And no, I am not Serpent Syra, but he IS my idol.
Those are fightin' words. I'm excited now.
MS Word Length: 51777 Characters
. That's an incredibly inaccurate way to determine lengh. Why letter count? Why not word or page? *shrug* Just sort of curious.
A raging sirocco crazed through the Slynvixian night, bringing with it, an infinite state of silence fractured fiercely by the invariant crashing of the white-hot bolts of lightning which danced above in the rolling heavens.
Run-on sentence. And if not, dangerously close.
into the soft, earthy material
You also use the atricle 'the' here incorrectly. Hah. But anyway, the use of a definite article implies that we should know what you're talking about specifically. In fact, you've never told us. All we know isthat it's made of 'soft, earthy material,' which could range from anything like a gym mat to the top of a building that has been padded for a bungee jumper and his dog. As per usual, in overdescribing, you've forgotten to tell us anything. Not to mention the way you describe it iplies that it is not, in fact, the ground. If it is simply dirt, how is it merely 'earthy material' and not the earth itself?
This should be a colon.
the impenetrable sheet of precipitation
*What* impenetrable sheet of precipitation? You've never even implied that some form of water was falling from the sky.
but quickly decapitated to its usual chromaticity,
Dissipated, not decapitated. Heh. Decapitated.
Well, that opening was pointless. You took four paragraphs to say, "A salamence sitting in a cage blew fire at an egg." Not a very thrilling way to start off.
Four hours later, the storm had gotten worse;
You still haven't told us *what* storm. You mentioning lightening, but rain and lightening are mutually exclusive. One does not require the other.
but the Salamence had awoken from her slumber to discover that her egg still had not hatched
She expects it to hatch cleanly, easily, and on its own in these conditions? You say it was hailing, which implies at least moderately low temperatures. Eggs need warmth, as do infants, to survive. And a at least mildly interested mother. 0.o
The slate-gray clouds were beginning to rotate as if about to produce a tornado.
The sky is green before a tornado. Also, if she is sitting in a cave, I'm going to assume that she is in a mountained/forested region, neither of which are very hospitable to a tornado. Long stretches of flat land, anyone?
The she-dragon had to make a choice: If she left the egg here, if there was, indeed, to be a cycloidal multitude of gales and precipitation, it would surely be destroyed.
Of course, it wasn't an important enough decision to make four hours ago. Nope, she took a nap first. *headdesk*
spread her crimson airfoils to their cumulative wingspan and,
*snorfle* Purple prose, love, gets you sentences like this, which are just... nonsensical. They are so loaded with words straight out of a thesaurus that they start to sound ridiculous, and are more and more blatantly not how anyone would actually talk or arrange their thoughts naturally. Instead of getting wrapped up in a dramatic moment, I'm sitting here wondering what possessed you to smush this together istead of just saying, "she extended her wings fully." When you do things like this, you take away from the story. It becomes less about what is actually happening, and more about how many multi-syllable words you can cram into a sentence.
Which leads me to another point. It's extremely difficult to maintain good tone with overinflated prose. You're sort of teetering here. I'm sort of into it, but because the prose is so bloated, and because everything is extravagent, it's becoming harder instead of easier to picture and appreciate what is actually happening. The story becomes backdrop. Here, most notably, it has lost a real sense of urgency. She and her child are in danger, and I don'tfeel like anyone, the salamence, me, or you, really needs to care.
lifted up and into the storm-borne sky and drifted nearly effortlessly into a prevailing thermal
That I doubt. If the storm is verging on tornado, she does not glide effortlessly into the horizon.
the lone egg had began to
I feel like that should be 'begun.' Double check me, but I'm pretty sure the past participle of 'begin' it 'begun.'
ystalline waters of the nearby lake.
Of *what* nearby lake? You don't use 'the' if you're introducing something for the first time like that. You use an indefinite article: a or an.
but instead a shimmering sapphire aura shining like a beacon against the raging precipitation, pierced by eyes that glowed like fire.
Um... eggs don't glow when they hatch. Not game-canonically, not in real life. In the show, the eggs don't really seem to hatch at all, if I remeber correctly, but simply transform when ready.
white teeth and uttered a single word: “Bagon.”
Not really too big a deal, but you're not born knowing a language. Snorts, growls, whatever, but I didn't pop out of the womb and say, "Hello!" That's what babies whimper and cry-- they don't know how else to communicate.
walking in a curious state to the neighboring river,
It was a lake not too long ago. And isn't it still raining like whoa? An infant would *not* be able to... ehh. Not too mention the river is violent and overflowing after TORRENTIAL RAIN FOR FOUR HOURS.
it had an awkward “he-ness” in his character,
A what? Find a better way to tell us it's a guy, if not by simply calling it 'he' within narration.
When he reached the water, Bagon inquiringly dipped one of his stubby hands into its crystalline body, twirling it under the exquisite surface.
And then, as the eye of the storm passed, a wind whipped up again and large waves from the violently overfilled river swept the bagon away and it drowned in a pool of logic mixed with common sense.
I'm also open to debate about whether or not a river is a 'body' of water. Or is it a lake again?
“Ba Gon ” The dispelled Pokémon
Period in there.
The young dragon gamboled through the wood blindly,
Ah, more thesaurus-related fun. To 'gambole' is to 'skip about in play.' Remeber: just because a thesaurus says the words are synonyms does *not* mean they can just be subsituted for one another.
After standing back up and assiduously inspecting his minuscule body for sufficient injuries,
Another one of those 'no one would actually every say this' tings. Haha. Can't you just hear him thinking? "Ug! A tornado is forming behind me, I have no mother, and I'm bound to be attacked by some rpedator as soon as the rain lets up (if the storm itself doesn't kill me), but first I must assiduously inspecting my minuscule body for sufficient injuries!" Seriously. You were doing really well there for a while, but this just destroys the tone mercilessly.
vomiting forth a rose-pink tongue,
Ehh, more words-not-interchangable-ness. Vomiting implies harshness and force-- something I doubt the bagon was going for in catering to a wound. Also, it just doesn't make sense, consdiering that the term vomiting strictly means somefrom coming out of the mouth
from the stomach. Unless bagon's anatomy is very unusual, I seriously doubt it was possible for him to have vomited his tongue.
wondering what this brown, sticky stuff was.
Mud isn't really sticky. Also, you messed up. You meant "...pondering deliberately over the source of this concoction-- slight darker in appearance than the sparkling waves of the radiant sun, but still of the same family visually-- that covered entirely his meager appendages."
Sorry if that wasn't flowery enough, I don't carry a thesaurus with me.
The dragon then expelled the earthy remains of the muck through his mouth and into his opposite hand,
Seriously. You win an award for turning, "He spat it out," into a twenty-word sentence. *boggles*
before casually actuating it onto the rain-soaked ground.
Ehh, the use of 'actuating' is questionable. To actuate is to 'move to action.' I don't think that's what he was really doing. When you spin a wind up toy, you're actuating it. When you throw mud on the ground, not so much.
He knew that if he did not get proper supplemental nutrition soon, he would die.
*monster wave from flooding river pelts him with hail as he is sucked up by torrential winds*
He did, however, find a small patch of grass, their ends glimmering with fragile dewdrops.
These are some sturdy dewdrops. It still hasn't stopped raining, you realize, according to the narration, correct?
He spewed forth an azure stub for a hand,
Again, spewed is not the right word. Spewing is generally a term restricted to liquid substances, as it implies a stream, or gushing. It also tends to mean 'ooze.' I'm not sure what hishand is made up that it spews, but I'll bet it's your thesaurus. Also, you say that he reached for it with 'with unrivaled cautiousness.' Considering spewing is generally a rather violent motion, you've walked yourself into a bit of an oxymoron.
which was now beginning to reveal itself after its confinement to behind the storm clouds, before shutting his eyes, and yawning a final time as he fell into sleep.
Just for both parties' reference, the rain stops *now*.
-----
Alright. Recap. A mother is forced to abndon her child, and the abandoned baby hatches.
... am I supposed to be thrilled endlessly by that? After you've taken '51777 Characters' to tell me? Maybe. In fact, if that was what you were trying to do-- that is, create dynamic characters out of a stressed mother and forgotten child to entice the reader and play on emotion-- this could have been an excellent opening, though I still would have complained that it didn't really lead us anywhere.
Instead, you were too busy trying to cram it full of big words and 'pretty' scenery, and, as per usual when authors try to do that stuff, it ruined everything else. I didn't care about the mother because you didn't make me try to care about her. Not only that, you didn't even make *her* try to care, which really makes it look like *you* don't care. The baby was there, and perhaps only better becauie it got more screen time, but was equally as emotionless. The tone in this was just awful, when the focus of it should have been the tone. The worst of it was at parts, you seemed to really get into it, and then I did too, but then you'd come back with the ridiculous way you word your prose, and I'd feel at a distance again.
Also, the way so many explicit details were hurled at us at once made it hard to put everything together. I felt like I was only getting pieces at a time, and sort of improvising the missing ones in. This was worsened by the fact that you didn't seem to remeber some of the details you have written, which should send up all kinds of red flags.
Also very poor was your attetion to logic. I mentioned everything really big up there, but just remeber-- it does have to make sense.
I don't really understand why you're trying to mimic Syra, because you obviously have a good handle on the English language and could be extremely good (not that he can't, he just has about 100x more word use and syntax problems than you do in my experience). I've always wondered what the point of the overdescript style was. I guess it's sort of a self-gloification thing, subconciously or not, where for some reason an author finds it more intriguing to describe what's going on around a story than to convey what's happening in one.
Come up with your own style. That's always better. Don't strain so much to fit a strandard. Remember: when you're into this and having fun, the reader will be too.
Nonetheless, there was something enjoyable in this, I guess becasue there were parts where I did enjoy it. I just can't convey well enough how this type of story-describing distances a reader from what is actually happening, ebcasue the focus isn't on the story. Which, I guess, leads to the quetion, if you're trying to tell a story, why aren't you focusing on it when you tell it?
Alright, so that wasn't exactly a compliment. I tried.
If I remeber to, I'll read more of this when you update it just because I like to hope that there are some fics worth reading out there. I guess my point down here is that, despite everything, I did sort of like and wanted to really like it.
Good luck.
edit: I would also like to point out how I did *not* harp you about how titles like this are less appealing than more. Snaps for me.
