The REALM OF CRITIQUES

Kings and Aces

Author:

@harukamii

Cover:

A striking and professional looking cover. Looks like something that could be on the shelves of a bookstore. Good work with it.

Blurb:

It starts off with a quote (which sounds good), but there is no name attached to it. Even if it's a character we've never heard of, a name should generally go alongside a given quote.

There's a lot of mention of rankings, but no hint as to what that means. A really rough idea as to what a ranking is, and why they're so important, could be very helpful and help build intrigue for a reader.

It sounds good for a blurb, but it kind of feels like a lot of buzz words and cool sounding sentences, without actually telling us that much. Like an advert that mentions 'thrills' and 'excitement' and characters with 'nothing to lose' on an 'adventure of a lifetime,' but doesn't actually tell us that much about the details of the story. Advert-like blurbs can be effective, but giving a reader a stronger sense of what's in the story would make for a stronger blurb. It does make it sound like an interesting story though.

Chapter:

Nice author intro into the background of the story (one of my stories also started out as a game concept).

The first chapter worked well to set up the world and introduce us to the main character, and a bit of action doesn't hurt either. The showing of his dark powers and his ghostly minions was well done and visually stunning, and gave a good indication of the kind of action and magic we'd be seeing in this story. I liked that not everything was fully explained to us, but that we figured things out as the scenes progressed. No big obvious info dumps that stalled the pacing. Perhaps a stronger sense of environment and character positions would be good. Also I did expect a rough description of the Khan when we met him, maybe what he sounded like or his build/what he was wearing, to help picture the scene a little more.

Some of the sentences were overly long and somewhat hard to follow, so be careful with run-on sentences. The writing is a bit wordy in places, and with another pass or two it can be tightened up and streamlined a lot to make it even stronger. There's definitely a lot of potential to the writing and the story, and extra points for the world building and creativity. Best of luck with this one.