Today we see that characters should not have information that the physics of their situation denies them.
What I gleaned about the story: Cyassay is riding to town, but the town is not there. And her horse is afraid.
Find this book on Amazon.
Note: When the cover on the Kindle page doesn’t match the cover in the book file, I get a slight vibe of low publishing standards.
Note: Furthermore, presenting a square cover for a novel immediately suggests children’s book. If you want your work to be perceived as a novel for grownups, you really need to be closer to a portrait-oriented rectangle. Something approximately in the 6:9 ratio of standard novel covers. This “picture book effect” is even more apparent with the cover that was included inside the book file, which I’m including here to illustrate the point.
Analysis: In the opening paragraph, a young woman rides toward Aralia with a rising sense of dread. At the bottom of the opening paragraph, we get:
Now, even though she was barely out of the dense forest and still more than fifteen leagues from the city, she could smell blood and smoke on the air, which worried her. The usual sounds of a busy city would have drifted to her even from this far away, yet she could not hear anything save the whispering of the lonely wind as it flew past her and over the long, lush prairie to Aralia.
If the wind is blowing past her, toward the city, how is it she can smell the blood and smoke coming from there? The wind is blowing in exactly the wrong way. This is a small detail, granted, and one that many reader may not pick up on, but I did and it conflicted with my sense of logic strongly enough to pop me out of the story. Remember, in the first paragraph, a reader’s radar is usually on high alert.
Note: Again with the hyphen instead of em-dash, and the unbalanced spacing. Is there another regional standard out there that I’m not aware of? When a dash is followed by a space, that usually signifies an interruption, not a simple aside.
Analysis: The sorceress pressed her knees against his flank- Elves did not use saddles- and barely managed to keep her hold on the reins until the horse dropped back to the ground.
This is the second time in a week that I’ve encountered this style of punctuation: a hypen in place of a dash, and with unbalanced spacing. I am aware of no editorial standard that punctuates a parenthetical aside this way. In my experience, this signals an external interruption to the speaker. Either another speaker breaking in, or some surprising event that cuts him off. So when I encountered this, I tried to parse it as an interruption, but it just didn’t work that way. It’s clearly intended to be a parenthetical aside. But the real point is that the effort to reconcile the typography here broke my immersion.
Analysis: The woman approaches the city with her frightened and reluctant horse, described thusly: As they neared where the city was supposed to be, the horse reared backward, nearly throwing Cyassay from his back. But then the next paragraph begins with: A gasp caught in her throat as she ascended the ridge that hid the city from view…
The phrase “where the city was supposed to be” implies to me that she now knows it is no longer there; that something horrific has happened to it. But she has no reason to leap to such a cataclysmic conclusion because, as is clearly stated in the next sentence, she couldn’t even see the city at that point.
WTF #3 seems more like a PoV violation than a physics issue to me. Thanks for these! They help a lot.
That’s certainly another way to characterize the problem, Mike. Sometimes it’s hard to decide which WTF label is the best fit.
Fifteen leagues is about forty-five miles. Would you really hear a city from that distance? It’s a day’s journey, even on a horse.
My thoughts exactly, Belinda. Unless she has ultra-super hearing and an equal sense of smell, and even then, this description is ridiculous. Grizzly bears have one of the best noses in the world and they can only catch a scent in the air from a mile or so.
I’m also not sure how a lack of a saddle would make holding onto the reins hard, as one involves the legs and the other involves the hands. You’d have to haul back on the reins if the horse is rearing to try to get it to stop anyway, so I would think you’d hold onto them even harder.
This is what drives me crazy about fantasy; people regurgitate without thought half-chewed bits from other, perhaps more factual stories (or maybe just repeat junk from equally unconsidered stories).
I have read in a few historical sources that on a quiet day prior to the industrial revolution, people in one town could set their clocks by listening for the church bells in towns 5-10 miles away. So in a quieter world, sound seems to have traveled a bit farther than we realize, but certainly not 15 leagues.
As for smoke, I can personally attest to being able to smell a forest fire that was burning 700 miles from here. The smoke was in fact so thick, even at this distance, that it appeared like fog between us and the neighbor’s houses. So I’m willing to accept her ability to smell a burning village from that far away. But blood? Not a chance.