"The Legend." (horror/history) - Page 2 - Writers Forum

horrorcrafter · 04-07-2005, 10:17 AM

Hey thanks Eggo.
Good advice.
Good waffle too.
But the whole idea is that they build the boat from themselves, as a result of their irrittion. They are monsters.And you don't really need a shipyard to build a boat..it just makes it easier.
But thanks for the review, that meant alot to me, and I think your input was important for me to hear. Good honesty is valuable. Anything you want a review of? Horrorcrafter.

horrorcrafter · 04-07-2005, 09:02 PM

The Legend, part 2

gohn67 · 04-08-2005, 12:51 AM

Hey, horrorcrafter, glad to see that you are continueing with this. You left at the best part, though. I wanted to see the pirates raid the boat.

I am a little iffy about the whole moving crates to make the boat faster part of this story. Mainly becuase it doesn't do much in terms of character development at all. I still don't know much about the personalities of the characters. It felt like this section was made to take up time, before the raid. It did just that except thats all it did, and was pretty pointless.

When they spotted the boat was when it started getting better though. Since this is horror the more death the better, at least for me.

One thing I noticed about your writing is that you tend to write your paragraphs in the same length nearly everytime. Also you use alot of long sentences.

Try making some parapraphs shorter, and vary sentence length. I find two- three- one word sentences effective.

horrorcrafter · 04-09-2005, 12:47 AM

The Legend part 3

Scratches · 04-09-2005, 02:23 PM

This is me showing how very much I hate to make enemies.

Quote:

Originally Posted by horrorcrafter

The Legend
These Americans were going to be bastards, we could already tell that from how they acted and thought.

How can you tell what they're thinking? I know what you mean... perhaps "reasoned"?

Quote:

Pompous, loud-mouthed, obnoxious, and cruel, after just a few months of arriving.

WITHIN just a few months of arriving, maybe? "After" makes it sound like they've been arriving for months.

I agree that the building gets a bit tedious to those of us who aren't fascinated by ship-design, but the wording was magnificent, as it is elsewhere. It's good to see someone that knows how to order a sentence.

[/quote]The forests we explored were magnificent. As we crunched across deep beds of crispy dead leaves[/quote]
I think there are too many words here; "crunched" implies the leaves' texture, so maybe you don't need "crispy"/"dead".

Quote:

frame, of a specific wineglass shape, which when assembled would form the ribs of our great beast.

I think the commas are a bit off here - I thought "frame of a specific wineglass shape which, when assembled, would form the ribs of our great beast" carried off the meaning better. Your call.

Quote:

The structural plan called for a double-walled hull of thick Oak beams, which would simply laugh at the feeble cannonballs which would make their appearance in a few years.

I don't know if oak needs to be capitalised at this point. I could be worried over nothing. Also, could you find a way of deleting one of the "which would"s?

Quote:

Conrad the navigator and I shaped the twin masts, and Conrad also made the great spars.

Second Conrad can be "he", I reckon.

Quote:

to find and grind the grain

Are you comfortable with this rhyme being here?

Quote:

Then, we stepped the masts,

Might sounds better as "we then..."

Quote:

I was of the opinion

I thought your use of the language fitted the time period perfectly, except maybe this bit. It's a little too archaic for me.

Sorry that these nitpicks are all I could manage at the time. I don't want to judge this genre. However, I feel maybe you need some sparse elaborations on the characters themselves, just to set the scene for the following story. I realise the boat is the star here, but maybe you could use that to bring in the characters a little more - their reactions and feelings towards it and so on.

Overall you have a brilliant writing style and there wasn't much to comment on in the first bit. I'd crit the second, but one must eat...

gohn67 · 04-09-2005, 10:10 PM

Part 3 was really good, I enjoyed it alot.

They only thing, which is minor and more preference is the paragraph length.

Here is an example.

Quote:

We also found fresh flour in the hold, sacks and sacks of the stuff, and barrels of sour red apples. Somehow room was found to store these luxuries on board Legend. Hans found three kegs of a pale dry ale from Holland. The bags of gold we found meant nothing to us. Jemmy searched the caravel from stem to stern for kegs of that precious black powder but found none. A caravel carries no cannon.

For myself I cared only for maps, and spent the better part of a day looking for good ones, with recent soundings of the sea floor.

The chartroom was a neat array of about twenty maps of the American coast, in four shelves according to scale, and two more shelves of maps showing the Old World. I took them all, of course, but found only three to be of any use to us. Those three maps, however, showed many details of the coastline from where we were now down to a place well below New Amsterdam, with the evil-sounding name "Philadelphia." I rolled them up and returned to Legend.

TheUberManlyMan · 04-09-2005, 10:42 PM

Hooray for exciting pirate warfare! Let's get the little stuff out of the way first:

Quote:

Fritz made a movement too quick to follow and then thrust both his hands in the captain's mouth and then stretched… there's some hot blood… tore… here's a crunchy rending noise… and ripped the top of his white-haired head right off as the screams were still in his throat.

This passage was really awkward for me. It's different from the rest of the story, and the fragments just didn't work for me. Not to mention the "and then"s.

The slaughter scene was pretty exciting, and I thought it was really interesting that you switched back to the monotonous shiplife tone so quickly. Rising action and falling action were both really rapid. It made it seem to me like while the killing was fun for the pirates, it was kinda boring and they had nothing to do again after it was finished. I'm wondering if that's going to be a recurring theme, or if they're eventually going to meet a more worthy opponent and engage in "true" battle.

I'll look out for the later installments

.

horrorcrafter · 04-10-2005, 05:59 PM

part three, chapter one.

shabi · 04-10-2005, 06:24 PM

Wow...this is great. I admit I skipped over the more technical nautical stuff--but, I decided, this is probably just a matter of taste more than anything else. The technical stuff fits brilliantly with the style of story you're telling, even if I personally don't find it interesting--it adds 'pirate flavor', I guess.
But I really liked the way you described their transformations and the attack. It was amazingly told.
The one thing I found confusing was the 'single sentient being with wings' thing. I assumed you meant it literally because they're transforming...people, but then I wasn't so sure because I couldn't really picture a giant golden multi-legged thing with wings sitting on top of a boat.
But overall, this is a really nice story so far. Keep it up.

horrorcrafter · 04-10-2005, 06:36 PM

Hey thanks very much shabi, I do appreciate your kind words. Say, are there any writings you want me to take a look at and review. I am always able to find the best part of stories and I express really constructive remarks. Oh, by the way, the wings are the ship's sails. Take care, Horrorcrafter

shabi · 04-10-2005, 06:38 PM

OH. Oh, now I get it.

Sorry about that. I'm a little slow sometimes.

damien_frosst · 04-12-2005, 10:26 AM

I keep coming back to this story, and the action (and telling) is getting better each time. I'd do a thorough critique, but I'm enjoying the story too much to get really bogged down in such details. It's still not quite horror, which is probably why I'm enjoying it so much.

Keep it up horrorcrafter, you've got the start of a cult following here.

horrorcrafter · 04-12-2005, 06:19 PM

Chapter 2

semtecks · 04-12-2005, 07:19 PM

This is starting to look pretty good, Horrorcrafter. Scratch has already given all the grammar crits you could need in one life time--i love it when i get long crits like that they make my work ten times better-- so i'll leave it at that. look forward o reading more in the future.

semtecks · 04-12-2005, 07:35 PM

This is starting to look pretty good, Horrorcrafter. Scratch has already given all the grammar crits you could need in one life time--i love it when i get long crits like that they make my work ten times better-- so i'll leave it at that. look forward o reading more in the future.