider the possibility that you're wrong every time. Moreover, you have to be objective with yourself and see what's prideful stubbornness and what's actually For The Good Of The Novel.
My two cents.
Hey Rosey! Stella here!
Sticking tongues out always bothers me in dialogue because it's actually an action that takes so long, as opposed to making an expression. I think we forget that because of all the tongue-face emojis we use!
This whole exchange befuddled me. What's zero? His confidence? Or her reopening the wound? What time? What? I think it just needs to read smoother.
Tense slip. Also, would read better as one sentence I think.
Is... isn't she going to warm up a bit first?
What I don't get is, if he's so concerned about her shoulder, why is he sparring with her? Wouldn't he refuse? Or at least go easy on her?
This all seems very tense, and a critical point. Make it sound like it. Short snappy sentences. Emotional input. Description.
Did she have it *made* for this purpose? Did she go down to the glassblower and request it? If not, what was its original purpose?
or could even be? Would even be? Either way, the tense is wrong.
Still kind of rude and a massive invasion of privacy. I'm surprised Nitika is not more annoyed by this.
Wait why has she gone to lean on a chair? Also, "wait" not "weight."
Okay, I think that my main issue with this chapter is that there's no tension. What begins as a normal day spirals into relative chaos. That's cool, that's a solid chapter, and the attempted assassination is a good plot point! But, there's no urgency, there's no risk as the reader is reading it. We don't get a sense of panic or even really annoyance from Kerani about what has happened - in fact, the only time we get irritation is with Bahij himself. I think that there's a few things you need to do to counteract this:
- more emotion. Let us know what Kerani is feeling throughout the whole thing. Tough nuts are interesting in fiction only if the reader is still able to identify and relate with them. And I feel like we don't really connect with Kerani in this scene, because there's too much explaining going on. If I found out that there was an assassination attempt that I almost didn't stop, I'd be exhausted. I'd be scared. We get the sense that Kerani is somewhat, by sitting and having a cup of tea. But the mood of the moment is suffocated by explanations of tea and assassinations and flashbacks and where she learns and what she does while she's healing her wound. Draw it all back. Get back to the character root.
- more action. I want to see her sprinting from the training rings. I want to see the rooms she passes, the people she nearly steamrolls, the stairs she takes two at a time. I want to see her yell and pounce on the server. I want to see her holding the tray at arm's length like it's a bomb that's about to go off. I want to see the action. You're telling us the story, so tell it. We have imaginations, but we need a little help.
- fewer infodumps. I feel like this is what lost the second half of this chapter to me. There's a ton of infodumps here. One or two are fine, but it's one after the other after the other. And a lot of them - a lot of them we're not interested in, and we can pick up from the dialogue. Want to talk about tea poisonings? Have them chat about it, or have Kerani explain it to Bahij! Want to talk about how you're going to test it? Have Kerani and Nitika discuss it, and nix the added paragraph explaining it. Try and infodump as little as possible, and get back to the story. The rest is, after all, extraneous.
Hope I helped, drop me a note if you need anything!
-Stella x
... Yep there's every single problem I have with this scene all in one review.
Thanks!
And I have now rewritten nearly this whole thing for some more tension. Hope it's improved!