Your trigger-warnings were a sign of things to come, but I was expecting you to deal with those issues more in the voice of the poet that brought me here, than as a means to get War Wine to where you needed her to be… My only advice to you on that end, is not to treat such formative experiences as mere devices, or paths of convenience to get your character to some desired future state of righteous fury and vengeance. If you’re going to use them, these hard-as-nails questions of rape, subjugation, psychological torment and the complete emotional destruction of a human being, I would rather see you address them fully for what they are, and acknowledge that your characters have to fully address them as well, in order to remain authentic and continue on whatever path you have laid out for them. Or else we’re reading a treatment for the kind of gratuitous sex-and-violence rap that everyone is now so accustomed to, slash-and-shag written for pubescent teenage boys, or grown men whose emotional lives stopped at sixteen. In todays world, the last thing lacking out here is evidence of how much a randy old man likes to objectify defenceless young women… and in my personal opinion the acts themselves are no basis for art and don’t belong in it, without being faced down and dealt with as what they truly are.

But please don’t misunderstand my critique or be discouraged, since I will definitely be reading on, because this is a prologue to a work in progress… I’m hopeful of a hinted-at depth in the body of the novel as a whole, and I’m definitely curious to see how you build on all of this material (which if treated well is enough for a novel in itself)

I’ll try to read chapter one on my lunch break tomorrow… meantime thanks for sharing such a huge part of your creative self.