Some thought it strange, an earth pony learning from an unicorn how to make various medicines, strange potions and other things that resembled magic to others, but in the end, magic wasn't a thing that was limited to unicorns anyway, and alchemy certainly wasn't the kind of magic you would need an horn for.
Up in the far north, in a shady, secluded town, a young earth pony is inducted into the secrets of Alchemy. One day, he's been sent by his mentor to deliver a healing potion to a town a few days of hiking away. After for the first time getting to know the world outside his hometown, he pleades his mentor to allow him for another trip. He complies, sending him to retrieve a legendary ingredient from far away. After rejoicing at first, the young apprentice soon has to realize that this second trip is going to be much harder and more dangerous than the first one.
Set in a medieval setting before Luna's banishment, using mostly original locations and characters, except for Starswirl the Bearded and possibly the two princesses.
Inspired by this piece of music
First chapter edited by CloppleJack.
If you find mistakes of any kind, please don't hesitate to point them out.
1051051 Thanks a lot! I'll fix that.
Interesting premise. I like what you have here, but I have two points of critique.
First, the minor one-you want to put a space between your paragraphs, and indent them. Minor formatting issue, I know, but it does a lot for us readers who want to avoid eyestrain.
Also, some of the explanation of the world comes in a way that is dangerously close to info-dumping, such as when you discuss Earl Sharp Knife.
I will keep an eye on this story!
1115742 Thanks. I'll try to avoid that in the future.
I alt-tabbed and wrote notes down as I was reading.
Here goes:
Put a double space between paragraphs and indent the first line of each one- it may not be proper formatting for real books but it looks much cleaner on FiMFiction. There is a convenient little button for the indenting, though you will have to manually do the spacing.
Something I learned in past English classes that is damn true, though I didn't accept it for awhile, 'Never start a story with a description of the weather. You can bust it out a paragraph in, but the first sentence... Never.'
From the first line:
"as it was usually the case around here. The sun rarely shone here,"
Repetition of this sort must be avoided!
*continues reading*
Alright!
There were some grammatical mistakes, some faulty repetition, some fragmented sentences (some of which were purposeful and added to the prose, but some of which were jerky and abrupt), yet, overall it was very good! The idea is wonderful and must be expounded on. I was grinning from ear to ear at the last line of Chapter 1.
So, in conclusion: I think you need an editor- for you have a great idea and are executing it fairly well, it just needs to be refined a bit.
Can I nominate myself? I'll do an edit draft of this chapter for you if you like, so you can judge my efforts before you accept. I want to be in on this story as it develops ;D
1764363 Thanks a lot for your helpful comment!
I went ahead and added some paragraphs and also indented them, so I hope the story is now easier to read.
Also, I knew about how you should avoid mentioning the weather in the first sentence, but I figured it would be maybe a bit different in this case, since it's neither a "nice and sunny day" nor a "dark and stormy night", but if that is still a sign of a bad writing style, I will maybe change it if I can find a different beginning.
I also tried really hard to avoid repetition, but apparently my vocabulary wasn't big enough to find different words every time. Could you please as well point out my grammar mistakes, so I can learn from then and do better next time? I have no problem with you being a proofreader, in fact I think it would be of much help and I greatly appreciate your support.
And yes, when I set out to write this story, I wanted to try writing something original. Thanks for the positive feedback on the idea. I also had a lot of human-centered story ideas, but I thought these were a bit overused, so I decided against them. Another good thing about this premise is that it leaves me a great deal of freedom - I can add a lot of interesting topics and themes in it, as the storyline and especiall the ending aren't carved in stone from the beginning.
1764636
I'll do that draft up for you in a google doc when I can- bit busy today, but I'll have the original text and then all of the corrections highlighted so that it's easy to see what's been changed.
1767750 Thanks.
1795763
Okay, thanks for your feedback. Any ideas on how to improve it? Also, what exactly did it make hard to read, the formatting, the language, the story flow or something else?
1795825
I will fix that at some point, when I find the time, and also will try to keep it in mind for future chapters.
Thanks for pointing out,
I wasn't aware it was a problem.
Anything else?
1795889 Could you please tell me the places where this is most apparent as well as saying where exactly the story felt rushed? It would help me a lot.
Also, was content-wise everything okay? I wanted to give the character some more backstory without losing myself in unimportant details, and I'm not sure if it works the way I intendet it to work.
1798814 Okay then. I was hoping that both speakers would be distinguishable just by their speak patterns and the way they address each other (for example, an rather old-fashioned way of speaking and addressing the other as "young scholar" signalizing that Starswirl was speaking), but if you say that is not enough and disrupts the flow of reading, I'll try to clear that up a bit.
Also, you really think I need even more information? I was fearing the opposite, that I might drift into info-dumping, like 1115742 mentioned. I also didn't think that the story would benefit from long descriptions of certain alchemy mechanisms, or that readers would be interested in reading them, so I tried to include only as much detail as I deemed necessary.
Interesting concept really. I think this has a lot of potential to become a great story.
3517199 Thanks! Well, the one thing standing in the way of that would probably be my writing speed. As you see it takes me months to complete a new chapter.
Any suggestion for improvements?
3517218
sent ya a few ideas, let me know what you think