Thanks for posting. I hope this helps or at least gives you something other than the loving spouse response. I am not a great writer or an expert of any kind. Feel free to totally disregard.

Overall It’s nice. I like it. Okay seriously. I tend to read mostly fantasy, science fiction, and weird. I love airships and all sort of things. Lots of promise here, but the language and writing bogged it down. Funny enough, usually it is world building that slaughters things for me on initial reads. Something about this story read to me like the introduction to a console RPG game, where my character has to “learn” the game mechanics in an epic start (ship crashing).

Characters We have Masilda and Zoe. Masilda is fighting a fever of unknown origin and is not quarantined from the rest onboard. Zoe reads like Newt from Aliens. To little really going on to get a fully feeling for either character at this stage. Masilda is definitely coming across as a good, caring person—but not really enough “meat” here to get a feel for either of them beyond quick caricature.

Setting Cloud Warden. Given the name, my mind went for airship or dirigible kind of thing. I liked the name, but I really did not get a full feel if this is supposed to be a claustrophobic below deck tight quarters of little light or some airy pleasure cruiser. Uncertain also if this is tech or magic holding this thing afloat, but it seems people can be above deck and in flight.

Hook The ship is crashing. The SHIP is CRASHING. But, I don’t fully get the impact (ba dum dum) of that until the end of the chapter despite foreshadowing it fairly obviously through out that something “bad” is happening.

Tension Despite the setting, the tension did not really grab me. Masilda has no real interest in catching up with Zoe. Her motivation is to comfort a crying child, right? But, I have no information at that point. For all I know, the kid is scared and hurt, but they are on a luxury cruiser with her rich noble family partying just a few meters away and Masilda is a goodie goodie two shoes. It could be an introduction of upstairs/downstairs class dynamics or creepy adult interact with someone who is not their kid. Not knowing the culture or having a real feel for those things yet, I am stuck using my cues, which led to me thinking about Newt. Honestly, though, it did not read with that sense of urgency. She is able to quickly scamper away seemingly okay and why wouldn’t she run away from the feverish stranger she was probably told to avoid (eg convalescing person —don’t go near).

Flow/Pace Your sentences are varied, but your verbiage is definitely fairly passive and distancing. So, although, the sentences flowed, the pace dragged.

Take the whole first paragraph, it is trying to set this idea of lapses in time with a “struggle to recall.” The character herself is in a distant sort of place. Also, seems rather off that she has been left “incoherent” but all we see of her is her responding and communicating appropriately. Shaken awake. Feels okay. Goes to investigate. Sees a kid needing comfort. Bodies also don’t seem incoherent to me. It feels like two thoughts: her body is unresponsive and atrophied while her mind is having trouble processing?

The word choices read fairly distracting at times even though none of them were say hyper specific jargon. Similar to incoherent reading weird to me, “the sway of the ship translate through her hammock” or “dismount manoeuvre.” Translate works, but reads odd giving the more common meaning of language and not say the more physics test question of moving from one thing to another. If there is a metaphor of a linen hammock swinging on a ship causing miscommunications in its sway, I did not really get it. Dismount manoeuvre is just redundant, but feels like playing at some sort of humor to the scene as if there is an elaborate Masilda triple-lache, but did read heavy and dragged at the pace.

Blocking I would prefer more dynamic fast paced wording for the action, BUT I totally followed what was happening and had a feel for the movement. So, even if the floor dropping away because of turbulence read with little urgency, I understood what was happening. Sometimes when reading too much fast paced urgent action, the blocking does get lost or could be even worse an overdone exposition train. The blocking here worked.

Plot Recover person wakes up aboard a ship being attacked. Trying to figure out what is happening, she comes across a scared girl who runs away to her death. The ship is crashing.

Descriptions I did not feel overly bogged down or pulled in by the descriptions of things. Two things that did stand out were the descriptions used to describe the hammock and the tremors/vibrations. Cumbersome? Things read cluttered and a little bit muddied. Calling it a suspended bed struck me as odd. Also, some of the words could have used more of a reference frame for me:

“The tremors were harsh in comparison. The vibrations travelled through the ship, down the cords of the fabric suspending her hammock and into her body.”

Versus: "These tremors were harsh. Their vibrations travelled through the ship, down the cords, through her hammock, and into her body.”

These tremors are different. It is their vibrations. Still, ‘travelled’ is ho-hum compared to say shook or something more dynamic. ‘Down the cords of the fabric suspending her hammock and into her body’ is also a drag to the pace of something that is basically a violent percussive force ripping though. Take this parallel: The lightning was bright. The thunder travelled through the building, down the bricks of the wall holding her Murphy bed and into her body. It’s overly descriptive in process without a strong payoff for me as a reader. I don’t get more of an understanding of tremor A versus tremor B.

The descriptions got a little bit wonky at the end. Ice being compared to a pairing knife ok...some great big swordy sword got a bit odd.

Also, how does a blade of bone dragging across wood sound different from another type of blade? I think the words were trying to go for that splintering (?) in the way both wood and bone snap, but was lost by that specificity.

Passivity/Psychic Distance I personally think more than some of the odd word choices, what really took me out of Masilda’s immediacy with little benefit to the action or understanding her motivation, was the unnecessary clauses and passive distancing in the words. It hid the plot with no reward.

Lots of ‘was’ and ‘were.’ She felt, she realised. Clauses within clauses. “[T]owards the stairs that gave access to the flight deck, alert for any more changes in the ships’ bearing.” Why not toward the flight deck stairs? What does the ‘alert clause’ really do? Her focus is on the stairs and the child, right? ‘Without incident’ is wholly unnecessary given the time span. This is not her wandering a few weeks in a desert. This is her “padding” her way through a ship that is tilting.

What the excess clauses do is make me as a reader gloss over the terrifying urgency of an imminent ship wreck. Without incident? The whole world is off its axis.

The girl called Zoe screaming? She heard Zoe screaming. Why set the distance in the immediacy of the scene?

“[M]ultiple puncture wounds. The weapon of their demise…” just clogs the works. Devastation greeted her. Bodies bled all over the deck from shards of ice ranging from slender slivers to jagged chunks. Don’t use that, but bring those thoughts together as opposed to filler between them. If its a hailstorm of ice blades impaling (already understood from her at the doorway), then we already get “multiple puncture wounds” and “weapons of their demise” is just clunky. But, worse, it takes us away from the scene. Even if it is trying to foreshadow that this is a deliberate magical assault of some kind, it stops the pace and distances the reader from the death and destruction.

“The pause to observe…” and then later “Had she been standing in the doorway, or further…” are totally things that take me as a reader out of the face that ice shrapnel just ripped through parts of the craft.

The accumulation of all these things ruins the immediacy and threat for me as a reader, which is directly what you are asking: does it grab me? keep me engaged? No. Does the plot? As it were here yes. I love the idea of an airship being attacked by an ice weapon, magic, or tech. Would I read further? With this current style of writing, I would probably not unless a friend who really enjoyed the plot recommended it for me to read.

First Impressions

My favorite part of this story was the reveal at the end that the setting is a skyship. It recontextualized the entire experience so far and left me thinking about this short excerpt even after I was done reading it. I don't think this would be as interesting if you stretched this scene out longer or waited longer for the reveal so if you rework this seen I wouldn't sit on the reveal too much. The placement is natural and interesting, although unconventional (some people may not appreciate being "tricked"). For me at least, I loved it.

I found the prose at times to be stunted. It felt very play by play, almost like I was watching a movie or tv show. This is okay in small doses, as obviously the reader needs to understand what is happening, but you need to be careful not to have a scene become a list. "They did this, then they did this, then they did this, etc." gets boring very fast. A good way to break this up is to play into the strengths of the medium which are two-fold, internal thoughts, and non visual senses.

specific criticism

She felt the sway of the ship translate through her hammock.

This is one of my favorite lines of the excerpt. I like that it establishes both a swaying ship and Masildas position at the same time, and it is concise.

The following paragraph is also strong in my opinion. In fact the entire introduction where you establish the setting gave me a clear picture of the ships galley, and an understanding of Masildas condition.

Though cold from her damp clothes, she felt fine, healthy even. The fever must have broken through the night, she thought.

I would rework this line. It is implied that "she thought" the fever had broken so its inclusion stunts the flow of this portion. Especially because it is established that she "felt fine" in the previous sentence. This creates a redundancy.

Five weeks aboard the Cloud Warden had taught her a few tricks for staying on her feet

I would identify exposition as one of your strengths. It is worked into the prose naturally. and never feels like I'm being slapped over the head with a pile of information.

It was followed by a scratching sound, something like a blade dragging across the wooden deck - if the blade was made of bone.

I think this part is a microcosm of one of the most consistent problems I identified in the excerpt. The word "something" adds nothing to this sentence, or to the excerpt in general. It would have the same meaning with or without it. And I saw several other instances of words without purpose in the excerpt. It important that every single word has a purpose in your writing, because the reader will subconsciously pick up on you wasting their time.

Now perhaps contradictory to what I just said, I felt there wasn't enough flowery language in this excerpt. The descriptions were often dull, not because I didn't understand them, or gain a clear picture in my head of the galley, but because they were boring to read. And that doesn't necessarily mean you need more metaphors, or need to over-encumber the excerpt with a lengthy description of every corner. But it could use more exciting language.

The air went cold, ice forming along the wooden boards lining the stairwell.

This is a good moment to describe my description gripe. This is perhaps the most exciting thing that has happened yet, and its dull. I would write something like "Masilda suddenly felt the air go cold. Her breathe puffing out in front of her. Ice snaked into the galley and began to descend down, eager to consume the ship and Masilda in it." Now I'm not a professional writer so take everything I say with a grain of salt, but I think that is a much more visual and urgent image.

Tension

I've identified one narrative issue that I don't think can be overcome unless you rework a small portion of this scene.

Through it all, she heard a child crying. It was the little girl, the doe-eyed waif she'd overheard someone call Zoe. She has no idea who I am

So, Masilda is the main character of this story, at least from what I can tell, and because of that I feel absolutely no stakes in the action. I highly doubt, that the main character will die before we get to 2000 words. So what is at stake, well Zoe of course. But here is my issue, Masilda overheard someone call this girl Zoe; Zoe doesn't know Masilda. They have zero connection.

I don't want to be crass but frankly I don't care about Zoe. If she lives or dies, as far as the story is concerned shes a crying kid that dies after 800 words or so. I think this scene would benefit from Masilda and Zoe already having a relationship. You don't need to linger on that relationship and write another chapter about them together but maybe Zoe has been taking care of Masilda. Maybe they have some sort of bond prior to this catastrophic event. This would heighten the tension and reintroduce stakes into the scene.

Words for the wise

This is my first critique, and I'm not a professional. I read Grauzev8's post and saw that they disagree with what I wrote in some ways. I just want to be very clear that this is the opinion of an average reader, with a tenuous grasp of language conventions (don't ask me to edit for grammar). Still I hope some of what I said was helpful and not overly brutal. Also, this is the first time I've used bold or quotes on reddit so I'm praying the formatting works.

Left a good number of comments under 'fake name'.

Highest level:

I think the bones of what you have here - woman comes to after being sick, encounters a mysterious child, child & everyone else gets killed by suspiciously aggressive ice, then the airship fully fails - are totally workable as a first scene.

There's some good conceptual scene-setting there (airships! danger! This Is A Book That Kills 6yo's On Screen!), and some good open questions for the reader (Who the fuck is our POV character, and how'd she end up on the ship? Does the little girl matter beyond 'hey something Bad happened? Was this ice-tastrphe totally natural, or is there more going on here?)

Just in terms of those bones, I think the only complaint I have is really more of a warning - if the kid's death isn't important to the story later, even if just for Masilda's mental state as things go on, then this is going to feel a bit gratuitous. Maybe that's the vibe you're going for, but I think "dead kid!" runs the risk of feeling a bit cheap if you don't play your cards right.

More tactically:

I think there's definitely some issues here that you can work on.

PACING - parts of this felt really unncessarily slow. Slow can be fine, for sure, but IMO you have to sort of buy your way into being slow by either 1. doing something else interesting with the slower pacing or 2. contrasting that slower pacing with what the reader has been experiencing.

I don't think what you're spending words on is interesting / important enough to count in the first bucket (its mostly repeating things, or giving the reader logistical details that dont really matter. Will highlight the clause making sure we knew that the stairs change direction after the landing the cowering child is on in the latter bucket. We just don't need to know that, so when I hit it it's really a headscratcher.

If you want to keep the first section slow so that you can speed it up once shit starts hitting the fan, think I'd try to find ways of using that space to either have more things happen, give us more details that actually distinguish your setting (don't really know anything but 'Airship!' at this point), or flesh out your POV character a bit (more on that below).

REPETITION - Maybe most tactically, I found your writing a lot more repetitive than I needed it to be. This was true at the most granular level - verbs showing up repeatedly in quick succession, 2/3 sequential sentences starting with "the girl" - to slightly larger scope things, like finding 5+ ways to say 'the ship shook' on the first page.

For the first class of issues, would encourage you to reread with an eye towards repeated phrases and words, and just think about ways to restructure things such that you don't have to repeat yourself, or just find other words with similar meanings.

For the conceptual repetitions, would just think about whether each piece of info you're giving us is telling us something new and distinct from what has come before. If not, odds are you don't need it.

CHARACTERIZATION - Don't think you've managed much on the characterization front in what we have here. That might be fine, though I'll flag that the bits we do have strike me as a bit odd. IE your narrator calls a small child 'dear' twice, which says 'older, matronly', but then only starts getting anxious not when she's almost killed by falling ice, but after that when things go quiet.

That'd be a hugely nonstandard stress response, which to me says something in the realm of "seriously fucked up" or "amygdala dysfunction". Unless that's really what you're going for, would think through what your character's reactions to all this would plausibly be a little more, and adjust this accordingly.

I'd suggest a progression something like bleary confusion-->disorientation & thought gathering --> concern for child --> frustration at inability to stand, new injury, being slower than child --> sheer terror at almost dying --> comes down off it a bit, doesn't want to move but motivates tentatively --> post-adrenal almost dreamy surreal state, makes the ice situation weirder --> shocked out of it via concern for dead kid

Or something like that. Think maybe the important thing here is 1. just the basics, the responses have to make sense in context and 2. if you DO want to do more characterization than you're currently doing, showing your character proactively deciding things ("her heart was still pounding and the part of her brain that only spoke in capital letters told her STAY. HERE., but she forced herself to take the next step" or whatever) will give us more of a sense of who she is.

Hopefully some of that's helpful - lemme know if there's anything I could be clearer about!

I'm running around today and only have my phone but I read your first crit and it's quite good esp for a first crit. I approved your submission.

First Impressions

Uhm, I liked it well enough. I liked the reveal at the end. However, man, you are verbose as hell. Like, it was very distracting in the beginning and I wouldn't have continued reading it after the first page. I was also not 100% sure what was going on. The action was seemingly random and I found myself having to reread to understand what was happening.

Mechanics

I didn't see glaring grammatical errors but this is a whooping size 19 font. Is there a reason for that?

You use the most complicated way possible to say things. I really think you should re-read this sentences by sentence and decide if the large amounts of words you are using, actually add any value to the story. So they help us understand the character or move forward the plot? Or are you just flexing your vocabulary skills. Por ejemplo,

She swung her legs over the side of her suspended bed and stretched out a toe to steady herself on the floorboards before committing her full weight to the dismount manoeuvre.

Does this sentence, need to be here? Is it just as affective if you say 'She swung her legs over the side of her suspended bed and stretched a toe out to steady herself. Five weeks aboard the Cloud Warden had taught her a few tricks for staying on her feet. This was one of them."

Does the bit about the full weight dismount maneuver add anything to our comprehension of what is happening and why? I would go through this and look for details that are not needed because you'll probably find a lot.

Another example:

She turned to see a twilight sky through the open door at the top of the stairs, the angle not affording her a view of the action on the deck.

Is it important that we know that she can't see whats happening on the deck? Or is that information implied because she only describes the sky?

I've also highlighted some areas where you are telling instead of showing.

Character

Yeah who is Masilda? We don't know who she is or what she wants. We don't know why she was on the ship. 1000 words in and you haven't given us a clue about this main character. Keep the skyship a mystery if that's what you want, but you can't keep Masilda a mystery or this story is going to get yeeted into the trash.

I greatly disagree with your decision to start in the middle of this action scene without giving info on the character because I don't care about her. I'm not hooked by the action because, I don't understand the stakes of the action. Should I care that Masildas ship is falling? I can't because, what id Masilda is a racist child trafficker? You're giving us nothing and so I am feeling nothing.

Explore ways you can use elements in the setting or the prose itself to show us who Masilda is, personality-wise and of course, literally, giving us information about this woman and why we should care.

Like, I dont even physically know what she looks like. We've got some other characters too, the little girl Zoe who is a plot device. Since we don't know anything about her or the small dead boy, I feel literally nothing when they die.

Plot

The ship is being attached by a space monster. That's cool. It liked Treasure Plant so it's something I'd wanna read. However, the action was a little confusing. I had to read it a few times but I think once you cut down on the unnecessary details, it'll make more sense.

There isn't much plotwise for me to talk about. She wakes up, there is a crisis, and she is sad by looking at dead kids.

Conclusion

I may come back to add more. Work suddenly picked up in the middle of me writing this but I think it's a great start and airships are awesome. However, the choice to not develop the character in the first chapter did not pay off for me and would have discouraged me from reading as I am unable to get 'hooked' by action which invovled a character with no motivation and stakes I don't understand.

So, this was easy enough to read and enjoyable. The overwhelming feeling that I had while reading your intro was that the content itself was good, but that it wasn't delivered as well as it could be. It felt very much YA to me, so I'll try to tailor my feedback with that in mind. The ending worked for me as well, it's punchy.

Rhythm

I noticed the rhythm was hitting a drumbeat far too often. Right at the start you have two sentences of the same length, followed closely after by two sentences that both start in the same way (with 'Her x was'). You need more sentence variation. There are numerous ways to write a sentence, don't limit yourself! The easiest way to change things up are to simply invert your sentences.

I want to point out when the rhythm is good as well. The following two paragraphs nail it:

The tremors were harsh in comparison. The vibrations travelled through the ship, down the cords of the fabric suspending her hammock and into her body.

She sat up. Though cold from her damp clothes, she felt fine, healthy even. The fever must have broken through the night, she thought. She swung her legs over the side of her suspended bed and stretched out a toe to steady herself on the floorboards before committing her full weight to the dismount manoeuvre.

The variation here is much better: you've got passive, active, different wording, and varied sentence length. But more importantly than that, you've properly spaced your paragraphs to account for subject change, and psychic distance properly increases in the second; in other words, there is clear forward motion that is easy to follow as a reader. (I also want to mention that you follow a similar cadence starting from the paragraph that begins 'Following the explosion....', and then into 'Masilda placed...'. This also has good rhythm and forward motion!)

The next two paragraphs also seem properly spaced to me, with good content and the right amount of internalization/exposition (at least to my ear), then switching to character action. But there are punctuation problems that slow the rhythm, and you slip back into drumbeat prose at the end with two more instances of repeated 'Her x did thing'.

As one example of how the punctuation could be edited in the third paragraph (of the 4 I'm talking about) to give a smoother rhythm, consider:

Five weeks aboard the Cloud Warden had taught her a few tricks for staying on her feet -- this was one of them. It would have worked too, if not for a third and far more violent tremor that caused the entire room to drop away beneath her.

Still, it could be better -- that last sentence is a little verbose. Which brings me to my next point...

Verbosity/Word Choice

As others have pointed out, I too noticed a few cases of word soup. It's pretty common in first drafts, so not too much to fret over imo. To not to beat a dead horse too much, I'll just point out a few examples:

When the whole ship shook again, she realised that a similar tremor is what had woken her.

You can cut that a similar tremor is; its redundant on the basis that the reader is smart enough to infer the information.

if not for a third and far more violent tremor that caused

I think this is another example of something that could be spiced up with more specific language. I think comparisons are easy to overdo, often running the risk of being too verbose, and as such are a prime target for cleanup on rewrites.

probably not the best way to write it, but a quick edit: 'if not for an even more'

Robbed of her foothold, Masilda went over awkwardly.

'went over' is very bland! Spilled, careened, rocketed, etc etc. Also, went over what? Look to use words that conjure a mental image whenever possible.

Shards of blue-white ice shot through the open door, piercing the wood like a hail of arrows.

It doesn't improve the paragraph much, but 'blue-white' should be cut. It's redundant on the basis that it's the normal color of ice, and will automatically be what people picture in their heads. 'Of ice' can also be cut, as its implied by shards. Also be careful using the same word again so soon, 'shard' starts to feel drumbeat-y.

The top door had swung closed again due to the angle of the ship as it described its continued turn. The door was peppered with holes, and wet as the ice began to thaw. Masilda pushed it open.

This entire paragraph can be boiled down to: 'At the top, Masilda pushed open the door that was now peppered with holes.'

Should also attach to the last para to improve pacing, which brings me to my next point...

Pacing

Similar to rhythm, you have a tendency to write short paragraphs (more importantly, all of them are the same length). Short paragraphs aren't bad per say, in fact they're often recommended for action scenes because they're punchier, but some of them are just flat out too short. For example:

She heard the Captain calling out, his words indistinct through the wooden ceiling.

Hardly warrants its own paragraph.

As a general rule whenever you give weighty information, make sure to spend time on it! Novel's exist in emotional time; if your character's mind is changing, it needs words. Tension should get more word count; summary, less. Let me call attention to the final paragraphs:

Masilda eyes fell on the smallest body. With her plain cotton shift and matted brown hair, the collapsed child looked like a small pile of laundry.

Masilda staggered towards the girl named Zoe, hopeful that she might still be alive. She made it a few steps before the ship listed further and began to plummet.

This is big impact, but it feels like it comes too fast. It feels like it's just one thing happening after another, since the first paragraph didn't get enough time/writing. This further contributes to that sort of drumbeat feel of the piece.

Ok. This is my first time critiquing here. The concept is definitely very high quality. A woman fighting a mysterious fever, a child without any background on origin. What I felt that you could definitely work on characterization here. There are only two characters in the story so you need to make readers care for them enough but I felt that they are not very interesting and I couldn't connect to neither Masilda nor Zoe.

The descriptions were surely top notch but I couldn't get the sense of plot from them. There was a vagueness all around. I felt that there was a lack of tension. The overuse of description bogged down the impact. We know the ship is crashing but the sense of urgency and desperation is not coming across as it should.

Also, I felt there was a lack of unique specificity in the story.