This chapter was really intense. I could almost feel the inferno and the twinge in the back waiting for an arrow. Hin Lan was so honorable and loyal to the end. Sen Rin did not disappoint, he is a beast. No more time for writing must read more...
The second item that I found very distracting and interfered with the pacing of your story comes at the end of the chapter on the secret messages. When the guard came to get So Ga to get him out of the palace, he interrupted So Ga in the act of writing and they left with the messages apparently uncovered for all to see. If you think about it, the main source of conflict in the story up until that point was So GA’s struggle to life with the restrictive and isolating protocols of the Little Palaces. He even wonders to himself earlier in the chapter what would happen to him and the other three princes if the messages are discovered. So when they leave the bedroom with the panels apparently wide open, it felt like you were pointing a giant arrow shouting “red alert! Plot important!” Keep in mind, too, that it is quite a while before we discover the source of the alarm, how serious the fire is, and most importantly that ultimately the palace will burn to the ground. For quite a while, I thought some trivial incident must have triggered the usual security paranoia and made them trade palaces a few hours earlier than planned, so that now we’ll have no idea when the messages will be discovered or by whom. This means that I was busy worrying about the messages all the way until I knew all four palaces were doomed. That’s almost a chapter and a half. In the meantime, although I was intellectually taking in what was happening, it prevented me from getting invested in the new arc until it was almost over. In tandem with the stuff I laid out in my other comment, it completely derailed my engagement with the story. Then we cut immediately to Min La and I had to take like three chapters to start caring about him.
In light of all that, I highly suggest you end the message scene with So Ga hearing somebody coming and hastily hiding the messages just in time. If you want to keep the tension and drama as high as possible, I think the story could sustain him hastily hiding them incompletely and leaving a CHANCE that they could be discovered, as long as you make it clear it’s rather unlikely. In either case I would strongly urge you to leave enough closure there that the reader’s attention can 95% move on.
That’s a lot of criticism at once, so I’d like to reiterate that I sincerely love your book and I will definitely be buying multiple copies for friends when you physically publish it. There are so many amazing themes, character arcs, world building concepts, and vivid passages that I’d love to see it succeed to its full potential and that’s the only reason I bring all this up.
Unfortunately, I think you have a pretty significant but easily fixable issue with your pacing. I read until chapter 49 while I gave it very careful consideration, then circled back and reread the beginning. I know it was meant to be surprising, but the fire took me so far off guard that the whole story felt very disjointed. Yes, you want to take us on a wild, exhilarating ride, but you don’t want to give us whiplash so hard that we’re too dizzy to focus going forward. I identified two key ways you can hone your presentation to match your masterful control of tension in the rest of the work.
First is the buildup of So Ga’s sense of threat. If you think about it, the entire story up until this point has been about the little palaces, and then you abruptly demolish them and send us sideways and tell us a different kind of story entirely. Obviously you want that to be a big surprise, but you still want it to seem like you’re telling the same story. As a first time reader I really lacked that sense, especially since you immediately cut away to establish Min La. In my mind it’s a question of buildup. You gave us no possible hint that So Ga’s world was under any kind of existential threat. I was expecting at most a polite showdown in government between two houses. It felt like the tv forecasting scattered showers only to get hit by a hurricane. Are we in the same reality? When I first read the story I thought perhaps you might need one more warning mini-arc building up to the fire, but now that I’ve thought about it more, if you tighten up your presentation of the warning signs you already have, you can make it a lot more effective and still not ruin the surprise in any way.
You gave us two sources of warning before the fire: the redacted report and the servant. The report mini-arc was fantastic. The servant arc fell flat, and here’s why. As a first-time, unbiased reader with no prior exposure to Laokoth, you are introducing us to all kinds of novel customs and cultural conventions in passing, and it all has a distinctly ancient Asian flair. The clothes and food seem sort of Korean, the architecture and indirect communication seem kind of Japanese and the politics seem like ancient China. This leaves the servant messenger arc open to two possible interpretations: either the message was so important to the future of laokoth and the lives of hundreds that a servant would willingly undertake a suicide mission to deliver it, or the society has such a tyrannical sense of loyalty to rulers and a pathological disdain for human life in the lower classes that rulers can order deaths for any trivial reason they choose. Note that these are not mutually exclusive.
A lot of history and stories about ancient Asia focus around the latter point. Shogun by James Clavell is an excellent example. Character after character is ordered to commit suicide over very minor infractions or to demonstrate loyalty and honor in absurdly low-stakes scenarios. In ancient China, peasants were conscripted to build the Great Wall and buried into it if they dropped. In ancient India I think it was, servants’ feet were never allowed over the king’s head, so if a servant accidentally wandered into a second story room above the corresponding downstairs room where the king was, they would be executed. Stuff like that. It comes up quite a lot. Now obviously Laokoth has a little bit of that going on, but not to any crazy extreme. Based on the rest of the book so far, it would definitely not be normal to send a servant on a suicide mission for a trivial message. However a first-time reader wouldn’t know that yet. We haven’t been in Laokoth long enough. Therefore the only way we can gauge how we should react is based on how So Ga reacts. Now he’s definitely upset and he definitely says that it must be URGENT, but by urgent I concluded that it must be time-sensitive. That doesn’t necessarily imply life-or-death. And we don’t get a sense for how abnormal sending a servant on a suicide mission would be. Perhaps So Ga is only upset because you want to portray him as more compassionate than the rest of the society. As I said, my expectations were limited to cat-and-mouse political drama. In light of all this, my concrete suggestion is to tighten up So GA’s internal monologue about the servant so that we the readers know the message is important enough that the threat is existential. That way, you can still employ misdirection. Because of the redacted court transcript, you can still keep So Ga worried about his father, while dialing up our sense of threat and unease enough that when the shoe drops, we have a greater sense of continuity throughout the story. Believe me, the fire is very surprising. You won’t spoil it by hinting slightly more strongly that SOMETHING big is about to happen.
I’ll discuss the second problem in a separate comment soon.
I am not sure why someone on the earlier chapters said this novel was slow. Yes we are still in the palace by now, so what? It is interesting things are moving and happening at a steady believable pace. Rip Hin lan. It is cool to see, even if as it seems for the last time, the disjointed messages that each prince's actions and questions leaves in the other one and Hin Lan's lives. Ended as those may be.
Hin lan you shall be missed 😕💔
O príncipe é um personagem interessante, diferente do comum.
Fiquei triste pelos outros príncipes. Viveram uma vida que não era a deles e não chegaram a lado nenhum.
This chapter was really intense. I could almost feel the inferno and the twinge in the back waiting for an arrow. Hin Lan was so honorable and loyal to the end. Sen Rin did not disappoint, he is a beast. No more time for writing must read more...
The second item that I found very distracting and interfered with the pacing of your story comes at the end of the chapter on the secret messages. When the guard came to get So Ga to get him out of the palace, he interrupted So Ga in the act of writing and they left with the messages apparently uncovered for all to see. If you think about it, the main source of conflict in the story up until that point was So GA’s struggle to life with the restrictive and isolating protocols of the Little Palaces. He even wonders to himself earlier in the chapter what would happen to him and the other three princes if the messages are discovered. So when they leave the bedroom with the panels apparently wide open, it felt like you were pointing a giant arrow shouting “red alert! Plot important!” Keep in mind, too, that it is quite a while before we discover the source of the alarm, how serious the fire is, and most importantly that ultimately the palace will burn to the ground. For quite a while, I thought some trivial incident must have triggered the usual security paranoia and made them trade palaces a few hours earlier than planned, so that now we’ll have no idea when the messages will be discovered or by whom. This means that I was busy worrying about the messages all the way until I knew all four palaces were doomed. That’s almost a chapter and a half. In the meantime, although I was intellectually taking in what was happening, it prevented me from getting invested in the new arc until it was almost over. In tandem with the stuff I laid out in my other comment, it completely derailed my engagement with the story. Then we cut immediately to Min La and I had to take like three chapters to start caring about him.
In light of all that, I highly suggest you end the message scene with So Ga hearing somebody coming and hastily hiding the messages just in time. If you want to keep the tension and drama as high as possible, I think the story could sustain him hastily hiding them incompletely and leaving a CHANCE that they could be discovered, as long as you make it clear it’s rather unlikely. In either case I would strongly urge you to leave enough closure there that the reader’s attention can 95% move on.
That’s a lot of criticism at once, so I’d like to reiterate that I sincerely love your book and I will definitely be buying multiple copies for friends when you physically publish it. There are so many amazing themes, character arcs, world building concepts, and vivid passages that I’d love to see it succeed to its full potential and that’s the only reason I bring all this up.
Unfortunately, I think you have a pretty significant but easily fixable issue with your pacing. I read until chapter 49 while I gave it very careful consideration, then circled back and reread the beginning. I know it was meant to be surprising, but the fire took me so far off guard that the whole story felt very disjointed. Yes, you want to take us on a wild, exhilarating ride, but you don’t want to give us whiplash so hard that we’re too dizzy to focus going forward. I identified two key ways you can hone your presentation to match your masterful control of tension in the rest of the work.
First is the buildup of So Ga’s sense of threat. If you think about it, the entire story up until this point has been about the little palaces, and then you abruptly demolish them and send us sideways and tell us a different kind of story entirely. Obviously you want that to be a big surprise, but you still want it to seem like you’re telling the same story. As a first time reader I really lacked that sense, especially since you immediately cut away to establish Min La. In my mind it’s a question of buildup. You gave us no possible hint that So Ga’s world was under any kind of existential threat. I was expecting at most a polite showdown in government between two houses. It felt like the tv forecasting scattered showers only to get hit by a hurricane. Are we in the same reality? When I first read the story I thought perhaps you might need one more warning mini-arc building up to the fire, but now that I’ve thought about it more, if you tighten up your presentation of the warning signs you already have, you can make it a lot more effective and still not ruin the surprise in any way.
You gave us two sources of warning before the fire: the redacted report and the servant. The report mini-arc was fantastic. The servant arc fell flat, and here’s why. As a first-time, unbiased reader with no prior exposure to Laokoth, you are introducing us to all kinds of novel customs and cultural conventions in passing, and it all has a distinctly ancient Asian flair. The clothes and food seem sort of Korean, the architecture and indirect communication seem kind of Japanese and the politics seem like ancient China. This leaves the servant messenger arc open to two possible interpretations: either the message was so important to the future of laokoth and the lives of hundreds that a servant would willingly undertake a suicide mission to deliver it, or the society has such a tyrannical sense of loyalty to rulers and a pathological disdain for human life in the lower classes that rulers can order deaths for any trivial reason they choose. Note that these are not mutually exclusive.
A lot of history and stories about ancient Asia focus around the latter point. Shogun by James Clavell is an excellent example. Character after character is ordered to commit suicide over very minor infractions or to demonstrate loyalty and honor in absurdly low-stakes scenarios. In ancient China, peasants were conscripted to build the Great Wall and buried into it if they dropped. In ancient India I think it was, servants’ feet were never allowed over the king’s head, so if a servant accidentally wandered into a second story room above the corresponding downstairs room where the king was, they would be executed. Stuff like that. It comes up quite a lot. Now obviously Laokoth has a little bit of that going on, but not to any crazy extreme. Based on the rest of the book so far, it would definitely not be normal to send a servant on a suicide mission for a trivial message. However a first-time reader wouldn’t know that yet. We haven’t been in Laokoth long enough. Therefore the only way we can gauge how we should react is based on how So Ga reacts. Now he’s definitely upset and he definitely says that it must be URGENT, but by urgent I concluded that it must be time-sensitive. That doesn’t necessarily imply life-or-death. And we don’t get a sense for how abnormal sending a servant on a suicide mission would be. Perhaps So Ga is only upset because you want to portray him as more compassionate than the rest of the society. As I said, my expectations were limited to cat-and-mouse political drama. In light of all this, my concrete suggestion is to tighten up So GA’s internal monologue about the servant so that we the readers know the message is important enough that the threat is existential. That way, you can still employ misdirection. Because of the redacted court transcript, you can still keep So Ga worried about his father, while dialing up our sense of threat and unease enough that when the shoe drops, we have a greater sense of continuity throughout the story. Believe me, the fire is very surprising. You won’t spoil it by hinting slightly more strongly that SOMETHING big is about to happen.
I’ll discuss the second problem in a separate comment soon.
I am not sure why someone on the earlier chapters said this novel was slow. Yes we are still in the palace by now, so what? It is interesting things are moving and happening at a steady believable pace. Rip Hin lan. It is cool to see, even if as it seems for the last time, the disjointed messages that each prince's actions and questions leaves in the other one and Hin Lan's lives. Ended as those may be.