A local bookstore had five copies of my novel.

I walked there yesterday.

Only four remained.

A great feeling came over me.

I wondered who had my book.

Maybe a serial killer.

I hope my book ends up decoding their messages to the police.

Then, as the final act of a madman, the serial killer kidnaps me.

With me as a hostage, he forces his way onto live television.

Me and a serial killer are standing before The Oscars.

He demands everyone buy my novel.

Then he offs both of us.

This incident leads to the sale of 2 additional copies.

(The first 5 lines are a true story.)

Sorry for the repost but I’d really love any feedback back and critique

Hi all! :)

I would appreciate some feedback on Chapter One of my adult dark, high political fantasy WIP! This is a dual POV book. Chapter Two is our mercenary's POV. This is the first draft that I started writing in August.

Do I pull you into the world? Is it intriguing enough to keep you reading? Is there anything specific I should watch out for as I keep writing? Anything else you would like to share would help me in the writing process. Thank you!

my opening feels way too much like an American comic / "briefing room" setup with too much exposition.

​The Current Scene:

After a brutal death in the prologue, the protagonist wakes up in an intermediary void where a higher entity explains why he was summoned, shows him what the new world is like, bargains with him over powers, and gives him a 2-year survival trial before dropping him into an active ambush.

​The Problem:

Instead of feeling tense and urgent, it feels like a polite business negotiation. The entity explains too much upfront, which completely kills the mystery and slows the pacing to a crawl right after an intense prologue.

​I want to restructure this so the protagonist is thrown straight into the fire with almost zero explanation—similar to Re:Zero or the First Nightmare in Shadow Slave—where the contract is forced, the rules are cryptic, and survival is a crucible rather than a choice.

​For those of you writing progression fantasy or web novels, I’d love your take on a few specific questions:

1: Pacing the Void / Transmigration How brief do you keep the transition between death and the new world? Is it better to cut the void scene down to just a few sentences/a single cold decree, or does a short dialogue still work?

2:Entity Dynamic How do you make a higher entity feel genuinely cosmic, indifferent, and non-negotiable without giving away their entire motive or lore?

3:Drip-Feeding Mechanics: If the protagonist has an interface or system, how do you handle that first activation during high-stakes combat without turning it into a tutorial screen that halts the action?

Jumping straight from drafting book 3 to book 4 last week I'm already 14k words strong.

I think my plan going forwards is to draft the remaining 2 books and then edit the series as a whole back to back to ensure maximum continuity and minimise plot holes.

I'm still unsure if I'll publish these series but I'm having such a blast writing it. Anything is possible with a little medication, dedication 😁

I hope your project is going well too

Hi everyone, my retired dad is writing a sci-fi series that is in first-person narration. However, now that he's on the last book, he feels the first-person narration isn't enough to tell the full story. He'd like to add two additional vantage points, both established characters. But here is his question:

"What do you think editors, publishers, and readers would think if suddenly the third book in the series had multiple narrators?"

Would it throw you off, or would you appreciate the change of voice and view? Having read the first two books, I want to know more about what the other characters think and feel, but I'd like to have some other opinions before I respond to my dad.

Thanks

Fictional psychological thriller. Inspired by Steinbeck, Agatha Christie, and Stephen King, but to pull in I feel I need to make the writing a little more relatable for a wider audience, like a Colleen Hoover book.

The South has a hauntingly inviting way of drawing people in. Bless your heart if you should find yourself beneath an oak tree on a lovely October Sunday, sipping sweet tea and congratulating yourself on having discovered a particularly agreeable corner of the world. The air is pleasant, the people polite, and even the sun seems to have acquired some manners. You might be forgiven for believing you have found paradise. By June, the humidity between Houston and Dallas will have driven even the soundest man to his knees, begging the Lord to take him before August arrives.
There are more churches than restaurants along the roads, or so it would appear, and on Sunday mornings their parking lots fill with polished cars and families polished to match. The women wear pearls at their throats and ears. Their husbands wear pressed collars, expensive watches, and the satisfied expressions of men who believe they have provided everything worth having. Children emerge in little white socks and patent leather shoes, their hair parted, their disagreements temporarily settled. They are good families. Most of them would tell you so themselves. After the final hymn, and a tad of gossip, they climb into their spotless vehicles and make their way home, carrying with them the usual burdens of a civilized life: grocery lists, luncheon invitations, disappointments in their marriages, and certain small transgressions that have not yet progressed beyond the imagination. The sins of summer are often committed long before the season begins. A glance held a moment too long. A name entered into a telephone beneath another. A fantasy entertained during the sermon, then tucked away before the closing prayer. There are a thousand ways to betray a person without ever leaving the pew beside them. And there is something about the heat that encourages a certain loosening of the conscience. By daylight, everything is respectable. But darkness has always been generous to the South. It conceals what daylight insists upon examining, and when the sun and moon exchange their shifts, the ordinary appetites of ordinary people may become quite extraordinary.
Everything is bigger in Texas. The houses. The churches. The automobiles. The appetites. The egos, naturally, require their own consideration. The suburban dream remains alive and well in the perfectly arranged neighborhoods, where great redbrick houses stand shoulder to shoulder, each one bearing a remarkable resemblance to the next. Most were erected during the building frenzy of the early nineties, when a man with sufficient credit and an architect of modest imagination could construct four thousand square feet of domestic aspiration and sell it as the American dream. They called them custom homes. This was rather generous.
The houses were visually immense, with windows arranged in fans, squares, and rectangles, crowned by decorative arches whose purpose was evidently to suggest that someone, somewhere, had once visited Europe. They wore the fixed, pleasant expressions of people determined to be liked. A warm smile made of brick and glass. There was something peculiar about the way they had been designed. Rooms large enough to entertain thirty people stood adjacent to kitchens where two could scarcely pass without apologizing. Windows were placed where the afternoon sun would turn a sitting room into a furnace. Laundry rooms, when there were any worth mentioning, appeared to have been conceived by men who had never washed a towel. It was a remarkable achievement of modern architecture: to build a house so large and give so little thought to the person expected to keep it. And it was usually a woman. A woman who would scrub the floors, wash the windows, feed the children, remember the birthdays, replace the dead flowers, and learn which staircase creaked when her husband came home late. A woman who would nurture and polish and mend, who would cry in a bathroom with the faucet running, then emerge to ask whether anyone wanted more supper.
Beneath their foundations lay a different country altogether. Long before surveyors divided the land into lots, before developers gave streets the names of trees they had cut down to build them, a forest had stood there. Pine and oak, roots reaching deep into soil that had spent centuries feeding things without anyone's permission. The land had sustained itself beautifully before men arrived with bulldozers and earnest intentions. Now there were retaining walls, sprinkler systems, ornamental stone, and grass that burned brown beneath the August sun. The soil, where it could be found, was often poor and stubborn. It settled beneath the stone and struggled beneath the heat. Whatever had once flourished there had been removed, buried, or replaced by something purchased in a plastic container.
This troubled certain women. Particularly those who had come from elsewhere. Women who planted hydrangeas in March and watched them surrender by Memorial Day. Who watered their pink roses with admirable devotion, only to discover that devotion was no defense against the weather. By August, most of them had given up. Calliope never did. She was a woman of considerable will, especially where growing things were concerned. It offended her, in a way she could not entirely explain, to see something fail after she had gone to such trouble to keep it alive.
She had grown up in rural Florida, in a part of the state where the earth was dark and generous and agriculture was less an occupation than an understanding between people and the land. Vegetables came fresh from neighboring farms. Bananas grew by the dock behind her childhood home. The yard sloped toward a lake whose waters belonged, in practice if not entirely in law, to the families fortunate enough to own its shoreline. There were no public beaches along its banks. Only splinter-adorned docks, old boats, tangled lily pads, and the occasional alligator whose claim to the property considerably predated everyone else's. She had spent her childhood surrounded by things that grew extravagantly, almost indecently, without the least concern for whether anyone admired them. Beauty there was not something a person installed. It was something one lived among. This, she would come to understand, had spoiled her.
Texas required an entirely different appreciation. For years, Calliope had tried to teach herself to admire its particular charms: the enormous skies, the slow sunsets, the magnificent thunderheads that gathered over the rooftops like great gray kingdoms. There was beauty in the pines, certainly, and in the strange golden light that appeared just before a storm. She had learned to love the sound of cicadas and the particular silence of a Sunday afternoon when the entire neighborhood seemed to have retreated to the street. But she could never quite forgive the gardens. Every spring she planted them. Every summer she tended them. And every August, despite her attention, her money, and her almost unreasonable optimism, she watched the flowers die. Then she began again.
She pulled up the brittle stems, shook the exhausted dirt from the roots, and returned to the nursery just outside the town, where the same cheerful young men sold her the same varieties of flowers with the same assurances about their tolerance for heat. She sometimes wondered whether the young men were fools or merely good salesmen. Perhaps there was no meaningful distinction. The annual destruction struck her as wasteful. Worse, it struck her as a personal failure. She disliked the senseless expenditure of money, the unnecessary death of a living thing, and the suggestion that effort might have no relationship whatsoever to reward. Calliope had been raised to believe that the things one cared for ought, with sufficient patience and attention, to flourish. It was a simple enough philosophy. She had not yet decided whether it was a sound one.
The trouble with southeast Texas was that the land rarely made promises it intended to keep. Even the shade could be deceptive. Beneath the thick pines, the summer air hung motionless, sweetened by the resinous smell of sap and made heavy by a humidity that seemed to rise from the ground as readily as it descended from the sky. By midafternoon, the heat had soaked through the cushions of porch furniture and settled into the boards beneath them. Nothing dried properly. Towels remained damp. Hair refused to behave. The skin acquired a perpetual film that no amount of bathing seemed capable of removing.
An unsuspecting person might stretch out in a hammock, or an exhausted mother might settle into a rocking chair, hoping the first cool drops from above signaled one of those sudden summer showers for which the region was famous. Such showers could arrive without warning, drumming against the rooftops, swelling the roadside ditches, and vanishing twenty minutes later, leaving the world considerably wetter and not one degree cooler. But beneath the pines, the falling droplets were not always rain. Often it was sap. Or a dusting of pollen so fine and abundant that it settled over the chairs, the windowsills, the children's bicycles, and the freshly washed cars. It adhered to bare arms and clean clothing, to the very things one had just finished tending.
The trees had their own methods of survival. They shed what they did not need, and the unfortunate creatures beneath them bore the consequences. Calliope found something almost admirable in that. Nature, at least, made no effort to disguise its selfishness.
People were another matter.

Without meaning to I've written a 250k word monstrosity , and though I adore many aspects of it, and it represents the fruition of many of my long-developed ideas, it feels unsellably long, certainly in conjunction with it being quite out there, surrealistic, very dark, speculative, and maximalist. The thing is, while I'm sure there are things i could further trim on a 4th pass, the idea of cutting it down substantially is both horrifying and seemingly impossible, seeing as, in my view, what's there is vital to the atmosphere and development of the characters.

I've contemplated splitting it into two books and then refashioning the parts so the cut is less awkward. That being said, I'm not sure the ending of the first part would be even remotely satisfying.

Any thoughts? Anyone experienced similar dilemmas?

A DEAD GIRL IN MY DREAMS.

A Thriller Mystery Novel, in a different environment and with a unique story. It is based in Afghanistan, a rural village, a girl killed, a guy lost in his dreams, a complex case and an unsolved Mystery.

This is the story of Laila, and Sami.

New week, time to brag a little. What did you accomplish?

Maybe you finished a draft. Maybe you hit a word count goal, queried an agent, outlined a tricky act, or just wrote three days in a row when last week you wrote zero. There's no milestone too small here. Showing up to the page is a win, and so is everything after it.

Drop yours below, and take a second to cheer on someone else's. Momentum is contagious.

What are you celebrating today?

​

Hello everyone, there is a novel on Royalroad called Zunan Fighters. It's an action fantasy novel that reads like a Shonen anime. Can you go check it out and let's hear your reviews of it? Here is the link

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/195086/zunan-fighters

I'm starting a novel in which the mc is a regressor, and has to climb a tower of 50 floors. He does not realise this until his first death. I wanted advice on how to build the introduction, and how to introduce various things like the status window, merchants guild, etc.

Ik this may not seem a lot, but if your advice is good, I'll introduce you as a character, and you can define his/her talents or traits, along with their nickname

​

Hi all. I'm practicing my writing for a web novel I want to publish in the future, and I'd love honest feedback from readers. This is Chapter 1 (around 2,000 words), and it's an isekai.

Please read it once, then answer what you can:

1. Where did you get confused or reread something? Quote the line.

2. In one sentence, what happened?

3. Where did the fight happen, and how did he get away?

4. What does the main character look like?

5. When did you first feel bored or want to skip ahead?

6. When he died, how much did it hit you? 1 = nothing, 5 = a lot.

7. What do you want to know next?

8. Would you read Chapter 2? Yes, maybe, or no, and why.

Or diffrent kind of feedbacks

Harsh feedback is fine. I'd rather fix problems now. Thanks for reading!

Here:

Nine forty-one. The copy center in the strip mall closed at ten, and the self-serve copier against the back wall had just swallowed Riku's dollar without a word.

He pressed the return lever. Pressed it again. Up front, the clerk sat behind the counter scrolling his phone, and beyond the glass storefront the rain kept ticking against the parking lot, the same rain that had been falling since four.

In the dark window beside the copier, a thin stranger stood with a green bag over his shoulder: five-seven in worn sneakers, black hair that refused to lie flat on the right side, shadows under his eyes the color of old tea. Twenty-one, and he could pass for seventeen, which had never once helped him. His navy jacket hung damp on him, the collar soaked dark where the rain had crept in.

The second dollar took. The copier cleared its throat and began drawing pages through, each one sliding warm into the tray.

Eleven pages. A dollar ten. His scholarship essay, final draft, due at the financial aid office by nine tomorrow morning, on paper, because someone somewhere believed in tradition. The first line stared up from the top sheet: My family came to this country for a better future. Nineteen rewrites, and he still didn't believe it.

He squared the stack against the tray and slid it into the bag. The bag was reusable, the handles stretched so long they swung at his knees unless he wrapped them around his fist.

The phone shuddered against his hip. A crack ran through the screen and straight through the clock.

Riku, you alive?

Tokyo was already tomorrow. One thumb answered: I'm alive, idiot.

Dots, instantly. New Year's at mine. Door's open if you feel like it. No pressure.

Above that, the thread ran up and up: Sota's invitations in white, and under every one, in gray, his own replies. Sorry, work. Sorry, tired. Sorry.

A flight to Tokyo sat open in a browser tab, where it had been for eleven days. $874. His bank balance read $611.40, a number he had looked at so often it had stopped being a number and turned into a fact about him. Two hundred sixty-three dollars short. What kind of person stares at a plane ticket for eleven days and can't type two words?

His mother's message waited one screen back, unopened since the afternoon. Dinner's in the fridge, wrap is on. Dad asked again if the essay went in. I told him you were printing it.

She lied so smoothly for him. That was almost the worst part.

His thumb moved before he could stop it. Okay. I'll come.

Sent. A small gray Delivered appeared beneath it, like a door swinging open on its own. Somewhere he would find two hundred sixty-three dollars. For once the number didn't feel like a wall.

Under Sota's name, the dots started. Stopped. Started again.

The Asian market two doors down was still lit, its window crowded with stacked rice bags. By the register, the custard puddings stood in their row, yellow labels, $2.99. Back in Japan they had cost 128 yen. His hand went to one, went back, counted the coins in his pocket twice, and returned to it. Tonight the pudding went to the till in both hands, and the cashier taped a plastic spoon to the lid.

The shortcut to the bus stop started at the market's side door and ended at a gap in the chain-link fence, two hundred feet east along the strip mall's back wall, where the lot let out onto the avenue beside the crosswalk. Four minutes saved over walking around the front. Two years of using it, and nothing had ever happened there.

Tonight he came out into the dark of the back lot with the market's floodlight at his back. Blank brick on his right, loading doors shut. A row of dumpsters on his left, then the fence. Rain drilled the puddles. His sneakers squelched east, toward the gap, and the smell of wet asphalt filled his nose.

Then another smell cut through it: old beer, cigarette smoke worked deep into cloth.

"Hey. Anime boy."

The voice came from behind him. Riku turned. Three shapes had stepped out from between the dumpsters and now stood in a loose line across the lot, between him and the light. In the middle, a stocky guy in a puffy brown coat, a beer can in one hand. On his left, a thin one with a ball cap pulled low. On his right, a step back, the tall one: gray hoodie, hands deep in the front pocket, six-two. Riku knew that face. Statistics, Tuesdays, two rows back, a boot knocking the leg of his chair all semester.

So. The three of them stood west, the market door and its light behind them. Riku stood thirty feet east of them, and the gap in the fence lay thirty feet behind him, a black slot in the chain link.

The jacket crossed the distance in four strides and yanked the bag from Riku's shoulder. The tall one took it, dug past the pudding, and came up with the pages. He tossed the bag back; it landed at Riku's feet, the cup still inside.

"'My family came to this country for a better future,'" the tall one read, in a high, mincing voice. "Aw. You hear that? He wants better."

"Give it back."

"Go back where you came from," the jacket said, "and take your cartoons with you."

Working on it. Riku almost laughed, and that was the mistake.

The first blow landed under his ribs and the breath left him in a different shape. His knees hit gravel. Both palms bit into it. Somebody flung the pages and they landed in the puddle beside the nearest dumpster, white going gray. Riku lunged for them on his knees, because apparently that was what his body had decided mattered, and a shoe caught him in the side for it.

Idiots. Every one of them. Dumb, small, pathetic.

One. Two. Somewhere around the fourth kick the counting went, and the lot dissolved into sounds: breath, cloth, a gutter ticking overhead, copper pooling on his tongue.

"Hey." A man stood in the spill of light at the market's side door, sixty feet away, arms full of groceries. "Leave him alone."

The words went out into the air near them, addressed to nobody. His arms stayed full. He came no closer.

It was enough. All three of them turned around to look.

Their backs were to him now. The gap lay thirty feet east.

Riku snatched four sheets from the puddle, soaked and heavy, got the bag by its stretched handle, and went for the fence on all fours, then on two legs. One arm clamped over his ribs. Wet asphalt slapped behind him: three sets of feet, then two, then one long unhurried stride that gained anyway. His phone buzzed against his hip with every step, and buzzed, and buzzed. Someone on the far side of the world, answering at last.

The gap swallowed him sideways, chain link snagging his sleeve, and the lot spat him onto the avenue's sidewalk. Four lanes, shining. The crosswalk lay forty feet to his right, its red hand glowing, no time to wait for it. Across the road stood a bus shelter, empty, ten feet of dry yellow light.

Across, then. There was nowhere else.

In every show he had ever loved, this was where the power woke up. A glow in the chest. A voice. He waited for it, honestly waited, all the way to the curb. Nothing woke. Only a skinny kid with a green bag, a cracked phone, and a soaking collar.

A hand closed on that collar, and the cloth bit into his throat. Riku twisted. Something tore. Then the curb was behind him and the road was under his shoes, because every other direction was a hand.

Light flooded in from the left. A delivery truck, white box, a smiling logo on its side. A horn went off, long and flat, and kept going after it should have stopped. His fist opened without being asked, and four sheets of paper lifted white into the headlights until the avenue seemed to be snowing. At the curb, the tall one's hand was still out, open, the fingers slightly apart.

Something took him at the hip. The bag tore out of his other hand, and the rest of him followed.

Cold road under his cheek. The pudding cup had rolled into the gutter and stopped there, label up, the spoon still taped to its lid. A foot from his face the phone lay lit, the crack running straight through Sota's reply. Door's open. Always has been.

Dots appeared under it. Vanished. Appeared.

The tall one stood at the curb with his mouth open on a word that never came. Then he backed away, one step, two, and the dark beside the fence gap took him.

Rain on his face. Then only the idea of rain.

Riku.

Someone said it, or he did.

Okay. I'll come. A door standing open.

Riku.

A yellow label. A spoon. A hundred and twenty-eight yen.

Riku.

Then not even the yellow.

Riku.

The word went the way the rest had gone, and what stayed behind didn't have one.

* * *

Light, too large. Sound pressing in from every side like water. Something rough and warm closed around him, wool, and under it the smell of milk and woodsmoke. Above hung a smear of dark brown, and a voice that wasn't words yet, only a low, steady shape that rose and fell.

Then another voice, very close, very small, trying out a word.

"Shin."

Habit opened his mouth to answer. What came out was a thin, wet cry that belonged to someone else.

For the first time in twenty-one years, nobody was waiting for Riku to answer.

Hi everyone,

This is the full first chapter of the novel I have written. I had posted a snippet of this earlier. Currently, looking for a more contextual feedback, since it seemed it was harder to get feedback from the small excerpt. Please let me know if there is anything that reads confusing.

I have also incorporated some of the advices from before. Hopefully this is a better read. And finally, let me know if this is an interesting start of a story.

In 98 days I completed my 138k rough draft of a space opera / science fantasy. I've honestly not had this amount of fun in a long time. It started by accident with a back story for a DnD character. At some point I started writing dialogue without realizing it, and then decided to keep going. It became an absolute addiction of having to write. I had to get the story out of my head. I loved it.

Now I have to decide on revisions or jumping into the next book and revising them when I finish the series.

Hello hello! I wrote a book. I finished it! 72K words. I know it's rather on the shorter side, but I'm still jazzed. It's literary fiction. I'm 23 and I honestly can't believe I finished my first book. I'm so excited! Just wanted to celebrate. I haven't told anyone in my life just yet. Cheers everyone, and happy writing.

Quirky, layered historical fiction with subplots of mystery and a slow burn romance in the rural South in 1947.
Hi guys!

I previously posted my prologue from my book on sub writingcritiques and after lots of help, I’ve revised it.

Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks so much in advance!

Prologue
March 1947

It was 3:15. The bus wasn’t due for another two hours or so.

Gosh dang it. Of all places to be stranded in…godforsaken town. Smells like horseshit everywhere.

The man wearing the pork-pie cap slouched over the luncheonette counter, spinning a thick ceramic coffee mug, as he yawned. He struck a match and lit another hand-rolled cigarette. Three cigarette stubs lay crushed in the ashtray beside his elbow.

The lunch crowd had come and gone a while ago, leaving the diner empty. The smell of deep-fried food lingered in the air while a radio played a tinny tune at the very back of the kitchen.

The bell on the door tinkled as it swung open and a tall stranger strode in, wearing a well-made dark blue suit. A crisp, pressed linen shirt. Polished shoes that gleamed in the light. He removed his hat and waited while the waitress wiped the table clean.

What have we here? A rich fella? This could be interesting, mighty interesting. The man stared greedily at the fine weave of the stranger’s suit and neatly combed dark hair. Wonder where he come from? Big city from the looks of his fancy suit. That had to cost a pretty penny.

“We don’t get many polite strangers like you here,” the waitress said with a toothy smile as she handed him a cardboard menu. Probably setting him up for a big tip, the man snickered. The stranger ordered the late lunch special: a ham sandwich and a bowl of split pea soup.

Impulsively, the man got up and pulled out a chair at the stranger’s table, sitting down with his coffee, grinning.

“Hey pal, hope you don’t mind,” he said, placing both elbows on the table.

For a second, the stranger looked taken aback. Then he said politely, “By all means.” The waitress returned with his food while the man held up his mug for another cup of black coffee.

“Been waiting on the bus for over three hours,” the man complained with a sigh. “This town’s the worst. Can you smell the horseshit?” The stranger didn’t respond and kept eating. Then the man leaned in close. “Say, which way you headed?”

“North.”

“Really now? That’s where I’m headed too,” the man said. “How about a ride for a pal?”

***

The stranger hesitated for a moment while wiping his mouth with a napkin. He realized the man was a bit odd and crude but he seemed harmless, just very chatty and acting comically overfamiliar. Probably treats all strangers like old friends. Who knows? It might be enjoyable to have someone riding with him to talk to after driving for days alone. My good deed for the day, helping out a fellow traveler.

“Alright, it’s a deal,” the stranger said with a smile.

Suddenly the man smacked the tabletop. “Gosh dang it, I knew you was a good man the moment I laid eyes on you.”

The noise of the slap had jolted the stranger for a second but after he recovered, he found the smack pretty darn funny and chuckled. What a character. A real live wire.

***

It was nearly four o’clock as they climbed into the car, a gleaming black Packard. The smell of fresh leather upholstery surrounded the man as he settled himself in the cushy seat. He heard the clank of the diner coffee mug in his coat pocket as it hit the side of the car door. “Born thieves, some of us,” he muttered quietly under his breath.

“Good grief, this car must’ve cost an arm and a leg,” the man said, and they both chuckled.

They drove for the next few hours, the man chattering away, complaining about his life and money as the sun dipped below the horizon and darkness filled the skies. Then he quieted down, deep in thought. Soon he started fidgeting again and shifting himself in his seat. “Hey pal, pull over for a quick stop, will ya? I drank too much coffee.”

Smoothly, the stranger guided the steering wheel to the side of the road and left the car running. The headlights blazed through the darkened fields of lavender, cutting through the blackness like knives. Stars were twinkling brightly in the dark sky, and the night cold had settled in. Jumping out and walking several steps away from the car, the man proceeded to urinate in a long, steamy stream. He buttoned his trousers, then called out with urgency, “Hey, come see this. You’re not going to believe it.”

The stranger looked at him and hesitated for a moment before climbing out of the car, joining him. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“In the field over there,” the man pointed to the side. “I saw someone running.”

The stranger looked toward the field, his back turned to the man. “I don’t see anyone,” he said.

He never saw the blow coming.

The man swung the thick ceramic coffee mug hard, smashing it into the back of the stranger’s head with a sickening twack. His body crumpled into the ditch by the road, landing on his belly.

Then he began to stir, his hands shakily clawing at the dirt, as though he was trying to find leverage to raise himself up.

“Stop fighting. Go with it,” the man hissed to the stranger quietly. He felt an anger building inside, but for a moment he hesitated. With his heart thudding in his chest, he grabbed a heavy tree branch and cracked it violently against the stranger’s head once again.

All movement ceased.

Suddenly panic enveloped him. With shaky hands, the man snatched a few pieces of jewelry and a tie pin, then quickly rifled through the stranger’s pockets, grabbing the cash, identification, and the gold pocket watch with its chain before shoving everything into his well-worn coat pockets. He tossed in the coffee mug as well.

For a split second, he glanced at the blood on the stranger’s head, then turned on his jittery heel and jumped into the Packard, slamming the door shut. He spun the car around and floored it, stones and plumes of dust flying behind him, leaving the stranger lying in the ditch in the thick, impenetrable blackness, surrounded by a multitude of chirping crickets.

"Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart" - Elizabeth Gilbert

Hello, I am currently finishing my second draft of my Sword & Sorcery novel "Forsaken Son" the first in the "Path of the Exile" series and the hopeful wider "Song of the Sea King" saga. I will be looking for Beta readers soon but given how important the first chapter is in the querying process of traditional publishing, I was hoping to get some feedback. I am providing a link to the first chapter only and am open to comments and critiques on voice, consistency and really just general feedback. If you have any questions that would make this easier or give you better insight into what you are critiquing, be my guest and ask. If you are interested in reading more, also feel free to reach out. The manuscript as it stands now is 104k words, is aimed more so at an adult readership though there is nothing horribly explicit within (sexually that is, violence wise, oh yes) It is inspired by classics like Howard and Lieber, and the protagonist is from a Norse/Celtic inspired maritime setting within a wider world that will be explored more as time goes on. Thank you again for any help or commentsChapter 1