Hello!

A little shameless self promotion (Oz said it was ok to post this here).

Anyways, I'm running a crowd funding campaign for my fantasy series in a the next week or so. My social network is small, so I thought Harry Potter people might love my series.

Here is the blurb:
"The Light is quickly vanishing in the Otherworld of elves and faeries. As the old and new ways struggle against each other, little hope of reconciliation remains. Fealty to technology usurps the miracle of nature, but at a terrible cost no one fully understands. Yet, with the coming of the year between the ages – the Liminal year – a new hero will embark upon en epic adventure to discover the truth of his own Nature and heal the realm."

Here is a painting of one of the characters:


If you are interested please visit my website http://www.sotrb.com, and we will keep you updated when our campaign goes live. If you want to see more artwork we have it on Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter:
https://www.facebook.com/SOTRBridge
https://twitter.com/SOTRB
http://www.pinterest.com/SOTRB/

Thank You!

 

Were you planning on including some sample chapters in the crowdfunding campaign? Because in all honesty, your summary smells a bit like generic high fantasy. A look into your hero's head and/or your world in context would be a great help in hooking backers, in my opinion.

 

Yes there will be a 90k word sample available!

 

Hey Everyone,

We've got our crowdfunding campaign live:

http://igg.me/at/sotrb/x/8285608

There's ten sample chapters available in PDF, MOBI, or EPUB formats. If you like the sample please pledge, and share the link!

Thanks!

 

My first thought was that your blurb is shit, but I went on and read some of the sample anyway. Your prose is clumsy and cluttered with adjectives like rats in a sewer. It needs some extreme editing. The syntax of your writing is terrible, and I couldn't get past a few chapters without abandoning it.

From the looks of the website, you've put a fair bit of effort into this, so I hope you find some success, but you really should have edited the work before putting it up as a sample. This sample should be encouraging people to support your work, not turning them away.

Perhaps the plot could be good in time. I can't say. But you need to work a lot on what you've already written, not just write further into the story.

Best of luck.

 

It's not that it wasn't edited well - you obviously don't care for the style.

Opinion is subjective, but thanks for being callus anyway.

;-)

 

Are you kidding me? Learn to deal with criticism like a fucking adult or gtfo.

 

I will learn to deal with criticism like an adult when I'm given criticism like an adult ;-)

Here this will help everyone:

http://www.wikihow.com/Criticize-Constructively

Cheers guys I'm going to go talk to someone right now who says they love it.

 

...don't let the door hit you on the way out I guess?

I've no doubt you'll find someone who loves your story. Enjoy mediocrity.

 

There is more to editing than spellcheck.

 

Oh man, guess we all better jump on that one man bandwagon, else we might feel left out.

:facepalm

 

Whoa there, he has eight funders on his fundraising site. That bandwagons looking pretty big now huh?

 

Was going to read it, but honestly the poor summary did nothing to draw me in that it would be worth reading. That in addition to Careotter's 'review' turned me off.

I might have been more willing to try it if you had more than 9 posts to your name here on this site. I get that this is shameless self-promotion; however just joining a site to promote is kinda poor class. Also, if you had been here on DLP for any amount of time then you would know that CareOtter's review was fairly tame by comparison to some. He called you out on poor work and gave constructive criticism.

Honestly feels more like a troll post if not for the time and effort on the crowdfunding...

 

When I try to help someone with their writing, I'm always eager to tell them where I think their story needs work, and I forget to tell them what I actually like about their writing. Well, I'm working on it.

Even though you've committed the grave sin of using the phrase "myriad of" (one of my many pet peeves), I will say that the overall theme and feel of the story seems pretty solid for a children's fantasy series. There's nothing remotely dark that I have seen, just a few drawings of characters with slightly mysterious motivations. Admittedly, though, I haven't gotten very far into the sample.

However, that clashes with the proposed length of the novel. You have a 90,000 word sample, but that should be the length of the entire thing. In fact, that's already too long. The main reason your story is so long is probably plot-related (I'm guessing), but you also use too many words to say things. Should you really use words like charmeuse if you're just going to define it in the next clause? There are paragraphs of description of glow stones scattered throughout the beginning, and a later one actually sort of contradict earlier ones. One of the first things we find out about them is that they are precious to elves and faeries, but later on we find out they are actually rather plentiful.

Another general issue I see is pretty typical in fanfiction: you have these great ideas for the world and you want to share them with readers as soon as possible. Do it wrong, though, and you're just dumping info on the reader instead of doing proper world-building. Seamus comes to grab a couple glow stones from Baudwin, but they end up taking a long tour of his room, where he shows off a bunch of his Steamway toys and pieces of art, and eventually Seamus just leaves without mentioning what he came for.

Also, I am very far from a poet so I could be wrong, but the poem at the beginning doesn't seem very good:

I sort of expected the second line to continue or something, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense on its own.

Anyway, that's all I've got. You've got some awesome artwork and a pretty solid general plan, but the execution needs some work in my opinion. Good luck!