Hello Writers, I'm looking for feedback on my story, The Crusader. It's set during the First Crusade and follows Micheal the Merciless as he takes part in the siege of Antioch in 1098. Michael is a man of violence but also a sexual deviant. So the story is a well-written dark tale that contains intense scenes of non-con. So not for everyone. Thank you for reading The Crusader https://chyoa.com/story/The-Crusader.50643
Nice first sentence! Reminds me of a quote from song intro I once heard: "No one ever wins. No one finally loses. Except the dead. Under the sun, they rot together, in absolute biological equality." It really sets the tone of the story. I like the rest of the introductory chapters as well. They're very terse, with short, easy-to-digest paragraphs, which gets the reader up to speed with the setting quickly. There's some low-hanging fruit that'll improve the story a lot: run it through a spellchecker, it'll catch simple mistakes like 'highground' and 'Christan'. Pay attention to your tenses: you switch back and forth between past and present tense, and that doesn't look like a conscious stylistic choice. You could also use a smattering of commas here and there, there's a lot of sentence fragments. Those contribute to the terseness I mentioned liking above, but as the story progresses into the main arc it feels less and less like a quick way to get to the meat of the story, and more like a cop-out to avoid having to flesh out your scenes. 'The Notary' branch finished strong, though! I didn't expect it to end so quickly, because the synopsis implies a long twisted trek through the near Middle East, but it seems like this is a story with actual danger, not merely a consequence-free bit of rapey stroke fic. Good stuff. Overall, there's a lot here to like, especially if you took a little more time to flesh things out while writing, and picked that low-hanging fruit I mentioned above. Keep up the good work!
Hi, LowKing Thanks very much for the feedback. Lots of positives to take from it. All very constructive. The change in tenses was stylistic but perhaps not as executed as good as hoped. As for the typos... Argh!!!
