In case nobody has mentioned it, Jack, we all thank you for this sacrefice for humanity. There are much simpler methods of suicide than reading Saccoccio and boring yourself to death.
To be fair, you are going to get that a little bit in fiction, but usually with characters that swim in and out of the narrative in minor roles. If your character is getting a larger role you are better off giving them a nickname of some sorts. Or if you have a character who you want to remain shrouded in mystery. I`ve no idea why you would ask the reader to put up with calling a character "the woman", that would get tiresome quickly. He could have called the first guy Hood or something, if he wanted him to stay mysterious. I`m sorry I haven`t been reading the book lately, so busy at the moment. Will try and get back to it over the weekend, although I may roll a few chapters into one critique to save time.
As a newbie to this forum i can honestly say that i have no idea about what is going on. While i gathered that, whoever wrote the small novel you guys are ripping apart, is known to you and you have some sort of bad memorie about him it was weird for me to see this^^. I do hope i never get on your bad side guys, what you are doing here is brutal. Entertaining and hilarious, but brutal XD.
This thread explains the origin of the whole thing: https://www.writingforums.org/threads/author-freaking-out-over-one-star-review.139643/
I noticed it too. If your perspective is your unique thoughts feelings and emotions on a subject or all subjects, wouldn't you base all your beliefs off of it?
I`m not doing this to be brutal, that`s not me, I`m just trying to fathom the novel honestly. Given that I`m looking at self publishing myself in the future I`m hoping to learn from this and give myself every opportunity not to cut corners and go the easy route but to fight to get the best out of myself, go that extra mile, and work harder. This novel is why you shouldn`t look at self publishing as an easy route, there are no easy routes in publishing, neither should there be. Just because you can publish a book easier than at any time in anyone`s lives doesn`t mean you should.
Yes, that`s probably true, the problem is that if you have to try and puzzle out what a sentence means surely you haven`t done your job. Or should you make the reader work harder?
How have I missed this thread?? This is priceless! While I was reading through all your comments I was thinking mana as in the mystical food stuff ... sort like lembas. Apparently, I was wrong & I consider myself to be a gamer. While I'll continue reading your comments, I'm gonna have to pass on reading this work myself. I personally find it annoying to read through lots of flowery sentences trying to figure out what things mean. Just tell me what's happening in plain words I just ain't that bright. (Picks nose)
Me too, but not the kind of games that would use this term. I don't think I could've got through this book either. I'm impatient with good flowery writing, on the whole, and I do not cope well with bad flowery writing.
@Tenderiser @doggiedude I'm not a gamer and I knew what mana was haha! Oh and Tender, you may not enjoy my co-author's writing then... Yeah this thread is starting to feel like Jack is the only one actually reading the book! Come on the rest of you I wanna read your reviews!!
This is the most flowery thing I can think of in my WIP, and I'm still thinking its a little goofy. Two-hundred and fifty million people gone in one swipe of fate’s claw.
It got worse. I don't know how it did but it did. Actually I do know, and I'm gonna tell you. Chapter 2: The Morning of a War (part II) Someone had a feeling you guys! First feeling of the book on page 46. More on that in writing but first... Events: This whole chapter has been full of those horizontal bars, some passages don't even last a page as we jump back and forth. Case in point the passage I ended part I on where Olwyn is in the forest. Well she's still in the forest, and some people that are not called elves, and are clearly elves, are gathering around her. And then we're off in the head of another army guy. This one is clearly a shaman and we get a bunch of non-story about his renown and the skills that he can use. Saccoccio actually has him cast a spell that gives his soldiers "a two thirds chance to evade attacks." It will actually get worse from there. Then we're with Olwyn again as the not-elves take her through the forest. She's spaced the fuck out, but remains cogent enough to worry about her baby. And Olwyn is like, "Guess I'd better trust this person I've never met before with my six hour old infant. I'm gonna worry about what his dad is doing right now instead." So she whimpers his name and then we get another line break. More army is happening. They're singing fucking songs--sorry, war cries--now. But we get to meet the baby-daddy, Lugh. And Lugh has a feeling! He doesn't like the Shadekin, despite the fact that he's in their army. I think. I was pretty sure the whole army was Shadekin, but now I'm not so sure. Apparently I'm one ignorant enough to mold his beliefs on the narrow shape of his perspective; and thus could never understand the Shadekin. There's some explanations that don't help this at all. I guess there was a magic macguffin that Woden used to macguff, and the Shadekin come from that, and now they kind of run the show. Saccoccio pulls a Rand and complains that In what way that could be useful I don't understand, but my beliefs are molded by my perspective, so I guess I never can. Lugh is unhappy that he's gonna have to kill a bunch of people and for a second struggles with this. Then he has some jokes with his friends and forgets all about it. I'm serious, that's all that happens. And we'll talk about it in writing, but now that there's dialogue for more than a single line, it's really weird. Like, finding your best friend in the bathtub masturbating to a pile of burning newspaper weird. But they joke about all the sex they're not having, or maybe just about the existence of sex? It reads like Saccoccio has never heard a joke about sex before, but is really trying his best. Then there's a battle, and Saccoccio uses a whole bunch of game terms, including naming his spells with Capital Letters, like this is a fucking game manual. He even used the term "area effect," and I found myself seized by the desire to murder the nearest living thing. His side kills a whole bunch of the other side, they all get resurrected with necromancy, a bunch of bullshit happens. The term "replenish your health" is used and I start wishing that I drank so I could deal with this. Horizontal bar and we're back with Olwyn, who dies. We don't know why she dies. Aside from the fact that she was running, and had just had a baby, there's no reason for her to have died. Even if that was the reason, Saccoccio says early on that she had healed herself so she could take off with the baby. None of that makes sense. This less-than-a-day-old baby also has some incredible concepts about death, and somehow understands that his mother is gone, and that he can't go with her. Even for Saccoccio this is a huge misunderstanding of how babies are capable of functioning. Bar, and we're back with the fucking nameless "the man" and "the boy" and "his wife". The boys is in a trance, I guess, not dead. That clears that up. While he's tranced out the man wanders through his "manor" so I guess that's where this is happening too. About 50 pages too late to try and set the scene, but I guess better late than never. The man has an argument with his wife about the boy, and makes some weird statement about "what happens to those that become lost." I guess they don't find their way home? Saccoccio doesn't distinguish this word from any other meaning, but apparently all that "become lost" don't have fathers. I really don't know what he's trying to say there. And then the chapter 2 is done and we're over halfway through with the book! Writing: Okay, we know that there are some weird word choices, but the way I'm writing this makes it seem like they're once a page or so. They're more like every other sentence. I can't put them all in, but I just want you to know how prevalent they are here. It gets weirder. When the soldiers are talking suddenly everything is 'tis and ye and bullshit. Out of fucking nowhere, and then that just goes away again. Fake middle English is bad enough (very bad) but just adding it and dropping it again is much much worse. I don't know why no one in the reviews pointed it out, but it's a gaping whole in an otherwise...mess of holes. I just wanted to bring it up. I found the famous line alluded to in the other reviews, which if you haven't heard about I'll gleefully point out now. First off, electormagnetism is a force, like gravity, or momentum. It's not a physical thing. Second it doesn't actually burn at all. It can get things hot, but understanding that words have specific meanings isn't in Saccoccio's wheelhouse. It's not even on his ship, or in his ocean. And third, magnetic forces are invisible, and even if you could see them, your brain would have no way of understanding what they looked like. So the statement is just a delicious layer cake of idiocy. It might be forgivable if it sounded good, but a seven syllable word is pretty hard to fit into snappy prose. But the best one of the chapter has to be the Shaman's final words as he rallies the army: Again there's some weird misunderstanding about how words work. Afar and far are not the same thing. Even if they were, far from the person you claimed to be has some context disagreements in and of itself. If you're absent from the person you could have been, does that mean you have a better clone you've been wanting to die with all this time? Thoughts: So there was a battle, and some mother died. This didn't need to take half the book to get to this point. Even if it had taken just as long, there should be much more story left, and I'm over halfway done. All of that jumping around didn't make the reading easier in the slightest. It would have been obtuse if we were just jumping back and forth from Olwyn to Lugh, but Lugh doesn't even get introduced until we're 3/4 of the way through the chapter. Saccoccio seems to think that every character in this battle need their own little biopic, and isn't adverse to skipping around to focus on every one individually. As it is it's pretty much incomprehensible. And I have to go back over best mother Olwyn. She takes off with her child, on the run from nothing we're ever told about, to die for no reason, and give her less-than-a-day old baby to some strangers wandering around the fucking forest. "Why?" is the only intelligent response to that chain of events. It's worth pointing out, to close this, that these two events are entirely unrelated. There is no reason to tell both stories, and especially no reason to tell them concurrently. Saccoccio decided he wanted to have a battle, so he hyped up as much bullshit as he could, threw an incidental character in it (that we don't even meet until well after the armies are ready to fight) and then kills him. There is a net 0 impact of this on the plot. The baby, (who I guess is also "the man" maybe?) is probably the main character, but all of the events leading up to this have no impact on him as a character. He's less than a day old, what fucking opinion does he have about his father's army? We're over halfway in, every named character save one is dead, and I have no idea what the point of the story is right now.
Oh, guys! Sorry, but I forgot the thing I was going to say about the sex joke. This is the joke: Hilarious right! Saccoccio really is the funniest guy. I have to save that one for next time I'm at the bar, everyone will go nuts!
You mean there are TWO feelings in one chapter???? Way to branch out Dave Soccoccio! The sad thing is your review and critique has been more entertaining than the actuall story. If David(I think that's his first name) had benefit of such attention during the beta phase he might have put together a story worth reading.
Ok, sorry, I just couldn`t read it, it got to much. I got to the next part where the boy speaks with a character (that is only referred as the man) who seems to be his biological father and some parts were better. The descriptions were on point, I understood what he was trying to say. And after that there were parts that I got, that were easier to read and even not bad. The biggest problem with this story is that I can`t really figure out what the story is. I ended up skimming the rest, parts where the boy and his father toy with chalices and the boy ends up drinking something that takes him to another realm. That`s when Onara takes the baby, which I presume is the boy, and leaves. The boy dreams of these things, sees other things, but whether these things are actually real or not is unclear. He visits these dreams again and we are taken to another place with a character called Dani. It jumps so much, even in the same scene, parts of the story missing that would help you to see the story he is obviously trying to tell you. Telling not showing, illogical jumps, sentences that I can`t quite figure out. It doesn`t make any sense. I did read the whole of his thank you note at the end. He thanks a lot of people and talks of adventures that would have made Blackbeard blanch white as snow and run with fear. Did the guy actually know all these people? Did he have these adventures? What I truly don`t understand, what completely escapes me, is why he didn`t get this read before he published. He talks about his editor but what kind of editor would have allowed all these errors to remain. Did he get it beta read? I know how hard it is to get beta readers, I`m having the same problem myself. It`s not easy but you have to do it, even if you have to pay someone, get it read. And surely anyone reading this is going to say what we`re saying now. Dylan, it isn`t ready.
Just downloaded the free pdf and read the prologue. Jack has hit it on the nose. I agree with his post completely. It is not the worst piece I have read, but its up there. The author never reveals the "Why" this is taking place. Just some cloaked dude reeking havoc on a city. No why he is doing it. After he levels the city, there is a break to the future that has a boy walking through the dead city in the future. Again, no why he is there or what was he looking for. If you can get passed his fancy sentences you can follow a little bit. But it is hard to get past it. On to chapter 1.
Okay, chapter 1 done. Yikes, one big drawn out conversation that answers very few questions. I understood everything, just still no purpose to this story. He makes this huge conversation between father and son, but answers no questions the son asks his father. It wasn't entirely bad, but there is absolutely nothing I can take from it to form any plot. This is rough.
