When Dragons Wake, Chapter 37 by Cynthia Cloughly

It’s always interesting when coming cold to a later chapter, to see how much I can pick up from what’s there. And also, I freely confess, to figure out what I can say for an Editor’s Choice, that won’t run into the problem of, “It’s been spelled out in detail in the previous chapters.”

I’m particularly grateful for the concise, pitch-style summary that begins the submission. It tells me in general but clear terms what the book is about and what the author wants it to do. Well done.

So here we have a fair-sized cast of characters, an identifiably epic-fantasy-style setting, and a series of revelations and reversals. Viewpoint character Nikko presents as the reluctant hero with what appear to be gradually unfolding powers and destiny, in a world in which women are seen as inferior to men. She reveals a gift of necromancy—working a spell that no one expects to succeed—that proves immediately and poignantly useful. It’s a nice, chewy chapter that moves briskly forward, and establishes the characters for the cold reader and no doubt adds further layers for the reader who has come in at the beginning. The only thing I was expecting that I didn’t get was dragons. Phooey. But if the title is meant to be a guide, those do have a role or roles to play in the rest of the novel.

In terms of worldbuilding, the patriarchal culture and the hero who doesn’t want to be are classic tropes (and the hyphenated names—is this random or do the hyphens have a purpose as abbreviations or honorifics?), but the way in which Nikko reveals her powers here is a bit off the beaten path. It seems that apprentice mages practicing magic is a thing, and some people may disapprove, but others will aid and abet, and quite cheerfully in the case of the person who killed the rabbit. What no one expects is for the spell to work.

As a cold reader, I wonder if this is common. Do mages always fail? Is it unusual when a spell does work? Is magic unreliable, and if so, how does this affect the position of mages in this world? Are they like psychics in ours, with powers that not everyone believes in, but enough people do that they can find acceptance even in police departments and universities?

These are questions that are most probably answered in the rest of the novel. What’s here is a narrow slice of a big and complex pie. But one thing I do notice, and I wonder if it’s developed in further chapters.

What about necromancy? Evidently it’s not universally approved of, from what Nikko tells us about how long it took her to get permission to use the tower. She experiences the rabbit’s death, which shakes her considerably—so there’s a price for what she does. But for the rabbit, once it’s reanimated, that seems to be it. It hops off to continue its life as it did before.

This is the lead-in and setup for the big set-piece of the chapter, the mother who has died in childbirth and the child whose soul Nikko encounters in her trance and is compelled to restore to its body. The rabbit’s resurrection is a much simpler process; she controls it, more or less. But by the next round, the magic controls her. She can only do what it commands her to do.

Now I wonder if, in subsequent chapters, there will be consequences for the resurrected as well as for the mage. The question of fosterage is settled, and there’s an indication that the child’s relationship to her father and her grandparents will be complicated. But has her return from the dead changed her? Will she be a normal child, or has her strange beginning altered her personality, given her powers, made her something other than human? Nikko worries that she’s been born into the end of the world, but is she in some way involved in that ending—either to hasten it or to prevent it?

I’ll be interested to see if those questions are answered, or if the novel raises new ones that I haven’t thought of. Whatever happens, I’m sure this child means something, either in herself or as a symbol of what Nikko can do. Or maybe both.

–Judith Tarr

Time Is The Fire, Chapter One V3 by Dylan McFadyen

Late in 2017 there was a bit of a run on authors taking down their chapters after I had pulled them for the Editor’s Choice but before I was able to post my crit. (Protip: Don’t Do That.) In the midst of this, one author asked me to look at a revision of the chapter I had reviewed in August. Normally we try to look at all-new-to-us chapters, but under the circumstances, with the author’s permission, I decided to give it a go.

This will not be a regular thing, but I thought it might be an interesting exercise. And so it turned out to be.

Both my EC and the original chapter have cycled off the site, but I remarked on the extreme precision and sometimes distracting detail of the worldbuilding, and the tendency for characters to talk about important events rather than experiencing them in the narrative—a technique I call “offstaging,” as in, important things that should occur onstage happen offstage instead.

The new version keeps most of the previous version. There’s a little less over-precision in the opening, somewhat fewer micro-details. We don’t usually stop to explain to ourselves what happens to the hardware and the software when we swipe a touchscreen, or to consciously analyze which fingers we use and how, unless it’s relevant to our interests. The same tends to apply to characters in fiction. We do get a little bit still enough to orient ourselves to this universe, but not so much that we’re distracted from the movement of the story. The revision moves more quickly as a result, and allows us to focus on the characters and their interactions.

The biggest change is a rewrite of a scene that, in the previous version, took place offstage. I am in favor of this. Exposition and offstaging are not always Awful Things Do Not Ever Do, but they work best in small doses. Mostly as a reader I want to be there in the moment, rather than hear about it at second or third hand.

So here instead of the Admiral telling the Captain about the big invasion force, we get to see it. There’s a bit of over-specificity again, a tendency to over-describe, but that’s easily enough pruned in the next revision. I’m much happier to have this new scene, to see through the viewpoint character’s own eyes, to feel his emotions as he realizes what’s happening.

There’s one more thing however that revision needs, and that’s smoothing over the edges. By this I mean that once the writer has tipped in the new scene, it changes the scenes around it, and particularly those immediately after. Deeper layers of emotion mean stronger or more complex reactions, and in many cases, changed reactions as well.

After Captain Aean has seen for himself what the fleet is up against, with the powerful emotions that this has evoked, he’s likely to carry some of those emotions through the discussion with the Admiral and into his conversations with his crew. Will he still make his “mirthless joke,” and if so, will he do it in the same way? Will his crew pick up the residue of his shock and horror? Will he try to hide it? If so, will he succeed or fail?

A strong scene like the new one will resonate. Those resonances carry on through the rest of the story, and affect scenes and actions later—not only those that follow directly, but later ones as well.

Emotions take time to process fully. When they’re amped up as they are here, it’s quite likely they’ll affect the character’s decisions throughout the rest of the novel. He might repress them and find them cropping up later, with important consequences for his conduct in the story, or he might release them in a rush and have to do damage control when he most needs to keep it together; he might say something he shouldn’t to someone who shouldn’t know, or not share with someone who really needs to know.

The possibilities are pretty much endless. So are the ramifications for the story. Here, it’s not a sharp turn or a strong alteration in the plot, but it adds depth to what’s already here. It makes the story stronger. The next step is to make sure the scene fits securely into the emotional landscape. A line here, a word there, may be all that’s needed to keep the ripples expanding outward.

–Judith Tarr

One Last Ride by Bill Mc

The beginning of “One Last Ride” grounds me in a believable, real-world situation.  Joe’s uncle has had a heart attack, and Joe must pick him up and drive him home.  Vivid description and some nice characterization draw me in and make me care about the uncle smoking when he’s not supposed to and Joe’s plans to work on his ’69 Mustang with his daughter when she gets older.  I believe in the relationship between Joe and his uncle, and I’m interested to see how their relationship changes over the course of the story.

For me, the story struggles to make the transition between its real-world setup and its supernatural climax, a common problem in horror stories.  As a reader, I’m much more interested in the setup than in the story about the Trader, the weird birds, and trading lives.  There’s not a clear and compelling connection between these elements, so many of the details established in the setup don’t seem relevant to the climax, and the climax doesn’t seem to build on the characterization and emotion that’s been established.  While the setup feels rich and believable, the climax seems familiar and unemotional.

Before I offer some suggestions, I want to discuss another difficulty I had with the story, which was confusion.  I’m not sure what trading of lives is going on.  The examples about “choking the life out of your own spouse” or slaughtering “the neighbor’s cow” suggest that one needs to kill another to live.  It’s not clear to me that this is what happens in the story.  After my first reading, I looked back at the story and thought that the uncle had probably died with his initial heart attack (that sent him to the hospital) and offered Joe’s life in his place.  But then the uncle seems to die again while they are speeding down the road.  And why does the uncle suggest they speed?  It seems like he wants to kill them both.  Is it after the uncle’s second heart attack that he offers Joe’s life?  And does he need to kill Joe to live again?  Since the uncle is already revived before Joe dies, is there a time within which the uncle must kill Joe?  It’s not clear to me that the uncle runs Joe down, which I think is what needs to happen if the earlier description of the Trader is correct.  The car seemed to run him down on its own, because the uncle never gets into the driver’s seat.

The uncle says, “I traded my life for yours, but he tricked me.”  I don’t know when this happened or how.  Since the uncle is near death, why would the Trader take such a bad trade?  And in what way did he trick the uncle?  All of this seems overcomplicated, so it leaves me wondering about rules and details rather than feeling the horror of a character dying.

Then it seems like Joe trades his daughter’s life for his own, so he can live and his daughter will die.  I’m not sure if that’s what you intend, but that’s how it reads for me.  But Joe seems to have no emotional reaction to his decision.  And I don’t know why he makes the decision he does.  I thought he loved his daughter.  I feel pretty lost at the end.

Perhaps what you intend is that the uncle offers his life so Joe can live, and Joe offers his life so his daughter can live, but that’s not what the Trader seems to be about from the examples I quoted above, and that’s not how the story reads.  Once someone has had a heart attack or been run over by a car, he’s not in any position to offer his life for anyone.

So how can the setup and the climax be better connected and provide a satisfying, unified experience?  First, I think both Joe and the uncle need to be more active in pursuing their goals and to have some power to achieve their goals.  Right now, both characters seem powerless, so the premise of being able to trade one life for another seems meaningless.  If the Trader is tricking and controlling, then mere mortals have no choice.  The uncle says, “He controls us.”  If that is true, then writing a strong story about these characters is very difficult.  As it is, Joe starts with the goal to drive his uncle home.  He becomes afraid of his uncle once the uncle comes back to life after the crash, and his goal becomes to flee.  He unwisely flees down the road, so the car can easily run over him, and then makes his decision quickly and without thought or emotion.  I think to work well, the story needs a three-act structure.  For me, acts are defined by the protagonist’s goal, with a new act beginning when the protagonist forms a new goal.  Driving his uncle home is Act 1.  There’s not really a strong Act 2 or Act 3, because Act 1 takes up most of the story, and then Joe doesn’t have time to pursue any additional goal for an extended period of time.  He’s only fleeing for 2 paragraphs.  If there’s another goal of saving himself (or his daughter), it comes and goes very quickly with that decision.  Since the driving/normality takes up so much of the story, the fantastic/climax seems to come too quickly and not be well incorporated.  In a three-act story, generally speaking, Act 1 is usually about 25% of the piece, Act 2 is 60%, and Act 3 is 15%.  Of course a story can deviate from these rough estimates, but this can give an author a sense of how his acts compare to the average, and let him know where he might need to use various techniques to compensate for less standard structures.  If this is to be a three-act story, then either the section in which Joe’s goal is to drive his uncle home needs to be significantly shortened, or the story itself needs to be significantly lengthened.  I think some of both could be good.  What would the three acts be? There are many possibilities.  Here’s one.  In Act 1, Joe’s goal could be to drive his uncle home.  After a smoke break, the uncle convinces Joe to let him drive.  He crashes the car, killing Joe and gaining another lifetime for himself.  In Act 2, Joe’s goal (as a ghost) is to kill the uncle and get his life back.  Perhaps he’s able to possess the uncle’s wife, who we know has some mental illness.  Perhaps she’s in contact with the Trader and that’s why she’s believed to be mentally ill.  This would help tie an element from the opening into the latter part of the story.  Perhaps Joe is able to kill the uncle, but instead of this bringing him back, it brings back the aunt’s mind, so she is now a whole person.  And perhaps she’s super evil, in love with the Trader, and perhaps Joe’s wife and daughter come to visit the aunt to console her over the death of the uncle.  The aunt wants to kill one or both of them to extend her life, or to allow her to give the Trader human life so they can be together.  Joe’s goal is now to save his wife and/or daughter.  So that’s one way that this could be developed into a three-act structure and connect the elements of the setup more strongly to the elements in the climax.

One final area to consider is the causal chain of the plot.  The plot should progress like a row of dominoes falling over.  One thing causes the next, which causes the next.  This gives the reader the illusion that events are unfolding on their own, without interference from the author, and that the character’s actions have consequences.  This also allows the reader to anticipate what might happen and feel suspense over it.  Right now, the causal connections between events and actions are unclear, so the story isn’t able to build too much suspense.

The story has some nice description, setting, and characterization.  I hope my comments are helpful.

–Jeanne Cavelos, editor, author, director of Odyssey

Bird’s Eye by RM Grave

Keeper of the Wings Ch 14 & 15 by Boz Flamagin

Part of my brief for these Editor’s Choices is to find a way to relate the piece I’ve selected to the more general audience. I usually try to balance specific comments with general observations. I also try to select early or opening chapters because there’s less background for me to try to fill in as I read, and in general I’ve found that an author’s habits are consistent throughout a ms.

This time I’ve chosen a later chapter of a very dense, chewy, science-fiction-y work, with a high percentage of unique vocabulary and a complex plot. The world intrigued me, and I was curious. I wanted to see how this author would tackle the challenge of portraying nonhuman characters in a completely alien setting.

It’s a big challenge. The characters have to be alien enough to be convincing, but not so much that they’re incomprehensible. There’s also the delicate balance between conveying alien concepts in alien words, and translating them into terms that humans can understand.

Coming in in midstream as I did, I had to do my best to pick up meaning from context. I couldn’t ask for definitions or explanations because the author had probably presented these in earlier chapters. By this point the reader will have acclimated to the vocabulary and be able to read without stopping to ask what a word or concept means.

I got the gist of it, and was able to follow the action and get a sense of who the characters were. One way the author made this possible was through the quick synopsis at the beginning—that’s a wise choice. And that led me to reflect on the art of the synopsis.

One of the hardest parts of the novel-writing business for many writers is that very thing. Pro submissions, whether to agents or editors, require a synopsis. There’s no getting around it. The person who’s reviewing the submission can judge the essentials of the writer’s craft from the sample chapters, but the synopsis tells her a great deal about the author’s grasp of the story.

A synopsis is more than a list of chapters or “this happens, then this and this.” It, as much as the query or the sample, is an indicator of the writer’s ability to keep the whole project in her head. It tells the reader what the writer thinks is important, and what she’s trying to do with the elements of her story.

To add to the fun and the challenge, agents and editors may request that this essential exercise be no more than a page long. Shorter if possible. While conveying all the essential elements of the work.

It’s like Cutthroat Kitchen for writers. “Here are all ingredients of your signature dish that takes days to make. Give it to us in six and a half minutes in an Easybake Oven with one hand tied behind your back.”

That’s what the synopsis at the start of this chapter has to do. It tells us what happened before, and what we need to know in order to understand what’s happening here. In a formal synopsis we’d get the rest of it as well, with enough of a tease of the ending that the publishing pro at whom it’s directed will know what kind of book it is and how it aims to achieve this. (Agents and editors prefer spoilers. They want to know exactly what they’re getting.)

The synopsis here needs clarity. The author has probably been so deep in the story for so long that it’s difficult to separate what’s evident in the text and what’s remained behind in the author’s head or in the previous iterations of the draft.

Outside of the actual characters mentioned in the chapters we’re reading—or for a submission packet, usually the first three chapters—there is no need to provide names. A plethora of alien names and terms can cause the reader to lose track of the story. A quick description will suffice: the aliens who are mentoring the planet, the various allies and adversaries and what they do, the physical and psychological processes that help move the plot.

With alien words, in short, a little goes a long way. Better a translation than a direct rendition. We don’t need to know the exact details of most plot elements—Sedeyre’s torture, for example; just that the torture happens. That’s the key, the thing that moves the story forward. The same applies to words and concepts. If the reader needs to know a term such as frenzaliz, she’ll pick it up in the sample, when it’s described and concisely explained.

The job of the synopsis is to convey the overall concept in clear, unambiguous terms. Basically we need to know the names of the main characters, the name of the planet, and maybe an alien term or two—though concise translations may be more effective. The goal is to present the general lines of the story in terms that are comprehensible to the first-time reader.

The clearer and less ambiguous the synopsis is, the more easily that reader can get a sense of what the novel is about. Then, in the sample, she can see how the author has opted to tell the story, and measure that against the larger picture of the synopsis.

It’s good practice to try this with the summary at the beginning of these chapters. The questions to ask are:

How can I convey my main ideas in clear, comprehensible terms?

Which alien words do I absolutely need to supply, and which ones can I present in translation?

Do I need to name every character, or can I just name those who appear in the chapters and briefly describe the rest?

For further challenge points, it might be useful to think about how to organize the synopsis so that it’s as clear as it can be. Would it be effective to start with the quick description of the situation the planet is in, with its galactic application and its mentors, then move to the events of the story proper? Would an equally quick description of the main characters be helpful before embarking on the plot summary?

In the summary as written, I’m a bit unclear as to whether the bullet points refer strictly to earlier chapters, or whether they’re meant to provide an overview of the whole. These are prior events, yes? And now we’re moving on to that the protagonist does next. Then of course, if this were a full synopsis, I would expect a complete, but very concise, summary of the plot as a whole. What the main characters want, how they work to get it, what reversals they undergo, and how they come out in the end. With as few names and alien words as possible, just enough to flavor the mix.

Writing synopses is a useful skill even beyond the requirements of the submission process. I find that when I put together a formal synopsis I can see gaps in the plot, catch inconsistencies, and get a clearer sense of what needs to be emphasized and what I can tone down or even cut out. It’s a good aid for revision, and great for concentrating the mind.

To sum up, and to get back to what’s really essential, namely this section of synopsis and the sample that follows: I’m intrigued, even with the profusion (and confusion) of alien names and concepts. It has some interesting ideas, and the worldbuilding is intricate and detailed. There are good bones here; lots of potential as it goes through the revision process.

–Judith Tarr