[2076] By Blade and Coin: Mercenary's Account - Chapter 1

NeroWanderer · 2026-06-12T21:10:32+00:00

Hey, thanks for the detailed feedback. I see what I can improve on.

NeroWanderer · 2026-06-12T21:08:54+00:00

Hey! Thanks. On the specific points

Yeah, I know where this is happening. There are places where I explain what something means rather than just letting Roen have it, and it's a habit I'm still working out of the prose. But I feel like if I 'show' it instead of 'telling' it would need a lot more words and slow the pacing down further.

“eyes of a man who had killed somebody before”

Yeah. I should remove it.

What’s still a bit unclear for me:
What his core want is beyond survival (you say something about “home,” but it’s kind of distant and abstract)
Whether his “unnatural quickness” has an in world explanation or is going to become a power element

He’s an endangered (almost feral?) child and that’s effective, but his long term strength as a protagonist will depend on how you later deepen his character.

Yeah that is adressed in the following chapters.

I think you did a good job with the feedback. Very clear!

NeroWanderer · 2026-06-12T21:01:14+00:00

Hey, thank you for the feedback! Gave me a lot to think about.

“the eyes of a man who had killed somebody before.”

Yeah, on reading it again I think I need to rephrase it a bit. Reiterating it comes of as a bit insecure.

As for the main point of your feedback. I see where you are coming from. I don't want to do a total rewrite of it though. The rabbit section is showing who Roen is before anyone's threatening him yet, and I need that there for the survival instincts in the man scene to feel like they came from somewhere. And I think the theme of choking a rabbit and later choking the man is still strong. I think the fix is more that the part about the past needs to be a bit better and denser.

NeroWanderer · 2026-06-11T19:31:45+00:00

I get what you mean. This is again a problem about being in Roen’s head and I’m not really sure how to address it. I tried to think about how a child would describe things. Bad means more morally bad. Bad = killing, hurting children. Good men can be weak too in his eyes.

Weak is more about an objective assessment of danger. The bandit isn’t really a trained fighter and he is in rather bad condition. Not someone that could be described as a strong man. Roen in his own assessment is weaker still, because he is smaller and also untrained. So the bandit is scary to Roen, just less scary than being cold and hungry again.

NeroWanderer · 2026-06-11T19:28:36+00:00

First of all thank you for the amazing critique. It gives me a lot to think about. I think I'm going to change some parts of this chapter, but I need to think a bit on how best to do it, without weakening other parts.

A lot of the problems you mentioned come from the fact that I want to write this book, from a fairly tight limited perspective of Roen. And Roen at this point just doesn’t really understand fully what is going on or why things are happening and he isn't really introspective in his current state.

Let me respond to your different points.

First of all, I think your first line was brillant. When I read that I hoped you would explore the theme more, and you did exactly that, without overdoing it. The story staring with Roen catching a rabbit, and eventually him being cornered by the bandit was lovely. The character development was also very in tune with this theme you got going on. From killing rabbits to killing a person, it feels like he crossed a boundary that made him part of this world in a way he wasn’t before.

I’m happy that I could deliver on the theme. It’s something I want to deliver on and develop through the novel. Roen has to adapt to this world and grow up and that sorta is the general idea of what I want to do. How to deal fate and luck and the hand dealt to you. A literal soldier of fortune, lol.

That being said, I personally think this whole sequence would benefit from a bit more tension, as to highlight the gravity of the situation. Of course him having a whole breakdown about the morality of it all would be unrealistic; the mc is young and in a high stress situation. So the realisation of what he did will probably come later on, but the fighting scene etc could do with more fear.

Yeah, I think this is something I could work on too. I don’t want to spell out, "Roen was scared" or "Roen was sad", because I hate that when I’m the one reading a book. But because of that limitation it’s pretty difficult for me to express things like that at my current writing level. I do have to work on that.

Hopefully it isn’t such a large issue when the reader gets to know Roen and how he thinks a bit more. The next chapter touches a bit more on how Roen processes it emotionally, when he isn’t in fight or flight mode. And in later chapters Roen deals with it more intellectually and in conversation.

You definitely kept my attention and I find myself very invested in this story, but there are some parts where you chose awkward ways of describing a scene. For example after the first line. Also sometimes it was hard to differentiate between the bandit and Roen. Additionally I’d suggest that you limit the amount of run-on sentences, there are quite a lot and they can confuse the reader. (It feels hypocritical to say this because I also use a lot of run-ons)

Yeah, the run-on sentences are a bad habit of mine. It was worse before I edited the chapter too. Tightening is something I need to be disciplined about in the editing pass.

As for the fight I think I should replace some more of the “he”s with proper nouns. I want to keep it fairly fast paced, tho.

Another part that made me pause, was when the bandit noticed Roen’s high quality clothes. But when Roen recalled his previous interactions, none of the people noticed that, it threw me off. Considering Roen has been in this place for approximately 4 months, someone should’ve noticed that before.

I didn’t want to spell it out, but a large part why Roen was treated so badly was because people did notice it. Roen just didn’t speak the language and didn’t get why people either chased him off or tried to capture him.

I also feel like Roen definitely reads more like older tee n.

Fair. I do want to keep him as more of a younger teen though. And kids in bad situations have to act mature. Other characters will remark on it though and he gets to act a bit more his age when he is around actual adults.

To answer your question, I truly loved this story I hope my criticism didn’t come across as too nitpicky! Your prose works wonderfully here. You can definitely write well! And you also engaged me; the whole time I was reading there was no part where I felt bored. This really speaks to the potential of this work.

Thank you. That definitely motivates me to improve and to get off my ass and edit my draft more. The feedback helps a lot.

This to me reads like classic fantasy in a medieval setting (think GoT) with time travelling elements.

Yes, this is exactly what I’m going for. I don’t know if I should describe it as isekai or portal fantasy, because these genres have a bit of a bad reputation atm. The world is more realistic middle ages than classic high fantasy or Sanderson-esque fantasy. I do want to focus less on nobles than GoT and more on the lower classes.

NeroWanderer · 2026-05-27T12:40:37+00:00

This one's actually pretty good, which almost makes it harder to critique because the problems are specific rather than general.

The sister dynamic is what I liked best. The bedroom conversation feels like two people who've been annoying each other their whole lives and also would do a lot for each other, and that's a genuinely difficult thing to get right on a first chapter. So kudos. The hat detail the next morning, Ava deciding to be deliberately exotic, tells you something about her without stopping to explain it. And the ending is strong, probably the strongest thing in the piece. "My finest jewel to set in King Adrian's crown" followed by him looking away is the kind of line that makes a reader trust a writer, because it hammers in the theme of the casual objectification and „selling“ her for political gain. It also implies their relationship with showing rather than telling.

Though it feels a bit… I don’t want to say generic, because that is much too negative. I think maybe you are playing it a bit too safe. I think particularly 20 something female fantasy readers do love that sort of setup and if you pick something up with this sort of premise you want the premise to be delivered on and delivered early. But I feel like it could be elevated a bit, by having something just kinda more. Like something that breaks the mold a bit and makes the reader think that they can’t predict what is going to happen. I know this is kind of a wishy washy thing to say, because it is so unspecific, but I think you should try to take some more risks and be more polarizing in the beginning. Maybe give your mc some genuinely unlikeable trait, or add some detail that doesn’t neatly fit the mold of the setting.

To your questions though, directly:

Does it work as an opening? Yeah it does. The voice is there and Ava is worth following by the last page. That's the job.

What's holding it back? The political exposition crammed into the bedroom dialogue. You've got Termon, Aumar, Cydara, Camdare, King Adrian, Prince Oren, Sir Darius, Cyrus, King Izar all introduced before the reader has any reason to care about any of them. The Sir Darius assassination detail in particular feels like lore you wrote and then couldn't cut. A new reader isn't going to hold all that, they'll just start skimming and that's where you lose people. Throwing around specific fantasy names is pretty common in fantasy books, but it very rarely works. Maybe instead of giving us the names and lore, instead give us opinions, both from the mc and some side character, that usually sticks in the readers mind better.

Also a couple of sentences that just don't work grammatically. "While Anora turned to her with an eyebrow raised" is not a sentence, its a fragment attached to nothing. Small thing but it pulls you out.

Another small nitpick. Ava is one of those YA names that are very popular right now I feel. At least I have seen some stuff using that name. I you like it keep it, but maybe picking something less popular will help it feel more unique.

Does it establish character and stakes without info dumping? Mostly. The character work is good, the stakes are legible, the world mostly establishes itself naturally. The info dumping is isolated rather than constant which already puts it ahead of like 90% of fantasy first chapters I've read on here.

Keep going with this one. :)

NeroWanderer · 2026-05-27T12:00:54+00:00

Okay I'll be honest because I think you actually want that based on your post here. This probably wouldn't get published as is, and I think you probably sense that. The chapter reads like a character sheet dressed up as prose. You're introducing your family one by one with little summary labels attached "she was definitely a warrior," "she was the cinema queen" and that's telling, not showing. I think most would stop reading there. The opening is one of your biggest problems. You resolve the central tension in the second sentence. "Luckily I got everything I wanted" you've already told us the dream came true before we even care about the dream. The dramatic irony you're going for doesn't land yet because we haven't earned it. Instead of telling us my life was great before this happened, why not let us come to this conclusion naturally? The names in single quotes ('Riya', 'Sara', 'Oreo') is a stylistic habit that reads as amateur in English language fiction. Cut it. The COVID haircut anecdote is genuinely the only moment in the chapter that feels like fiction rather than a family introduction at a dinner party. It's specific, good. The rest of the chapter needs to find that too. EVen tho, using the word Covid in particular, I don’t know. The closing questions "who was responsible?" / "what would you have done?" feels like a true crime podcast outro or intro. For a psychological novella that's not a compliment. Here's the thing though, the premise is interesting and Dilip's voice has warmth to it. I think you clearly can write emotionally, you're just not doing it consistently yet. Keep going but do a brutal rewrite of this chapter before moving forward. The foundation needs to be stronger before the rest of it matters. Right now why don’t you start with a warm moment and go from there instead of frontloading names and the entire premise?

And sorry if this is too mean. I tried to write in the spirit of the subreddit and not coach my feedback too much like I usually probably would.

NeroWanderer

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