Jenna said that she wrote TSS because otherwise she would have had to include a twenty-page info dump at the end of TSC where Leila would have had to explain how she knew everything to Tobias. This is weird because Jenna was as big on outlining as she claims to be then she should have realised this in her outline and fixed it then rather than writing a whole new book. I get why she had to write TSS, to fix the big mess of the ending of TSC, but it never should have been necessary in the first place
So I don't know if you guys noticed, because you guys didn't read the whole thing with your eyes... but legit when Leila sneaks into the tournament place and Cosima is the fake savior, even though this is Leila's POV, the capitalization of She and Her gets put onto Cosima and taken off of Leila...when it shouldn't because she's not the actual savior and we're in the savior's POV, so obviously she wouldn't move the capitalization off herself, that makes zero sense. Even the scene where she's eating peaches with Mr Sad Piece of Toast and she says 'me' it's not capitalized 'Me' like it had been previously. Moreci completely broke the rule she didn't even have to make. Also I think the editor was so done with this shit because I found some capitalized 'She' in there that were for like Delphi or one of her handmaids.
How easy would it have been for the mural to be of her mother/grandmother and have her think about her mother watching over her, and then if her father comes into the scene he can look disdainfully at the mural or something and we can get a comparison with the love and loss Leila feels for her mother and her father being terrible. Or it would’ve been cool if it was a mural of all the past saviors and we know that Leila is a small child and maybe one of her sisters could comment on how she doesn’t really look like an all-powerful savior in comparison. Idk there’s so much world-building/character building you can do with just a mural and idk why Jenna literally refuses haha.
6:45 it kills me that moreci does this thing a second time where she introduces family of mc using vague distant words ("two women" in Tobias's case, "the royal" here) and only then calls them mother/sister/father. like, we're in the third person limited, the words on the page are still character's thoughts even if they're filtrated through 3 person. how often do you think of your family as "women" and "men" and their titles? it's so emersion breaking and for what? element of surprise? in case with leila it doesn't work even theoretically, we *know* that brontes is her father. it's a companion novel. we've read the first book it's a minor thing but it's so clunky and it so clearly shows that jenna doesn't think how her characters would view things, which is extremely bad for limited pov stories
".. a piece she had seen a hundred times yet never ceased to captivate her" is not grammatical. The conjunction "yet" coordinates the two sentences, where the subject of the last sentence (with the verb "ceased") is implicit, referring back to the subject of the previous sentence. As in "Marie was intelligent, yet didn't understand the question." But in Jenna's example, the subject of the first sentence ("..a piece she had seen a hundred times") is "she". So "she" is also understood as the subject of "ceased": "She never ceased to captivate her." But it is *the piece* that should be understood as the subject of "ceased".. (In the first sentence, "the piece" is the direct object, which is extrapolated and placed at the beginning of the sentence). Poor writing.
But I think the piece is the subject. The spots on their own are meaningless, The important thing is the picture. The spots are descriptions of the mural, not the other way around.
@@sharonefee1426 Exactly, "a piece" is meant to be the subject of the second sentence (the subject of "never ceased to captivate her") But it is not the subject of "a piece she had seen a hundred times before". "A piece she had see a hundred times before" is, strictly speaking, a noun phrase, where "a piece" is the head and "[which] she had never seen before" is a relative clause describing "a piece". The subject of this clause is "she". We know this, because "she" has to agree with the verb ("had seen") in person and number, something we can test if we change the tense to present tense: "*she* *has* never seen before" - "*they* *have* never seen before.
I will never read TSS. I was so let down by book 1 that I won't read book 2. I watched Jenna's yt channel a lot and according to her, TSC would have fit my genre preferences perfectly. Dark fantasy romance? COUNT ME IN! But man. It's by far the worst fantasy romance I've ever read. So bad. The worldbuilding was flat. We never really got out of the castle and the MC is a Mary Sue. The smutty scenes are SO BAD, too. And that's coming from a reader who enjoys smut! I just don't like her overuse of the word 'c*ck'. I read the book like 1 or 2 years ago and I still remember how odd it was to me when the MC was reading literal solutions to the maze off the walls. Big no-no for me. Now I can't watch her writing advice videos anymore, because it feels like she doesn't even follow her own advice :x I think I'd give TSC like 1 to 2 stars. Twilight was way better xD
I have not read any of her books. (and from what people are saying, I don't plan on it) But is it really that bad or does it just feel like that because she does writing advice?
I think because Jenna is so adamant about what makes a writer a "good writer", it opens her up to looooots of criticism and from what I've heard, what she does with her writing contradicts what her videos are about. (also I don't plan on reading her work either, haha.)
I've read far worse writing, the shock absolutely was that some things she advocates against are right up front and persist. I felt like I read the book of a lesser writer than the person I heard speak on her channel. SS was wasted on me completely I might still read SA if I hear spoilers that it's a blood bath, because that's kind of the scenes written best in SC
I think her books are mediocre. They are way too long, the worldbuilding is very lacking, the characters are very flat, the politics writing is extremely bad, the dialogue often drags on and on and the underlying morals are kind of messed up. Oh and the romance is done in a weirdly sexualised way and not really emotions based, which I as a romance reader care a lot more about. Pride and Prejudice is one of the best romances and there is zero sex in it. SC was still kind of fun to read though it had all of these flaws. Jenna is decent at writing action. It is very frustrating to read her stuff, because there are so many areas she could have improved upon and it is kind of sad, because she had some good ideas and some of the scenes are fun. I think she just needs more practice and a less dogmatic approach to creating a book. Just because you plotted everything, doesn't mean that you don't have unnecessary scenes and don't need extensive restructuring. The one area that is the most difficult to fix is the morals in the book. She has this idea of good people who can do no wrong (despite committing atrocities) and bad people who are bad and only bad. It's very juvenile, which is why her books feel very YA and not adult.
They are so bad compared to the advice she gives. A lot of amateurish mistakes and a sense of juvenility like a 16 year old wrote despite Moreci being IN HER 30s.
"A piece she had seen a hundred times but never ceased to captivate her." - sigh.... what bugs me about this line. 1) she kept exact count of how many times she has seen this. A hundred is not = hundreds (indefinite). Perhaps its a character affectation / personal turn of phrase, but it makes Her feel like She is prone to exaggeration / unreliable narration. I shrugged a hundred times at this line. 2) i admit, as a human being, when i look at stuff that draws my attention, my first overriding thought is "I'm captivated." Not the why, or the new detail i missed each of the 99 previous times i looked, you know stuff like that has emotional weight behind it. "As Her sisters debated the graphic importance of a man's size, She found her gaze drifting to the mural above. A piece whose beauty had washed over Her hundreds of times but always revealed a new mystery when She looked, really looked at it. The (physical description of mural) always reminded her of (emotion/sentimentality - e.g. Her Grandmother, a Savior like Her and Her Mother before. Strong, unwielding, confident but not overbearing. Loved and beloved.) She (semse of regret/yearning/emotion that signifies what she's looking for in this book - a promise to the reader). Sorry, i think the lack of POV personality is why this story feels so ungrounded and weightless. From the lazy details to lazy word choices ... argh. Proceeds to rant for 20 mins on a 10 min video.
If youve read Jenna's books, you'll spot this issue in them a lot. Everything is worded with little to no personal feelings and emotions added to them, making the text feel robotic and dry.
@@nevisnebis1207 I would become a patron in a heartbeat if I could. But it is out of the question for the forseable future. Hope one Day I Will be able to go back and watch
You can tell she only had one rough draft and one good draft. The way I'm going, I'll have several rough drafts, a few almost-good drafts, and then a final draft that I plan to publish.
I think the point of cutting out the description to two is to show how much she doesn't care about her sisters, and cares more about the painting, as you can empehize with "Leila’s gaze didn’t leave the mural". I actually thoght there were some in corridor, cause where the do you put murals...? (I mean you can outside, but this is much more than Ancient Greek it should present)
I tried reading these books. But all of the time I was reading them I couldn’t see the world. Like it was a white void. And characters ugh. It’s hard time reading them. But I have a rule, if I started reading book or series I must finish it. Oh gods it was hard. I know Jenna Moreci is trying to show that Cosima is a savior but it’s so easy to figure out that she is fake and that Leila is Savior. Not hard at all. There are hints throughout the story showing Leila being Savior.
Jenna said that she wrote TSS because otherwise she would have had to include a twenty-page info dump at the end of TSC where Leila would have had to explain how she knew everything to Tobias. This is weird because Jenna was as big on outlining as she claims to be then she should have realised this in her outline and fixed it then rather than writing a whole new book. I get why she had to write TSS, to fix the big mess of the ending of TSC, but it never should have been necessary in the first place
The mural is the perfect oportunity to describe Layla. Just have her compare herself to the first savior
So I don't know if you guys noticed, because you guys didn't read the whole thing with your eyes... but legit when Leila sneaks into the tournament place and Cosima is the fake savior, even though this is Leila's POV, the capitalization of She and Her gets put onto Cosima and taken off of Leila...when it shouldn't because she's not the actual savior and we're in the savior's POV, so obviously she wouldn't move the capitalization off herself, that makes zero sense. Even the scene where she's eating peaches with Mr Sad Piece of Toast and she says 'me' it's not capitalized 'Me' like it had been previously. Moreci completely broke the rule she didn't even have to make. Also I think the editor was so done with this shit because I found some capitalized 'She' in there that were for like Delphi or one of her handmaids.
How easy would it have been for the mural to be of her mother/grandmother and have her think about her mother watching over her, and then if her father comes into the scene he can look disdainfully at the mural or something and we can get a comparison with the love and loss Leila feels for her mother and her father being terrible.
Or it would’ve been cool if it was a mural of all the past saviors and we know that Leila is a small child and maybe one of her sisters could comment on how she doesn’t really look like an all-powerful savior in comparison.
Idk there’s so much world-building/character building you can do with just a mural and idk why Jenna literally refuses haha.
This might be my favorite thumbnail thus far
Finally put Will on the thumbnail for the Patreon moolah.
Makes my grateful that my writing is improving from watching these videos, since I self publish as well. 😅
6:45 it kills me that moreci does this thing a second time where she introduces family of mc using vague distant words ("two women" in Tobias's case, "the royal" here) and only then calls them mother/sister/father. like, we're in the third person limited, the words on the page are still character's thoughts even if they're filtrated through 3 person. how often do you think of your family as "women" and "men" and their titles? it's so emersion breaking and for what? element of surprise? in case with leila it doesn't work even theoretically, we *know* that brontes is her father. it's a companion novel. we've read the first book
it's a minor thing but it's so clunky and it so clearly shows that jenna doesn't think how her characters would view things, which is extremely bad for limited pov stories
".. a piece she had seen a hundred times yet never ceased to captivate her" is not grammatical. The conjunction "yet" coordinates the two sentences, where the subject of the last sentence (with the verb "ceased") is implicit, referring back to the subject of the previous sentence. As in "Marie was intelligent, yet didn't understand the question." But in Jenna's example, the subject of the first sentence ("..a piece she had seen a hundred times") is "she". So "she" is also understood as the subject of "ceased": "She never ceased to captivate her." But it is *the piece* that should be understood as the subject of "ceased".. (In the first sentence, "the piece" is the direct object, which is extrapolated and placed at the beginning of the sentence).
Poor writing.
How about this: "She had seen that piece a hundred times, but it never ceased to captivate her." Something like that.
@@Chaos-94 Exactly!
@@Paaseliten I think Jenna really should have gone back and rewrote her stuff more than she did.
But I think the piece is the subject. The spots on their own are meaningless, The important thing is the picture. The spots are descriptions of the mural, not the other way around.
@@sharonefee1426 Exactly, "a piece" is meant to be the subject of the second sentence (the subject of "never ceased to captivate her") But it is not the subject of "a piece she had seen a hundred times before". "A piece she had see a hundred times before" is, strictly speaking, a noun phrase, where "a piece" is the head and "[which] she had never seen before" is a relative clause describing "a piece". The subject of this clause is "she". We know this, because "she" has to agree with the verb ("had seen") in person and number, something we can test if we change the tense to present tense: "*she* *has* never seen before" - "*they* *have* never seen before.
Loving the handsome thumbnail.
as someone with curly hair, i can confirm they do not bounce when i giggle.
*crying in bad economy and high currency exchange rates*
I will never read TSS.
I was so let down by book 1 that I won't read book 2.
I watched Jenna's yt channel a lot and according to her, TSC would have fit my genre preferences perfectly. Dark fantasy romance? COUNT ME IN! But man. It's by far the worst fantasy romance I've ever read. So bad. The worldbuilding was flat. We never really got out of the castle and the MC is a Mary Sue. The smutty scenes are SO BAD, too. And that's coming from a reader who enjoys smut! I just don't like her overuse of the word 'c*ck'. I read the book like 1 or 2 years ago and I still remember how odd it was to me when the MC was reading literal solutions to the maze off the walls. Big no-no for me.
Now I can't watch her writing advice videos anymore, because it feels like she doesn't even follow her own advice :x
I think I'd give TSC like 1 to 2 stars.
Twilight was way better xD
I have not read any of her books. (and from what people are saying, I don't plan on it) But is it really that bad or does it just feel like that because she does writing advice?
I think because Jenna is so adamant about what makes a writer a "good writer", it opens her up to looooots of criticism and from what I've heard, what she does with her writing contradicts what her videos are about.
(also I don't plan on reading her work either, haha.)
I've read far worse writing, the shock absolutely was that some things she advocates against are right up front and persist.
I felt like I read the book of a lesser writer than the person I heard speak on her channel. SS was wasted on me completely
I might still read SA if I hear spoilers that it's a blood bath, because that's kind of the scenes written best in SC
I think her books are mediocre. They are way too long, the worldbuilding is very lacking, the characters are very flat, the politics writing is extremely bad, the dialogue often drags on and on and the underlying morals are kind of messed up. Oh and the romance is done in a weirdly sexualised way and not really emotions based, which I as a romance reader care a lot more about. Pride and Prejudice is one of the best romances and there is zero sex in it. SC was still kind of fun to read though it had all of these flaws. Jenna is decent at writing action.
It is very frustrating to read her stuff, because there are so many areas she could have improved upon and it is kind of sad, because she had some good ideas and some of the scenes are fun. I think she just needs more practice and a less dogmatic approach to creating a book. Just because you plotted everything, doesn't mean that you don't have unnecessary scenes and don't need extensive restructuring.
The one area that is the most difficult to fix is the morals in the book. She has this idea of good people who can do no wrong (despite committing atrocities) and bad people who are bad and only bad. It's very juvenile, which is why her books feel very YA and not adult.
They are so bad compared to the advice she gives. A lot of amateurish mistakes and a sense of juvenility like a 16 year old wrote despite Moreci being IN HER 30s.
I have both of them. They aren’t great but it’s not much different than Zodiac Academy or Colleen Hoover…mediocre new adult wish fulfillment fics.
Awwww so the full video won't be coming to youtube?
"A piece she had seen a hundred times but never ceased to captivate her."
- sigh.... what bugs me about this line.
1) she kept exact count of how many times she has seen this. A hundred is not = hundreds (indefinite). Perhaps its a character affectation / personal turn of phrase, but it makes Her feel like She is prone to exaggeration / unreliable narration. I shrugged a hundred times at this line.
2) i admit, as a human being, when i look at stuff that draws my attention, my first overriding thought is "I'm captivated." Not the why, or the new detail i missed each of the 99 previous times i looked, you know stuff like that has emotional weight behind it.
"As Her sisters debated the graphic importance of a man's size, She found her gaze drifting to the mural above. A piece whose beauty had washed over Her hundreds of times but always revealed a new mystery when She looked, really looked at it.
The (physical description of mural) always reminded her of (emotion/sentimentality - e.g. Her Grandmother, a Savior like Her and Her Mother before. Strong, unwielding, confident but not overbearing. Loved and beloved.) She (semse of regret/yearning/emotion that signifies what she's looking for in this book - a promise to the reader).
Sorry, i think the lack of POV personality is why this story feels so ungrounded and weightless. From the lazy details to lazy word choices ... argh.
Proceeds to rant for 20 mins on a 10 min video.
If youve read Jenna's books, you'll spot this issue in them a lot. Everything is worded with little to no personal feelings and emotions added to them, making the text feel robotic and dry.
Thanks for the snippet.❤️
10 minutes? Is this some kind of torture?
The patrons get a whole lot more of this, apparently. Time to fork over my cash to see the rest of this 👍
@@nevisnebis1207 I would become a patron in a heartbeat if I could. But it is out of the question for the forseable future. Hope one Day I Will be able to go back and watch
feels like it :(
im so sad i cant watch the full video DX
You can tell she only had one rough draft and one good draft. The way I'm going, I'll have several rough drafts, a few almost-good drafts, and then a final draft that I plan to publish.
I think the point of cutting out the description to two is to show how much she doesn't care about her sisters, and cares more about the painting, as you can empehize with "Leila’s gaze didn’t leave the mural".
I actually thoght there were some in corridor, cause where the do you put murals...? (I mean you can outside, but this is much more than Ancient Greek it should present)
I tried reading these books. But all of the time I was reading them I couldn’t see the world. Like it was a white void. And characters ugh. It’s hard time reading them. But I have a rule, if I started reading book or series I must finish it. Oh gods it was hard.
I know Jenna Moreci is trying to show that Cosima is a savior but it’s so easy to figure out that she is fake and that Leila is Savior. Not hard at all. There are hints throughout the story showing Leila being Savior.
NOT THE VIOLET EYES OMG LMAO
Have you guys read her first book? Eve: The Awakening seems to be better than this.
Yeah, but her videos are still so much fun.
Don't teach writing when you can't write a good book.
Hey , its angry otter
Read TSS and at this point I'll read the next book.... if you promise to do a video too