Feedback Wanted (1,829 words)
Hi, all, I'm here kindly requesting some feedback on my chapter 1. In full transparency, I've written this book in its entirety, and I am not happy with first version. This is a re-write of chapter 1, and I think it's better, but I haven't had any outside feedback and I'm full of more doubt than you can imagine. I'm not searching for anything too specific or nit picky right now, just for some broader answers.
Is it a coherent opening? Does it pull you into the world in a way that makes sense, or is it too vague and/or confusing? Too much or too little? etc
Would you, as a reader, be interested in continuing reading after this chapter? Are there questions about the world and/or plot you want answered? Is it too boring of an opening to care about?
Am I even headed in the right direction? God, lately I just feel like I'm so stuck in my own bubble, I don't know if anything I'm creating is actually good. I am in desperate need of an outsider's opinion.
Thanks in advance for anyone who takes time to read or comment <3
transcript of the text here for anyone who doesn't like to read off of screenshots:
Chapter 1
“Bathe yourself in his silver light,” a man shouts from the street corner, voice carrying over the small crowd gathered around him. “Accept him into your heart and give your all to our Lord Spirit!”
Kieran rolls his eyes, ducks his head, and hurries past. For once, the constant ringing in his ears is a blessing, giving him something else to focus on. It’s been nearly two weeks that he’s been in Peoria but he may never get used to the absurd amount of worship happening everywhere all the time. With a church on every other street and rogue preachers in between, it’s impossible to walk out of the house without catching a sermon.
Back home in Hostettler, churches were still common, but not to the extent they are here, in the Lord Spirit’s city. People don’t preach in the streets of Hostettler.
Kieran quickens his pace and weaves through the residents milling about, his destination the main church of Peoria. The Holy and Righteous Temple of the First Disciple. It’s a mouthful of a name but Kieran has come to learn that most people just call it The Temple.
It’s a beautiful cathedral, standing tall in the center of the city, in what used to be a vacant plateau but is now a dense city of at least a hundred thousand. It’s a beautiful mix of wood and limestone with high reaching spires, elegant arches and sturdy columns, artfully carved statues of the Lord Spirit set into various alcoves. It is admittedly stunning in the midday sun, the dark wood soaking up the day’s warmth, the polished, glittering limestone shining back at the world.
A block away, Kieran can already hear the sounds of the Orator preaching inside, the woman’s voice carried through speakers set outside the massive wooden double doors. Though the gathered crowd is dense, they are quiet so as to not miss a word of the sermon. The street preachers keep their impromptu sermons away from the church, and Kieran assumes that’s because he saw a man get arrested for preaching on the church grounds the day after he arrived in Peoria.
There are a lot of laws surrounding their religion, most of them Kieran knows from his previous job as a Votary’s guard. Really, every law can be boiled down to one very important, very enforced rule: Only worship the Lord Spirit on his terms.
A law Kieran breaks every day, but secretly. He follows the rule set out for him and every other resident of the country of Atlas: attend an hour sermon twice a week. He wastes two hours tuning out a sermon he’s heard too many times, then goes home to do his own worship in the privacy of his own home, and it’s not the Lord Spirit he prays to.
But the Lord Spirit is all he sees as he slips through the crowd and towards the front steps of the cathedral. On one hand, he hates coming here, because of the images of the Lord Spirit in every direction he looks – paintings and statues and stained glass murals and woven into tapestries. But on the other hand, Kieran loves and admires this church. It wasn’t originally built to worship the Lord Spirit; it was built by the Lord Spirit to worship their God. At the base of the stone steps is a plaque with a short description memorializing the church as the sacred place it is, along with a picture of what it used to look like. Hardly anything more than a little log cabin. It was originally a humble place for the Lord Spirit alone, when he was just a man, somewhere he could find privacy to commune with their God.
It is no longer the quaint and humble place it once was, and it no longer honors their God.
A familiar sense of duty settles over him and Kieran sends a prayer up to his God. One day, this will be yours again. Perhaps not in his lifetime, but one day, his God will be worshiped in this church as she should be. One day, people will remember the truth, remember who really blesses their lives, and they will worship her once more.
Ready to get his hour over with, Kieran strides up the steps. Just as he’s about to start elbowing his way across the threshold, shouts of, “Make way, make way!” has him stumbling back out of the way and bumping into the people crowded around.
Like it’s been rehearsed, a path clears in front of the doors and down the steps and to the street behind, plenty wide to safely allow two men to come rushing by, between them carrying a stretcher with a man on it. Kieran steals a glance at the man’s face as he passes. His dry cracked lips are barely parted with short, shallow breaths, his pale face ashen and drooping. He blinks lazily, seemingly not seeing a thing. Kieran doubts he’s aware enough to know where he is. He’s seen that look in people’s faces before, during times of drought or starvation, in the faces of people who work themselves to the grave to make a living.
Once they’re past, the crowd converges on the church, blocking the pathway and jamming themselves into the doorway. Kieran elbows his way in, muttering empty apologies where necessary. He could just stand outside and listen to the sermon, be seen on the church’s video monitoring system and get his hour credit, but that other part of his heart tugs him inside. There’s a connection to his God through this temple that cannot be felt anywhere else.
There is not an inch of available sitting room so Kieran finds a place against the back wall sandwiched between strangers. He keeps his arms crossed tight over his chest, trying to take up as little room as possible, and keeping his arm pressed protectively over the outline of his pendant where it hangs at the bottom of his breast bone. A gold and glass sun on a thinly braided gold chain given to him by his mother when he was a child, he only began wearing it regularly a few years ago, right after her death. Now, he only takes it off when he sleeps and bathes, otherwise it’s always hanging around his neck, guarded safely under his shirt.
He focuses on the warmth of the pendant and tries to ignore the animated sermon, but there’s a speaker just above his head making sure he both hears and feels every word.
The woman, donned in a dark blue robe with streams of silver embroidered on the sleeves and skirts, is reciting a passage from the scripture that Kieran has heard many times before.
“When the last board was placed, our beloved Lord Spirit, no more than a mortal man at the time, knelt and said his first prayer within these walls.” She spreads her arms wide as if to embrace the church itself. “In a blaze of silver moonlight, our God manifested before him and spoke to him with the voice of the wind. It was then that the manifestation of our God soaked into him. He accepted the duty given to him by our God: to carry God’s spirit and do its bidding on earth. He is God in mortal form! Our true prophet, the voice and embodiment of our highest power, we praise you!”
She, Kieran thinks. He’s one of few who believe their God is a person, a woman. He’s one of few who don’t believe that she’s in the body of the Lord Spirit. He doesn’t look to the Lord Spirit as their prophet or God incarnate. It’s undeniable he was blessed at one point – the feats of power he’s performed can’t be ignored – but he hasn’t done anything of the sort in a very long time. Every story of power is a piece of history and Kieran hasn’t witnessed him do a damned thing for as long as he’s been alive.
Kieran, and the small religion faction he belongs to, hypothesizes that the Lord Spirit lost his connection to his God given power long ago and has just been faking it since, all the while pushing their God aside to put himself in her place. And the worst part is, it’s working.
“We sing our praise to our Lord Spirit,” the crowd says as one before an organ starts to lead them into a hymn.
It’s in a high key and the voices around Kieran threaten to put the ringing in his ears out of business. Like needles to his ear drums, their screeching voices pierce him with every horribly sung word.
O, Lord Spirit, I praise your name
Voice of God Incarnate
My one and only prophet
Infinite is your power
Everlasting is your reign
O, Lord Spirit, who rules his kingdom
With the light of God's own grace
Blessed be his name
Eternal burns his flame
O Lord Spirit, I praise your name
Kieran breathes a sigh of relief when it’s over but barely has a moment to feel that relief before everyone drops to their knees simultaneously. It’s hard to find a place to kneel with the shuffling bodies and he ends up just crouched down with his back to the wall.
The crowd speaks as one again, this time a chant rather than a song. “We kneel and submit ourselves to you, Lord Spirit, and offer all we have so that you may shine your favor on us. We thank you and we praise you.”
Kieran follows suit when the crowd stands – or sits, for those with seats. Ten men emerge from two doors behind the altar, woven baskets in their hands as they go around to collect everyone’s offerings. Money and jewelry and anything else worthy of being offered to their Lord Spirit is dropped into the baskets. Thankfully, there are enough people around, reaching over one another to fill the baskets, that Kieran easily gets looked over and gets away with not giving anything.
They don’t deserve his hard earned money. Where does it even go? Directly into the Lord Spirit’s pockets? It clearly doesn’t go back into the communities. Kieran experienced the poverty and destruction in Hostettler first hand, and working under Votary David, he saw how difficult it was to get any help from the Lord Spirit or his churches.
The Orator picks up the sermon again as the men continue to collect from the congregation and Kieran lets his mind wander instead of listening to her. The voice from the speaker above his head turns into a featureless drum of noise and the faces around him blur into a sea of colors and his thoughts turn to dreams of the future. A life free of the pain of his past, a life of his own.
It’s all in front of him and he just has to reach out and take it.
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