What is your opinion?
A good piece
"This is, overall, a great start to what could be a good novel. It is, by my standards, quite a nice read. My only issue with this story is the grammar and punctuation. There are a few commas where there should be periods, and at least once there is the wrong use of Their or Where. These are small mistakes, which can be easily fixed within five or so minutes, and once they are fixed and more is added to this work I think it will shine brightly on here. Keep up the good work Martyn!"
Promising Beginning
"Ritson's work, "A Dance With Fire" has that quality I most enjoy about fantasy: a slow, gradual unfolding of the plot without endless exposition intoned in a Gothic voice. If anything, the tone and setting seems quite intimate as we are introduced to the setting through the characters' dialogue and musings. It even--gasp!--has touches of humor throughout the story, which many fantasy writers seem to frown on (such as the clever line about the stew looking less like strew than the table which it sat on). I'm still getting my legs with this story, so I can't definitively see the valley for the trees just yet, but I'm compelled to continue the journey. I think this is a story typical of the best fantasy, which can't legitimately be judged from 2 chapters, but needs a good 50-100 pages to really make its mark. This is not a negative quality by any means, but merely attests to the writer's pace and narration. My only negative comment, which made me withhold one star is some editing issues: a few missed capitalizations at the beginning of dialogue and a lack of punctuation, particularly commas, which makes the story (at times) unnecessarily difficult to read. But this is easily fixed, and will win the work new readers once edited out. There's also one sentence which doesn't make sense because of a dropped word. But isn't that the point of sites such as this one--to throw up raw work and get editorial feedback? So again, this is hardly a demerit in my eyes. Great work overall!"
