[2217] Vainglory (again)

I am once again asking strangers to carry my writing 🔫.

Ripping this summary right from my last post: Vainglory is a not!space opera set in a secondary fantasy world tech'd to the early 1900s with flying dreadnought airships and a lot of talking. There's also a not!Communist revolution brewing in the imperial capital, a violent secret police plotline, and an order of magic-science wizards at war with an order of child soldier-prophets.

In its current form, it's a(n amateur) medley of a bunch of stuff I liked: China Miéville's cool as fuck industrial fantasy science, a little Pierce Brown (specifically Golden Son's political arcs), Wolfhound Empire's pseudo-fascist spystate and its counter-revolutions, annnnd a spiritual sprinkling of Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

OK, I'm a little sheepish about being back so soon (it's only been ~2.5 months), but I am honest to god CloseTM to the finish line. I've done yet another considerable tune-up on the finer details of this story, including a violent(ish) restructuring of the opening. I still have to close out the last few chapters, but I have a bounty of notes and I'm pretty much on target to have a 100% finished, proofread, and edited manuscript by Christmas.

However, I've got a few versions of this intro still floating around and I thought I'd put this one up for crit, especially since I might submit some version or another to a local writing thingie and I want to survey the room a bit. This one, compared to last time, frontloads some of the more important world bits while pushing back some of the other PoVs, as a common critique was "too many names too fast." I brought back a controversial scene (the entire second half of this chapter), but I'm not sure whether I like it. That leads me to three main guiding questions, if you want 'em:

• 1. How is character empathy and investment? Obviously this is a semi-short piece split between two PoVs, so I'm not expecting anyone to fall in love here. Just a general vibecheck on narrative empathy, too much, too little, etc.
• 2. Does the Matilda section feel like it belongs? Does it carry its weight in wordcount, or does it feel a little fluffy? The only other currently written alternative is meeting her for the first time after the events of the chapter go down.
• 3. Too much world, too little character? How's the balance there? That was the big through-line last time, so I did an edit focused on pumping some early life into characters. Unfortunately not a lot of that is shown here because this is only 1 of the 6 actual PoVs now, but still.

Of course, I'm also very open to total freeform crits and all the usual suspects too. I definitely want to hear about prose/style, as I know I have kind of a heavier "voice" to begin with, so if anything feels too choppy or thick, let me know!

Anyways, I got a lot of good feedback here last time and I'm... cautiously optimistic I'm on the right track figuring out how to tell this ever-expanding story. Publishable? Probably not for a long time. Fun to write? Certainly.

All that to say: I don't think I'm going to post again soon (unless this is a trainwreck and I feel the burning urge to resubmit something else), but I'd like to put some feelers out for betas. u/OldestTaskmaster, your soul belongs to me (thank you so much good lord), but I'd love to have 2-3 more, so if the synopsis and/or this first chapter interests you, That Is Good Please Talk To Me. Depending on what you're cooking with, I'm willing/able to do a swap, but it's probably best for both of us if it's SFF.

Also worth noting, this wouldn't be until Dec or early Jan, but I'm weird about posting too much on here, so figured I'd do it in one swoop with this post!

Thank you in advance!

Submission: [2209] Vainglory - Chapter One

Crit: [3724] (Rewrite) Undecided Title, Climactic Chapter.