Thread:Sakaros/@comment-29301-20180903145046/@comment-29301-20181007195153

I have some actual feedback (or perhaps gushing, whatever you might call it).

First, Abattoir. I found two favorite things in it. First, I really enjoyed how you played around with the medium when Alecto's in the third level, screwing with the prose in order to illustrate how her mind's getting screwed up. A very effective technique. Second, her encounter with the "It" at the bottom in the fifteenth chapter. It struck me as very... I don't know, abstract, but precisely in the way that such an encounter ought to be. When it comes to prose, whether I'm reading or writing it, I automatically try to imagine how stuff would look if it was a movie - the cinematography, the soundtrack, and so on. And to an extent that makes sense, as prose often is about creating a visual in the mind of the reader. But I've found that there are certain things that you can't do that with, and so you have to fall back on what I'm currently calling "abstraction" for lack of a better word. Had you tried to describe Alecto's encounter with It visually, conventionally, you probably would have ruined it.

Now, Danse Macabre. Ugh, it's like you looked back at the ordeal that the heroes go through in Twist of Fate and said to yourself, "I wanna punch my reader in the emotions twice as hard." Honestly, at the end of Chapter 16 I was fifty percent sure you had gotten ballsy enough to kill off Tirien or Narasi - but you must have been doing something right as you wrote them, because I'm relieved that you didn't. You similarly did well with Chancellor... whatever his name was. I wish we'd been able to see more of him. And speaking of secondary characters, I liked Kenza as well. I'm just baffled that you made such a lighthearted, almost goofy personality believable as a Jedi.

Hell of a twist at the end, though I find it somewhat puzzling (what's getting poisoned got to do with losing Forceful-ness?) and I can't guess where the story might go from here, far as Tirien's concerned. Though I'm very much hoping to see Alecto meet a grisly death before it's over (Abattoir-induced sympathy notwithstanding).

So yeah, looking forward to the next one, whenever that'll be.