Tag Archives: minigrav motivators

Neogenesis – Chapter 19 part I

Tinsori Light

In which Tocohl makes a status report.

I found the jump from where Tolly and Haz were at the end of the previous chapter to where they are when they show up in this one so jarring that I actually flicked back a few pages to make sure I hadn’t accidentally skipped a chapter. Maybe it would have been a short chapter, and amounted to “Everything went according to plan for once”, but it still feels to me like its absence leaves a perceptible gap. Even a sentence or two from Tolly or Haz about what they’d been doing since the end of last chapter would have helped. (Maybe we’ll still get that in an upcoming section, and I just haven’t got to it yet because I stopped to write this entry.)
Continue reading

Neogenesis – Chapter 15 part III

In which matters proceed with unexpected swiftness.

We were discussing pacing in the comments a few posts ago, and I said that I have trouble judging it because I only read one chapter a day. This isn’t entirely true; although I usually do read one chapter and write one blog post a day, I sometimes get ahead of the schedule if the story is exciting enough to pull me forward. (The record is the end of Scout’s Progress and beginning of Mouse and Dragon, where I burned through at least a dozen chapters as quickly as I could write the blog posts between.) The reason I mention this is that there have been a couple of places in Neogenesis, including this chapter, where I’ve started to feel that pull forward, only for it to be cut off as the story switches to a different set of characters. Switching to a new storyline every time the current one gets exciting is a way to keep suspense, but it also means that each storyline has trouble building momentum.
Continue reading