Aetheria Falling written by KitZimmerman
INITIAL IMPRESSION | 12/15
Title & cover
This cover is nice! The overall look is pretty simple, but there's so much detail in the smaller image that I think it works out well. I'm not a huge fan of slapping those awards stickers on a cover so beautiful, but that's more of a personal decision. As for the title, I don't have any problems with it, either. It's always risky using the name of something we don't know yet as a title, but considering it sounds like a place and there's a place right on the cover, a bit of deduction tells me all I need to know.
Blurb
Blurbs are like a product pitch for a super picky audience. We only have so many words to convince them to read your book, and since there's such a huge range of stories to pick from, any number of tiny things can turn them away. Your blurb is organized pretty well, but it's not quite as snappy as I think it has the potential to be. For one, you could cut out some unnecessary info and words to make everything flow. For example, you don't need to be saying things like 'an ordinary archivist named Aureus is forced', because it would be a lot smoother to take out some extra words and just say 'ordinary archivist Aureus is forced...' In addition, 'named' is a bit of a telling word, so I always try to find away around it.
I really like the way you introduce the characters in the blurb and how you set up the conflict, but you have a great opportunity to do a title callback at the end to really make it all nice and tied up. Something like 'Aetheria is falling' could be your last line. I also think you don't need your last paragraph to come out of the story and take a step back because it's a little cold. Still, I like the content, and you could just rephrase it to be 'The end of the world can be very personal' or something.
LOGISTICS 14/15
Commas
I found you. I found the writer who doesn't make comma errors. You freak me out.
Punctuating imbedded action tags
I always find the imbedded action tag to be the one that writers always learn last or never learn at all. It's a pretty niche little rule, but if you have an action tag in between two sets of dialogue, you actually need two em dashes outside the quotations (my em dashes don't look quite right here because I'm writing on Wattpad; yours are formatted right in your story). Here's what you did in this situation:
"Possibly...possibly--" he cleared his throat, "high necromancy combined..."
So corrected it looks like this:
"Possibly...possibly"--he cleared his throat--"high necromancy combined..."
Some writers don't like the way this looks (me) so they tend to avoid it at all costs. In my case, I only use it if I really want to outline how the dialogue is being interrupted by an action. If you want it to be less obnoxious about it but insist on having it there, just put the action tag in with a dialogue tag, like this:
"Possibly...possibly," he said as he cleared his throat, "high necromancy combined..."
I hate this too (I hate a lot of things) because the tag just feels weird. I tend to do this instead:
