Williams Perils of the past Antarna 2

[KaneW]

Hi all,
Like Bron, I'm unfortunately also posting below theirs - Darren, looks to be the permissions, sorry (replies allowed but not new posts).
Please see the next section of my manuscript as attached.
Looking forward to reading your pieces (have downloaded yours to read, Darren and Bron) and to our discussion.
Cheers, Kane

[DazWizzle]

Hey Kane,

Loving the imagery of the fight scene.

I really enjoyed the way you used Enthrisis would spell things out with his body. That came across really clear.

The only real things I got from this was Enthrisis, and Leharist sound really similar after reading it a bit.

See you tomorrow

[BeeMore]

Hi Kane,
I've attached comments, apologies for the short notice but looking forward to discussing soon.
Bron

[RKaplan]

Hi Kane,
Apologies for the late post. I hope you’ve had a happy holiday and are gearing up for a lovely new year.
As I said with the beginning of your piece, the amount of work and thought that you have put into this world is palpable.
There’s so much rich history and lore and different factions all crisscrossing each other that I cant help but to be pulled in.
However, similarly to how I felt about the beginning, it feels like you are holding the reader at arms length and not letting us really enter your world. So many cool parts of your world have been minimized into a few lines when I want to hear so much more about them.
You have magic, gods, teleporting, betrayal, training, third eyes, previous lives, a temple on a mountain that lets you time travel sort of. There’s so much going on, but we haven’t gotten a good look, or the chance to explore any of them. I understand this is only the beginning and we will no doubt explore these concepts in depth as the story moves forward, but there are a few issues with this.

1. It can be a bit overwhelming having all these exotic and complex ideas shown to us within forty pages. I’m struggling to keep them all in my head.

2. The complex and otherworldly ideas are so unbelievably cool compared to Antarna’s “plight” and her traveling up to the cave on the mountain to train with Gil that they are pulling my focus away from the story. For example, Antarna believes in a death god, and can’t touch anything that is the seventh of something, but besides a few examples of her counting we’ve seen her eat, climb a mountain and do yoga more than any information we’ve gotten about the death god and yet the death god is frequently a part of the conversation.

3. I have so many questions (that with each new page I read only grows) and very few answers. Yes, the first forty pages shouldn’t have any huge reveals, but the excitement of being pulled into a world like you have so lovingly crafted is learning about the things that are in it and naming them isn’t enough. For example, we’ve spent forty-ish pages at the temple and we know nothing that sets a death cult apart from a church/ yoga retreat. They do yoga, have priests and listen to sermons. Why is seven an important number? Why are they in an isolated temple? Why did the followers of death decide to follow? Why are they near a cave that lets you see past lives? Doesn’t the idea of past lives sort of disprove death?