The Hedgehog's Dilemma Review

The Hedgehog's Dilemma Review

Okay. Let's get started.

I realize you aren't a dedicated writefag, but I will not hold back. Pic related. I will focus on your writing for this review, as art is far from my area of expertise, but I'll still give you my opinion on your art anyways.

Anyways, from the top:

>The ball is a grand success. All the movers and shakers in the city are here. Tramen adjusted his ascot. And they will all be mine.

The first sentence is fine. The second sentence is alright until you get to "here". It's clearly meant to be a sentence portraying the perspective of the character, but we don't have a character yet, and the first sentence is ambiguous in terms of perspective.

Then, on the third sentence, you give the reader a character, but it is entirely in the third person. Odd, considering the last two sentences were either ambiguous or clearly from a character's perspective. The last sentence is a continuation of the second sentence's perspective, which just muddles the whole thing even more.

The issue with this paragraph is that it flipflops in terms of perspective. If the second sentence was third person, "all the movers and shakers are there," it would come off as a description of the event and the first sentence would fit perfectly. The third sentence would fit as well, as it is a description of a character at the ball. And the fourth sentence could be modified easily to complete the puzzle, something along the lines of, "and they will all be his." You thusly maintain the perspective of the narration while still achieving the same sort of opening as you had in mind.

The next thing I'd have to say about the paragraph is that each sentence is a bit too cut and dry for my tastes. There's no soul, no seizure of the attention of the reader, no pizzazz! You could easily slap two or more of those phrases together into a complex or a compound or a compound-complex sentence to produce a much more engaging style.

Not a great start.

So, from the very first paragraph, it's clear that your style leaves much to be desired. Let's see what the next one is like. It's much larger, so hopefully it gives me more meat to work with.

>The room was adorned by fine tapestries and ionian columns, overflowing with food and music. The real spectacle, though, was the wallflower hovering around the appetizers, pretending to look occupied. Body of a fresh maiden clad in a dress of emerald silk, with the face of an angel and the hair of a hedgehog. She had been there for 20 minutes now.

Better. Ionian should be capitalized, because it is a proper noun. Sentence three needs a "the" at the start. I understand, sort of, what kind of style you were going for with that one, but the sentence is painfully grating because the very beginning is like a sudden stumble in the middle of a walk. Style is supposed to work within the flow of your writing, not interrupt and violate it like a two bit whore (naturally there are exceptions to this and sometimes stylistic devices are purely meant to fuck up the flow of prose for the sake of effect, like an incomplete sentence followed by a hyphen at the end of a paragraph to emphasize the beginning of the next one. But I digress).

The larger issue here is, again, with sentence three. You describe a person, but you aren't explicit in linking that description to the previously mentioned wallflower. Sure, a competent reader can put two and two together, but it is a glaring flaw in the paragraph that ought to be addressed.

Oh, and don't use numerals in prose. Write out the word. "20" should be "twenty".

That last paragraph was better in the sense that it did have some meat and content in it.

>What started as a plan to wed off his useless sister to a hopeless sycophant turned into a fantastic way to make “connections.” As host of the ball and Last Lord of Dorne, Tramen flitted from group of fatcats to group of peacocks. In reality, he made a beeline straight for the appetizer table. He ran a hand through his mane of golden locks, ready to show the girl a sight she would never forget. Gracia had been cursed since birth with blindness, but now that the curse was lifted, the world was a whole new place to her. Ah... he remembered fondly how he met her.

Connections doesn't need quote marks, really. Everyone knows what social connections are, and you aren't using a personal or modified definition of it.

"In reality..." is a weird sentence. It doesn't have any bearing on what came just before it. You use the phrase as if Tramen was not actually "flitt[ing] from group of fatcats to group of peacocks", but that doesn't make sense, really. If I am interpreting this correctly, he was indeed doing that, but his intentions were not to be a social butterfly - he wanted to get to the food. That should be made more clear, and that could be accomplished most easily by simply removing "in reality" and replacing it with, say, "unbeknownst to the partygoers/folks/whatever, he was actually", and then making a few verb tense adjustments to the rest of the sentence and such.

The rest of the paragraph is fine, really, though the last sentence bothers me. Ellipses. Haza uses ellipses in an improper manner as well, but his particular usage holds deliberate meaning and impact. Ellipses are also often uses to denote an awkward pause in a character's speech, as you seem to be using them, but that is a very juvenile trait of writing that a lot of fanfictions suffer from, and on top of that, this is not dialogue, this is a character's thoughts. Why would anyone think in speech patterns?

I'll be frank. It's awful. I can't get through a single paragraph without finding glaring issues. I don't have the time or motivation to go through this whole thing paragraph by paragraph and point out your errors and ways to improve your writing skills. Again, I fully realize that you are not a writefag, you are a drawfag dabbling in writefaggotry. In fact, I love that you are experimenting and trying new things. But if even one component of your picture books is below par, it drags the whole thing down. The best advice I can give you is to simply read. Read prose, I don't care what, just read it. Read a lot of it. Then copy the style, the organization of sentences and paragraphs, the diction, et cetera that you read until you develop your own refined style that will, God permitting, make your picture books legitimately enjoyable.

Then, come back to me and ask me to read your new and improved material.

So, you get the dubious honor of receiving my first rating of 1, or unreadable.

Originally I planned to also review your art, but it seems a bit pointless by now.