I’m going to wait to see what you and others think about the second draft first. Then make any corrections before sending the newer one.

Again, thank you.

I want to echo what Sherwood said. You have a really interesting conflict, one that I personally find intriguing

Now, SLOW DOWN.

You don’t need to tell me in the first page why the two characters don’t trust humans, but do let me know that they don’t, so I will wonder WHY they don’t and what the situation is and what will happen next.

Show me the setting, the two characters, and let their interchange reveal as much of the conflict as is necessary for me to want to keep reading.

In fact, I would almost say that your opening should start about five minutes (in narrative time) before this part of the conversation. The “Why?” could then come a page or half a page into the conversation instead of starting it.

Thank you for your comments. They were really helpful. I should be sending a revised draft soon. Hope it’s better.

That said, I do hope on your next draft, you’ll slip in those details that will make such a promising opening unique. The suggestions made would help a lot with that.

Talking of the wizard - whether the character’s name is Grandel or Grandle (you use both), it struck me as too reminiscent of Grendel, though there’s no obvious similiarity of characteristics.

I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t turn the page.

Well, the last line should have a “the” before “traitorous,” but apart from that, the grammar is fine.

What isn’t fine is the storytelling. This reads a lot like a gaming transcript, where it’s assumes that everyone knows the classes and races and so on. We’ve got a shapeshifter, we’ve got a mentor/wizard of unspecified (but presumably not human) race and so on.

The trouble is that, for fantasy fiction, human is the new “white.” We assume that our protagonists are human unless told otherwise, and if told otherwise, we expect to be told more. Yes, it’s rather ethnocentric, but people are ethnocentric because it gives a frame of reference. If you start a story with “Bob was not white” the reader then gathers that A). Race is an issue in this story, and B). the author better tell us what race Bob is so we have some chance of picturing him as something other than “nebulous non-caucasian male.”

Is a shapeshifter a werewolf? A creature that can take any form? A what? Is the mentor a three-toed purple sloth beast?

Most of this could be solved with description and an opening that is something other than “As you know, Bob.” Maybe a brief recap of the human perfidy that has the shapeshifter so upset lo these many years later.

Anyway, the current form of the story isn’t inducing me to turn the page, not because of the basic problem, but because of the prose and dialogue.