please delete post

Thanks for the edit.

I must admit, speech tags are my bane. I'll have to go through and re-work the point-of-view thing, which as you pointed out is choppy.

This is the link to the novel.

novel.php?id=195

Thanks for the review!

-Voxina

Well, seeing as this is from the middle of a piece and not the beginning, I was a little lost. My knowledge of fantasy carried me through to the end, but because I don't know what's happened up to this point, I'm not going to comment on anything story-related, really.

Just some tech/mechanical stuff.

First, I think you need to decide on a narrative. As far as I can gather, you were going for a third-person limited sort of deal. But, you switch it every few paragraphs, sometimes within a paragraph. One minute, we're following V (can't remember her full name), then G, then Rosh, then G, then V, then Rosh, etc. And it's incredibly confusing.

You could do a true omniscient and get in everything--or swing the other direction and head for third person objective. But, omniscient can get clunky and slow, which is usually not what you want for a climax or modern fantasy in general, and third person objective is not what you have going here at all, so I suspect you don't want that.

So, evaluate the perspective each of your characters has on the situation and choose one to be a narrator for a good while; if you want to switch, use a line break to signal your reader, but be aware that excessive switching can grate on readers' nerves. After deciding, weed through the text and make sure everything noted is something that the chosen one can sense, or something that the chosen one knows. The idea with limited is that the reader knows only what the character knows.

Also on that note, it helps build character if you make sure that what you're writing via your chosen narrator is actually what that character would sense/deem important. Which is not always what you the writer want to share, or what is actually important (some poor writer in the world is stuck with a shallow, mindless drone who thinks of nothing but the colors of people's clothing, I'm sure)

Next, dialogue formatting.

The two types of dialogue tags, which assign a bit of speech to a speaker, are direct and indirect.

With a direct tag, you the writer say that Joe Bob is emitting a sound and that the sound he's emitting is "This." In other words, you have a speaker, some sort of verb that means to make speech, and everything inside the quotation marks is the direct object. And because the stuff enclosed inside the quotations, no matter how long or short, is part of the grammar of the sentence, it's punctuated as such:

"I hate you," he said.
He said, "I hate you."
"I hate you!" he yelled.
He yelled, "I hate you!"
"I hate you?" he asked.
He asked, "I hate you!"

With indirect tags, the stuff inside the quotation marks is NOT part of the grammar of the sentence. The connection between the speaker and the stuff spoken is, well, indirect. Implied. A product of an unspoken agreement between writer and reader.

"I hate you." He spat at her feet and walked away.
He spat at her feet. "I hate you!"
Etc., etc.

Some people try to get creative with their tags, usually because some English teacher mentioned that you should only ever use 'said' once. I'm of the school of thought that the less pretentious the tags, the better. But even so, one cannot physically tremble out "Please" (to use an example from your piece) or countless other things.

I hope all of that made sense. Please tell me if it didn't and I'll explain better.

Also, I'd like to see this from the beginning if you haven't already posted that up.

Rach