MathiasCavanaugh.com

Full disclosure: I received a free copy of The Choosing from Mr. Laszio in exchange for an honest review. 

WARNING! May contain spoilers!

The Choosing, I’m sorry to say, had a very, very difficult time even registering on my scale of 0 to 5 stars.  For the first three quarters of the book, I was seriously considering giving it less than one star.  The short reasoning for this is that this story is simply not on par with what I expect from a fantasy novel.  I think my standards are fairly reasonable.  But honestly, The Choosing feels like an unedited, or only lightly edited, draft of a story.  It is missing so much.  It does tell a story, but stumbles in doing so.  And in my opinion the story is not that solid.
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Dragons have been spreading rumors of The Elvenbane to sew seeds of trouble among the elves who are cruel to their human slaves.  Neither dragons nor elves are native to this world, but while the elves have conquered the native humans, the Dragons have opted to hide in seclusion.  The Elvenbane follows the story Shana, a half-blood outcast raised by the Dragons and the subsequent rise of the half-blood wizards years after the last rebellion had been put down by the Elven Lords.

The story is told from the various points of views of people within the world (third person) but focuses mostly on Shana, Alara (a dragon shaman and Shana’s foster mother), and her son Kemanorel.  The story actually starts with the point of view of Shana’s mother, Serina Daeth who is a concubine of one of the elven lords.  Serina  became pregnant with a forbidden half-blood child and is fleeing for her life at the start of the story. Read more…

I tend to find that when I am working on a novel project it generally takes about 50 pages or 12,000 words before the real basis of the story itself is charted.  Usually by about page 50, about three quarters of what I had originally mapped out as the course of the story has gone into the scrap heap.  Or at least that stuff is stashed away for a possible future story.  Under the Darkened Moon followed this rule which I did not even consider a rule when I started writing it as it was my first project.  However over time the law seems to be holding true.  I have at least 50 pages completed in several other novels and each of them have resulted in 75% of the planned course being discarded or seriously revised.  Be it The Half-Orc Princess, Cry of the Golden Wyvern or Her Lovely Blood, the 12,000 word rule has been a nemesis to the finest laid plans for each of them.  Even a project I just started today as a sort of test story, The Arrow, completely went off in another direction by the 1,500 word mark and is, honestly, better than what I had sketched for it.

I attribute this to the fact that I seem to work better when actually writing than postulating and sketching things out.  I just cannot see how everything fits together until I start actually writing the actual text.  Maybe some other writers can.  But I cannot.  So I am just accepting this and embracing.