Talk:Stargazer/@comment-25941663-20180629092542/@comment-25941663-20180629092650

It's a quite interesting story with an eye-catching concept. I'm afraid, though, I cannot say it was that well executed. The story not only suffered from the grammar mistakes I mentioned above, but it also lacks in the technical department a tad bit.

The main issue I have is inconsistent wording. At times you draw pretty detailed paintings using more sophisticated vocabulary, but other times the vocabulary is very simple.

For example, you have some very vivid imagery like this:

"He has grown used to the slashes that drew the life from his body and painted the sand with scarlet stripes"

The use of the phrase 'scarlet stripes' and 'drew the life from his body', along with 'painted the sand' make for a very nice visual. The use of more stylized prose adds a note of uniqueness and 'archaic' feel to the story.

But the majority of the story is simpler like this:

"a purple turban on his head had a great jewel attached to the front" - Here, to spice things up, you could have written 'wearing a purple turban adorned by a great jewel' or something like 'a purple turban adorned by a great jewel sat on top of his head'. Of course, the word 'great' isn't that great in here and you could have used a more 'artistic' word. 'Dazzling', 'mesmerising', etc.

An other example of this jarring contrast is this:

"The only ember of hope he had left was that the vast quantity of his fellow slaves"

You start of using 'ember of hope', which is more stylized, but you end with the phrase 'vast quantity', which is pretty commonplace. Instead, you could have used something like 'the myriads', which keeps the sentence stylized.

(By stylized, I mean that you use words that are not so common)

This contrast between unique and mundane wording makes reading this a bit awkward. It felt like it was all a bit disconnected.

Apart from this technical issue, I noticed only one thing storywise that I disliked.

That is, I didn't really like how quickly the slaves decided to revolt against the wizard. I was expecting more of a build-up, showing how they were mistreated and the like. Also, believing that the old man was a fraud from the get-go does not seem realistic. The whole ordeal happened a bit too fast for my taste, the go in and immediately they revolt.

All in all, the story did have its moments, and apart from the pacing of the revolt, it was solid plotwise. Unfortunately, it is too inconsistently written to be that enjoyable.