Reviews for Virtuoso's Ultimatum
Eleve Osirian chapter 6 . 1/7/2010
I must admit that you are a good storyteller. Your story is one that managed to grab my attention and though I only read three of the chapters, I find myself wanting to return (once I’ve gotten some sleep) to keep reading. Good job with the hook!

The Preface was helpful, in the fact that you explain what certain words mean at the very bottom. However, I think that you could have explained what they were in the story itself; after all most novels/stories might include such a list, but on top of the list, explain in the story as well. I didn’t notice you doing that in the first three chapters.

On to the prologue: I like the imagery here. One sentence that I especially liked was, “That was the night I felt for the first time the morbid chill, of what it feels like to stand on the line which separated life from death.” To me, this sentence builds up a lot of tension for the next event, and leads the reader onward with a good push. It's fair to say that you are good with enticing your readers.

One could argue that there is “purple prose” to be found here; a type of writing that goes TOO overboard with "flowery" language. I noticed that this continued into the next chapter, which thankfully is a bit longer (I like reading long chapters versus a bunch of short ones). An example is this:

“Brakmar, the caliginous warlord, shrewdly bollixed his unholy gavel over the blacklands known as Sidimote.”

While it lends credit to your vast knowledge of the English language, your common reader is not going to know what bollixed or caliginous mean. It would be my suggestion that if you want to use this type of language, that you find a way to give the meaning of the word somewhere close by so that people get the jist of the idea. Here, you kind of did that unintentionally I think by having the words “warlord” and the description of Brakmar using his “unholy gavel”. For me personally, I like this style of writing, because it does give so many details, but at the same time, can't stomach parts of it because it does get tiresome of reading details that are not pertenent to what is happening. Of course, this is just my opinion, and isn't the end all, be all. If it is your style, then it is your style.

The last part of this chapter is what slowed me down, because the big blocks of text and the listing of who is who and who does what. Perhaps if you broke it down into smaller sections it would be easier to digest so to speak. While there is information there that should be read, because its important to the story, I daresay most people would just skim over it rather than read it word for word because it is so thick.

I was glad to see in chapter four a bit of dialogue. Remember, however, that with each new speaker should come a new paragraph; don’t lump it all together.

Overall, I think there are some things you could improve on to make it even better than it already is. You have a great foundation of a story here; I'd like to see you use that to your complete advantage.

Happy writing!