All Comments on 'A Guy and His...? Ch. 52: War Pt. 02'

Ok I am so not happy here!! Please send that next chapter out as soon as possible! Please keep writing!!! 😥😥

Nice twist! Didn't see this. Coming.

You wrote: "Then to his amazement she lost far more than he'd planned. Out of the over ten thousand she'd started she only had about five thousand left.

Shaking his head Jake knew they had a better chance but, with that many, she still had numbers on her side. He'd hoped that the collapsing ground trick would have taken more. Well at least she was down to half, now they wouldn't die as quickly."

First, "...she lost far more than he'd planned."

Then, "He'd hoped that the collapsing ground trick would have taken more."

He'd planned for her to lose less AND he'd hoped more would have been taken?

That's a mental puzzle which can't be resolved.

If you ever re-write his tale, you need to also eliminate the redundant problem your characters have of not growing; they never seem to learn from catastrophe, or rebuke.

IE: Jake is constantly repeating himself about not raining down destruction on the Jinns when they can't answer a question, or make a mistake. It becomes trite and, obviously, repetitive.

The same for Jake; it nearly kills himself a half dozen, (five dozen, it seemed like), times by over-exerting himself. It's OK to have a character be stubborn, and exhaust themselves through self-sacrifice, but it can't be life threatening EVERY time, or it, too, becomes trite, and meaningless. It also makes the character look stupid, and be unrelateable by the reader; no sense of self-preservation.

For a story to resonate with readers, the reader must be able to see themselves, or be able to put themselves in a character's shoes. If the character doesn't act like a normal person; learning, changing, exhibiting self-preservation, being curious, explaining themselves to others, etc, they are not relateable, and the story suffers.

Fifty-two chapters in, my suggestion would be to do a re-write. Drop the single page chapters, (especially the chapter titles which don't end in numerals. Add the chapter 'title' at the beginning of the text. Ending the chapter title with words makes it impossible to simply change a number in the URL, which is the fastest way to move to the next chapter.), and work out the character conflicts and plot holes.

You do that, and this will become a superb work.

I've known a couple of published Sci-Fi writers in my life, in the days before eMail, when a letter to someone made a real connection, and created friendships. They just didn't get that many 'conversational' letters, instead of 'I want/could you' letters.

Because of those acquaintances, I've read pre-edited versions of published books. This reminds me of some of them.

Spoiler alert: published authors depend on their editors to fix the kind of stuff I've mentioned through out the comments. LOL Publishing houses employ profrssional editors to insure 'good stories' become money makers, often times in spite of the authors.

GeoD

One too many head injuries for Jake!!!