Critique request: The Azhari Emperor
http://wanderers-sandbox.wikidot.com/dr-nepalwala
the story is under the tab of same name. this is my first story.
Critique request: The Azhari Emperor
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» Critique request: The Azhari Emperor
Before this is ready for posting or even really critique you need to check it for proper spelling/grammar/formatting. Use proper capitalization and put spaces between paragraph.
read YONQ
I'm sorry if this comes off as harsh, but it's really difficult to tell what's happening here. It sounds a bit like a half creation myth, half galactic civilization thing, but the characters and entities that you introduce all blend together. It's impossible to parse which entities are taking which action, your verb tenses and reference tenses are all out of whack, and this causes the action to be extremely difficult to visualize.
My advice at this point in the draft would be to read your work out loud with the editing mode open. You'll realize that much of it causes you some headache when trying to say it aloud as you would a normal, conversational sentence or narration. Once you've made all those fixes, my next advice is to make a sort of story-board for yourself, it can be simply a list of bullet points explaining in plain terms who's who and what happens. Then, read through your story with the storylist next to it, checking to see if each point is explained in detail, and if it's not meant to be explained in detail, make it clear that it's meant to be abstract.
In it's new iteration this is a lot better, however, there are still a few issues. The largest one is your verb tense consistency. At some points you use present tense, like "he walks," "she says." However, you also use past tense, like "he tilted his head," or "they said." Intermixing these two tenses is not recommended for reading comprehension, unless it has a very specific purpose; I would highly recommend fixing the whole story to be consistently one or the other.
That being said, the clarity of the story, what's happening and to who and all that, are significantly improved. I get what's going on now. The issue now becomes, I'm not really sure why any of it's happening. You introduce a lot of new words, and explore a lot of concepts, like memetic threats, honor, and artificial intelligence, but it feels rather like a barrage of new stuff without any real reason behind it. Things just happen. Even your main character, Kaizen, just kind of hops between emotions and his motivation or grasp of the situation is unclear. You introduced the beginnings of this "reverse self-sacrifice" idea near the end, the "sacrifice of being alone," but it's very quick. You miss out on a lot of potential emotion there, so my advice would be to cut back on new things that hop around and explore your main character's thoughts on the subject before it actually happens.
Good work so far, and happy writing
-Piano
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