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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BSF" data-source="post: 1639890" data-attributes="member: 13098">RPGgirl's 20090 Upanga RoadOK, I had fun with this story.  Conceptually, it was cool and had some very interesting elements.  I have spent some time this weekend thinking about what comments I want to make on the story.  Hopefully, they will be useful comments.  Glancing over Berandor's we have some similiar "issues".  The pic for Derek is a little out of tone with how he sounds.  But, I generally handwave things like that.  The pics rarely fit "perfectly" and it is sometimes inportant to rewrite things just a teensy bit.  That being said, I would have like a little more description on what Derek looked like.  With Ceramic DM, you have presupplied pictures and a time limit.  It makes it hard to be as descriptive at times  and taking the shortcut of just using the pic is seductively easy.  I know I have problems with it!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  The thing about this particular pic is that you do a good job describing some of the other pics.  Personally, I chalk it up to the early pic use while you are getting into the flavor of the story.  Later on, you were probably rolling through it pretty well and the descriptive writing was just coming easier.Initially, I was having a lot of difficulty figuring out where Derek came from.  First, I thought he was native chinese and him ending up in Africa seemed weird.  Then, his uncle didn't communicate with him all that proficiently.  Coupled with Derek's internal dialog about Macgyver and spiderman, and the revelation that his father went to school in British Columbia, I decided that he must have grown up somewhere in North America.  If there had been a little more explanation of that earlier in the story, I think the story would have a little better flow.  The books are a decent pic use, but they could be a lot more effective with a little bit more foreshadowing.  But, it is just a picture of books and that does not easily lend itself to being an integral part of the story, without being only about the books.  Boy, that is a non-sensical statement.  How about this?  Being a picture of books, it would seem to suggest that the books are the focal point of the story, or the pic will just end up as a throwaway.  You tried to make it important for the character, which was cool.  I think you should put a little more focus on it early in the story.  Then, when the letter shows up, the reader feels more empathy with Derek as he opens the textbooks at the end.The story flow is interesting.  You have some tension at the beginning when Derek shows up at the enkang.  The next real tension you have is the break-in at the aquarium.  There is something about the break-in that just seems a bit flat to me.  I am not entirely sure what it is though.  I wish I could give something more substantive than that to work with, but maybe something will come to me later.  Derek's uncle seems to accept the broken ankle without any explanation from Derek.  I understand that the uncle was a secondary character, but I think putting a little more "flesh" on him would round the story out nicely.</blockquote>

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