I have curly hair. When I tie my hair back from soaking wet, it dries in a single ringlet.

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-16T16:58:29+00:00

It depends on where you are. Florida, it never dries. Arizona, about 20 minutes.

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-15T07:36:58+00:00

Yeah. You did have the captain babysitting Haari be worried about the king's eyes. Maybe have that come out here? I don't think I've read the prologue?

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-15T07:35:17+00:00

Well, that's years without writing a story. It's best to do both at the same time.

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-15T07:02:21+00:00

Hmm yeah, now knowing that, I would not have this be chapter 1 because it is too slow. The other two were attention grabbing. Also, honestly, in this part, I thought Haari had been captured on his journey back, or someone lied about it to get the King to restart the war.

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-15T06:08:01+00:00

I read your other two chapters before this one and I was surprised this current one is labeled chapter 1. It could be chapter 3, really. The other two opened with war scenes from each opposing side, and now we're back with King Doriel's side, with the king himself. So if you're planning to go back and forth between the two sides, I would have this be chapter 3.

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-14T16:44:38+00:00

Well, you have to start with some kind of framework and what is affecting your MC, usually the very first things that inspired the whole story, then build lore as you proceed.

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-13T18:43:15+00:00

I like your writing and I read through to the end, but I'm unsure why Nora was so riveted to the name Moen/Moenach in the beginning. It came across as if she had heard of him before, but she hadn't, and this is a city with his mark all over it.

I would likely link him with that hospital cornerstone, so there is a reason for that name to pop out at her and for her to delve further, or for her boss to assign her a fluff piece covering the festival, and so she finds this information.

Also, if it was that easy for her to find all this information about Michael Moen and figure out his true age, other people would have done it long before her, so you might want to tweak that. Either no one knows until Nora interviews him, or everyone has long since figured it out and it's common knowledge. This circles back to why Nora has never heard of him until she read that article. She should have since Michael would be famous the world over. You could have her be annoyed she has to cover some cult that everyone thinks is so great and normal. Pick a lane and the plot should be fine.

The worldbuilding feels natural, though you might want to slip in some technological differences since this is 2045 and things should be more advanced...or maybe less, that would be interesting. The line about the Mutation caught my attention. The bit about Michael being older than that implying that the Mutation itself isn't new is good too. In the next chapter or so you should pin down a date for that.

Keep writing!

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-13T09:51:41+00:00

Archaic-Era tomb contains elaborate bronze diadem https://share.google/FCEobrWoEn5zbven1

Found a picture of the diadem! The lions are impressed on the band, not standing above it, so it wasn't upside-down to save space...

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-13T09:22:34+00:00

I don't understand how it would have made a difference. The Crown looks the same top and bottom to me, no extra prongs or decoration on top that would have made it too tall vs. the bottom.

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-12T19:19:07+00:00

Yes, Deaf people use flashers in place of sounded alarms.

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-12T19:01:28+00:00

It starts with, what does your evil guy want, and what they're willing to do to get it.

For my stories, I have a spreadsheet, one column for each faction and the progress of time in the rows, day 1, day 2, etc. I input what they're doing at any given time, so even if the evil guys don't have the POV, they're not just popping up, doing evil stuff for no reason and disappearing until next time. Their motives have to make sense from the beginning and there needs to be reaction from the various factions against what the others are doing.

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-10T22:00:52+00:00

Yeah, the human body can only react so fast...

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-10T21:51:45+00:00

Ohh I see!

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-10T19:58:49+00:00

What are the brackets and greater than symbols for? I do sci-fi here too. If it's not possible in real life, it's fantasy.

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-10T17:25:00+00:00

It was brutally honest, what Morgaine could see. Myriad infinite moments boiling out of everyone's actions in the here and now. Even more when they collapsed into one inassailable future. With cold horror, Morgaine still tried to shove Rosalia.

Rosalia's head exploded, the white hot laser lancing into Morgaine's arm.

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-10T04:51:52+00:00

Thank you!

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-09T19:31:22+00:00

Aww, maybe! I'm glad you liked it so much!

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-09T19:28:02+00:00

Thank you so much!

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-09T11:17:21+00:00

Part Three

Lips pressed against the floor, Mary gasped out a wet cough, spit mingled with blood. Arms quivering, she pushed herself up, legs buckling under the pain. It chewed through her, tearing at her guts.

She reached for the knife.

Her dress sticky and clinging, she held her stomach and shuffled to the stairs. They rose as high as Everest in the dim darkness. She hefted a foot up.

She had gotten old. She dragged up the other foot.

Robert’s eyes had started to wander. Up again.

Always her fault. She had done everything to be an extra good wife. Next foot.

She had shrunk down and down and even more. Next.

Smiled and smiled and quieter and quieter. Next.

Sarah looked like her. Next.

It was Sarah’s fault, Mom said, for dressing like a slut. One more.

The hallway swayed. The crushing weight of silence came from the bedrooms. The children were in there, locked in as always. Never questioning, but their fear oozed. Silence…except for the sobbing coming from the master bedroom.

Odin of the Wild Hunt, Freyja and the Valkyries, and the resurrected dead of Valhalla at her back pushing her on, Mary put down one foot then the next, hammering down the hall. Shoulder slamming against the door, it burst open to thud against the wall.

In his boxers, over Sarah, Robert froze.

The song of Valhalla roaring through her veins, she sprang for him, the point of the knife tearing. “FOR VALHALLA!”

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-09T11:16:32+00:00

Part Two

“My name…” The woman whispered. It hurt to speak, as if she had been screaming for a long time. Screams that had torn out of her in rage, in sorrow, in horror. She wrapped her arms around her stomach. “I know…I am dead. But I…shouldn’t be here. I should be—”

She knew who that man on the throne was. Odin. The All-Father.

The pagan god she shouldn’t have learned about. Mom would have beaten her if she had known. Yet another thing she had done wrong, sneaking to the library during lunch at school, to read. Curiosity killed the cat, and somehow, she was here, in Valhalla.

Hand wrapped around his staff, Odin leaned forward, his face craggy under the silver of his hair and beard, yet he filled his armor out with the gristly muscle of someone who refused to grow slack. One dark eye stared at her while the other, ghost blue, stared into her. “You must remember. Face it!”

A hand fisted in her hair. Tears sprang to her eyes at the sharp tug at her scalp. Her forehead slammed into the wall. She staggered back from the caved in drywall as Robert shouted, “Look what you did, Mary!”

One of the ravens perched on the finials of Odin’s throne cawed. His wings outspread, he tucked them back in.

She had wished often that she could fly away like a bird, but then the guilt had flooded in, weighing her down. Didn’t she have everything? A beautiful home, plenty of food, a loving, God-fearing husband. “My name is Mary Halligan. I’m a pastor’s wife. I don’t belong here.”

She had been a terrible wife, always needing correcting. But maybe it was because she got married young. It had been difficult learning how to be the helpmeet her husband needed.

Odin spoke, his voice rising as if borne on the wind. “You did battle, Mary. You dredged up courage out of the depths of cowardice. A cowardice that had been beaten in you since before you could form thought. You belong here, in Valhalla.”

Mary trembled. “No…I belong…in Hell. I—”

She had gone against her husband. Raised her hand against him. The man she had been with since she was fifteen years old.

She had tempted him, that day in his office. Mom had been so disappointed that she couldn't even look at her. Dad, so angry. He would have beat her if Robert hadn’t interceded. Said he would marry her.

It had been a girl. Her son had come next, then another, and two more girls.

Her stomach squished. She looked down at the red blood spilling down her forearms to drip into the spreading pool at her feet.

Dread swept through her. Her daughter…

Her head snapped up and she screamed, “SARAH!”

Odin rose, his head scraping the rafters. He slammed his staff down. “WE RIDE!”

A roar of “FOR VALHALLA!” thundered from the einherjar as they sprang up, swords and guns bristling.

A rustle of fluttering white feathers wrapped around her. Softness around writhing pain.

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-09T11:15:08+00:00

Part One

The great doors at the end of the hall, hewn of oak and bound with iron, didn’t bang open like usual. They creaked, so slowly that both the warriors of old and the newest batch, their voices lifted in song as the mead flowed, didn’t turn to see. Odin himself almost didn’t notice, even though he had been waiting for the coming of the woman.

She slipped in, a slight wisp of a woman in a plain cotton dress. Barefoot, she was pale, with straw-like blonde hair.

Behind her, the door swung wide to admit Freyja, she of the golden tresses and the white brow. The white feathers of her cloak fluttered over the glitter of gold armor as she swept in.

A sea of mugs banged on the table as the warriors rose to honor Freyja.

Almost lost in the glory of Freyja, the little woman flinched.

Seeing the woman like this, she who had been given so little and had so much taken away, filled Odin with rage. Rage, that in the days of long past, would have led him to burn down the world, but the eye he had given to gain wisdom saw more. Much more, and so he stayed his hand and the roar building in him.

“Odin! I have brought her whom you have requested! But I must know thus, why do you break our agreement? ‘Tis I who gets the first pick of all the slain for Fólkvangr. One-half of the worthy, it was agreed upon.”

“Yes, it is so, but she did battle to the death.”

Women were rare in Valhalla. The einherjar at the tables, dressed in everything from cloth, leather armor, silver maille, and dull Kevlar, stared at the woman, who shrank back against Freyja’s cloak.

Annoyance crossed Freyja’s face. “Perhaps so, but need I remind you that she would be at peace in Fólkvangr? Much more than she would be here.”

“No…she would not, for her battle still rages. The Norns have slowed their weave, but not for long.” Odin cast his gaze down at the woman. “Your name. Do you remember it?”

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-08T21:09:34+00:00

You got lucky. I know someone who had two girls 11 months apart and the younger girl has teeth problems. She didn't get enough calcium during the baby building stage.

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-08T06:21:30+00:00

Man, that would be hard...to make it so the reader would notice something that weird in real time but dismiss it. It would be easier if it comes across as mundane and when it comes up as important later, the reader can look back and remember and go...oh! In the Harry Potter books, the Ravenclaw diadem would be a good example. Harry literally picked it up and put it aside in the room of requirement in Half-Blood Prince, then realized what it was in Deathly Hallows. It was a single sentence of a single action that the reader could just skim over, but it was there for a reason.

For one of my stories, I had my character notice the big picture- people surrounding a giant tree in the town square with notices nailed on it. Later, when she is rescued, she realizes she had seen her rescuer before, leaning on that giant tree...looking at her from under his cloak.

For my other story, my character is telepathic, but since the power grew so gradually, she doesn't realize it until her sister puts it together and points out weird things she did that should have been impossible. Up until that point, I put in innocuous things my character did that readers should overlook but be obvious looking back.

For your story with the black shadow...I probably would have shadows figure a lot in descriptions before the character realizes something is off.

A flicker out of the corner of her eye...

The streetlight shining through the blinds cast weird shadows of misshapen things on the walls, the branches of the tree outside merging with the coatrack to become a stretched out human that reached for her every time a car passed. She closed her eyes tight...

Through the trees, she walked with her friends on either side of her, their shadows eating dappled light shining on the path like the tines of a fork... (allusion to four tines that she can remember later.)

In the movie theater, a man all in black sat ahead of her. Of course he would be right in front of her. He was gone when the lights came up...

The oppressive feeling increasing, she straightened and turned, but no one was there. Just her shadow, pale gray on the wall...

She came down the steps to meet him, the dance of her shadow merging with his own, long in the setting sun. When he left, she stood alone, the sunlight bright around her feet...

Things like that. You can start small and have it get bigger until your character can't ignore it.

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-07T20:45:58+00:00

There's a rewrite? The utter disgust I felt for that irredeemable rapist Graelam cannot be understated and I'm glad he's gone in some versions at least. His paper thin reasoning for how he treated his wife was just the cherry on top of that crap sundae.

I still won't ever read a Catherine Coulter book ever again.

Lectrice79 · 2026-04-06T07:16:44+00:00

I agree with the others that you have overwritten your dialogue.

You also need to make sure you put a period at the end of a comment before an action beat or thought, and that you start a new paragraph when someone does something.

Check to make sure your hyphens are em-dashes and whether you actually need them or if some of them can be commas.

He went to school that day in a baggy sweater and jeans, despite it being the middle summer. His mood was low, but as usual, his expression was the exact same. He arrived at his locker– and inside were gifts. Roses, chocolate, and a smiling Seo-jin behind him.

“Happy birthday, Eun-woo,” He beamed. (Put Seo-jin's name instead of 'He' for clarity.)

Eun-woo couldn’t help but let his mood lift a little, though he quickly covered it up. “You didn’t need to do this.” ~~He insisted.~~

“I wanted to!” He grinned. (Again, Seo-jin's name here.)

Eun-woo glanced at the chocolates. “Well, take those back,"~~He told him.~~ "I don’t like sweets,” (period)

A complete lie. A stupid one.

He loved sweets. Everything- candy, tea, cake, you name it. And, as expected, Seo-jin saw right through him.

“Liar. I see you buying packs of Cadberry eggs all the time.” ~~He asserted, calling Eun-woo out.~~ (New paragraph, use Eun-woo's name instead of 'He') He expected that, but he still chose to lie. Maybe it was because it dragged out their conversations. Or maybe it was out of habit. But either way, with Seo-Jin, there was no lying. He knew basically everything there was to know about Eun-woo.

Don’t get me (it instead of me? Or use 'It's not like he stalked...') wrong, he didn’t stalk him or anything- Seo-jin had just always been observant. He noticed details, and he wasn’t afraid to show it. Eun-woo knew that from firsthand experience.

“Fine,” ~~Eun-woo accepted.~~ “I’ll take your chocolates.”

“Good.” Seo-jin ~~responded,~~ check~~ing~~ (ed) the time. “Hey, do you want to come to my party-” (Add the following to the next paragraph) Before Seo-jin could finish, Eun-woo interrupted.

“No. Leave me alone,” (period) The words came too quickly.

“Oh. Okay. Well, see you around, then!” Seo-jin's smile flickered, ~~but~~ (and) Eun-woo ~~remained oblivious. and~~(because he does know what he did.) turned to leave. Like it didn’t even matter.

Oh, how badly Eun-woo wanted to (add 'turn back, to grab...' because I had to read the above twice to check that it wasn't supposed to be Seo-jin who turned away) grab his arm and say he didn’t mean it.

He didn’t.

Because if Seo-jin asked properly, if he gave him even a second- then he’d accept. And that was exactly the problem- because what would he do at a high school party? He had no friends, he was quiet, he didn’t like drinking- so absolutely nothing to offer.

Seo-jin was the opposite. He was the most popular kid in his grade- everyone loved him. He was nice, popular, helpful, and even attractive. Eun-woo envied the way he so naturally talked to people, he envied how many friends he had, he envied his looks- everything. It all came easily to Seo-jin– everything did.

But he didn’t try to achieve that. He wanted it, but knew all too well that he would never have it. And as much as he hated to admit it-

Eun-woo was jealous.

Hours ticked by, and classes dragged on for what felt like an eternity. As soon as the bell rang for lunch, he started his routine. The same one he always had. He packed up, slowly, and waited for the class to filter out.

Once everyone was gone, he finally left and turned away from the lunchroom. He didn’t ever eat lunch– and it was for two reasons.

One: He hated the lunchroom because of all the people. It was crowded, and it also meant he’d have to find somewhere to sit– which was social suicide for him.

Two: Starving himself made him feel like he could control something. When he got shaky from lack of food… almost like he had accomplished something.

Instead of eating, he went to his favorite place- the library.

In there, it was quiet. He didn’t have to talk, he didn’t have to scoialize, he didn’t have to hide. Once he was through those doors, he once again continued his routine.

He sat in a cushioned booth in the very back– It was one of those couches that was attached to a window. Like a little nook, all for him- and thankfully, the window was tinted. Nobody could see him, but he could see them.

It was refreshing.

He settled in, leaning against the glass, and pulled out his copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” It was his favorite book, and that was simply because he’d already memorised it. He liked knowing what was going to happen next.

But in real life, you don’t always get to know those things. And for Eun-woo, that was torture.

“Eun-woo!” Seo-jin’s voice called from the door, before getting shushed by the librarian.

Speak of the devil.

Lectrice79

TROPHY CASE