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 Review #4644133 |
 | In the Name of the Father  [E] My latest Starhawk tale based on my science fiction book series The Starhawk Chronicles  |
| (4.5)  Welcome to WdC from the "Newbie Welcome Wagon" Good day to you, Author Joseph J. Madden , and I hope it finds you well. It is with great humility that I come before you with this review. I am certainly no one to be telling anyone how to write, having myself successfully managed to avoid fame and fortune for over sixty years, but I flatter myself that I have learned a thing or two in my decades of chasing the dream. Given that you have placed this item on the Please Review forum, I take that as my invitation to offer my opinion. And make no mistake, it is nothing but an opinion for you to use or discard as you wish. My reviews are thorough and honest, and while I hope we can be friends afterward, my greater hope is that you become a better writer as a result of our having crossed paths.For the record, I am an occasional hobbyist writer of fantasy, horror, and steampunk (hence my handle) who tries to review in a wide variety of styles and genres; I have, in fact, been recently nominated for a Quill Award for reviewing. I should explain that I use this review template in which I discuss my views on the important areas of quality storytelling, then compare your work to my own beliefs on the matter. As I said, I'm no authority, but hopefully my comments will give you some ideas to take your writing in directions you hadn't previously considered. Before we begin, a word about your bio. You spin an entertaining yarn about the profound effect Star Wars had on you as a child, and its influence on your writing. That was an informative read, and my congratulations on your accomplishments. But you state that "I was born in Queens and now live in Wisconsin with his wife." You need to either change that to "my," or specify whose wife you're living with  . Okay, let me just drop a warning here, and we'll get started.THIRD-PARTY READERS TAKE NOTE: SPOILERS AHEAD PRESENTATION: This aspect deals with the first impression your story makes when a reader clicks on the title. Call it the cosmetics. I'll be looking at abstract items from text density to scene dividers in an effort to ferret out any unfortunate habits that might cause a reader to move on without actually reading anything; before you can dazzle him with your show, you have to get him into the tent!  You have used the default font provided, double-spaced your paragraphs, and your scene dividers are clear and centered. Nothing is wrong with any of that and you rate the full five stars in this category, but I'm going to offer a couple of suggestions to make it even more professional-looking. Use any that strike your fancy.First, the font. WdC defaults to a tiny form of Arial. Arial is an attractive font that I sometimes use myself, but at this size it most closely resembles the fine print in a used car contract. There are many ways to tweak your fonts here – this review is in 3.5 Verdana with a 1.4 line space setting, for example – but the easiest way to bring Arial to life is to simply place the command {size:3.5} at the beginning of your text. As a published author yourself, you're probably aware that virtually every professionally published book out there uses indented paragraphs, so much so that I would suggest that there is a subconscious connection in the reader between indentations and professionality. You achieve said indentations on WdC by placing {indent} at the start of each paragraph. I know that sounds like a slog, but there is a shortcut key at the top of the creation box, and once you get used to it, it isn't that much different from hitting the Tab key for each paragraph. Your scene dividers consist of three centered asterisks, simple, basic, and accepted everywhere. Did you know that WdC offers over a thousand emoticons that can be centered as scene dividers to really make a story pop? You access them in the Writing.Com Tools menu in the left sidebar. As an example, {center}{e:pirateflag}{/center} yields:  STORY: Now we come to the heart of the issue. This is really the basic element, isn't it? If you can't tell an engaging story, it doesn't matter what else you can do, because nobody's going to read it anyway. I try to explain aspects from characters to grammar, but I don't know how to teach someone to have an imagination. The fact that I'm here writing a review is proof that you've done a pretty good job with the story. Let's examine the individual parts of the whole and see what works to make it successful. At its heart what we have here is a prelude to a larger story as a helpless child on the cusp of adulthood is bent on revenge against a super-foe for his father's death. Literature is rife with these stories, but that isn't meant to discourage you. I'm pretty sure that everything has been done before. What matters is what you do with your telling, and this one, though long, held my attention throughout, never once becoming tedious nor causing me to question whether I should finish reading it. The Star Wars influence shows through clearly, yet doesn't feel in any way like fan fiction, or worse, the dreaded ripoff. This is simply a nice tale that sticks to what it purports to be, and delivers a satisfying interaction between the viewpoint characters, which is a hard combination to beat. Well done.MECHANICS: Whether you're writing fact or fiction, prose or poetry, the "holy grail" that you're striving for is immersion. This is an area that no author, myself included, ever wants to talk about: "I've done all this work, and you want to argue over a comma?" But those commas are important. What you're really doing as a writer is weaving a magic spell around your reader, and your reader wants you to succeed. He wants to escape his mundane world for a period and lose himself in your creation. Errors in spelling and grammar, typos, "there" vs. "their" issues, use of words inconsistent with their actual meanings, all yank him out of his immersion while he backtracks to re-read and puzzle out what you meant to say. This is never good, and this is the section that deals with that.  Most stories that fall do so here, and many of them fall hard. I want to first assure you that many stories I review generate laundry lists of errors that become so tedious to write that I throw up my hands and just say, "and many more examples." Your story is quite good mechanically, with only a couple of points I want to address.The first occurs in this passage: It had taken this last, extreme act of violence against innocents to spur the Galactic Confederation into taking action “I’m not saying this guy doesn’t deserve to be taken down. This is copied and pasted directly from your text. Assuming there are no missing words, it needs a period after "action." "I'm not saying..." is clearly a new paragraph, and needs to be double-spaced. If you were using indentations, this would have jumped off the page at you. The others are more opinions for your consideration. You write: And jumped back just before being cut in half as a force-field materialized across the tunnel in front of him. This sounds like he was cut in half, which would make it impossible for him to push K'Tran down to avoid the charges. Suggest, "jumped back, narrowly avoiding being cut in half." The next one is more of a personal preference for precision: “The mission was a complete and total failure,” K’Tran sighed. I have never in 73 years of life heard anyone sigh a sentence. They say things with a sigh, and things followed by a sigh, but this innocuous little sentence was a major yank on my immersion. Use that tidbit however you wish. Finally, a couple of paragraph issues that may just represent a difference in style, but for your consideration: You would have done the same.” He paused, picking up yet another rock and hurling it as hard as he could. Ah! I didn't see what happened here until I copied and pasted. There is a paragraph here, but you missed the double-spacing. Again, if you were indenting, this would have jumped off the page at you. And finally: K’Tran held up a hand to keep the boy from going any further. “I’m done, Jess. I think that "I'm done" should start a new paragraph. Again, a style issue, but take a look and see what you think. Oh, and one more thing: Readers may find it helpful if the ship's name, Starhawk, is presented in italics; it tells them that it doesn't refer to a person or a place. Well, you must be thoroughly aggravated with me by now, but this isn't bad work, and my view is that it just needs another proofreading or two to tease out the remaining kinks. Not bad, as I said, and only a half-star deduction. CHARACTERS: This section discusses all aspects of the characters, the way they look, act, and talk, as well as the development and presentation of backstory. Allow me to present "Tyler's Axiom:" Characters are fiction. Rich, multifaceted characters with compelling backstories will seize the reader in a grip that will not be denied, and drag him into their narrative, because he can't abide the thought of not knowing what will happen to them. Conversely, lazy, shallow stereotypes will ruin any story regardless of its other qualities, because the reader will be unable to answer the second question of fiction: Why do I care? I found all of your characters to be believable and their dialogue, an especially tricky area, to be natural and fluid. In keeping with the Star Wars inspiration, many of the names and creatures are outlandish, but you have wisely kept the main characters easy to identify with (as a human), and their names short and easy to remember. These are all important aspects, and you've handled them quite well.SETTINGS: This section deals with the locations you've established for your action, the ways in which they affect that action, and your ability to describe them clearly and concisely. You could say that this aspect answers (or fails to answer) the first question of fiction, What's going on here? Setting can be used to challenge a character, to highlight a skill or quality, to set the mood of a scene without overtly saying a single thing about it, and a host of lesser impacts too numerous to mention. You might think of it as a print artist's equivalent of a movie's "mood music," always important yet never intrusive. All in all, a pretty big deal, then. So how did you do? Here again, in sci-fi as well as fantasy, you have an alien world to bring your reader into without leaving him dazed and confused, and you've done very well at it. I felt involved in every scene and never had to go back to re-read to figure out what I was looking at. Difficult to accomplish in this genre, but I encountered no problems at all following the action.SUMMARY: And there you have my words of "wisdom." I hope that I have presented my opinions in a way that is constructive, and that you will find helpful to your endeavors going forward. I thank you for sharing and exposing your work to the whims of public opinion, and I wish you a thrilling journey to wherever your writing takes you.** Image ID #2234711 Unavailable ** The curious may follow my antics at "Invalid Item" — Serious writers may visit a group that comes with occasional deep conversation, and a spiffy monthly contest featuring unusual and valuable prizes. Our forum, linked below, is open access, and if you like what you see, contact me or Richard ~ Looking for Luck!  to be welcomed to the fold.
 My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
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