Just got back my pre-reader evaluation of Ponies in Space. · 5:18pm May 17th, 2012
(Warning: This blog post contains some annoyance)
So, I tried sending Ponies in Space to Equestria Daily to see what they thought. First time under the new system.
This is a list of the errors I was told I have.
-Dialogue punctuation
-Purple prose
-Capitalization
-Block formatting (either have indents or line breaks for new paragraphs, preferably both)
-Exposition dumps
-Missing commas
-Characterization (I'm not sure if these characters are supposed to be the show ponies placed in a space environment, or completely seperate characters)
-Show vs. Tell
Thing is, some of them (the purple prose, for sure) are artefacts of writing in the David Weber style. My earlier evaluation of the fic, for example, was from the pre-reader who is versed in Weber's books, and I got a completely different set of problems:
1) The Warshawski sails are configured for sub-light travel upon dropping into a system at a worm-hole or worm-hole junction.
2) You're capitalizing 'pegasus' when it does not need to be; undoubtedly, this is an artifact of the word processor as mine does it too. You still need to correct it, however.
3) While I can almost see Rarity as a ship's captain, I CANNOT envision Pinkie Pie as an XO. Military vessels in the Honorverse do not tolerate the bounciness of Pinkie Pie. I shudder to think what Adm. Harrington would do to any such that tried to bounce on -HER- vessel.
4) Comma abuse. You're tearing through them worse than a Ghost Rider missile salvo through the Havenite Navy.
5) There is no building up of velocity in Hyper. Initial hyperspace velocity is mainly depending on the strength of your Warshawski sails and has absolutely no major relation to the initial entry velocity. Again, you've got to be at the wormhole to make transitions.
6) Word repetition; you use too many in rapid succession.
7) You're writing a crossover, but you need to make it accessible to those who aren't well versed in what you're crossing over. All the military acronyms need to be explained once or twice so others can understand.
8) Your transitions are too abrupt. You go from crew introductions to Twilight's post-operation analysis. You need to give us the goodies, too. Smooth your transitions out.
9) They'd not have to com back to base for authorization for full military power to their engines. They'd have to com to the Port Authority to clear wormhole of all traffic to allow for a full fast paced transit of capital and supportive ships.
It seems like some of the more recent set are direct consequences of my fixing the earlier set - not many ways to make a crossover like this accessible to non-Weberverse readers without, well, infodumping. And hybridizing the traits of Honorverse and MLP characters to make the crossover work has led to "characterization" issues.
Any ideas how to handle this?
I'm not sure where I made show vs. tell errors, for example... And how do I make fimfiction do the same thing Fanfiction.net does and automatically add line breaks between paragraphs? (This issue is what originally drove me from Deviantart, and I resorted to making .PDF files to post things there).
With the spaces issue, there's two ways round it that I know of, either make the spaces in the word processor you work in so that you have the double line break from the get go, or use the indent paragraphs function on the chapter editor in FIMFiction.
With the rest... I know a bit about the Honorverse, which is part of why I read this, though one thing I would say that doesn't help with the encounter I had with EqD's prereaders is that they're long on problems, short on pointing out where errors are or suggesting alternatives, which makes them pretty crap for someone looking to improve their writing.
Thing is, some of them (the purple prose, for sure) are artefacts of writing in the David Weber style. My earlier evaluation of the fic, for example, was from the pre-reader who is versed in Weber's books, and I got a completely different set of problems:
1) The Warshawski sails are configured for sub-light travel upon dropping into a system at a worm-hole or worm-hole junction.
It's been a while since I read Weber, but from what I recall, the speed of the acceleration of the ship is always pretty much static on hyper. I think there's a good description or two of an exit from it in the first couple of books, maybe entry as well, but I believe your acceleration translates directly from STL to FTL depending on the velocity at entry/exit and the band, however he does mention that there is such a thing as a deceleration crash - people getting sick from dropping through the hyperspace bands too quickly, suggesting that there's some measurably effect on the body, even with the inertial compensation. I also believe there's a moment or two while engineering on a ship reconfigs the sails from FTL mode to STL mode after dropping to sublight speeds, though it probably happens fast enough that normally there's no obvious loss of velocity.
2) You're capitalizing 'pegasus' when it does not need to be; undoubtedly, this is an artifact of the word processor as mine does it too. You still need to correct it, however.
That one should be entirely dependant on choice, since I tend to capitalise most of my species names when I write, usually I don't capitalise 'species group names' such as human, pony, dragon, etc, but I do capitalise individual species such as Earth Pony, Unicorn, Pegasus, Franthoryn, Rhyl'saar, etc.
3) While I can almost see Rarity as a ship's captain, I CANNOT envision Pinkie Pie as an XO. Military vessels in the Honorverse do not tolerate the bounciness of Pinkie Pie. I shudder to think what Adm. Harrington would do to any such that tried to bounce on -HER- vessel.
I agree that Pinkie and Honor would not get along at all. Military commanders tend to be a lot more straight laced and serious than she's shown in general. Granted that doesn't take into account abilities, nor experience, so I would say if you're keeping Pinkie from the show, maybe make it that she is fairly young for an XO and not seen much combat, or that there's a history for her to fall back on to explain how she got to that rank on that ship.
4) Comma abuse. You're tearing through them worse than a Ghost Rider missile salvo through the Havenite Navy.
Without doing a proper beta of the fic, this one I can't really comment on.
5) There is no building up of velocity in Hyper. Initial hyperspace velocity is mainly depending on the strength of your Warshawski sails and has absolutely no major relation to the initial entry velocity. Again, you've got to be at the wormhole to make transitions.
As I said for point 1, from the descriptions I recall there's no real acceleration or deceleration from switching from STL to FTL or vice versa, but there's obviously something given that there's a comment about deceleration crashes from dropping through the bands too fast. This is your version of the universe though, so maybe the sails work a little differently here and there's visible effects from going FTL or dropping out of it. Agreed on the wormholes though, generally you have to actually fly into them to use them, though they don't always see that. I'm pretty sure Conquest Frontier Wars used to have ships seem to accelerate into a wormhole once they got into a certain range and were going through it. Don't remember B5, but Star Trek had a wormhole open then the ship fly in at STL speeds with no acceleration, so it depends on your style to some degree.
6) Word repetition; you use too many in rapid succession.
Not something you can do much about sometimes, but sometimes it's better to repeat a word than sound like you're abusing a theasaurus.
7) You're writing a crossover, but you need to make it accessible to those who aren't well versed in what you're crossing over. All the military acronyms need to be explained once or twice so others can understand.
Best way to do this would be character dialogue or technical readouts in the fic, out of the fic you can put up a chapter for going through everything if you wish.
8) Your transitions are too abrupt. You go from crew introductions to Twilight's post-operation analysis. You need to give us the goodies, too. Smooth your transitions out.
Transitions can be abrupt, it depends on how much you're able to write out and how much you want to skip over, however the interesting bits should be covered or touched on at least.
9) They'd not have to com back to base for authorization for full military power to their engines. They'd have to com to the Port Authority to clear wormhole of all traffic to allow for a full fast paced transit of capital and supportive ships.
The first half of this is dependant on where they were going to full power. If they're in the 'control zone' where there's a lot of ships trying to move about, they would need permission since they'd probably need to have the path cleared similar to the wormhole. The second bit I agree with, there's a lot of ships moving around a wormhole, coming in full burn without telling people is a bad idea since it leads to crashed ships.
120405 Those are the earlier problems, and half of them aren't actually relevant anyway. The ones I'm upset about NOW are the ones in - for bullets.
As for the numbered ones...
1) No wormhole in Equestrian space. The Wings are for supralight and for crash translations. One of the minor changes I made.
2) Dealt with.
3) I made it so she's mellowed out over time, and works well with Rarity. And is mildly precognitive, as per the battle in chapter 3.
4) I tried to reduce them.
5) He's assuming there's a Wormhole. I have not mentioned a wormhole. And the Wings I use work slightly differently - they can carry velocity down-gradient, to some extent, and there most certainly is a build up of velocity in hyper in canon. Hell, they need to make journeys under Impellers in the Selker Shear in the Honorverse!
6) Gone through to try to reduce.
7) I've briefly explained terms on first use - this appears to have led me to infodump, as per the upper (more recent) pre reader. That or it's the military briefings, which deserve the accusation even less.
8) I've added a couple of interim scenes, like Admiral Magic Star, and softened up transitions slightly.
9)There's no wormhole in Equestrian space. They were in parking orbit around the local equiv. of Hephaestus station, an important installation that would react badly to accidental collision, and needed clearance for activation of their Wedges at all. Again, I included clarification after getting this, though.
Any thoughts on the upper - bulleted ones, which are the current sticking points?
Did you get any further info yet?
125746 Yes, just now. I'll quote the conversation here:
Me:
I've checked, and it seems that it's possible to dispute points from a submission rejection via replying. There's a few things about my recent story submission critique that I feel may have been in some way unfair.
First off, the "Purple Prose" and "Exposition dumps" are a result of the style - I'm writing in the manner of David Weber, a science fiction author (and he himself has been criticized for them), but I can't really remove them without changing the style. The infodumps in particular were something added in after a prior, pre- three strikes rule, submission to EqD in which I was told I had insufficient explanation of the science fiction components of the setting. Unless it's the military-style briefings which are being referred to, which are supposed to be like that. That's how briefings work.
Capitalization - I'm not sure what kind of thing that's going to be. A lot of the terms used are proper names derived from non-proper-name words, in the military style, so it is possible that it is these which were causing the problem. Example - "the ship's Wings". The correct term there is Wings, as they are a particular thing with a defined name.
The block formatting I have little issue with, though it's only even present on the FIMFiction version thanks to different formatting systems compared to Fanfiction.net.
Missing commas - this is a particular sticking point for me, since the previous review I had explicitly told me I was overusing commas. I've attempted to reduce the comma use to only where necessary, and... well. I feel like I'm being told two different things.
Characterization - this is entirely intentional. They're not quite the same as the MLP characters, because they've spend decades in the military. Their characters in the fic are modelled on the effects this would have on them - for example, Fluttershy is still timid, but she's entirely capable of doing her job as a tactical officer.
Show vs. Tell - I'm not certain, but I think this results from the Weber style as well.
Where would I be able to get more information about where I made errors like that, in order to address the specific causes for complaint? And I know there's a pre reader among the group who is knowledgeable about the Weber universe. (My most recent blog post on FIMFiction contains the pasted contents of that prior review, for comparison: http://www.fimfiction.net/blog/29584)
Thanks for your time, and hopefully some of these problems can be resolved.
Pre reader:
Dear Author,
While I not familiar with David Weber, nor his particular style, I can explain to you why Equestria Daily does not accept stories with either exposition dumps or chronic levels of purple prose. Exposition dumps, particularly that in your character's dialogue, comes across as unnatural, obtrusively attempting to develop character and back story while introducing concepts that both characters should already be fully aware of, for example the conversation where Rarity and Pinkie talk about the mineral extracting company, or where every unimportant piece of jargon that was implied from the speech (see: Golden Horn, obviously an award from the dialogue) is given at least of sentence of explanation regardless of whether or not it deserves it, where the truly confusing pieces of jargon (like whenever they're moving the ship, the words you put there literally mean nothing other than 'do things!' to the uninformed reader) are left unexplained.
Purple prose is also a stylistic error that we happen to discourage. A story that is over-stylized with flowery prose, complex multi-syllabic words that seem entirely out of place when concerning the rest of the work, or words that haven't been used since the late 16th century, comes across as completely unreadable, or makes the writer seem like they are fishing in the Thesaurus for synonyms to make themselves look smarter. Needless to say, it's a problem, and the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest exists for a reason.
Capitalization in your story is slip-shodden and inconsistent throughout. This is not a minor error, this is not one instance; it is systemic. Captain of the List is capitalized, then it's not. Other words, like Wings? Flat wrong. You might be able to make a case for "The Wings", but only if they are collectively unique. We would not let you capitalize "flight deck" either, even though its "a particular thing with a defined name." I also noticed "Pincess" or what you meant "Princess" is also flippantly capitalized.
Your formatting is an eyesore. It's hard to read, strains my eyes, and looks ugly as sin. Change it to reflect proper fiction standards or don't resubmit. That's an ultimatum that you can believe in.
You're missing commas. Plain and simple. There's no arguing that.
So, you're telling me that you're purposely making the characters act outside their boundaries with minimal adherence to their actual characterization due to military? You've gotten elements of their speech intact, but no real action or behavior that distinguishes them as being pony. Honestly, you could replace the names with Senor Gooblygook and it'd still make sense.
Show vs. Tell is not a stylistic decision for your prose at large.
I hope this clarifies some of your issues,
-Ω
Me:
I'm going to go over these points - would you be able to recommend somewhere I might get an idea of where commas are missing line by line, or other such things? - but my primary concern was actually not addressed. As per my linked blog post, my primary concern was that I had received an earlier criticism with diametrically opposed advice in a number of particulars.
One example being how I was told I had to many commas, and now I have too few (though the change was not in fact very large between the two submitted versions), and another revolving around explaining terms more on first use (which I am now told could be obvious from the dialogue, though the earlier critique said that all terms needed to be explained once or twice). Most notably, I was criticized for word repetition, while I am now being criticized for complex and uncommon words.
I did not have characterization on the earlier criticism.
This means, in short, that I am getting inconsistent signals from the two criticisms. While I know it's churlish to ask for a specific pre reader, the previous person was rather more of a Weberverse fan (and hence knew what to expect, stylistically - I'd not want to "fix" some of the problems if they make it less like an actual military sci fi book as it's supposed to be. I would point out that a crossover is supposed to appeal to the intersection of two fandoms, and have elements of both.)
Is there a reason that my two experiences with pre readers on the same fic have produced such mixed messages?
(And to reply to a particularly barbed comment of yours that I feel to be unfair, look at the fic on one of the two other links I provided if the formatting is bad on the one that seems to be all you have looked at. I can "fix" that for future submission quite literally by only providing the ff.net and DA links.)
Pre reader:
We have given you a list of issues with your story. Whether or not they're consistent with the old review you received is irrelevant. The issues listed now are present within your story, and they will have to be fixed if you want this story to be posted.
In addition, why would we give you a specific pre-reader that would go easier on your work? The "style" you are attempting to emulate is what's causing the problems. The solution is to fix the story, not fish for a pre-reader that's going to give you a free pass because they're familiar with the style. (On a related note, the pre-reader that reviewed your story first did look at it again. He agreed with the most recent pre-reader's criticism). Your crossover is taking all of the wrong elements of the crossed-over style.
If you wish for someone to look over your story and point out issues, there are many review threads on /fic/ that can help you out.
Presented without further comment, because I think I need to go shoot aliens to cool off a bit.
125812
Well, that turned out to be a bust.
I think he's got a point on the capitalization, but the rest is pretty baseless, not to mention very unhelpful.
Not that I'm that surprised, ED has some wierd standards, and get reaaaly specific with commas and formatting.
"So, you've grown wings" had some similar problems, even though it's a damn fine story.
I guess you can either try to work those things out and hope the next guy won't pull another 180° or just go on and hope the next guy does pull a 180°.
You definitly should look at their FAQ on formatting, and do it exactly according to that.
And you could fix the chacterisation issues by including a few sidestories that show the development into the current characters. Nothing bigm maybe 2000-3000 words across three or four characters.
And don't actually think the prose was all that purple, though that is a matter of personal taste.
125844 What really tees me off about it all is that I didn't edit it very much at all (the first few chapters) from the previous guy - in fact, I was worried I'd done too little, barely enough to get by and fix the old problems.
Apparently there is no such thing as "enough" commas, and adding the scene with Magic Star had negative value for the quality of the characterization (since it's now a problem and wasn't before, and that scene is post-first review).
I'll let ponychan have a go on it, and if there are errors they can't quash...
"...a matter of personal taste." That's just it, on the purple prose. I wrote all this without recourse to a thesaurus. This is how I actually speak and write.
Problem with sidestories is that I consider the best kind of character development to be the gradual kind - it would take a hell of a lot of text.
125857
I do agree that development should be slow, but it would be a possibility to get rid of the issue, which seems to be that they are too different from established canon.
Personally, I don't actually think there is one, Au and all, but I'm just a guy on the internet.
125872 You know, I have to wonder if he actually read all of it. His main characterization complaint was as much that there was "no real action or behavior that distinguishes them as being pony". I did not know that your average sci fi race was capable of breaking the sound barrier in a massive explosion of weather magic, because that happens in chapter five...
As for my reasoning behind the personalities, I used their canon natures to assign them to Mil Sci Fi "tropes" with some adjustment.
Twilight is socially a bit behind, but technically skilled and The Admiral.
Rarity is The Old Lady, standard ship captain trope, aloof and fastidious - "runs a tight ship".
Pinkie is an Executive Officer with MUCH more exuberance than the standard. That was actually criticized by the previous guy - for being TOO PINKIE!
Fluttershy was the hardest to do - so I made her an introspective officer who does her job as a job. She's not happy with all the death and mayhem, but sees it as her duty - common in real and fictional warfare, I think.
Dash is a fighter jock. Barely any change.
AJ doesn't turn up much, but I tried to portray her as an engineering officer who is solidly dependable and has some sense of humour.
Hey, I don't have any issues. I just think the adjustment might be what set him of. I don't know, but I read it that way.
And yeah, the later chapters have a lot more pony, mainly the marine sections.
125901 ...random thought. Isn't any fic with shipping between any two of the mane cast going against their characterizations? They're portrayed as a circle of friends...
125917 Yeah, word of god actually outright states there's no romance. Twilestia runs into the same problem.
As someone who doesn't know David Weber, one who's done a small amount of edits on your work (lolhai, remember me? It's been a while), as well as having some insight into the pre-reader community, I offer counsel:
EqD's pre-readers have one goal in mind: find stuff that the EqD audience likes and reject the rest.
They're not a perfect bunch, but they've managed to accrue a fair estimation of what the general populace doesn't like, and this estimation spans, among other things, purple prose and exposition dumps. To put it bluntly, you as a fanfic writer simply don't have as large a window of opportunity to grasp your reader as David Weber does. He can afford to use purple prose and such because he's established, and his work + style sells to an audience who will sit and sift through it, so to speak (if it didn't sell, the publishers would have refused him). Now EqD's reading audience are very unappreciative of purple prose, stylistic or otherwise. I reckon that half of them would reject "Lolita" about 5 pages in. The same goes for exposition dumps - chunks of data are a turn-off more often than not, because rather than "filling in" the reader, it feels more of a dump - hence the term infodump. Again, how much is too much is subjective, but the pre-readers have the best grasp of the amount than any other group, by virtue of experience. So the pre-readers do what they do - they tell you, "It's purple, so we won't accept it", because the readerbase won't like it. And pretty often they're right. Not 100%, but close enough.
It's not a fault in your work, per se. It's just opinions, preferences and accessibility, which is what the world of publishing, RL included, is morphing into. Efficiency in inefficiency, you might call it.
Also, pre-readers won't finish reading everything when they've spotted what they deem to be "enough" errors. A 50k-word work, with 5 missing commas in the first chapter of 4k words, even though it may be edited perfectly after, will get sent back for an editing pass, because the pre-reader simply doesn't have the time nor the will to slog through all of it. They take your first few thousand words to be a guide to estimating what the rest of it will be like - not too different from what an average reader would do.
Anyways, you've given it to Golden Vision. He's good at what he does, and hopefully he'll be able to shed light in a more specific way than I could.
129210 Thanks for that insight - what really annoyed me about it, though, wasn't the advice so much as the contradiction. It's all very well to say "they don't like infodumps" and "no purple prose", but when I'd previously submitted it and been told to "explain things more" and "use more varied words", it really, really grates on me. (Especially as I edited it as little as I felt I could get away with to remove the glaring problems.)
And as a complete aside, I'm now imagining a pony with a spider's web cutie mark - "webber". He weaves worlds...
129219
>contradiction
That's a fair point. But then again, the first pre-reader was someone familiar with David Weber, so he/she'd be more accepting of the style, I suppose. And standards have certainly become more uniformed since then (a few months or so ago, if I remember?), though I would respectfully keep my opinions on that trend to myself. You can request for your previous pre-reader, though having a reason to go along with it would help.
130567 See the stuff I pasted into the comments, in my conversation with Burn Note. Apparently, I can't. And he thinks the same as the other guy anyway.
Ah, well. Hopefully something will prevail... (And I'm just casually going to point out that anything with shipping in it is more "out of character" than my entire fic...)
125949
130567
Just a point of possible interest.
I think I just worked out what the reason for all the comma comments on my fic was.
I'm British, and I read a lot of stories written by Americans (e.g. Baen books)
And, and I did not know this until very recently, comma rules differ from the UK to the USA. So I've got a rather strange mix of comma rules in my past experience. While I think I apply primarily UK rules, I might be mixing in US rules on occasion as a result of having read so much US-based fiction. And to someone used to pure US rules, that will look like the commas are misplaced in any sentence with three clauses or more.