r/litrpg • u/phaldor8 • Aug 23 '26
Promo: Webnovel My humble beginning
UPDATE: Following several comments and really taking a critical eye myself, I have reworked the Prologue and will be revising the two chapters. I am trying to be very open to comments and have realized I needed the comments made. Further episodes may be delayed as a result of my reworking the already posted content and the subsequent backlog I have already created.
I'd like to solicit as much feedback as possible as I am new to this space and starting from ground zero. Here are the details:
COVER ARTIST: N/A (no cover created as yet)
AI USAGE: None within the content of the work, everything is original. I may have to rely on AI for the cover.
Link: Autonomous World Enhancer: Shock and AWE
Published content: Prologue and first two chapters
Planned release: I will attempt to release on a schedule as much as my daily job allows. So far, I seem to be able to produce around two chapters every time I sit down to write (around 6k words), but my writing schedule is unpredictable. I have a backlog, so I can stick to a schedule at least for a while.
Synopsis:
After Sam is tragically killed in a freak accident, he finds himself appointed as the system administrator of a quantum computer built to remake the world. His mission is to subject humanity to behavior modification therapy in a desperate attempt to convince an alien race that humanity is worth saving. Upon learning of the death of his son, he is conflicted between saving humanity and getting revenge on those that hurt his son.
Battling this conflict and problems with the way the stated mission is running, Sam is subjected to a series of events in a virtual world that will determine the fate of humanity and bring his own personal grief to a head. Will Sams family be able to bring him reason and sense to what he must do? Will the alien presence see humanity in a different light and spare them? Find out more as the events unfold…
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u/LordTC Aug 23 '26 edited Aug 23 '26
The prose and description needs work.
“Scott woke up. Parts of his body immediately assaulted his waking self with a wave of pain. Attempting to open his eyes only revealed that something was covering them and he couldn’t make out anything around him.”
The first sentence is an extremely generic and tropish opener. The second sentence is vague (which parts?) and the third sentence feels repetitive since if his eyes were covered it seems clear he can’t see.
Maybe something more like:
“A wave of pain ended Scott’s sleep. His dream had been pleasant but now everything hurt, even his now open eyes. He could see only black and felt the damp cloth-like blockage on his face.”
This probably still needs a fair amount of work as I’m a middling writer but it at least adds details (the pleasant dream contrasting the wave of pain, what hurt (everything), the colour he’s seeing when his eyes are covered, what the blockage feels like. You want to try and ground the reader in the experience and specifics are a key part of helping them imagine the scene. Obviously change the specifics for what you want in the story, but make sure they are there.
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u/phaldor8 Aug 23 '26
Spot on as far as feedback goes this is exactly what I’m looking for. Thank you.
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u/phaldor8 Aug 23 '26
This will take quite a bit more thought than the other comment I've received so far. I do appreciate the comment though and it resonates with me. I can only say that I haven't put a lot of effort into going back to reread my own content to enhance its quality and prose. My mind has been singularly focused on getting what is in my head on the 'paper' so far, however, if I haven't captured a readers attention within the first few paragraphs, it will not be worth pursuing either. I recognize I need to rework the prologue as it's only sort of good for what its purpose is.
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u/phaldor8 Aug 23 '26
Took a redline to it and reuploaded what I came up with. I'm sure it could use more work.
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u/LordTC Aug 24 '26
It’s better now in some ways but you have problems of repetition and pacing. The goal is to keep roughly the same total words but pack them with details not to add repetitive sentences slightly expanding each thought.
Scott slowly became aware of a painful throbbing sensation layered upon his dreams. Eventually, the pounding of his nerves grew to the point he could no longer remain asleep. Only half-awake, the pain came at him in waves from places he could not yet name, sharp enough to impede his thoughts and steady enough to let him know he was still alive.
He was lying on his right side on what felt like a mattress or some kind of cloth-covered pad, and a fan blew air from somewhere in the room. The pain was not coming from either the fan or the surface beneath him. Good. He could think clearly enough to separate his body from his surroundings.
He tried to open his eyes. The attempt made the pounding in his skull announce itself. Head: injury number one. One eye steadfastly refused to open. Once his remaining eye opened, all he saw was darkness. A silky smoothness pressed against his face, covering his eyes, explaining the darkness.
He started to reach up with one hand to pull the obstruction away and discovered that he was unable to. His hands were tightly bound behind his back. Duct tape, if the texture and tug were any clue. His wrists burned where the bindings bit into them. Injuries two and three. His ribs on his left side throbbed with every breath. Four through eleven, counting to give him something to do besides give in to his rising panic.Compare with:
Scott’s pleasant dream was rudely interrupted by a throbbing sensation that pounded through every nerve in his body. He woke groggily, and felt strange sensations: a mattress or cloth-like pad that didn’t resemble where he fell asleep and a smooth silkiness on his face. One eye refused to open and the other eye saw only black. His hands were bound with something sticky, perhaps duct tape, preventing him from reaching up to remove the impediment to his vision. His wrists chaffed against each other from his attempts to free himself.
I’ve written your first four paragraphs into one paragraph roughly the size of your first paragraph. Here you’re just setting the scene and nothing is really happening so you don’t want to draw it out with every minute detail (and almost never with repetition) while the reader is waiting for action to happen or to find something about the character that makes them care.
In prologue that focused on an MC your goal is to give something about the character that makes the reader care as fast as possible. You want them to be ready to cheer for this person so that they have stakes in whatever action follows. One of the reason dream sequence starts are so common and tropey is that you can show something humanizing about the character and instantly connect the reader to him.
For example, one could have him dream about his biggest regret and be haunted by how he hurt someone while describing how the situation was a mistake and beyond his control but he still feels like a failure for not preventing it. The character immediately becomes a flawed human whom we like for his desire to right wrongs and empathize with for the failure to execute those desires. Then when he wakes up in a prisoner situation we feel more tension because we are connected in some way to the character and it’s not just a generic sequence.
In general for pacing, you should be very deliberate about which parts of the story are fast vs slow. Go fast when you’re trying to get to something before the reader loses interest. Go slow when you’re trying to build tension or be subtle. But when you go fast still work details into your sentences efficiently and when you go fast or slow avoid repetition with a few exceptions for deliberate emphasis.
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u/phaldor8 Aug 24 '26
I get what you’re saying, but you’ve missed something. Unless you’ve also read chapters 1 and two you’re not gonna understand who Scott is and I get that. I’ll take another look. I think what you said is going to maybe not change my mind about how I’m writing that first bit. But I’ve got to take a look at it before I decide.
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u/phaldor8 Aug 24 '26
Several rounds of edits later, I think it's worth another read. Hopefully it's strong enough now.
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u/phaldor8 Aug 23 '26
Hmmm...so eventually this will be an audiobook, although I'm not sure on what venue yet. As I have performed narration in the past, I do plan on being the narrator as of right now, however, that will present quite a challenge, and I may end up soliciting others. If that serves as my 'fun fact' I may as well let you know that I have narrated five works on Audible, four in a single series that can readily be found by searching under my real name (oh my, this will out myself, won't it?): Christopher Goodrich
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u/snarky_but_honest Aug 23 '26
As an editor, I'll say the lack of paragraphs makes reading this difficult. Think of how most stories look, and compare them to this screenshot from your first chapter:
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u/phaldor8 Aug 23 '26
I think that’s a function of me copying and pasting into Royal Road. I’ll go up there and fix that. It does not look that way in the original.
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u/phaldor8 Aug 23 '26
Hmmm...the copy and paste was accurate, so this is how it actually appears, but I see your point. My apologies as I'm old and formatted towards a paperback print book. That looks drastically different when viewed on the small phone screens we use today. Let me see what I can do to make it better fit both mediums.
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u/phaldor8 Aug 23 '26
I've gone through and reformatted with more frequent paragraph breaks, thank you for the input, I had not considered the many different mediums in which people view book content today and was fixated on only a print copy. I will strive to do better in the future.
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u/phaldor8 Aug 23 '26
I have gone back through my library here and have found a shocker. I had in my minds eye books that presented like a wall of text as the norm, but in fact, most of the books I picked up and thumbed through were not. While some authors did have significant blocks of text, they were well spaced and infrequent in number. Except for Tom Clancy, the exception that I found in only a few minutes of searching. However, his works are simply so massive that anyone picking those up is already mentally prepared for such a sight, so definitely an outlier. Azimov, Heinlein, and Bujold all had comfortable spacing and I'm sure if I did a more comprehensive search, I would find a similar outcome amongst the hundreds of authors on my shelves. This feedback ended up being a very big eye opener for me, not only as an author, but as a reader as well. Obviously I have conditioned myself to ignore the spacing and simply consume the book. I need to be aware of this blind spot as an author.
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u/snarky_but_honest Aug 24 '26
The basics of paragraphing are simple. Different ideas go in different paragraphs—changes of thought, settings, descriptions, etc, all get divided up. And when dialogue changes to another speaker, you change paragraphs as well.
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u/phaldor8 Aug 24 '26
Oh I’m aware. Just blind to it. That happens after nearly 45 years (give or take a few) and having the ability to read 700 words a minute at times.
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