Title: The Ellyrium Scepter by Saramitra_
Source: ELGANZA, INC. | AWARDS by TheCieloCommunity

Category: Science Fiction
Mature: N (death, religion, violence)
LGBTQIAP+: N

Status: Complete

Special note (judging): I had three books in this category, and the other judges (TJDW1989 and SSears90) had three books each.

Result: 63/100

Clicking the "External Link" button below the "Continue to next part" button will take you straight to the book, or click the link in the inline comments here. → 

The author requested I post the feedback early so she could review it, so I've wiped the scores and will add them back in when the award results are announced for this category.

*****

Rubric:
- Title: 5
- Book cover: 5
- Description (blurb): 5
- Plot & storytelling: 15
- Character development: 10
- Writing style: 10
- Grammar: 10
- Originality & creativity: 10
- Emotional impact: 10
- Pacing & structure: 5
- Accuracy (if non-fiction): 5
- Overall enjoyment & engagement: 10
Total: 100

*****

Total: 63/100

Title: 5/5
Love it! I get fantasy/magic vibes from it, but I can see sci fi/alien, too. Either way, it's a title that grabs attention for sure.

Cover: 5/5
This cover is gorgeous. I love the blues, and while I'm not quite sure if it's an alien hand coming up from the bottom to hold the scepter, or if that's the staff of the scepter, I don't really need to know. It's intriguing. Similar thing with whatever's going on above the glowing scepter, but the uncertainty adds to the mystery. Your choice of font, size, color, and placement is all perfect, and I love the little flower watermark in the middle (I assume that's what it is). It goes really well with the rest of the cover. It wouldn't be a bad idea to bump up the font size for your name and the subtitle at the top, as they're a bit hard to make out from the title page without squinting, but otherwise, I love this.

Blurb: 3/5
Since the Bloody Summer contest is over, I'd recommend moving that note about this being a contest entry to the bottom of the blurb with the prompt info. It takes up valuable space in the short preview of the blurb, and you need to use that space wisely to hook potential readers.

There are a lot of single-line sentences. All of them, actually. Every paragraph break introduces a break in thought and implies a change in subject, so this makes the blurb really clunky. I'd recommend putting these sentences into paragraphs, so there's a good flow when reading them. I think the first three lines all go together well, so that could be your first paragraph.

The next section feels weird to me. I like the fourth line, but the following four lines feel like you're giving away way too much of the story. It's only one chapter long, so I have to wonder how many important plot details are here, and giving away too much actually removes some of the mystery you need to draw readers in. Short and sweet can have a much sharper hook than long and wordy. So, after reading and rereading this several times, I think I'd cut the lines between "Welcome to" and "To survive," put those two sentences in their own paragraph, and then cut "Trust is a currency," ending the blurb with the question set apart in its own paragraph. And I'd cut "Read to find more," since that feels a little too much like a TV ad to me.

But your grammar is pretty solid, although the commas might be a little iffy here or there (they're such a pain). The content of this blurb is definitely interesting, though, so I'm curious where this goes.

Plot & storytelling: 8/15
This is an interesting plot, but the story feels a bit bare-bones to me. And that's probably more to do with working to meet the requirements and deadlines for the Bloody Summer contest when you first created this than anything else. If you ever wanted to, you could expand upon the timeline, add more details, and probably split this over a handful of chapters instead of just one.

As with the blurb, there are way too many single-sentence lines and far too few full paragraphs. That breaks the flow of the story and also makes transitions difficult. It makes it seem like everything happens right away, even though there are indicators of time passing in the text. For instance, Jake worked a full day before he opened the door. That got lost in the story, for me at least, so I had to scroll back up to find that, because I thought he opened the door immediately. Grouping sentences that all flow from the same topic set by the first line of a paragraph would really help here.

Jake makes a lot of observations that don't make sense based on the available information. Why does he think the aliens stopped aging after 33? That's a really specific number. Saying he thinks they stopped aging in their 30s would be more realistic. Similarly, why does he assume the person with the Scepter is the Duke? Is Jake British, or does he come from a culture with titles of nobility? What about the year 1500? How did he come up with that? There's nothing in the text to indicate this world seems like it's in the past. Quite the contrary. It all seems pretty futuristic to me, with the pop-up stats above everybody's heads.

Also, the whole part about the Scepter being a person is really tricky. Since a scepter is a staff, and the Scepter carries a staff, it's just weird. Maybe saying he's the Scepter Bearer would make more sense, although this is a stylistic choice based on the world you've created. I'd definitely recommend adding more clarification about this earlier in the story.

What were the two people doing when the truth bar went down? It says Jake regretted looking in their direction, and they were engaged in an activity, but it doesn't say what activity that was. There's something vague about them getting up from that position. My first fill-in-the-blank assumption was that the people were in a physical fight because it sounded like they were angry at each other when they left, but then the line about getting up from that position made me think maybe they were engaged in sexual activity. I don't think either assumption is right, but I have no idea what they were doing, and that seems like a pretty important detail.

The alien's appearance is another detail that's important to note right away. You mention the bland color of their clothing, but beyond that, it sounds like they just look like tall, androgynous humans. Then, when Jake finds out about the outcasts from society, he's told about the skin color differences between the outsiders and the townspeople. So, we find out the people around him have had blue and silver skin this whole time, and there's been no mention of it until now.

Basically, there are no plot holes, and the plot itself is good. I'd just like more. More details, more information, more explanation.

Character development: 5/10
This is tricky, because there are indications of characteristics throughout the story, but I feel like there isn't enough time or space for adequate exploration. Jake's wife, his children, and all the aliens are just names on a page. Jake himself is a pretty flat character, but he must be very observant, and he must have a broad knowledge base for him to make the assumptions he does based on limited information. Still, his reactions to this new world don't feel natural. He doesn't even think about his family until his second day there, and his initial fear disappears very quickly. His emotional responses are fleeting, and it doesn't take long for him to submit and become subservient to this world. Yes, he's trying to follow the rules so he can have the best chance of getting home, but it feels like he loses himself in this new world and becomes part of it well before the week is even up, and that doesn't fit with the intelligent, curious man at the start of the story. Unless that's a characteristic of this world, too—that it turns people into mindless servants.

Like I said, I think there just needs to be more exploration to make sense of Jake, his reactions, and the changes in him throughout the story.

Writing style: 7/10
I've already talked about the single-sentence lines breaking the flow, and there's an overall rushed feel to this, more so at the end than at the beginning. And I really think that's probably just from writing for a contest. You had to create this complex town with specific attributes, and then you had to write a story that included all of that info, maybe with a word requirement, definitely with a deadline. And you pulled it off. But there's not as much time for editing when you do something like that, and there are awkward phrases throughout, again, more at the end than at the beginning. Some places feel like you had multiple competing ideas in your head that all got put into one jumbled sentence. So, while the overall story is clear, there are places where it's not, and while most concepts within the story are understandable, some are ambiguous.

Grammar: 6/10
The two biggest issues here are verb tense and dialogue. You often separate dialogue tags from dialogue, which shouldn't happen, because dialogue tags are usually incomplete sentences that are actually considered part of the dialogue. That, combined with all the single-sentence lines, makes following conversations sometimes difficult, and that's without considering Jake's thoughts and the aliens' unique dialogue format. It can be hard to tell if a sentence is a dialogue tag or a shorter sentence, and if it's a dialogue tag, does it go with the previous line or the next line?

The very first lines are an example of this. The first line is dialogue, and the second line is the dialogue tag, so it should immediately follow the previous line: "I love you!" Jake said as he hugged his wife, Brenda from behind. (There should also be another comma after "Brenda.")

Dialogue tags directly describe who is speaking and how they're saying it. The sentence following dialogue isn't necessarily a dialogue tag, but a dialogue tag will always follow (or precede) a sentence of dialogue, and that dialogue tag is considered part of the dialogue. It can't stand on its own. If the sentence following dialogue starts with "he said," "she asked," "they shouted," or anything similar to that, it's probably a dialogue tag. And if the dialogue would normally end in a period, but there is a dialogue tag following it, you should change the period to a comma.

Thoughts and alien speech further complicate things. You differentiate thoughts with italics within single quotation marks, and you denote alien speech with italics within colons. I kind of understand why you want to mark the alien speech that way, but it's spoken aloud, and it's in the same language Jake uses, so it's just dialogue. It's not mind speech or a foreign language. It's the same as Jake's dialogue, just spoken by an alien. For that reason, I'd treat it the same as regular dialogue, especially since Jake's dialogue, the aliens' dialogue, and thoughts all occur in close proximity. That gets really confusing.

As for thoughts, I think cutting the single quotation marks and just using italics would help differentiate those even more from the dialogue. But the bigger problem here is the thoughts become past tense at one point, and they continue in past tense throughout the rest of the story. Jake isn't thinking in the past tense. The events of the story may be in the past to the reader, but they're in the present for him, so his thoughts should be in the present tense. Another issue, less common but still problematic, is the occasional slip into the third person. He definitely doesn't think of himself in third person.

Outside of dialogue and thoughts, the narrative is in past tense, but there are occasional slips into present tense, again, more toward the end of the story. Actually, all the grammar issues become more common as the story progresses, which is, I think, part of you writing to a deadline and having less time to edit than usual. I brought up awkward phrasing in the writing style category, and a lot of this is from run-on sentences and excessive wordiness. For instance: "...the countdown had not moved an inch, so hadn't the door." The comma should be a semi-colon, and it would be a lot cleaner and clearer to say "neither had the door."

I pointed out the missing comma after "Brenda" in the first example earlier, and that issue with missing commas on both sides of offset phrases continues through the story. There are also some mixed up prepositions, like "when he looked down on himself," where "at" would work better than "on." Pronouns can be an issue, too, with singular objects getting the plural "they" and plural objects getting the singular "it," and there are some places where the object referred to by the pronoun isn't clear.

Lastly, several questions don't end in question marks, and whenever you use trailing periods, you should use a full ellipsis (...), which is just three periods. No more; no less.

Originality & creativity: 10/10
This is an incredibly original concept. Reading through the town info really impressed upon me how much work you put into creating this town and this plot, and I can safely say I've never seen anything like this. Your descriptions are good, too, although I'd like to see more of them throughout the story.

Emotional impact: 2/10
I had a very tough time connecting with Jake's character for the reasons I've already discussed earlier, and although there are plenty of concepts within the story that should bother me (like self-sacrifice and stoning), they were too distant and flat to really have an effect.

Pacing & structure: 3/5
I think the actual timeline of the story is good, but there needs to be more detail within each time period to make one day stand out from the rest. Jake's home life before he opens the door is a prime example of this. That just seems like filler information to sort of explain how he got to this town, and the sentence about Brenda not remembering who he is immediately after he goes through the door falls flat. It's just too rushed. It's a brief mention that has no bearing on the rest of the story, but you could really tie that in with Jake's waning memory toward the end of the story and make a big thing out of it.

Accuracy (if non-fiction): 5/5
Free points. Yay! 🙂

Overall enjoyment & engagement: 4/10
Like I said, it's a very unique, interesting concept, but it feels skeletal to me. It was hard for me to engage with the characters, and Jake's odd assimilation into the alien society didn't make sense to me. When the story ended without answering the question about his choice, I felt like that wasn't much of a cliffhanger, because he'd been losing himself bit by bit already, and his connection to home had mostly vanished, so it seemed pretty clear to me that he would stay. But that's just my interpretation. I'm sure other people may think it's obvious he's going home. It's an interesting open ending.