Need constructive criticism? Send me a DM.

[Exemplary Characters]

Short and to the point: I'm an author and editor by trade, and I've been doing this for quite some time.

If you need constructive, skills-focused criticism of your writing, send me a DM and I'll give you a thorough crit and high-level, issues-based summary of key areas for you to focus on, tailored to your stage of development as a writer. I remember how hard it was to learn when I started out, so you won't get shade from me.

For an example of how I write casually (as in, I'd never publish any of this, it's too rough), here's the openings to two stories I've recently started on here:

Autumn was a dreary season throughout the region, but the city had felt tired even before the clouds turned grey, its once thriving commerce now ebbing, the absence of ships felt by the quiet where once the rowdy sailors had roared, laughed, and fought their way up the hill to the taverns. Instead of human warmth, tonight the streets were alive with the thunder of the storm overhead, gutters overflowing in the downpour, cobblestones sheeted with running water that raced down toward the port and spilled into the murky harbour.

Some hour or more had passed since the pale sun had set, and – for all that the street lamps had been lit – the night was nearly impenetrable beneath the cloud cover, imperilling pedestrians as they darted between the carts that came up from the warehouses for overnight deliveries. To be outside was to be cold, wet, and possibly trampled.

Fuck that.

If there was a silver lining to the city losing trade, it was that passage was cheap, and the slightly fraying but still fine inns were grateful for any patronage that brought coin. Together with the increasing presence of smugglers, it meant that a supremely talented magician could pause in her travels to drink fine liquors in quiet and be assured of a comfortable room when the bottles ran dry... or at least, became too heavy to hold.

All of this suited Nalsa well. In matter of fact, as she sat in an upholstered chair pulled up to the fireplace and drank dwarven whiskies from squat glasses, she liked being the only patron — and she even liked the sound of drumming rain behind the crackle of the flames. Her shadow was dramatic where it fell across the room, as were the vibrant oranges and golds of the robes she wore, complimenting the neat, metallic blonde hair that perched on her head in a bun, bound tight but for a single lock of silver-white that hung down her cheek. She revelled in the mystery she was surely radiating, the figure she cut, imagining herself the very picture of arcane glamour and aloofness, insouciance in radiant profile.

Mostly, though, she enjoyed getting quietly drunk, and knowing no one would stop her.

It is a fact oft remarked upon that the moments which shape a life are seldom appreciated while they are lived. Perhaps this sentiment misled the philosophers who, morbid in their fascinations, each in their own way declared that the true worth of a life can only be measured when its course is run – when the river of the blood has at last dried in its arterial bed – for, whichever side of the scale the ending is placed upon, how the ending is laid down will determine how the balance hangs in the final accounting. Other minds have countered that death is the worst moment to define a life, and indeed turned the metaphor of weights and measures back upon itself, for in death the spirit vacates the body, and it is not the lightness of the spirit that matters more than the heaviness of the flesh?

This question will be returned to, in the fullness of time.

Consider now by way of illustration the story of young Catherine, an alchemist by trade but not by conviction, accustomed to the weighing out of more material substances than accrue in the soul. She, too, did not know the moment where her fate was decided, having been roused from her bed in a temporary residence and summoned through the city to a palatial estate, brought into a parlour where several women were fainted, and one could not be roused. Quite a crowd had gathered to call for a leech, but the common doctors were all busied elsewhere owing to an outbreak of cholera, and the party was too discrete to trust with physicians of means and name.

That was how Catherine climbed from the gutter, at least for a night, attending to the sickly and frail, her pockets lined with gold and threats when she pronounced one young woman dead. But her rise had not gone unnoticed; as it would later turn out, there was a leech in the room after all.

Alchemists like Catherine were taught several laws in their early years of study. The first law was the law of decay: that all things corrode and dwindle with time, much like Catherine's finances as she dwelled in the city. The second law was the law of equivalent exchange: for each action there must be an opposite reaction, such as when she gasped and screamed for joy when a letter silently arrived to cordially invite her to take up work in a country estate. The third law was the law of conservation of measure: substance could not be conjured from nothingness, and any appearance to the contrary must therefore be deceptive, such as when Catherine boarded a specially arranged coach to make her trip from the city.

And the fourth law, the law most frustrating to alchemists, was the law of irreversible change: no reaction could be directly reversed, no decision undone, as Catherine discovered when the coach lurched to a halt in the middle of remote, autumnal woodland and she emerged, blinking, to find the coachman and horses simply... gone.

The storm that rolled in was sudden, and as the road flooded and the coach tipped over in the mud it was as though a devil's wind drove her into the woods.

So at last picture Catherine, in that vulnerable moment, as she staggered through the sheeting rain, what few valuables she had carried with her, sodden to the bone and nerves wracked by the thunder. Feel her fear as it mounted, her pulse as it pounded, and the thrill that lit her bosom when she saw a building through the weirdly swaying trees. Know her trepidation as she entered into the shattered courtyard, the long-dry fountain filling in the downpour, the feminine statute weathered beyond legible visage. Observe how startled she was by the flash of lightning over the old manor house, how for an instant it seemed as though the roof was the roost of many silhouettes before the sky dimmed.

But most of all, fix in your mind the hope in her eyes, when she spied the lit lantern hanging beside the manor's dark door.

 

[Exemplary Characters]

Two people have taken me up on this so far. Always happy to help others, don't be shy.

 

[Exemplary Characters]

Bumping again for anyone who wants it.

 

[Exemplary Characters]

Time for another bump. The half-dozen people who've reached out have all benefited, so why not you?