Hiya! Semi-professional editor here to
rain on your parade point out some things to help polish up your work!
There's a big number one problem: your semicolons. There's three sub-problems:
1. The first word after a semicolon is
not capitalised.
2. Semicolons make for very long sentences, so there needs to be some breathing room between them. Here, they're almost one a paragraph in places. This can be somewhat mitigated by fixing problem three:
3. They are--not always, but often--used wrong. Semicolons
must join two
independent clauses. "Independent" means that the clauses before and after the semicolon must have a subject and verb that don't rely on the previous clause for their meaning.
For example, this sentence:
Quote:
Gayle often used it as a warning against temptation, more often than not choosing to recite the passage before they were due a delivery by the farmer and his young sons; A coincidence that always made Ada grin impishly.
Consider the second clause here. Pretend for a moment it's its own sentence. Is "A coincidence that always made Ada grin impishly" a complete sentence? No, because "a coincidence" is not a proper subject in this case. Therefore, the second clause is not independent, so a semicolon is incorrect. I don't often like to impose corrections--my job should only be to show you where mistakes are and then I should let you correct them as you see fit. But for the sake of the example, this should probably be two sentences, with a period taking the place of the semicolon and an "It was" added before "a coincidence".
That alone is a big and persistent enough mistake to turn off many publishers. There's others: I don't know how you squashed 120k words into 200-odd pages when it should be about double that; prologues are almost always a bad idea (either it's too dull/disconnected/infodump-y for a chapter one, in which case cut it and distribute the information in it properly, or it's a perfectly fine part of the book in which case it should just be chapter one); I'm deeply interested in what the tone and audience of this book'll be if your aim is to introduce more non-villain protagonist dragon characters, and yet the blurb and prologue make it seem as if dragons were until recently slave-owners who corrupt and warp the creatures around them with their magic. Are these characters heroes? Is redemption or recompense for the race's worst excesses going to be a central plot point? The prologue seems to imply the dragons' extinction is a sad event--any extinction is, to an extent--but readers will be hard-pressed to say it isn't deserved. Have you addressed that? Four POV characters is a decent amount--is the overarching plot still cohesive?
And all this minus a fair handful of typos, misused words, and things like dialogue tags being capitalised as if they were their own little sentence instead of being attached to the end of the dialogue.
Please don't take this as me saying this piece is
bad. It
is unpolished, but you knew that, right? That's why you're asking :)
She/Her
