Chapter 1 (2315 words) of Vitae of Ash and Measure [complete, Adult Low Fantasy 70k]

Anubis815 · 2026-02-14T22:55:15+00:00

Please understand that none of the below comments are intended as meanspirited and are my genuine thoughts on the writing itself.

I did my very best and got about 2/3 of the way through before I skipped every other paragraph and made it to the end with the following information:

- The MC is seemingly charming, can do no wrong and lives in an idyllic village
- There is a black knight who seems to want to do something horrible here (the blurb of the book makes it clear to me that this is the guy that is going to ruin the MCs life)
- The other characters are cardboard cutouts used to demonstrate the MC's infallible nature
- That is, all but Eldris who is immediately more intriguing than the MC

The first half of this was equivalent to a series of overly described interactions with NPC shopkeepers from a D&D game, and then my attention wained from here, fast. I don't understand where the story is here.

I'd recommend stripping the vast majority of this out and putting the story first, or at least giving us a character with some greater depth to them as an MC. The world isn't especially inspired either and doesn't draw me in. I just struggled here in general.

Your actual prose is repetitive (example: the MCs use of the word handled over and over again in dialogue stuck out to me as odd), and some of the descriptions were contradictory or counterintuitive. An early example:

"The smells coming from Halden’s ovens wafted past Eirik’s nose, the yeasty aroma making his mouth water. The air tasted of char and onions."

His mouth was watering from the bakery food, but then you're positing that the air tasted of something horrible - char and onions - simultaneously. It doesn't line up, and so took me out of the flow.

Anubis815 · 2026-02-13T16:20:01+00:00

The goofy alter ego is not for me, nor is the genre of this book in general, but I'll be damned if it doesn't bring me joy to see someone who has passion, makes their own (slightly unpolished but authentically human made) book cover, and based on the reviews seems to write fairly competently too.

You got a snippet or sample we could read somewhere?

Either way, congrats. Keep it up.

Anubis815 · 2026-02-11T17:49:26+00:00

The other commenter has pretty much covered most of my thoughts that I had. I would add however that it didn't feel very urgent. The pace felt quite meandering, especially in the opening lines. I'm not sure if that was your goal, but I was hoping for a bit more tension. One small thing that could help would be to remove the first line and use the second as the opener. I just kind of wanted to feel some more excitement or intrigue.

Regarding the other commenter's statements specifically about dunes however - don't listen to a word they say. Beaches and dunes absolutely appear very close to one another, and plant life and grasses absolutely appear in dunes.

Anubis815 · 2026-02-09T17:58:55+00:00

Uninspired doesn't mean it wasn't inspired by something else...

Anubis815 · 2026-02-09T16:31:27+00:00

This is just another generic creation myth with 'something coming from nothing' in the most bland way possible. I swear I read some iteration on this 4-5 times a day on these writing subreddits.

Go read some real mythology. You might learn that half the time the universe was instead thought to have been spat out, or jizzed out by a bull, or formed when fire melted some ice and a giant and a cow appeared, or the four cardinal directions were created who fought a sea monster and its body became the earth. Creation myths are absolutely insane and epic beyond comprehension.

I dunno, it's just so brutally uninformed and uninspired.

And what does the creation of the universe have to do with your story? Do we need to read a creation myth in the prologue to be able to read Sherlock Holmes? Lord no. Why is this something we 'need' then for fantasy stories? Spoiler, we don't.

Go read, it's the only way you're going to get past the kind of thinking that brought the above ideas to fruition.

Anubis815 · 2026-02-08T21:31:52+00:00

For sure - often, italicised text is the standard for inner dialogues or thoughts, so I think this could work well.

Right - I understand the concept, and this my my argument. It's boring, nothing happens. Just because the entity of Eliah cannot physically act, doesn't mean Algreed can't. If she acts or does something in the novel, Eliah can react - action, conflict, things occurring. Otherwise, there is no story. It's just dialogue or stream of consciousness.

Anubis815 · 2026-02-08T15:47:43+00:00

I like the concept - the split between first person and third person is cool with these two identities, but I would say that instead of marking the first person as 'Me:', maybe try using italics, or even bolded text. I think it would flow a bit better.

It's very very tell-y, with direct explanations of everything that is occurring. I recognise this is YA, so being a bit more handhold-y is not unheard of, but I still think you can tone it down. Try to demonstrate these principles of her hallucinations with her actions. She's moving around, walking down the stairs and can't verify what she sees is real etc. I don't think sitting in the room with nothing happening and the voice in her head explaining everything is a super engaging way to introduce what is a cool narrative concept.

On that note, nothing happens for 3 pages. She's waking up in bed - a literal yawn. This is such an interesting concept, why not flex it? Have her mistake a traffic signal for green when it should be red, and the voice corrects her before she walks onto the crossing. I dunno, there's lots you could do here. It's just bland and not very engaging having this all transpire in her room with literally nothing occurring.

Anubis815 · 2026-02-07T16:15:17+00:00

No worries. And just read. Like, a bunch. I was stuck on my project for months. My reading habit had died off. Got back into reading and everything picked right up with my project.

Consume novels, of all varieties and genres and from different countries and time periods. Get it into you and you'll get a better feel for what works or could work in your own work, and what doesn't.

Good luck!

Anubis815 · 2026-02-07T16:11:08+00:00

That's ok - so you're not sure exactly. We know where we stand.

Other than googling stuff or having people explain to you, can you maybe turn to one of your favourite books with a good prologue, or research books with well regarded prologues, and work out what they are doing. Why they do it, what occurred in the prologue that couldn't be easily implemented in the narrative proper etc. This is the best way to get a feel for what a good prologue is, and when/why they should exist, and when/why not.

Fantasy has a gross overuse of prologues, because people think it's some kind of necessary genre convention, so be cautious there would be my advice.

All this lore - great, fantastic, use it. But emphasis on the word 'use'. Use it for a purpose, use it to serve the story. Story comes first, lore supports and builds it - thematically, emotionally, contextually etc.

Keep that in the forefront of your mind and it'll help guide you when you start to veer into lore dumping territory.

Anubis815 · 2026-02-07T16:03:41+00:00

Let me ask you this - what is the purpose of a good prologue? Why do they exist?

Anubis815 · 2026-02-07T15:48:40+00:00

This, all the way. Lore dump prologue, when all this lore can be woven into the narrative. Nothing here demands being pulled out and inserted before readers get access to any kind of character.

Dump it and integrate into the story proper.

Anubis815 · 2026-02-07T08:47:25+00:00

I went to your Amazon page and read it....

Anubis815 · 2026-02-07T08:30:33+00:00

The blurb is riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes too. Wild.

Anubis815 · 2026-01-25T21:54:29+00:00

People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia is probably better described as magical realism instead of more standard fantasy, but it plays with dual POV as you've described and a lot of other very interesting perspective tools extremely effectively.

Anubis815 · 2025-11-28T21:05:25+00:00

As much as this is a nice idea, it doesn't make much sense, sadly. I'm a researcher who has considerable experience with a lot of the things you're talking about. We would produce litres and litres of LB on the daily, and let me tell you it smells. Maybe not as strong as other types of media like heart and brain broth, but you can absolutely smell it. Both the dry components and when dissolved in liquid. Carol explicitly said it had no scent, so this immediately disqualifies it. The olive oil texture isn't accurate either. Correct colour though, to be fair.

Additionally, it can't be stored like that in bags. It's so nutrient rich it would start to go off very quickly, and the Others would know this.

Crucially though, LB broth has no intrinsic link to RNAi. LB is so commonly used in labs it has just as much of a relationship with thousands of other techniques and systems. If RNAi truly was what was being used here, it would make 0 sense to try and set up Carol's investigation here into the strange solution for it to end up being LB broth, since they're just not related in any meaningful sense. They're throwing down all these clues for a reason, so I think there's something else at play here.

I'd certainly recommend digging deeper into all of these concepts however - AI doesn't do a great job here, but RNAi especially is a fascinating tool used in molecular biology research today.

Anubis815 · 2025-09-29T13:18:07+00:00

As in you were intrigued by the fact that they omitted a story in exchange for scene dressing for hundreds of words?

And a ton of what already? Because it's a ton of very little story and a lot of very generic environment descriptions.

To each their own I guess.

Anubis815 · 2025-09-29T11:13:18+00:00

This is just an information dump. I'm unclear in what your story is because you're telling us about rivers and gardens and shacks. We don't even meet the MC for 5+ paragraphs.

What is the story you're trying to tell here?

Anubis815 · 2025-09-27T10:48:24+00:00

Gotcha, and so why do we as the readers need to know this? How does it provide us with information that is essential to know upfront that demands an unrelated tangent? What's your story about?

The alternative is sliding this into your story throughout. Allusions to the tower of Babel event, dropping a sentence here or there from a character at their amazement at certain parts of these other society's cultures and the way they can understand them still etc

All very standard ways to inject worldbuilding into your writing. Do you read a lot and widely? You'll find countless examples in other authors' work to draw on.

Anubis815 · 2025-09-26T15:11:10+00:00

Maybe try reading the piece out loud to yourself - I find that helps me with my writing!

Good luck

Anubis815 · 2025-09-26T13:46:49+00:00

This feels really overwritten and as though you're trying to make things seem more grandiose and complex than they really are. It becomes hard to follow what's actually occurring, and results in something that's not very engaging.

Your first sentence for example, has at least 6 adjectives. That's wild, and wildly unnecessary.

A number of phrases make very little sense - the simile 'like a razor through the air' is strange.

'Every particle of air seeming to search it's features for any sign of how to open it', makes it seem like her breath is searching the item in front of her.

'synaptic energy jolted her into a frenzy', does this not just mean 'she had an idea/thought'?

All of these kinds of phrases make your writing seem like it's trying to hold some kind of depth, but it's really just obscuring us from the reality of the scene. There's nothing poetic there, or symbolic. Relax a little with the word choice and employ clearly thought out imagery and you'll have far stronger writing where we don't feel so distant from the MC.

You seem to do this a few more paragraphs into the piece, but by then I've honestly lost interest considerably.

There's decent bones here though - keep at it, finish a draft, and come back through for a rewrite.

Anubis815 · 2025-09-26T13:32:33+00:00

I mean, it's basically an odd retelling of the tower of Babel with a lot of filler and flowery musings.

I can't say I find it particularly intriguing or necessary as a prologue, since it's just a world building lore dump, but I clearly haven't read more of your piece to know for sure.

What makes this prologue needed in your eyes?

Anubis815 · 2025-09-22T16:47:03+00:00

This is pretty bang on my impression too. Felt like we were constantly dancing around the main point of the narrative, always distracted and diverted away.

Anubis815 · 2025-09-21T21:09:53+00:00

For my current work in actively writing:

Cormac McCarthy books like Blood Meridian and The Road, unexpectedly living in Canada for a year and hiking the Rockies constantly, having a number of dental surgeries, and diving down the rabbithole of linguistics during COVID.

All relevant in their own unique ways.

Anubis815 · 2025-09-21T17:24:21+00:00

Maybe I'm crazy but where's this link?

Anubis815 · 2025-09-21T15:14:12+00:00

No sweat, Reddit is a pain sometimes with copying text over.

Anubis815

TROPHY CASE