The author not knowing how to write teen dialogue means that this confusion is expressed in very awkward and cringe ways that feel totally out of place with the overall tone. More well-funded publishing houses, please, and less self-publishing style editing.Ĭharacter development progressed well, although Zaxis is still a bit confused as to what his personality is supposed to be. Once again, Stovall’s weakness when it comes to writing child or teen characters is obvious – she doesn’t seem to know how they talk, and ends up making them sound extremely weird in some places, and very, very suave at others. This also means uneven pacing of the action – extremely slow, filled with exposition and very boring in the first half and then the events of a book and a half crammed into the second half.

But once the action picked up, the story was absorbing enough that I forgot to keep hate-highlighting. The first half of the story was incredibly dragged, which made all the weird sentence structuring extremely obvious. You’ll end up with clunky sentences, weird mental voices, accents that flit in and out and disappear without any consistency… In short, what you will end up with is Dread Pirate Arcanist. But it is widely presumed that this is the case, and as a result, authors are now under pressure to release sequels close together – either the very next year, or even in the same year at times.Įven if you have a good story to tell, if you rush the process of writing and editing, you’re going to ruin it. I do not know whether the collective attention span of the reading population really has decreased. I hate what the contemporary publishing industry has done to good storytelling. Synopsis: Volke and his fellow apprentices face a bigger challenge as they face down the Dread Pirate Calisto, and his True Form manticore eldrin. Cover Art for Dread Pirate Arcanist by Shami Stovall

Dread pirate arcanist