It was supposed to be a routine goodwill trip to Saddle Arabia, but now the ponies of Bronco Company have found themselves framed for burning a town to the ground, and a full blown war isn't far behind...
Looks like the earls plans aren't going exactly like he wanted them to go, which is nice m
Can't help but feel sad for Reconnoiter , just like for Qasam, that they are fighting a war (or are they about too), that they don't really have control over, and that they will suffer from it just because of some overambitious jerk and his cronies.
In the first part, that's the sort of scene which I would have been strongly tempted to skip or skim over, for one simple reason: info dumps to other characters in which information the reader already knows is revealed are hard to write. In this case, however, you pulled it off beautifully, with the already known exposition being perfectly broken up with new introspective ruminations related to it, in a way that all flows smoothly. Beyond the way you threaded that needle so well, the speech afterwards, discussing WHY she didn't want her troops following her, was full of dee pathos.
In the second part, that was yet another feat of delivering an info dump in an interesting way- although made much easier by the fact the reader didn't already know those details. Sure, we're getting what could have been dry military information- but it's delivered in a slow way that feels like impending doom in an increasingly tense way. It's accompanied by plenty of emotional flairs to keep it from feeling like a dry exposition dump, all without crossing the line into making professional soldiers seem too bound up in emotion. Beyond that, there is the further layer of the dramatic irony available only to the reader, in which we know the characters' sense of impending doom directly contradicts the hope the reader gets from the scene.
Basically, this chapter is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about when I previously pointed to your skills as a writer.
Looks like the earls plans aren't going exactly like he wanted them to go, which is nice m
Can't help but feel sad for Reconnoiter , just like for Qasam, that they are fighting a war (or are they about too), that they don't really have control over, and that they will suffer from it just because of some overambitious jerk and his cronies.
This was yet another wonderful piece of writing.
In the first part, that's the sort of scene which I would have been strongly tempted to skip or skim over, for one simple reason: info dumps to other characters in which information the reader already knows is revealed are hard to write. In this case, however, you pulled it off beautifully, with the already known exposition being perfectly broken up with new introspective ruminations related to it, in a way that all flows smoothly. Beyond the way you threaded that needle so well, the speech afterwards, discussing WHY she didn't want her troops following her, was full of dee pathos.
In the second part, that was yet another feat of delivering an info dump in an interesting way- although made much easier by the fact the reader didn't already know those details. Sure, we're getting what could have been dry military information- but it's delivered in a slow way that feels like impending doom in an increasingly tense way. It's accompanied by plenty of emotional flairs to keep it from feeling like a dry exposition dump, all without crossing the line into making professional soldiers seem too bound up in emotion. Beyond that, there is the further layer of the dramatic irony available only to the reader, in which we know the characters' sense of impending doom directly contradicts the hope the reader gets from the scene.
Basically, this chapter is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about when I previously pointed to your skills as a writer.