A book I am writing - Just a short passage - comments please!

Hi, I am writing a series and would like some feedback. Please be gentle! This is in the middle of the second book.
lol


I started the briefing, “The primary question on every one’s mind is, why has a Great Dragon and Rider returned to Earth. I hope that the fact that the Pre-emanate Pair have elected to handle this personally has not been lost on you. Your civilization has two major hurdles to overcome in what we consider to be your immediate future.”

“Your first hurdle is that Mother Nature will soon display Her awesome power to humanity. There is a fifty percent probability that a near extinction level event will occur in the next two hundred years increasing to ninety nine point nine percent in the next five hundred years. It may in fact happen tomorrow. You have the Pacific Ring of Fire that is overdue in several places for major earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. The volcano under Yellowstone National Park in the United States is showing life and is overdue for a major, hopefully not catastrophic, steam event and you have other lesser stress points that are overdue. The Great Ocean Conveyer is slowing and if that is not enough, your polar ice is melting at an alarming rate.”

“The last major event of this magnitude was in 535AD when an Indonesian volcano started the period known as the Dark Ages. The volcanic winter that followed caused crops to fail on a world wide scale. In that time Earths population of humans was in the millions, multitudes died. Your population is now in the billions. Any global event that interferes with the production of food on the Earth will send billions to their deaths via starvation and disease. You are the most populated planet known to us and there is absolutely nothing we can do to help in this regard. All this information is available to any of your citizens that undertakes honest and complete research on the internet and yet when someone tries to bring it to every ones attention they are labeled ‘doomsayers’ or ‘conspiracy nuts’ and are treated with scorn and derision. You have only yourselves to blame for this situation. After billions are dead we may be able to assist the survivors since the numbers will be manageable and your current technologies can be brought to bear on the problem of your survival as a species. This has happened before, you have legends of it.”

I waited for a response. The Prime Minister responded. “The governments of the world are aware of the situation but can do little about it. Scientists can not agree on the facts. Rather than have our people live a life of fear, we choose to do what we can to hide the situation, if it exists, and hope that in time we will be able to bring new technologies to bear and we wait for science to provide answers. For example, space flight may one day enable us to populate the stars.” I looked at him and said, “Until you start Mankind’s Age of Reason, to teach your children about their own psychological motivational factors and control their own destinies without blaming everything except themselves, you will not be allowed to colonize other planets. If you spent your current wealth on technologies and supplies to assist in a planetary crises instead of spending it on weapons of war you would and could make a difference. You choose not do this and you will inevitably suffer the consequences of your own shortcomings. I repeat, as long as you are this warlike species you may not colonize other worlds. You will be prevented!”



There you go.

P

lol, anyone?

Do you want the truth? It's too soap-boxey. Sorry.

You might want to read it as though you were the reader (target audience).

Thank you!

I find it interesting , I agree with the "soap-boxy" comment just a tiny bit though but I don't know enough details to know if that is a fair opinion.
I am curious and would like to read more , keep going , hopefully you'll post more

Thank you for sharing

I let that sink in and continued, “The second hurdle for Humanity is the reason we are here. Every seven hundred and thirty years or so the plane of existence you occupy comes close to intersecting the plane of existence upon which Demon Kind is imprisoned. Demon Kind wishes to escape and to flood this plane with their seed. Demon Kind is trying, as we speak, to open gateways to your world. This happens occasionally on a host of worlds and both the Battle Forces of Ressalon and the Knights and Masters of Balance act to prevent this. Demons feed on life force, the higher the development of a species the more potent the life force that can be acquired. Six billion humans is enough life force for Demon Kind to destroy their prison and flood this plane of existence, wiping out all life on a multitude of worlds. All would be lost. Therefore we are here to help. We can train your people and develop your weapons and tactics so that they are effective. We have done this before on many occasions. You may at any time refuse our help and we will leave and simply monitor your progress. We will not allow Demons to gain the upper hand, there is simply too much at stake. One Demon Lord given several weeks could amass sufficient power to allow hordes of lesser Demons to cross. Eventually the Demons would gain the upper hand. Be very, very clear. Upon that event, I will order all life on this world destroyed rather than have that quantity of real Power fall into Demonic hands.” I sat down and waited. xx thought to me, “Nice speech!” yyyyyy added, “You just scared them all half to death, the Prime Minister is now thinking of a way to extricate himself from further involvement. He is not well suited to this task and is aware of his own limitations. His Majesty is trying to see his role and the military minds see a challenge to be overcome.”

reply to post by pheonix358


I'm glad I found this thread.

What you have are a lot of bullet points without any cohesion. "Well how the heck do I get cohesion Boncho? Should I go out and buy superglue?"

"Yes, that ought to work."

But of course we could try something else as well. As I mentioned your writing is basically a bunch of bullet points lumped into a paragraph. (If you'd like to call it that.)

Now, don't mind me, I have terrible grammar... But I do know the difference when something is formulated in a way that is easy to read.

So let me give an example of the style of your work and the types of things we can do to modify it.

►Every seven hundred and thirty years or so the plane of existence you occupy comes close to intersecting the plane of existence upon which Demon Kind is imprisoned.

►Demon Kind wishes to escape and to flood this plane with their seed.

►Demon Kind is trying, as we speak, to open gateways to your world.

►-....happens a host of worlds and both the Battle Forces of Ressalon and the Knights and Masters of Balance act to prevent this.

►Demons feed on life force, the higher the development of a species the more potent the life force that can be acquired.

Here I took a few sentences out of your quoted text and put them into bullet points. To be honest, they seem more suited to bullet points. This really isn't a bad thing, you are showing that you can put your ideas down, now you just need to structure them.

What I see is too much info, without any idea of where it's coming from. From the OP section, it seemed as though you are another race of beings that are talking to humans. (Is this right?), anyhow, I'll run with that.

Lets go from a first person perspective of the Alien....

----------------------------------------------------------------------------


President Rosen looked at me wide eyed, tongue hanging out of his mouth. He still couldn't get over the fact that I entered one of the most secure buildings his country has to offer. "Countries", the very thought of these creatures still operating in territorial boundaries is quite humorous.

"Explain to me again about the Demons." He asked, tapping his hands back and forth while sitting on his leather couch in the blue room.

"As I said Mr. President, my species is much older than yours. We have tracked the 'Demons' for over twenty thousand years. Of course, your culture would refer to them as that, but many others have a different name. They are from a different plane of existence and their reality will come back alignment with yours in the next few years..."

The President rose to his feet, hands gripping the back of his head.

"When was the last time this happened?"

"Seven hundred years ago." I explained.

A look of shock came over his face.

"The Demons will venture into this realm and plant their seed. It is their only mission. Once they have fulfilled that your civilization will be infested with their evil. And no one will be able to protect you then."

The President flopped back down to the couch letting out a big sigh.

"This isn't real is it?" He asked, "This is a joke... This has to be a joke!" His knuckles clenched turning pale and creamy.

"It's no joke Mr. President. You watched me drop six of your best secret service agents to the ground, unconscious. You know I carry advanced technology and you know I'm not from this world. You must assume your role and start thinking clearly about this."

"But... uh..." The President stammered. His face tightened. "Give me more information then. What can we do to stop this?"

"It is quite easy as the protection of your world is not solely up to you. There are two groups of warriors that fight the Demon kind. The Masters of Balance and their allies, the forces of Ressalon. If the two hadn't intervened in the past you would not even have a world to live in. Remember the dark ages? They were here fighting the evil Demon scourge. And they won."

"This is all incredible... unbelievable..."

"The Demons want your life force, and right now you are intelligent, but you lack the power to stop them. This is where our allies will help in protecting you."


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blah blah blah, etc, etc, etc

Here's an example where I took the bullet points and put it into something more storylike.

Hope this helps.





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One last thing, it was hard to build off that as it is a tad cheesy. But with some tweaking, I see no reason for it not to work. And don't take that to heart as it could just be a matter of taste.... Just be careful with things like "Knights of the Masters of Alderon" and similar dog doo.

reply to post by boncho


Thanks Boncho, I don't know if it makes a difference to you but this part of the book is supposed to be a military briefing and your views make me feel like I hit the nail on the head. It is one person delivering a briefing to an audience. I didn't make that clear, by bad.

Thank you for the help, I appreciate all of the responses.

You may not be a fan of Star Trek but I am mindful of Star Trek's creator when he said that technical gibberish was gold. (The plasma inductors are overloaded! We will have to purge them!)

P

well it sounds like all the stuff you read on ATS in the past year ....culminated it into a story.

reply to post by pheonix358

Thanks Boncho, I don't know if it makes a difference to you but this part of the book is supposed to be a military briefing and your views make me feel like I hit the nail on the head. It is one person delivering a briefing to an audience.

Nothing wrong with that and it puts everything into perspective a lot better.

The problem with long winded paragraphs though is it detaches the reader from the story. It's really up to you, but in that case I would put the point of view in the people observing the speech/briefing. Or at least have your MC focus on what other people are doing or how they are reacting to his speech.

And there is nothing wrong with technicals, it's just that if you put too much gobbledygook in one sentence, it makes it hard to read, even for the tech savvy kind. Roddenberry used di-lithium crystals as his fuel source, and it was so catchy and believable I'm sure there are a number of people out there that probably think it's real today... The thing is, is it is only mentioned once in a while. His stories sold on the human value, the space part was just a setting...

I had (past tense) similar views to you on gobbledygook until HP came out. I tend to look at it a different way now. That long winded section you are referring to is used twice in the second book and will only be used once each book in the series if necessary. In some societies a person's titles mean more that the person's name. In the Western world it is all about the perception of how much you are worth. 'The founder of Microsoft' is ho hum. The Founder of Microsoft worth 40 freaking billion dollars' gets most people off.

Thank you for the effort you have put in, it is kind of you. The hard part is finding a publisher. To find a way to separate yours from the trash. I think I prefer the old days when the difficulty in producing a manuscript meant most could not be bothered. Now there are so many who think a week in front of a laptop is all it takes!

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n m