Tamer: Enhancer
I wrote a book!
It has nothing whatsoever to do with Grrl Power. It’s actually Tamer fanfic. Hopefully that’s obvious from the cover there.
I’ve never written a book before, so I decided to see if I could. I’ve dabbled in prose before, like a lot of you, I’m sure, but never actually finished anything. I figured that using an established universe would make the process a bit easier. Actually I found writing quite enjoyable, editing is the hard part.
Please let me know what you think! Pacing, wordsmithing, characters, all that good stuff. I’m amenable to all constructive feedback. Feel free to leave comments here, but please be mindful of spoilers if you do. You can also email me at grrlpowercomic@gmail.
FYI – There are sex scenes in the book (spoilers, I guess.) Not a lot, but they don’t fade to black. Well, some are more terse than others. I would describe them as explicit, but not gratuitous, but those are obviously relative terms. If you’ve survived MSE sex scenes you’ll be fine.
Tamer: King of Dinosaurs is by Michael-Scott Earle. I’ve linked it several times in the past. The first book is free if you’ve never checked it out, but you don’t need to be familiar with Tamer to read my story.
Obviously, “Tamer: King of Dinosaurs” is Michael-Scott Earle’s IP and my fan work is by a fan for fans, and certainly not intended to infringe in any way.
Download the format of your choice here.
- Tamer: Enhancer – mobi for kindles
- Tamer Enhancer – epub for everything else
- Tamer Enhancer – PDF if you like.
- 02/03/2020 – The book’s been updated with a ton of edits and fixes.
- 02/16/2020 – Even more fixes.
Book 2 is out! Check it out here!
For those of you unsure of how to get a .mobi file onto your Kindle or Kindle app on your phone/ipad, the easiest way is to download it, then email it to your kindle email. You can find this on Amazon, under “Your Contents and Devices” you’ll see a list of books you’ve bought through Amazon. Click on “Devices” up at the top and you’ll see a list of kindles and phones etc that have the kindle app installed. Click on the box with the “…” next to each device and you’ll see an email address for it. Just email that address with the .mobi attachment.
Alternatively, I’m sure you could transfer it with dropbox or google drive or whatever poison you use.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Holy crap
Hypothetically, if one weren’t tech savy like myself, how would one download the .mobi file to use on their kindle reader on their phone? Or, since it’s the kindle app on the phone, would one use the .epub version?
Asking for a friend.
The easiest way to get it on your kindle would be to DL it, then email it to your kindle email. If you go into Amazon, then look under “Your Contents and Devices” you’ll see a list of books you’ve bought through Amazon. Click on “Devices” up at the top and you’ll see a list of kindles and phones etc that have the kindle app installed. Click on the box with the “…” next to each device and you’ll see an email address for it. Just email that address with the .mobi attachment.
Beyond that, you can just DL it to your computer then transfer it over to your phone with a USB cable I guess, but I’m not sure how to get that file in your reader app. I’ve never done it that way.
Alternatively, I’m sure you could transfer it with dropbox or google drive or whatever poison you use.
On your phone, tap the “ePub” link. It will frottle around with Dropbox, and complain you can’t view the file. This is Dropbox being a dumbass. Tap the “…” item in the upper right and select “export”. Tap “Copy to iBooks” and it should appear there. Similar instructions with the .mobi file should work for the Kindle app but I haven’t tried it. This is on iOS 13.murmle, btw.
…would my Kindle report its contents back to Amazon?
I think if you email the file to your Kindle address, it shows up in your device library, but I’m not sure about that.
I confirm it works, as it is exactly what I do with mobi files from other sources than Amazon (and what I did here specifically).
One additional note – you have to make sure the email address you send it from is marked as allowed to send books to your kindle books.
Yeah, I’m not so much worried that it won’t work as I am wondering what would happen if I import my extensive library of mobi files that may have… been found in the wild?
What, like Amazon might get mad at you? I have at least 2 dozen files from various sources on my kindle. None of them were pirated, granted, but even if they were, I’m not sure how Amazon would know that.
None of mine were, technically, pirated (they were mobi versions of books I had bought as paperbacks and wanted to reread without going back to paper, so I didn’t want to pay twice for them) and they worked just fine.
front cover is when ARK survival evolved tameing goes wrong XD
My thoughts as well. The alien women are the only obvious problem with that headcanon.
https://www.michaelscottearle.com/tamer-king-of-dinosaurs
but does Dabbler make an appearance?
Hah, no, there’s no crossover at all.
Although… I wouldn’t be surprised if representative members of the alien races that appear in the book wander through the background of the comic the next time Sydney is on Fracture Station. :)
/humblebrag
I’m a somewhat successful indie sci-fi author. It’s a very interesting time to be jumping into the scene. I only mention it because you’ve obviously got the storytelling chops to do this, Dave. I’ll read through what you’ve got and I’d love to send you my notes. I also have an excellent editor with reasonable rates. If you want to go pro, I’d love to help. A small price to pay for all the fun I have reading Grrl Power!
Thanks! When I get around to doing this for real and charging for it, I’ll definitely want a comprehensive editorial review.
That was a really great Story. Thank you! I like the Tamer-verse anyway, but i think i liked the way the relationships between the MCs in your story developed even more than in the published books. A really nice treat between Tamer books.
Thanks! As I’m sure you know if you read the comic, I like all the stuff that happens in between the big action scenes, so it’s only natural that I spent a little more time on dialog than action scenes. :)
I loved the cast! You have a gift for alien yet understandable characters. I also want to see one particular character beaten up by Max…and perhaps see Halo poo-poo his spice level. Would love to see you do more with this story!
Um … when I click on one of those I get a page w/ a huge cover picture and nothing else. I was expecting to have it download the .mobi file …
Apparently dropbox has a .mobi viewer built in. Maybe that’s what you’re seeing. There should be a download button on the page somewhere, probably on the top right?
Actually, there is a button at the top that you can use to simply download, if you don’t want to use DropBox.
Well the cover looks promising. Alien women and dinosaurs, what more do you need?
I’m interested just because “Archduke of Dinosaurs” is a hilarious subtitle.
I’m more looking at the guy,he looks merely inconvenienced by the cardio…
Seriously, what kind of life have you lead, that the idea of being eaten by a dinosaur garners a “meh” reaction
As a fan of the “I’nglish” language, I have to say that I appreciate your ability to choose words and not misuse words.
I also felt that you conveyed the sense of panic met by competence, the interaction of strangers, and the differences in alien cultures (counting Earth as one value of alien).
Yes, there were a few places where editing would have helped, but all in all I think you are a better writer than Tefler of “Three Square Meals” is.
I have only gotten to chapter 13, but I will continue to read through to the end.
Thanks a lot, I appreciate the feedback!
I do have someone doing a low level scrub of the book, so I should hopefully have a revised edit in a week or two.
Finally finished reading it. Very well written, and a very well expanded English vocabulary that I had to look up words several times..
Overall, it’s making me want to read more, but in a very different was to the MSE books. Your book is simply hilariously funny, and in some ways, it’s actually detracting from scenes. During times of tension, you throw in lines which while very funny, removes reduces the tension which you had set up. For instance ass breaths landing on Sam which you use the analogue of a dartboard. A tense, serious scene, interrupted by myself laughing stupidly.
Overall, it was a very fun book, and I really like your style.
If you do release your own books, I’ll be sure to check them out
Thanks for your comments, glad you enjoyed it!
Actually,
That is part of the charm for me. Emotional roller-coaster rides can be fun.
Really liked the book – actually more so than the last Tamer Book.
After a clumsy start it reads well enough. The protagonist being well endowed, sexually skilled and immediately building a harem is conspicuously modelled on Three Square Meals, but by the rather abrupt end of the book it was less of a knockoff and more of a show-em-how-it’s-done, with plausible reasons and reluctant women with completely different personalities.
The tale is plot-driven, yet the characters are surprisingly rounded. Your technique of describing them indirectly by the way they respond to events is subtle and means each reader will read a different story, which is a level of art unlooked for in such an adolescent story. At the other end of the spectrum, Heinlein had his characters endlessly expounding their viewpoints. It was tedious and since the viewpoints were all Heinlein’s it didn’t work. Nevertheless he sold a lot of books, so I think you have a future as a novelist if you want it.
You could try third person. It would let you move the camera around more. On the other hand, it may be that the absence of a god’s eye view keeps the reader more firmly inside the story. You certainly made good use of the unanswered questions.
The beginning was intended to be abrupt because honestly I just wanted to jump right in. I didn’t feel like writing an establishing chapter for Sam, and I thought the bits I stuck in about his past were enough for the first book. Certainly not enough to round out his history, but I’d planned on talking about that a bit more in book two.
Making Sam a big tough guy had nothing to do with TSM, it was more about contrasting him with Victor from the original Tamer. Victor works perfectly for the slower burn of what was intended to be a longer running series, but like I said with this writing exercise I was interested in getting right to it.
I will grant that Sam’s curiously good hearing was me trying to juuust dip my toe into third person writing. I wanted the reader to experience things that might have happened when Sam wasn’t quite close enough for him to really justify him being in on, so the solution was that he caught the edges of conversations he only could have with great hearing. Maybe I should have reeled that in a bit. My preference as a reader is generally for first person, but maybe I’ll dabble with third person eventually.
Thanks for your comments, I really appreciate it. I’m glad you liked it.
I gotta agree with Pete on this one. I’ve read your story twice now – the writing is quite good, the subtleties of each character grow with a reread, plot and pacing are excellent (especially noteworthy considering you are writing within an established plot and storytelling device and took full advantage of that) – this is an excellent first NOVEL, not just an excellent fanfic.
I hate to say this, (because I enjoyed this a lot) but you need to leave Earle’s world right now and seriously consider doing something original, because you have plenty of good ideas of your own and real potential as a writer.
I’ve wanted for so long to commission you to do a cover for one of my novels but clearly that is never going to happen because you are going to be waaay too busy raking in dough as a writer and artist to be doing any dinky-ass commission work for fans. Good for you.
Thanks! I’d like to move on to original stuff as well, but I’m having fun with Sam and crew at the moment, and will take another book to hopefully refine some shortcomings with this one.
Why don’t you have Sam’s crew meet Victor’s and not see eye to eye. Your voyeuristic alien reality show producers would love it, which gives you an excellent deus ec machina whenever you need it without collapsing your story.
I’m not sure what they’d have to disagree over. The fact that they’re both human would probably make them pause long enough to avoid any battle motivated by misunderstanding. The only way I’d see it kicking off would be if Nira Wrathed one of Victor’s dinos, but I wouldn’t want to write that anyway.
At the end of your book, Sam doesn’t have a strong enough tendency to empire building for him to rub Victor the wrong way. But he is a world away, and by the time they meet he will have waded through the blood of hundreds, possibly thousands, and his merry little band will be large enough that he doesn’t even know the names of many of them. Not all of them will be entirely reasonable people. Small atrocities will occur. Retributions will follow, tit for tat and tat for tit. Events spiral out of sight, out of mind and out of control. Everyone knows it couldn’t be us, we’re the good guys.
My two cents: a “Victor’s entire crew shows up” crossover would be awkward, because there’s so many characters to introduce and so many conversations to handle all at once.
Idea: Sam’s group rescues one of Victor’s people from dinosaurs, and she explains why she’s far from home, and she helps out with Sam’s base a little, has some hot sex, and then leaves to go back to Victor’s base, carrying some nice tools or whatever trade goods Sam has…
And one of Sam’s group (presumably Yxlyn) goes back with her, ostensibly as a guard and guide, but also to fetch back some of Victor’s plants or whatever for Sam’s base, and it’s implied if not stated that she’s planning some hot sex with Victor’s group.
Heh, well usually in harem fiction, the guy is the only one having sex with the ladies (and vice-versa in reverse harems) I’ve never seen a harem story where one guy and his team meet another guy with his harem and they swap or trade members.
That might be interesting actually, if an author wrote multiple stories in the same universe.
Some of the best stories are those that take an established trope and the subvert it. In terms of a harem setup, interchange of devoted partners who are, because of character, _more_ attracted to a different prime could easily be justified. I’m not sure if a full transition to poly rather than harem would work, but certainly exchange of harem beauties can be justified.
So, after reading through the entire Tamer series within a week (a new guilty pleasure thanks to you), you have now made my weekend just vanish by writing (good) fanfiction I *had* to gobble up.
It’s not quite as engaging and quite as funny as Tamer to me, but the characters work better and just seem more real, especially Yxlyn has grown dear to my heart (“Shutterfly”? For real? XD )
And I have to say I absolutely love-hate you for the abrupt ending. Please send more! I like it actually better than MSEs original.
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed, well, both the original and mine.
The ending is a bit abrupt, I agree. I had originally just written through that scene and just kept on writing, never thinking about where I’d end the book, but when I realized I had like 90K words past that, I realized I needed to find an end point, or I’d wind up putting out a single 400K word book 3 years from now.
Granted I could have ended it a bit more gracefully, like including the scene with Yxlyn, then do some teaser get-to-know-you stuff with Voss, then wrapped the book when they went to bed.
As it is, I guess book 2 will open with the Yxlyn/Sam scene? That’s… hmm. Going to have to think about that.
If you didn’t want to start a book off with a hot sex scene, it might make sense to release the hot sex scene as a standalone short-short story, and then the second book starts with the morning after?
I think I’ll do a quick recap of the previous book, then an abbreviated sex scene, but we’ll see how it pans out.
Just binge-read it myself yesterday and this comment does touch on the one complaint I have about it. All the build up for Yxlyn’s attraction, but you did the fade to black! It was a bit of a letdown, considering how much I really liked her as a character. Abbreviating that escalation of their relationship would not be doing her character arc justice.
If you’re not wanting to open the book with jumping into that scene, then do a point of view switch and have Nira spend time getting to know Voss in Sam’s place. Use that conversation to do a quick recap of the first book, interweaving whatever tidbits you want Voss to drop about her experiences. Also use that to firmly establish Nira’s thoughts on this relationship, including why she’s okay with the whole Harem thing just out of the blue. Then once you’ve reminded your readers about who’s who, what’s going on, and why Yxlyn is awesome, switch back to the cave and give Yxlyn the blossoming she deserves!
(At least that’s how I’d handle it. However you choose to handle it, I’ll be eagerly awaiting Volume 2!)
I don’t think I’ll play with PoV switching. It would be fun to get into Nira’s head, but it goes against the PoV presented in the first book and the established narrative structure of the source material.
When I say “abbreviated” I mean it won’t be 20 pages of squelching noises or anything. It’ll probably be more of Sam and Yxs talking than anything graphic, but we’ll see how I think it works best.
You do excellent sex scenes.
Great job. Enjoyed it a lot.
Thanks!
Pucker factor 9, engage!
It was a fun read, a very nice contrast to MSE’s books, As much as I enjoy reading his stories they have become a bit repetitive and predictable. New characters and new viewpoints are refreshing. Are you going to coordinate with MSE in the future to keep universe cannon the same?
Thanks! I don’t have an inside track on anything MSE’s working on or any Tamer intel. I had to make up whether or not the translators worked on writing since it hasn’t come up in the books yet. With Voss and her skill, I get a little deeper into the weeds there in the next bit I’ve written, but I’m just guessing at it all.
Reading it now. The girl on the cover of your book looks far more interesting than any of the not so alien pin-up girls on the covers of the original author’s books. I wouldn’t mind a style that shows the occational drawn page or illustration to show characters, landscapes and situations, like in Jules Verne’s novels. Now, in case you’re thinking that I’m secretly hoping any of these illustrations will also be used to show things like alien glow-in-the-dark boobies, alien tails that are equipped with an organ that produces a hypnotizing sound that’s used to prevent males from running away and subdue them or an alien female whose body temporarily pushes out her womb during an orgasm (poor Sam had no idea), because fertilization in her species happens outside the body, you’re very, very right.
Hah, I had considered doing some drawings for the interior of the book, but there’s only so much time in the day.
Honestly, it’s better than anything Earle wrote. A lot better.
There are some pacing and structural issues that may or may not be a problem for the broader audience. Namely, there are a lot of LitRPG elements that get crunchy and grind-ey at points. However, this type of reader often loves that stuff, so for the genre you may be on point. For me they dragged some, but I am not a LitRPG or harem fantasy reader. You know the audience better than I do!
It does not follow a traditional three-act structure, either. One thing I liked was that the pacing seemed much more like an old Tarzan novel. In these, discreet smaller adventures just sort of line up to form one long action sequence. In this case, the smaller discreet adventures alternated between romance, action, and crafting (a lot like a good video game!). At 100,000 words, I’m not sure if this is a great idea, though. Most writers in this genre keep their work around 50,000 words o avoid this issue. What you’ve written is a real, honest-to-goodness, sci-fi adventure book. It’s long and meaty. It might flow better if you gave the whole narrative a more defined structure.
It was fun to read. You’ve got the chops for this, Dave.
Thanks! I appreciate the feedback.
Part of the reason that I chose Tamer as the universe to write in was that the books don’t really have the typical structure. There’s not a “bad guy” to defeat in a third act climax, and I felt that would suit my writing style well. It didn’t allow me to practice or develop structured narrative chops which I might need in the future, but my goal here was simply to write something start to finish.
It’s funny you mention the LitRPG elements as being crunchy and grindey, because Tamer is about as light LitRPG as it gets. I prefer the light stuff myself, but there are people deep into LitRPG that get upset if the character doesn’t stop and check all his stats and inventory five times a chapter. I’m sure the audiobooks for those novels are riveting.
As for pacing, I thought more people would ding me for that. Tamer has a fair amount of action in it, and I wanted my book to have a not too dissimilar feel. In one of my later revisions of the book, I realized I had a 12 chapter span with no action scenes in it. I knew from the get-go that I vastly prefer writing dialog to action, but I realized I needed to edit in a fight somewhere. My book is still a bit light on the action, so maybe that’s something I’ll work on for the next one.
I for one, would not advise you to model your writing TOO much on MSE. He is extremely prolific and very successful. His books are a lot of fun for his fans. The things he does well, he does VERY well. Very few people would call him a ‘great writer’ though. I’m not joking. You are already better than him. Please continue to be better than him!
Your pacing was not bad. It was just… different. It’s a style of writing that lends itself to shorter works very well, especially if serialized. I LOVE me some Tarzan for exactly this reason. How it plays at 100,000 words will depend a lot on the audience. LitRPG has it’s own kind of reader, so you may be right where you need to be. I write more standard sci-fi fare, and I run in the 100,000 word range, too. It’s a lot of pages to fill. For many readers, things that do not specifically move the plot along or provide essential exposition can get irritating. In my first book ( https://www.amazon.com/Ordnance-Fixer-Book-Andrew-Vaillencourt-ebook/dp/B06Y4QX6BF ), I spend about 4500 words early on to explain essential technical background so the reader will understand the “rules” of my universe. Critics pinged that part for a “backstory dump” and “Slow pacing.” Look in the review section and you’ll find it! In cyberpunk, it is story and action uber alles!
Several sections of your book would probably run into that problem outside of LitRPG readers. Who, as you say, seem to LOVE that stuff.
Continuing–
There may be room for you to condense some of the non-essential-to-the-plot crafting exposition and add some more narrative tension through the romance elements and even kick up the action a little. then you’d have some space for a bigger and more satisfying ending.
Conversely, you could condense the whole thing to 50-60000 words and run it like an old tarzan series, where the action and drama is tighter and faster, giving you the opportunity to up the stakes and tension over several books. This way you could include more crunchy-ness in a spread out and more digestible manner.
Not sure when I became your editor, by the way. One man’s opinion is all, plus the excitement of watching a good writer take a step.
Please take my advice with a grain of salt!
It’s odd though coming from doing the comic where each page gets 200 comments or more, getting feedback on the book is mostly a lot less specific, so I really do appreciate comprehensive feedback.
I thought some of the crafting bordered on tedium, and I cleaned that stuff up a bit once during an editing pass, but I didn’t want to strike too much of it, as rebuilding civilization from scratch is one of the fun things about the Tamer series.
I don’t think I could condense the book as much as you suggest. Action and drama is honestly my least favorite things to write, so I don’t think I’d be able to stick with just that long enough to finish a book. :)
Second the opinion that your writing is better than MSE – or I just like it more. I had no issues with the structure – it flowed along and clearly was meant to be the first installment of a longer arc. IMHO, insistence on a tight arc can be a mistake – it leads to overblown and therefore less believable plots (what? The world needs saving AGAIN?”). As an indie author in the same vein I can only applaud. A large part of the charm is in building a picture of the world and the characters.
I liked the device of a very practical skill, and the decisions make sense (MSE has not thought about how well a log stockade would stand up to 15 ton grazers – ie, not at all – while a 2 metre deep ditch with sheer sides keeps large animals out out because nothing very big can jump – I know because I have fallen in one).
Thank you, I appreciate the feedback.
I think there’s an argument to be made that MSE has a “tighter set” than me. Obviously he enjoys writing action as much as I enjoy writing dialog, and that will always be a difference between us, but I do feel like I could dial in the motivating factors a bit. I made the group find that cliff cave because I didn’t want to retread them building a fort. That’s already been covered in the source books, but I might have screwed myself a little bit because it’s actually too defensible. Nothing can really mess with them up there except birds and other survivors. It’s not a bad situation from a writing standpoint, but it’s something to at least consider.
Tastes vary. Most of the (small number of) reviewers for my books like them, but one did not on the grounds that it was too dialogue-heavy.
Caves make sense, as do islands (Graydon Saunders mixes dinosaurs with Icelandic sagas in The Human Dress to great effect, and his humans have a lot of sensible solutions). The top of the mesa might not be as safe as they hope – no tyrannosaurs, but that would make it a good nest site for Hatzegopteryx – 14 metre wingspan, two metre beak. 300 kilos of flying death.
Hello,
I just finished the book and wanted to add my compliments to the other commenters’.
Editing is indeed necessary. There were a lot of missing or doubled words. But I’ve read far worse, I can assure you and I don’t remember a lot of misspelled words (there must have been, nobody’s perfect after all ;-) ).
I would disagree with the other commenters about the ending and the pace.
True, the ending could have been rounded up a little bit, but I honestly think it was a nice point to end the first story. Things had been done, the climactic conflict had been solved…and finishing with the actual sex scene would have been worse. So, while there could have been a little bit more discussions between the four abductees, Ixs and Sam going into the cave was the way said discussion had to end as well as the book, in my opinion. (oh, and I don’t think starting the next one with a sex scene would be that interesting)
As for the pace, I did not feel it was too long. There was a good continuity between the chapters, the story only covers, what, three or four days? Honestly, I felt there were less lulls in the story than in MSE’s novels. And more appropriate action. He tends to stretch out fight scenes by going into too much details or add more-or-less unnecessary ones he keeps on detailing (the second Space Knight book is terrible with this), and Enhancer did not have that at all, quite the opposite: there are very few actual combat scenes, and most of them consist in the characters fleeing. I love his books, but, yeah, I do feel yours is a little bit better (at least for my taste), with deeper descriptions of the characters’ interactions and feelings. His are action-driven books, yours is story-driven, and I tend to prefer that (even though action-driven is fun too).
Concerning how much humour there is, I felt the balance was good for this kind of book: not too much, but enough to alleviate the tension and make it light instead of dark and brooding. For example, I don’t think the dart reference with Ass-Breath’s corpse was wrongly timed, since the fight was indeed over. It’s not as if there was any chance the main character would die suffocating under the enemy’s corpse, so it was more of a comedic sigh of relief after a harsh and savage fight (and so was the way he got rid of the body…).
Anyway, I would really like to see you co-operating with MSE to develop both stories in parallel, and merge them at some point (not too early: Victor and Sam together would be a really world-breaking combination, not only because both are building a powerful and well-united faction, nor just because Sam will clearly develop a pseudo-industrial base more efficiently than Victor is and it would be the perfect fit for Victor’s assets [Tamed dinos equipped with Enhanced armor would be near-unstoppable], but also because Enhancing Victor’s Taming ability would be terryfingly powerful), and I am waiting for book two of the Arch-Duke’s adventures…
Now, one final remark:
While I can understand the fanfiction approach to avoid worldbuilding… why did you not write a book in the Grrrlverse? You could easily write stories about how Archon was founded, about Max’s past, or Dabbler’s, or create an ARC-Light story, or even Grrl Power After Dark. The main characters would not even need to be involved (much or at all), thus freeing you from keeping straight both continuity and timelines.
And I am quite sure that there would be a lot of people eager to read them… :-)
Maybe you could strike a deal with MSE so he could write action adventures in the Grrrlverse (Dabbler’s space adventures would fit him to a T) while you continue the Enhancer storyline in the Tamerverse… ;-)
Damn, I did not realise I had written so much… so:
TL;DR:
Very good book, good pacing, just the right balance of humour in my opinion.
I would like to read the sequel and have it become canon in the Tamer-verse.
I also wonder why you did not write in your own universe, there are enough things you could develop independantly from the comics’ storyline.
Thank you very much, I’m glad you enjoyed it. I hope to have a revised edit out in few weeks.
I think it’d be cool to work on something with MSE, but he doesn’t seem to have an shortage of ideas on his own, and he also works so much faster than me that I don’t think it’d be possible for us to collaborate.
I do have an idea for a Grrl Power novel, but it’d be one of those side mission things. I really don’t know how it’d all work out or sync up with the comic, so who knows if/when it’d happen, but the idea keeps bouncing around in my head.
Writing about something like the founding of ARCHON seems like it would have to involve 10 dozen characters from different agencies and a bunch of politics and people bickering over jurisdiction and stuff like that. I’m not saying it couldn’t be done and maybe even be a fun read, but by contrast this book had three characters in it. It was perfect as a starter novel.
I could eventually see writing about some of Dabbler’s adventures. Probably in third person though. Writing her POV would probably make the book unreadably smutty. :)
About your production speed compared to MSE, you’re right he works really fast, it may be a problem, I did not think of that. However, there are ways around, notably time jumps. MSE is writing almost day-to-day chronicles. You could always jump a few weeks between some books to compensate. It would even make it easier for you to control how much “engineering scenes” you have to add to correctly describe Sam’s work, since some progress could be summed up at the start of a book instead of being detailed.
For the Grrl Power novels, I understand your point about a starter book needing to have less characters.
But, as for Dabbler, I think the POV would indeed be interesting precisely because she has that sexual obsession. Not for the smut scenes (I’ll be honest, I frequently pass them in books), but because it would be interesting to see how this works and lets her be a functional individual. She is an adventurer and an engineer DESPITE her urges, and still she enjoys them. How does that work? It could be extremely interesting, especially with her sarcastic streak in addition to that.
(on the other hand…yeah, now that I write it, I can see how it would not be a good idea for a starter book… ;-))
Just read through the story, very much enjoyed it. I’ve not read any of the books this is based upon, so can’t comment on the relationship with those. I liked how the characters’ relationships built and how their species differences and similarities worked together. Looking forward to the next series :-)
Thanks very much! I had fun writing it. Except for some of the fight scenes, but I think I’m getting better with those.
In my not so humble opinion, the only thing lacking in the fight scenes is what you do all the time in the comic, establish where people are and keep that clearly in mind. To my mind, the last fight scene with “arse-wipe” was the best because it was coherent in that way. I especially liked the description of Eeks taking him on until he managed to accidentally hit her.
Positioning is an easy thing to overlook when writing, well, anything, but action especially, because as the writer, I have the scene firmly in my head. Communicating enough to a reader so that everyone is on the same page, but without bogging down the scene with unnecessary positioning updates is a skill I’m obviously still developing.
Had a few thoughts about the sex, not sure what I can write here, but the salt comment stuck me as … weak. Humans need salt just as badly ( see Roman root to word salary ) but boiling our brains in our skull is worse so we use salt solutions to bleed heat but more importantly to prevent the salt concentration in our blood from becoming too high ( nature loves solutions that solve 3-4 problems at once, see bone marrow ). You would have to ask a biologist, but an alien that sweated potassium instead of sodium might be a quick fix. Then the hero tastes just like an “alien chip” but using a salt substitute.
Noticed the LitRPG influence even in the sex scene, but that is not a bad thing depending on your target audience.
Very very well written. Would love more erotica from you. Perhaps “Tales from Dabbler” were the intro chapter is Dabbler and a female/ male/ non-binary friend reminiscing then the rest of the book being the back story to the conversation.
I find Harem fiction fascinating. I love a good series with a married couple because in my experience friendships enhance any relationship. But harem fiction allows authors to “have their cake and it it too” since you have the established harem partners for stable relationships but the new potential partners for the “will they NOW, or will they later” of most erotic fiction. The only thing that comes close is shapeshifter fiction but that can run to horror erotica way too easily ( which is okay if that is your target audience).
Of course humans need salt, but remember with the melon scene, it’s suggested that Nira’s race barely uses any glucose. It’s like their needs for sugar and salt are swapped with what a human requires.
Really I just wrote the scene because it amused me though, not as justification for weird alien biology.
It was a great way to re-enforce that these are not just ‘humans with bumpy faces’, but actually sapient beings from a different society. I agree that your book was more engaging to me than the original material as well…it felt more visceral, much easier to get into the character’s heads. Making one of the characters an author that kept lampshading book pacing in general was also amusing. :)
Just wanted to drop my two cents. Loved the book, the action was fun, the romance and smutt nicely written and the characters are interesting. I am really looking forward to book two. Or do you publish the separate chapters somewhere as you write them like other fanfiction?
Here what I am looking forward:
– futher survivalist/engineering tools and objects that will make their lives easier. I like characters figuring solution to problems and building stuff.
– seeing what’s on top of the mesa and how much space they have to work with. (They will probably need to build several climbing point around it so they can explore around more easily or get stuck with only one way to get up. Retractable ladders probably.
– New characters. Ennemy, friends, friennemy, neutrals. Anything really. Newly arrived with beam of lights or others who managed to survive.
– More smutt (of course)
– Maybe some more artwork within the books.
If you write any more book, warn us, I would like to read them.
Thank you! I don’t publish chapters anywhere at the moment. I don’t write with a particularly reliable frequency, and the early stuff is kind of a mess. That might change as I do more of it though.
I am about 2/3 the way through at this point and I had a few minor items to add in the ‘wordsmithing’ category. The spell checker has found all the misspelled words, but there are a few places where a correctly spelled but wrong word in context shows up. For instance calling a weapon ‘viscous’ instead of ‘vicious’.
And lastly I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that someone who gave Sydney a My Little Pony ringtone on her phone says that someone in this story is as timid as ‘Shutterfly’. All MLP fans who are into softcore Dino Scifi must be so disappointed. https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/Fluttershy
(but honestly, is there a copyright issue or something going on that prevents using the real name?)
Hah, I messed up one instance of “vicious,” swapped nearly every instance of “farther” with “further” and yeah, I about kicked myself when someone pointed out that I screwed up Fluttershy’s name. Those have all been fixed though. Hope to have a revised edition out in a week or so.
One other swap fix you may want to make is in chapter 18. When the main trio are standing together you write “Nira tousled her hair” a pretty good trick considering she doesn’t have any. I think it was supposed to be Yxlyn.
As for my previous comment, if you really WANTED to have a ‘viscous weapon’ you could always add in one of those little dinos from Jurassic Park that spits poison goo into people’s faces. :)
Ok. I’ve finally found the time to finish. If you read my posts in your comic then you know that I don’t think much of the “harem” genre. It is a bit hilarious to me that Nira is a writer of womens romance novels, because the harem genre is pretty much just the gender swapped version of that genre. It’s crap. I’ll let it go at that and focus on the other aspects of reviewing your work.
Where I ask questions please don’t feel like you need to respond. All I ask is that you think through the answers to yourself, and see if the questions don’t point to places where a lot of improvement to the story can be made.
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Special skills: Why is it that neither Nira nor Yxlyn actually got a skill? What they have listed as a skill is just a racial trait, just like Nira can breath and see underwater. Only Sam had a skill actually added, because humans can’t pick up a rock and ‘enhance’ it into an axe head. This seems to follow the same humanocentric bias that Michael-Scott Earle has in the free portion of his first Tamer novel which I listened to. In that novel the protagonist is also a human, and also has a skill added, while all four of the women in his harem have as their special skill just one of their racial attributes. Actually the spider woman has as her special skill some architectural knowledge, which is even worse when you think about it. She may have spent a few years studying the subject, and instead of being able to tame dinosaurs or enhance things she is told by her Eye-Q that her “special ability” is the architectural training which she already brought to the table. A very bad deal for her. Anyway, giving a magical (in the Clarke’s Third Law sense of the word) skill to a human male and not to the alien women is inconsistent, and that makes it chafe up against logic once the reader thinks about it for a bit.
Ch 9
Sam is trying to use his Enhance skill to make rope out of a tree vine:
Sam has just recently had a very remarkable and unforgettable demonstration that his Enhance works on living things. He Enhanced Nira, she became the god of lightning, and she blew a hole like a howitzer into T-rex’s little brother. So why would he even speculate that Enhance doesn’t work on living things? And why would he then have to chop the vine away from the tree before Enhance started working on it? Abilities need to be consistent, whether that is in a magical universe, a super hero universe, or a weird alien abduction setting where the aliens give their (human males only!) abductees a special ability each.
But now you’ve gone and spoiled the consistency by having Enhance work on Nira but not on a vine attached to a tree. Even the weird step of cutting the vine away from the tree and then Enhance suddenly working on it seems odd.
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Ch 1
Who is our protagonist? It’s almost a complete mystery to the readers. This needs a lot of work. In Tamer book 1 (name not remembered) we know from our protagonists thoughts fairly early that he is fairly recently orphaned, that he is in a dead end job but is fairly complacent about it because he both isn’t terribly motivated and he enjoys working with animals, that he is a bit of a pussy and allows his manager to walk all over him, and a few other details. This builds a connection with the readers, some history that they might be able to relate with or empathize with or at least relate or connect to the real world.
What do we know about Sam? By the end of the novel here’s what I know:
1) His name is Sam.
2) He was pulled by the aliens from prison. Crime unknown. Sentence duration unknown, but he’s been working out and is fairly buff, so assuming he was already in decent shape when he went in I’d guess that he’s been in for over a year. But that’s a pure guess because this guy never shares anything about his life with the readers.
3) He’s a smart guy. How do I know this? Well, who looks at a beautiful alien woman and thinks “Her ventral coloring was nearly white”? Ventral isn’t a word that sees a lot of daily use. Who thinks like that? He is also able to identify more than a few dinosaur types on sight. Even ones which are not as mainstream as a T-rex or a triceratops or any dinosaur you might have seen on Jurassic Park. He is aware of the different epochs dinosaurs lived across, and that animals like the murder birds are out of place, time wise, with dinosaurs. So he is either educated in the field or it is one of his hobbies. You don’t get that kind of knowledge in prison.
4) He has some very particular skills. I was very active in scouting as a boy and young man, and did a lot of hunting and hiking and camping aside from scouting as well. I participated in some survival courses and was exposed to a lot of primitive skills. So when Sam was all confident that if he found some flint that he could knap himself up a knife, I was a bit surprised. My experience with knapping is limited to about an hour spent being lectured about it and then another hour spent in hands on practice. Hands on practice that demonstrated exactly how difficult this skill is to master. I might manage to make a knife if I had a lot of flint on hand and maybe 8 hours to try and fail and try again and again and again. Maybe. But Sam is casually certain that he can do this. He doesn’t think that he might be able to do this, he knows he can do this. Why? What is his prior experience with knapping that makes him think that this is something he can do? Sam might know, but the readers sure don’t.
5) He’s familiar with a lot of pop culture references. By a remarkable coincidence, I’d bet that this is the exact set of pop culture references that you are also familiar with.
6) He is in good physical shape. He does do some thinking about this, so we know he spent some of his time in prison lifting weights.
7) A bit of his physical appearance blended (at last!) with some introspective thinking that explains a couple things to the reader: “On the other hand, I had been in my share of brawls, and I looked like it. I’d been told I wasn’t so hard on the eyes, but I had a scar through one eyebrow, and my nose wasn’t quite as straight as it used to be.”
8) He speaks fluent English. And by ‘fluent’ I mean that he is very well spoken. He does not speak in prison slang, or use words that might make the reader think that he is a thug or uneducated. He also speaks Spanish, but how or why he knows a second language is yet another a mystery for the readers. Aside from the “ventral” thing I mentioned above, Sam casually throws out conversation like this all the time:
“We usually greet people by shaking hands. It’s supposed to show that we carry no weapons, although I always thought that sounded apocryphal.” And:
“[…] it’s a narrative trope common to many genres.”
Here is how Sam describes Nira’s eyes:
“They reminded me of a crocodile’s. They had a small, oval pupils and their irises were so large I could only see the whites of her eyes when she looked to the side. They were dappled green with amber flecks of gold, like two nebulae brimming with newborn stars.”
To be “reminded” of a crocodile’s eyes means that Sam has seen crocodile eyes, in detail. And we also learn that Sam is a freaking poet, what with the nebulae brimming with newborn stars bit…
Sam is familiar with several rather obscure types of bladed weapon: “I was sure I could make the inside edge into a decent blade like a karambit or a hawkbill.”
Sam can identify several kinds of tree by the scent of their pollen: “In a single breath I caught more scents that I could ever identify, but I definitely smelled pine and oak, maple, possibly mesquite, as well as flowers, and crisp, unpolluted air.” That’s some really good woodcraft! Better than anyone who doesn’t pretty much live in the woods full time can ever expect to have… Why is Sam so familiar with the scents of various kinds of trees? Who knows, because Sam didn’t bother to let the readers know.
Sam is familiar with the specific names of some rather obscure governmental forms: “[…] I wasn’t sure an anarchosyndicalist commune would thrive here.”
Sam doesn’t have a life on earth he is interested in returning to. But aside from the whole “in prison” thing that’s about all we know about why.
So we know that Sam is well built and strong, a brawler, good looking, intelligent, probably very well read, with a wide variety of knowledge and skills in some fairly obscure and unrelated areas. So far no mention of any weaknesses or limitations. He isn’t skilled in knots, but as far as it was shown he would have gotten the job done, it’s just that Nira is better at it than he is. He is looking pretty much like your garden variety author-insert Marty Sue.
What we don’t we know about Sam by Chapter 11 could fill another novel. But here’s a list of things that we might be expected to know about him:
What is Sam’s education?
What is his vocation? What does he do for a living, or what did he do for a living before prison at least?
Why was he in prison? This is a fairly major exclusion. Dropping on the readers that Sam was plucked from prison by the aliens but just leaving it at that leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
What are his interests, hobbies, activities he’s pursued, etc.? Especially as they apply to his current predicament. No one sits around and thinks in a monologue “I like to fly kites and draw anime and knap flint into knives,” but when a character is casually confident that he can knap flint, or do well at any other difficult or fairly specific task or skill, then it is a far more natural thing to have them muse to themselves something like “I’ve got Drew Evans of the Chillville Survivalists to thank for being able to knap flint. Man, I never thought those boring hours spent chipping away at rocks while he criticized the class’ lousy efforts would ever actually pay off!” Or whatever, you get the point I hope.
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You’ll have to forgive me if I’ve placed one or more of the entries below under the wrong chapter. Navigating in that epub interface is slow and kludgy.
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Ch 1
Typos/Grammar:
“and their i[ri]ses were so large”
Ch 10
No, it isn’t what he had been looking for at all. So far Sam and Nira have almost exclusively been running from one danger after another. Sam was ready to spend the night in the tree. Then Nira manages to spot that the tree limb connected with the cliff face, and Sam’s hope there was that there would be room to sleep on the cliff ledge. Then he “was about to hunker down for the night” on the ledge when Nira again spots the cave opening. Sam wasn’t looking for a cave, a cave had never been mentioned at all in his thoughts or speech. It wasn’t even what he had been hoping for, because as I noted his thoughts had never turned to the possibility of finding a cave.
Typos/Grammar:
“or ivy draw[n] by an elf.”
“I [A] few gulps a day should do [to] keep me going.”
“I shot Nira a glance obviously chuffed.”
Does this want a comma after glance? It does not appear to be grammatically correct. Also, be careful of having your character use colloquialisms that you favor. It makes all of your characters blend together. This is why Wonder Woman uses “Hera” as an exclamation, and wizards not raised by muggles use “Merlin” in Harry Potter for the same thing. I believe you’ve used ‘chuffed’ in Grrl Power.
Ch 12
Typos/Grammar:
“I should [be] cross with you because you’re just hopeless with knots.”
Ch 13
Typos/Grammar:
“anarchosyndicalist” I believe this should be two words or hyphenated anarcho-syndicalist.
Ch 15
Typos/Grammar:
“Yxlyn glanced at the edge of the pond [and] got very still.”
“There are no big dinosaurs around whose mouth[s] I could leap into, so I guess I’ll stay put.” Match the plurals, although for speech grammar errors are not necessarily errors. I mean, they are still grammar errors, but people don’t always (or often, depending on the person) speak with perfect grammar, and that’s fine.
“The next few hours were very productive. I got the fire going large enough to keep most anything from getting too curious. Nira prepared and cooked the fish, and Yxlyn gathered several nice candidates for me to use as a handle for the axe.”
Earlier Sam had resolved to use his Enhance ability any time it was off of cool down. So why isn’t he doing so here? He has several unenhanced dino teeth, he could repair or add some pockets to his coveralls or see if he could change the color to a camo pattern, he could see if he could improve on an already enhanced item such as Nira’s spear or the axe head (this was before he’d learned that enhancing is a one-time-per-item thing). But instead he’s wasting these uses even though he knows how foolish that is. Why is that?
“I am a self-confessed materials snob.” Why? Why the fuck is Sam a “materials snob,” whatever the fuck that means? How do you expect your readers to relate to this sudden declaration without providing the smallest bit of background on an odd predilection of your protagonist which came out of nowhere and means nothing to most people?
“I didn’t really like over relying on this weird power our alien abductors had granted me. It was amazing, but I was wary of it making me lazy.” And yet again another 180° flip from his earlier resolve to use this power every time it is off cool down. With no real explanation other than the idiot thought that relying on a tool makes one lazy somehow. This is like a man in a wilderness survival situation being wary of his lighter making him lazy…
Ch 16
Typos/Grammar:
“I was starting to think the maul was dumb to haul ?it? around as well, […]” Remove the ‘it,’ or rephrase as “I was starting to think it was dumb to haul the maul around as well, […]” I prefer the second option.
“[…] it would make a viscous [vicious] weapon.”
“Mostly, the fog just made it look creepier, but it did absorbed [absorb] higher frequency sounds.”
“I needed to really start considering the Enhance skill as just another tool on my belt and stop looking to solve every problem with it.” Why? How is this even a logical thought? A solved problem is solved. No more problem. So why would any sane person, especially in a survival situation, think that a skill which can solve problems is for some reason a crutch or in any other way a bad thing? It’s just dumb and stupid and bad, and if you’re going to run with this then you need to flesh out the whys of Sam’s decision if you don’t want your readers thinking that he is an idiot to not fully capitalize on the enhance skill.
“”I really don’t have anything or anyone to go back to on Earth.” In fact my situation here is arguably better than it was back home.” Wow, 16 chapters and we finally get the tiniest peek at Sam’s background. It’s not much, and what he does let drop he doesn’t bother expanding on in any way, but that’s better than the prior 15 chapters at least.
“Mostly, the fog just made it look creepier, but it did absorbed higher frequency sounds.” Here’s Sam thinking like Reed Richards again… “it did absorb some sounds” would be more like how someone whose masters thesis wasn’t “Sonic resonance patterns through a dispersed and aerosolized H2O medium” might think.
Ch 20
Typos/Grammar:
“[…] cheese course with some wine along side [alongside] it.”
“[…] someone on an ATV had almost jumped.” Yeah, that’s a fairly specific and awkward metaphor. One that should be avoided in a story that isn’t going for a Douglas Adams vibe.
“[…] almost sounded like a series of contrabass clucks.” What’s a contrabass cluck? Describing things in terms that the general reader can understand is always preferable. It makes the description relatable, and allows the reader to picture/imagine the scene better.
Ch 21
The blue woman ability to turn off the translation function but nothing else is really hard to justify. The aliens added a translator to all of their abductees, so why would they want it to be, even selectively, turned off? By one specific person? Voss got dealt a lousy hand here. That said, she at least possibly has an ability which isn’t just an ability her race has naturally. Because as hard as it is to imagine the aliens wanting one of their abductees to be able to turn off the translation function they deliberately gave to them all, it is even more difficult to imagine that some race has as an innate trait the ability to disable surgically installed translation computers.
Wow! Thanks for the feedback, and for taking the time to write up something so comprehensive. You have a lot of fair points.
A few comments:
You’re right that Sam is underdeveloped. I should have done a better job with that. The fact that we don’t know anything about him at the beginning of the novel was a choice driven by my desire to dive right in to the action. The “life on Earth” chapter 1 of the original series was important to establish some baseline things about Victor and the fact that he’s from modern Earth, but I find those boring when I’m reading almost any novel. I don’t like flashbacks, but I’d still prefer to jump right in to something more engaging, then let backstory surface as the rest of the story progresses. Star Justice does this well, IMO.
But back to Sam, wanting to get right to it isn’t an excuse to leave his history an almost entirely blank slate, and that’s my fault as a first time author. I have backstory for him, but I never found time to work it into the first book. Really I should have had Nira at least ask him what he used to do on Earth. I’ll fix that in the next book. It feels like it’s a little late to try and edit even a short passage about it into book 1.
Racial special skills: You’re right that some of the alien races only get their natural abilities as special skills. It’s the same way in the original novels. I suppose the advantage for them is that their natural abilities can then level up and become far more powerful or at least have a much shorter cooldown than other members of their race. As you point out though, Voss doesn’t have a racial ability. And as far as her having a weak ass ability, you’re right. Some of the abductees get really shafted by the alien overlords. There’s a guy in the latest Tamer novel whose ability is to create floating lights that are as bright as a 100 watt bulb. He has no chance of becoming a mighty warlord, or even surviving on his own. That’s just the way it is.
As far as his powers not working on living things, you’re kind of right. I maybe should have had Sam be confused that he enhanced Nira but couldn’t get it to work on the vine, only he didn’t enhance her, he enhanced her skill.
Dinosaur Expert: The fact that Sam knows so much about dinosaurs wasn’t integral to his character in any way, but I realized almost immediately when I started describing dinosaurs that Sam would simply have to be able to identify them on sight. If he couldn’t, then I’d wind up just describing every dinosaur they came across to the reader, and besides a few easily identifiable dinos like stegosauruses, triceratops and a few other herbivores, every predatory dinosaur kind of looks the same. Large rear legs, smaller arms, lots of teeth. I wanted to include dino names so if people really wanted to they could google them. It speaks to the clever setup of the original novels really, that the protagonist has a scan and identify system built in. So yeah, it’s weird and probably unrealistic that Sam knows a shitload about dinosaurs. It was just a conceit for the readers’ benefit.
As far as Sam’s “list of things he knows,” I mean, he’s a well rounded guy I guess. Again, I should have given more backstory to justify his knowledge base.
Sam knowing what an anarchosyndicalist commune is was actually a Monty Python reference. I could have just as easily left it out… in fact it would have been easier to leave it out because I had to look up the spelling, but whatever. It amused me. As far as him knowing how to knap flint, like myself, he’s never actually done it, but we both know that if you bang the right kind of rocks together in the right way, one of them will get sharp. Maybe it’s way harder than he thinks, and maybe that’s something to explore in the next book, but he knows its possible to do and figures “how hard can it be?”
“By a remarkable coincidence, I’d bet that this is the exact set of pop culture references that you are also familiar with.”
I mean… yeah?
Mary Sue: I’m not a fan of the term Mary Sue, mostly because it’s been diluted to mean “a competent character” instead of a wildly overcomptent and blatant author insert. The original Mary Sue was a better engineer than Scotty and was smarter than Spock etc, etc. Personally I don’t think being able to identify different types of wood by smell ranks as elite woodcrafting, for instance. More of a “anyone with a working nose that has been to Home Depot” level skill.
If you mean that the whole thing is a power fantasy, then yeah, it 100% is. As is nearly every other piece of media I consume… outside of comedy I suppose. It’s what I like. If you meant that Sam should suck at more stuff to make him relatable… I guess? I don’t mind competent characters as long as they’re not obnoxiously and unjustifiably over-skilled. Maybe Sam can’t drive stick and is terrible at macrame and also doesn’t know what macrame is, but it didn’t come up while he was running away from dinosaurs.
Part of the reason I made Sam a physically competent guy from the get go was partially to contrast him with Victor, but also because I hadn’t planned on writing a ten book arc showing him develop into a hunk over time. It also helped justify the girls’ immediate attraction to him, as, again, this was never intended to be a slow burn.
I’ll get on those typos as well. It’s crazy how many times I can reread something and still miss stuff like that.
Thanks again for your thoughts. By the time I get around to writing some original IP, hopefully these efforts and the resulting feedback will help me improve.
Just a couple of points to make on your reply:
First, and not to belabor the point but I forgot to include this in my original review: We know a lot more about Nira and Zxyychex’s life and likes/hobbies/interests than we do Sam. We know that Nira is a writer, at least at a hobbyist level. We know that Zzvycx participated in some competitive escape and evasion games, and is a fair basket weaver. I could go on about the things we know about those two ladies, but as I said I’m not trying to beat you over the head about this, just hoping the message is very clear that for the reader to give a damn about the protagonist, or any character, they usually have to know a few things about them.
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I mean… No.
You make a character an actual character by giving them a personality and a background different from your own. You write down the things they like and dislike, and work those into the character’s speech and reactions to things. If they are a Star Trek fan then you can have them drop Start Trek references. But if all your protagonist all love Star Trek then they will all just blur together and become a grey and indistinct jumble. Maybe Sam loves jazz, and you hate jazz. So you might have to look up a few names of jazz bands and songs, and some jazz great that anyone with an interest would know. But maybe Sam really likes one particular jazz great, but don’t think much about another equally famous jazz great. Maybe Sam hears a dinosaur call and thinks to himself “Sounds like something Herbie Hancock might have written in a fever dream.” It’s like a science fiction fan having several shows they love, but a few they really hate also. I myself like Star Wars and Star Trek, but I had an Uncle loan me the entire Stargate DVD set and I watched the first 5 or so episodes and then returned them to him a few months later without having watched any more. It just never hooked me. Get it? Likes and dislikes, even within the same genre. It is a little bit of work, but it pays off in huge dividends. It adds dimension to your characters.
As far as I can tell this is a distinction without distinction. Spark is something Nira can do. No Nira, no spark. “[Sam] enhanced her skill” means the exact same thing as “Sam enhanced Nira.” The same applies to Zxyzyzl’s Camouflage skill. He touches a vine to enhance it into a rope, and he touches Nira to enhance her into the god of lightning. The only real difference is that the rope remains a rope and cannot be enhanced further, while Nira’s enhancement is not permanent and can be done over and over.
Mary/Marty Sue and author insert are two distinct things. They often overlap, but they don’t always. Take David Weber’s Honor Harrington series of novels. It is wildly successful and long running, with something like two dozen novels in the setting. And Honor Harrington is a Mary Sue character. But she is not an author insert.
A Mary Sue isn’t just “a competent character.” It is a character with few or no noticeable flaws. Or things which are described as flaws but which never actually act as flaws. As an example, take Bella from the Twilight novels. She is described as being socially awkward and shy, but in actuality she makes friends at the drop of a hat and has no trouble in social situations.
Honor Harrington lives in an advanced culture where limbs which are lopped off can be regrown. But Honor herself has a rare condition which prevents this regeneration. This is quite a disadvantage, or so you might thing. But when she loses a finger, is she from that point on shown to be inconvenienced by the loss of a finger? Nope. Instead she gets a cybernetic finger with a built in blaster. Wow, that inability to regenerate sure was a huge limitation for our heroine, wasn’t it? She is also described as being fairly plain. Not by herself alone, although we do get this from her own thoughts. But also from the description of the omniscient narrator describing her to us. But men still seem to fall in love with her and honestly consider her to be beautiful, as we can see by their thoughts. So yet another supposed limitation or disadvantage for our protagonist which isn’t at all any kind of disadvantage.
If you’ve ever read the first year or so of Erfworld, Parson is also a Mary Sue. He is described as being fat and out of shape, but this never slows him down any time it matters. The worst we see is him climbing a tower’s stairs with (I think) Sizemore, and when they get to the top he bends over and wheezes “Stairs.” But aside from being shown it wasn’t plot relevant. It was just a single panel in the comic, and there was no urgency to climb those stairs, he was just going to visit Stanley or something. His lack of fitness had no plot relevance. When he gets into a physical fight for the first time he is able to pick up his (admittedly much smaller than him) opponent bodily, snap his back, and throw him into the mouth of a dwagon (dragon). No physical limitations when it matters! Even a person in fairly average condition might have an issue picking up a resisting ~50lb weight and chucking it ~6 feet, but our fat and out of shape protagonist had no problems at all with the feat.
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Your writing will improve, because that’s just a natural thing which will occur over time. You may never be the next Samuel Clements, or [insert any known good writer here], but you will get better than this first effort as long as you stick with it.
I know you’ve got a full time job already with putting out Grrl Power, but if you’ve done any research at all you can’t have missed the fact that almost every successful writer disciplines themselves to write X words per day. The X varies per writer, but it is usually a fairly significant number and not just a page or two or a few hundred words.
One last thought:
Your grammar and spelling and sentence structure are fine. typos happen, and as you say it is usually easier to pick them out of a fresh page than from something you’ve produced yourself. Writing in an editor like MS Word can help, with its built in spell check. This can also help you keep any obscure/alien character/place/item names straight, by putting them into a dictionary (don’t use the global, make a new dictionary for each new setting! This I learned from experience is the way to go with this) so if you typo it you can be prompted with the correct spelling as long as you are close enough.
You don’t butcher you’re/your, you don’t typo homophones (would/wood, steak/stake, do/due, etc.), and that puts you way ahead of the game.
I guess the term Mary Sue has evolved. The original Mary Sue was an author insert. The author’s name (or at least the pen name she posted under) was Mary Sue.
I was confused when you suggested that Sam and I have the same pop-culture reference library because obviously Sam has to have some subset of my own, and anything in which I am not familiar but become familiar with in order to round out a character also adds to my own knowledge base.
You don’t have to be a fan of something to reference it, especially in internal dialog, but I see that you were talking about making Sam a fan of something which I am not. I… guess I could see some character drop some Jazz references. Not country though. Not a main character. I don’t think I could write someone I can’t identify with.
This is exactly why you should write characters that are different from yourself. It takes you out of your comfort zone, and that can help you grow. At the very least you’ll have to do some research and you’ll learn some things you didn’t know before.
I don’t care for country music either, for the most part. Twangy guitar isn’t my thing, and the themes of a lot of country music just don’t reach me. But I do like a lot of country adjacent stuff, like Bob Denver. And also a lot of heavy metal, which confuses some people.
[Personally I don’t think being able to identify different types of wood by smell ranks as elite woodcrafting, for instance. More of a “anyone with a working nose that has been to Home Depot” level skill.]
Well, there is your fix. Just change the text to explain that the forest smell like more different woods than a Home Depot. He is an engineer and somebody who seemed to have worked with tools a lot. Garage fool of tools and projects kind of ‘a lot’. Could help deepen the character by explaining one of his hobby or something.
Finished reading your book. Reading a Tamer novel now. So far I like your book better. A lot. I hope Early won’t read my post.
When I read about Sheela, I suddenly heard “Thunder! Thunder! ThunderCats! Hoooo!” in the back of my head and saw a distant Lion-O take off in the direction of a weird looking mountain…
And then there’s that spider woman who has 4 friggin huge spider legs sticking out of her… back? Please, please, don’t ever create unrealistic, evolutionary impossible creatures like that. It ruins things. It’s supposed to be sci-fi and not Lovecraftian eroticism. Lovecraftian eroticism doesn’t work. Ever. Don’t believe me? Just imagine Chtulhu with a wig, make-up and a pair of boobs having sex.
My only comment on your characters is that I was a bit surprised that evolution hadn’t given Nira flipper-like feet and webbed fingers. On second thought: forget the flipperfeet, because while I’m writing this, they make her walk in my mind like a clown who is wearing oversized shoes.
Also, your book has humor. Glorious humor! I couldn’t find any in the original novel.
Thanks!
The original series has some probably-not-possible-through-evolution alien girls show up, but no Cthulhu’s in wigs I promise.
This was pretty good. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting much with it being your first book.
Not gonna win any awards for making me feel things, but the overall story telling and comedy were good. Part of my love for this might the hole ARK left unfulfilled. Wish I could give you better feedback other than, ‘i liked it’. Probably the best thing to me was the living personalities if the characters.
I’m going to go recommend this to a bunch of harem/monster girl lovers.
Thanks! Emotional depth is probably not my strength. Like, at all. But it’s something I can work on.
This was a very fun and entertaining read. The pacing was good, the humor on the spot. The ending was a little sudden, but it absolutely made sense.
You already admitted yourself that Sam is underdeveloped and that is the only criticism I’d have. You dropped the prison elephant into the room and never explored it, aside of it being the reason for his physical shape and a reason for not wanting to return to Earth. All the personality traits you gave made me wonde what exactly happened for him to not only be in prison, but even ending up in solitary confinement, and that distracted from the story a little.
Anyway, thanks for the read.
Thanks!
its too bad Nira never asked him about the “Department of Corrections” thing later. That would have been a great opening for a bit more back story [pillow talk between romps because the pillow says Dept of Corrections? Just a thought]. But since you aren’t going back to add it, I look forward to the next installment.
It’s not that weird. This comment section is dedicated to the Enhancer book, not to the comic… You may want to repost… :-)
I loved this book and finished it in a few days reading at any opportunity. I look forward to book 2!
Thanks!
Is it wrong that I want to see this done as a comic?
I’ve been reading GP for quite some time now and never really glanced down at the ‘Author’s Comments’ very much but I was surprised to see you talk about writing a book and hoooo boy was I pleasantly surprised! I know nothing of the Tamer-verse but you did a damn good job of introducing the world and your characters without me needing to have read the books. It was well-written, funny, and made me realize things I didn’t know about myself. Can’t wait to read your next work!
Thanks for your comments, glad you liked it!
My comic comments are where all the smart stuff goes… by which I mean weird rambly stuff I can’t fit on the page. :)
Thank you for writing this. Calling it fanfiction does it and you a disservice. It is a full blown novel in its own right and stands on its own merits. I haven’t read any Tamer, so I’m unsure what elements are yours and which are drawn from there – but it doesn’t matter; the story works just fine and I thoroughly enjoyed it. So much so that I plan to read it again tonight. Thank you again.
Hah, thanks! I’m not sure what else to call it. It uses the same universe as the original books, but features none of the same characters or locations. It’s not fair to call it “inspired by” though. I dunno.
Is there any chance of a few more illustrations? It would make an already good story even better – although I suspect your time is already fully spoken for!
I could see doing some art of Nira… Yxlyn might be a bit more challenging though.
Can this be uploaded as a pdf? I have downloaded it and have had no luck in finding anything that can open the epub file type. I have tried several times to read it online and have only been able to read up to page 273 once because of my local shite internet. So many failed to load pages and reloads. Ugh.
I’m working on a few more edits. I’ll try and have a pdf up by monday’s comic.
Woohoo, thanks a bunch. Looking forward to it. Good book by the way, looking forward to part 2, judging from the above comments.
Just finished reading, awesome job, now I am going to be waiting for the next installment. You are more than ready to do this full time in my opinion. I am really wishing some aliens would kidnap me and send me there too.
You obviously have not been paying attention to the survival rate…
Thank you!
I read your book first, then the entire Tamer series
I would say I like the main (male) character in Tamer better (I find it had to relate/like to a character that was incarcerated, you skimped on that element, but he did “something” to wind up there…)
But I actually love the main two female characters you created, Nira (#2) and Yxlyn (#1)
Thanks! I’ll focus on developing Sam a bit more in the next book, but it’s just so fun to write about new alien girls!
Got it, read it, loved it! Feels like it completely belongs in the Tamer universe, really liked the characters and the powers.
Thank you!
Hi Dave, I liked the book and wanted to read more after. Good work. Just don’t do a team up with Michael Anderle. I’ve read about 20-30 of his books. Now if I see his name on the book, I just skip it. I’m not sure why as I more or less enjoyed his books. Rationality is overrated.
Glad you liked it.
I can say I’d never considered co-writing anything with Anderle. I’ve actually never read anything by him, though I think I may have one or two of his books on my wishlist.
I don’t know anything about Tamers. So I can only assume that the chick is a sleestak.
Amazing work Dave. I would very happily pay for your books. Have you considered a kickstarter or something to fund some of your writing? I think this book is good enough for you to come to some kind of agreement with M S Earle and start co-authoring books or have a parallel story (perhaps the groups can meet at sometime). Bloody good read.
Thanks a lot! I haven’t considered kickstarter or anything quite yet. I don’t write with enough regularity at the moment to justify something like that, but eventually I would like to try and write something to sell.
Dude, this was an absolute joy to read and I had an incredibly hard time putting it down, or just being away from it. This was such a great story with your pacing and character ideas and the way those characters developed organically. I loved that Yxlyn grew more and more bold and out of her own shell until we got this glimpse at a badass invisible woman! At times I honestly wasn’t sure if I was reading a fanfiction or something by the original author. This was really great and I NEED MORE, haha!I can’t wait to see if you do more, or what new thing you do next. Honestly, I think you have some great writing chops to get into doing books
Thanks so much! I had a hard time “finishing” it and putting it out there. I wanted to noodle on it forever, hah.