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Preliminary Commentary (First Pass); @morreafirebird

Criticisms and Questions:

Unclear who or what Gedeon is, who Markus is; took a couple of takes to get that the dragon and celestial objects were a description of the outer design of the vase.

Gedeon’s motivations are unclear and confusing. He wants pretty things because… what? And why the ring? Why does Markus need a ring gem from Gedeon if he can make such beautiful creations from glass already? The nature of his romance with Ruhette is confusing.

Who is Ruhette? I get that she’s Markus’ love, but it seems hinted that she’s engaged to another man? Or did I miss that?

I’m not sure I understand Markus’ conflict. His history is unclear – what is he? What are his powers? What does he do? Why does he do what he does? I understand at one point he clashed with bandits and Ruhette healed him after that encounter (though I had to do a lot of personal dot-connecting to arrive at that understanding), but is / was that a regular part of his life? Is Markus a young man or a teenager? His angst seems kind of directionless.

I don’t want to be a rain cloud, but I found the story kind of hard to understand. It hit the ground running, and then kind of stumbled onward. I didn’t really get what was going on.

Positives:

I like your prose! On a syntactical level, your descriptions are often quite beautiful and your action manages a breathless pace which only needs to be tempered and restitched together a little so the reader understands the divisions of time, flashbacks, memories, and scene changes.

Same goes for your dialogue: it’s not stiff, it flows, but it requires some rewriting to connect it to the rest of the action and the story as a whole.

Sum and Suggestions:

> The story feels like it was written in haste, very much seat-of-your-pants as opposed to methodical story-boarding (not judging!). I think it could benefit from some planning and segmentation to separate the story out into ‘chapters’ marking important theme and message scenes to revolve around.

> Markus – I think Markus would benefit greatly from having the story restructured more around developing him and his internal drama over marrying Ruhette, as that aspect got lost in between the magical action and his confrontation with Gedeon, who still confuses me as a villain.

> Gedeon – I don’t understand why Gedeon is evil, why he opposes Markus, what he wants or why he wants it, or even what Gedeon is exactly.

Still, the story was magical and intriguing enough to keep me reading, and since you chipped in so quickly and so early on my own story, I would be happy to devote more time to critiquing and beta-reading your story, and more behind-the-scenes work for Markus.