First impressions and initial thoughts….so far
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I have to agree, while it’s interesting the book needs some more umph! Also a few things that seemed missing.
-in second book when Tom bonds with Tamarin to become her anchor we never did here the two of them discuss there contract and what it means for both parties
– waiting to see characters like Marcus the immortal, and N the sage of worlds, tho if it’s in the missing 20% then ok.
– there wasn’t much interaction between Tom and Rupert
There’s other things but will wait after I re-read and go over it in case missed something or misread something. Read the alpha late last night after work was already tired but couldn’t miss this. So I maybe mistaken by somethings. (Also found d some things misspelled but will put up later).
Cool….history repeats, that’s the importance of doing a beta.
With book 1 there was no beta, but I had 2 or 3 readers commenting and what was practically an infinite amount of time of writing/rewriting, where I’d go away for months and then come back with fresh eyes.
Trying to do that on a 12 to 18 month cycle is essentially impossible.
Iskerus and Barbarus have more of an impact / character progression than Randolf. Randolf’s only scene is meeting Damien when he returns and revealing that he always knew Exador was an archdemon.
Edit: But I’ll wait on your write up their conflicts that they wanting to resolve. Randolf had zilch conflict.
i found reading the book up to the D’Orcing tedious. We have a lot of scenes that are repetitive (Inferno ship gets shoot at by Mountain Doom, Report to Tom about the attack.) and irrelevant stuff. (124 inferno) Generally there are a lot of times the characters talk about a whole lot of nothing.
After spending some time recharging mana overnight and thinking about my first pass of the Alpha – here is a question for all the other alpha readers…
Does the use of the Time Periods and aligning scenes to that enhance the book??
I think the introduction of the time periods and aligning the scenes has resulting in all the “small” scenes that I mentioned previously, and a lot of the jumping about in POV. A lot of them seem to be a quick peek in time & place on characters in different planes / areas without achieving some sort of goal or dealing with a situation that advances the plot.
Thoughts????
Randolf is mostly sitting it out; should have added that.
The problem is, I can’t give all the characters all the time they deserve in a single book, so sometimes they have to sit it out.
Pathologic, agred, many of the short scenes have been an issue for many, much ado about not much. So those will have to get reviewed/redone/eliminated/consolidated.
So, for the “sitting it out” characters, rather than making a scene from their POV perhaps it could be re-written from the POV of one of the more major characters and the sitting it out person reveals what needs to be know from their eliminated POV?
I think a LOT of scenes could be reworked to be from another main POV and have those old POV reworked so the character is secondary and doesn’t detract from our mains.
i think some of the issues with these (sitting out) characters are causing the book to feel like it has reduced in scope, what i mean in where book 1 and 2 felt like it was formed of multiple of threads interwoven stories, book 3 feels like the thread count has been reduced.
we can tell that events occur with these non-participating characters especially jenn and gastrope but its not mentioned or at least not mentioned in detail. events or interactions you’ve though about yourself but not written down on paper aren’t transmitted to the reader. its not like nothing happens for these groups we just dont hear about it, which is sad.
i have to re-read but at first glance there seems to a lot more opportunity for inclusion of jenn/gastrope group aboard the nimbus’ story. With their conclusion of the investigation and concerns of orc/alvar conflict and conclusions/discussions/comments/motivations and/or perspective on current events. As a group these characters seem to make some determinations about events and how they will respond that are not known to the reader. seems lie a great opportunity to include these characters and weave back into the story those other threads. While ive commented on jenn and gastrope specifically the same applies for the other characters; lenamare, tris, exador, ramases, the grove, the alvar, the council, Oorstemoth etc…
you’ve got great characters, weave some more of their stories into events lest it start to seem lie its all Tom 24/7 following that single thread.
A big issue I had is that Tom questioninv the whole Orcus reincarnated through the book but it is then stated he’s going to dinner with a god of reincarnation yet nothing comes of it. You really either need to have a conversation between Tom and the God of Reincarnation or take that line out because it is a major disjoint. Tom is so worried about it but doesn’t bother to ask god of reincarnation who Phaestus said would be really interested in it!!!
Ugh, finally finished. My first impression was like it felt like a slice of life of multiple characters. It wouldn’t be bad if they live exciting lives, but its just humdrum. Gonna need to chop a bunch of it off, if necessary maybe just put the scenes in another book where the characters are involved more? Just backtrack the timeline so the next book might actually be happening at the same time as this one.
The story picked up at around page 230ish with Tal Gor’s battle. That’s rather a lot of pages to go through where the reader is bored like heck. Then it felt like it was building up for like the big battle in Nysegard, when it suddenly stopped abruptly. Er I hope the battle was in the missing 20%, because as of right now I’d give the story 2 stars in Amazon. It’s boring. I was seriously not entertained. I didn’t see the usual funny scenes or exciting action scenes (excepting Tal Gor’s battle) to root for the characters that I had expected. Good thing it’s still at Alpha. Time to fix it up.
So far, funny/action/memorable scenes for me was:
At the start where a demon was trying to get a dismembered head out of their behind ( heh )
The dramatic entrance to Nysegard within the volcano eruption and stuff. This felt rather wasted though. Should time it as the place is getting attacked by Unlife, you get an action scene, a dramatic entrance and a timely save.
Tal Gor’s battle.
Maybe Melissance’s entrance and the D’Orcing ritual? It was just interesting though. Didn’t quite evoke any emotions really.
So not really a lot.
I don’t know if this helps, but a lot of the short scenes that bounce around could be combined into one longer scene and that might make the book better. Keep the same action, just don’t write a page, move to another character and then come back. Just stick with the same character and keep going for a while. Temporally it might not make as much sense, but narratively it wouldn’t be so episodic.
Yeah, the general consensus is that a lot of these short scenes need to be condensed, eliminated or ooomphed up.
This was expected, alpha and first beta is very much a first pass, I needed to get reader feedback as to what to enhance/what to cut.
Coming back to several posts back…my big problem is that it’s a huge tale with lots of interesting characters that I want to explore.
However, when I take time to do that, some people feel like they are being robbed of “Tom Time” so my problem is in deciding what/who to cut or expand to enhance the story.
This is why I am spinning of the Chronicles of Astlan (where Tizzy disappears to), Seas of Fate (Asmeth, N, Marcus, etc).
I have even toyed with spinning even more arcs off into parallel books, but not sure how well it would go over if you one “has” to read three series to get the entire story. And as well as going over, how well could I pull such a weirdness off?
CoA and SoA should be stand alone, if people want….
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