I had to choose this piece for this month’s Editor’s Choice—it’s in so many of my wheelhouses. Secondary world based strongly on Earth history, opening in an alternate Tyre, with mentions of Egypt and the ancient Middle East. A hint of adjacent or alternate worlds—one moon or three. There’s so much to love.

The writing is lovely, too, with occasional images that made me stop and go, “Oh, nice!” This, for example: A hint of smoke and jasmine lingered in the air. Or this: I tried to call out, but the storm stole my voice. And this, too: I reached and pulled the weapon free, the white light of Creation’s power sheening its black surface.

There’s a true love of words here, and a strong music in the prose. It’s a pleasure and occasionally a revelation to read.

The writing is very fine, but there’s still work to do. The author’s note on the draft mentions that an editor found the protagonist hard to relate to. I don’t necessarily have that problem, but what I do see might call for a kind of inversion of the usual rules for strong writing.

Keep your writing active, we’re told. Eschew the passive and the abstract. Focus on the concrete. Gravitate toward clear, vivid, memorable images and active constructions.

This is excellent advice in the main. Here I think we may need to relax the rules a bit, keeping the lovely images but moving a bit away from the consistently concrete. That’s the basis of the issue with the protagonist, I think.

She is very active. She’s a doer. She observes and comments and acts and reacts. She seems to have agency, in that she has goals and an agenda, though there’s a fair element of inadvertence in how she goes about achieving them.

What’s missing for me is a sense of emotional depth, of being inside her skin. The story is strongly cinematic—that is, we see and hear what’s going on; we’re shown surface actions and external results, so we have hints of what’s happening underneath. We don’t actually break through the wall into her inner thoughts and feelings. We have a predominance of the concrete, but there’s not quite enough of the abstract or intuitive to balance it.

I chose the quotations above for their beauty but also because they illustrate what’s going on with the storytelling overall. While she appears to act, she’s really being acted upon. Inanimate objects and forces of nature carry the weight of the story. I think we need to go another layer or more below this and show the emotional landscape: the deeper effects on her of the things that are happening around and to her. Let these things happen, but let us see them through the filter of her senses and feelings. We have the data, but we wonder how she’s processing it.

The plotting runs into this issue as well. Her departure from Tyre is reactive—her husband is killed and she has to flee, but while she’s acting and speaking, we have to extrapolate what she’s feeling. She might be numb, that would be a natural first response, but as a reader I want to be sure that’s what’s happening.

When she raises her powers to invoke the storm, its strongest effects happen offstage—and past the initial impetus, her role is essentially passive. We jump from storm to shipwreck, but might benefit from a suitably concise experience of the disaster, with a stronger sense of how it makes her feel and how she may be trying to regain the control she’s lost–or perhaps she’s not trying, but giving up, as once again her magic betrays her. That may seem like a passive response, but it’s a choice. In emotional terms, it’s active.

The questions this reader is impelled to ask, here as elsewhere in the story, are about penetrating the surface and going down into her inner world. What does she feel? How do these events affect her on a deeper level?

The ending has great potential, though her quest to find her own, three-mooned world could be more strongly grounded in character and story. Is it a major motivator, or is it more incidental? Evidently it’s been delayed by her marriage and her stay in Tyre, and now she’s stopping again. I feel as if the stakes at this point could be higher, and she could have more difficulty making the choice—and the choice itself could be clearer. She should make it because she truly chooses to, because she has solid and compelling reasons, rather than because there’s a vacancy and someone needs to fill it.

This comes back to the question of agency. She does a lot of things, but does she do them on her own initiative or because circumstances compel her? What are her strongest driving motivations? What mix of emotions and needs and desires drives her to do what she does?

I don’t think this needs a lot of exposition, nor any purpling of the prose, but if she feels as clearly as she acts and speaks, that may help to resolve the issue of relatability. Readers like to feel as if they’re inside a character’s skin, living the events of the story with her. A little more inside to go with the outside, and this already well-written story will be even more powerful and effective.

–Judith Tarr