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The Palace Job, First Chapter
takyris
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2) I'm not always a fantasy person but it worked for me.
3) Fantasy. Reminded me of Scott Lynch, in a way.
1) Yes.
2) Usually shy away from fantasy, except if I'd heard good things (my main reason for buying new literature).
3) Fantasy, but it felt different enough for me to stick with.
1) Yes.
2) It worked for me, but it left a lot of questions still floating around about the setting. Obviously this would be addressed in the rest of the novel.
3) Fantasy. Maybe some sort of magepunk where magic is technology, but fantasy nonetheless.
(No problem if your answer is "Uh, no. Fantasy. That's it." But there's epic fantasy, historical fantasy, swords & sorcery, modern fantasy, urban fantasy, and so on. If you felt like this was something specific, or a mix of fantasy and something else, let me know.)
And yeah, I know there are fixable things. I'll be taking a line-through pass next time I send it out.
Thanks again. Much appreciated.
2) I don't usually go in for hardcore fantasy unless it's a known quantity, but given that the fantasy wasn't a HUGE part of the opening, I'd give it a chance.
3) It's not really fair since I've been reading your blog posts about this book, but it's pretty obviously set up as a straight-up revenge tale. So I'd be expecting that from the rest of the story.
2) N/A. Though I can't say I really like the title.
3) I don't like to read fantasy all that much... tbh. Given the last line of the chapter, it involves revenge. So, I'd go with Pseudo-Fantasy Revenge?
Curious, what changes in the later chapters to make people think the first chapter isn't a representation of the entire thing?
People are getting the fantasy, generally, but they're not getting that aspect of it. The opening was meant to show that on a small scale, but currently, it doesn't do that very well. I had a good talk last night with someone who's read the whole thing, and who had some awesome ideas about what elements were missing (more issues of what I'm showing than what's actually happening -- where the camera is, what the reader knows).
So, based on people's reactions here, I may be revising the chapter to be a better representation of the novel as a whole. I don't want an editor to read this first chapter, think "ordinary fantasy novel" and not be interested in seeing more.
That's exactly what he writes. They're very good books.
Actually, the original title of this while I was writing it was "Nine of Locks", and then "Lies of Locke Lamora" came out, and I had to swear and change it. The new title is better, anyway, I think (someone above not liking it notwithstanding). It's closer to a Dortmunder book title, but with a fantasy twist.
(I left Loch's name intact, though. I wasn't changing that. If and when this gets published, it'll be years after LoLL, and I don't think people are gonna scream about it being a ripoff just because the names are similar.
Also, as I noted in the blog, I read exactly one chapter of LoLL. I read the one chapter to make sure that my style wasn't exactly the same, and then I didn't read any more, because I figured that was the easiest way to make sure I wasn't influenced by it, if anything ever did come up as a claim that way.)
Thanks muchly for the feedback! Confirmed a minor fear, and I think I've got a place to go with it. If anyone is curious, I can post revisions up at some point when I, you know, do them.
In a nutshell, I was going to say that the language sometimes gets in the way of the action. Also, I like figthing. I watch and participate in boxing and grappling. The fighting did ring true with me. it's very action movie, which if that is your goal, that's fine. But I was not too enchanted by it.
Kicking the back of the leg doesn't make someone fall to their knees. You'd have to reap their leg out or sweep it. Small details like that that I just did not buy.
Also the metaphor with the Urujar/African slaves was too obvious. It reads a bit sloppy. It's probably worth pursuing, but it would be better if it was more deftly woven in.
The pace is fast,which is good for stories of this kind. A tight crime caper.The fantasy elements I liked. It's like fantasy for grownups or some kind. Actually, it's just fantasy that doesn't lose itself in itself, but that's another debate.
Yes it does. Or, at least, drops them to one knee.
I'm specifically thinking of a kick to the back of the knee. It forces the knee to bend and, if the guy has weight on the leg, drops them to one knee. I wrote "back of the leg" instead of "back of the knee" because I wrote "fell to his knees", and that was a whole lot of the word "knee" in one line. I'm not thinking of a little snap kick that just weakens the leg. I'm thinking of one of your good quality sideways-stomp-with-outside-edge-of-foot kicks.
Again, I'd write that, but then something that happens in half a second takes ten seconds to read and understand.
Sorry if you didn't understand it. That was a tradeoff line for me -- enough information that the average person (who is not a fight-scene expert) got what was happening. Most of my fight scenes are edited by me going in and cutting out half the details, because I radically overexplain everything.
Could you specify how it felt sloppy? I get that it's obvious. It's meant to be obvious. But what makes it sloppy? (Not defensive here -- it was something I got dinged on in rough drafts, and I've tried to tone it down. What struck you as something that was too clunky?)
Anyway, thanks for reading. Much appreciated!
This is what I'm saying about the fight scenes. The words get in the way. A fight is not something that has to be explained at length in prose. Books are not movies. You're not working with the same tools. Your reader won't visualize everything, so explaining everything is counter-productive. It just slows down the action.
Find something to focus on, what makes the biggest visual impact, and milk it for all its worth. Your heroine here is like kung-fuing everyone, and chaining combos, and doing somersaults. And everything is explained in so much detail that things...bog down.
That is my gripe with the action scenes. I feel they should be more succint and less overwritten. The other readers here haven't mentioned anything like that, so I'm assuming I'm the only one who feels this way. Take my opinion with a grain of salt then.
That part is what gives it all away. It's meant to be obvious and it is. But this is too blatant. Let me figure things out and find some subtext. Not everything under the surface needs to be spelled out.
Bite your tongue!
Mind you, I'm apparently the one guy who reads all of Guy Gavriel Kay's chapter-long duel scenes. I had no idea that not everyone loved those.
I agree with what you're saying. I hadn't heard this from anyone else, though, which is odd. Hell, my wife is the first person to tell me to cut the fights down, because she doesn't care. Either it didn't bug her, or I've finally worn down her defenses. Or she just skims them now and doesn't tell me.
It's not that I disagree with what you're saying. It's that I hadn't heard this from other people on this draft. (In other crits -- the reason I haven't heard it when I posted it here is because I specifically asked people only to answer three questions, and it's entirely possible other people would jump on this.)
This, I disagree with. Not specifically to this work -- I can't judge whether it's too blatant or not. It's gonna vary from person to person, and I wanted the person expecting your average fantasy book to clearly get "Yo! This is not elfland! This is a book with people of different pigmentations!" -- but the notion that it should necessarily be in subtext. I see that as a great piece of advice for a short story, but I don't believe that it's a great piece of advice for a novel. This is a book that deals with racism a lot of the time, so the notion that this is something I need to make into a puzzle for the clever reader to ferret out? That doesn't fly with me.
(To be clear: I'm not saying that you're wrong. It is meant to be obvious, and blatant and obvious are too sides of the same coin. "Blatant" is what you say when it's obvious and bad. I don't think that everything obvious is bad, and I don't think that you think that, either. You clearly think that this instance of obviousness was bad, and I'm taking it under advisement.)
This is likely better in another thread, though.
On this, however: now that I think of it, it's also possible that what you see as a tone error (the obvious nature) is something I see as a feature. The next chapter contains a puppet show for the commoners that serves as a fantasy-world news segment, with a dragon-puppet moderating a yelling debate between two puppet-pundits (a gryphon for the Skilled political party, and a manticore for the Learned political party). So this obvious hit-over-the-head-ness you're talking about? That's pretty much the whole book, and it's on purpose. Doesn't invalidate your critique (I had a few specific people tell me that they hated me using fantasyland for broad social commentary), but it ain't changing.
(Which, to not sound like more of a dick, is why I asked that people only answer the questions. That wasn't because I'm a pretty princess who cannot change anything. It's because this has gone through three revisions already, and I generally like where it's at, with one or two caveats. I appreciate the hell out of the crit, regardless -- you're echoing the small group of people who are out of my target audience for the blatant social crap, and I'm noting the fight-scene issues to see if anyone else mentions them in future revs.)
Huckleberry Finn is also a book about racism, but it never exposits upon slavery.
I know you don't want crits, but I agree with Munacra - the exposition hurts this.
That was the rationale behind the line, anyway. I could very well be extremely massively wrong.
Okay... who's your target audience for this book? Do you intend typical fantasy readers to pick it up and read it or is it targeted to people who are more interested in reading it as some sort of social commentary. I agree that the particular quoted passage is very much too blatant for my personal tastes. I would likely read more, because the writing and story interest me enough to continue, but if I'm picking up a fantasy novel I do not want to be hit over the head with "racism is bad" the whole time.
Also, extremely minor point but it grated on me the first time reading the piece and now sticks out again in the quoted piece.
Shouldn't this be "Her skin wasn't as dark as a normal Urujar's" or "Her skin wasn't dark like a normal Urujar's" rather than "as dark like."
See that's a bit better presented than the chains thing.
EDIT: By which I mean the original sentence.
2) I give this genre a chance
3) The text sounds like Pern. It's character-driven tech-like magic fantasy.
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Okay, I'm throwing it out.
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But still... what one would you suggest I try? It can't be that bad... :U
If you like romantic fantasy (Mercedes Lackey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, etc -- the Blue Rose RPG devblog has a decent article about what romantic fantasy inspired the game), then the Pern books might be right up your alley.
It was not exactly what I was aiming for in my book tonewise, but that is why I posted this -- to see what people thought at first glance.
I, uh, don't see how this is like Pern at all. Also, please don't compare Pern to Eragon, because the one is decent depending on your preferences, while the other is a steaming pile of hackneyed, derivative crap.
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...yeah I'm only passing through to shit on Eragon. Ignore me.
I really couldn't call this Pern-esque either, I simply didn't get that vibe. That's not a commentary on the quality of either piece, just that this is completely different to McCaffrey in tone and pace. But setting or technology wise, I suppose there're science-fantasy elements of a sort.