Page critique 8/10/23

[Nathan Bransford]

Below is the page up for critique on the blog on Thursday. Feel free to chime in with comments, create your own redline (please note the "font colour" button above the posting box, which looks like a drop of ink), and otherwise offer feedback. When offering your feedback, please please remember to be polite and constructive. In order to leave a comment you will need to register an account in the Forums, which should be self-explanatory.

I'll be back later with my own post on the blog and we'll literally be able to compare notes.

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Doctor of Physick
Genre: Historical/Paranormal/Speculative Fiction

243 words

Chapter One

Brother Petrus, presently of the Cistercian foundation of Jorevall Abbey but sometime Neel Thornton of Thornton Steward in the North Riding of Yorkshire in the Kingdom of England, was not as secure in his vocation as he or his superiors would have wished. Never was this truer than now, on this night of Ash Wednesday of the dying year of Our Lord fourteen hundred and seventy-seven, when a vision of the future woke him an hour from Prime from what had been a sound and happy sleep.

Like his late mother Aldys, and his twin sister Elyn back in the world, Petrus was given to visions great and small. This vision was terrifying.

A greedy usurper, backed by the French, takes the throne. He and his followers put the common folk under a crushing load of fines, fees and taxes, put the screws and worse to merchants who refuse to give instead of sell their wares to the usurper's men, and put to the noose or ax anyone else who dares impede their will, much as the Henries the Fourth and Fifth slaughtered those they called heretics, and using the harsh old Roman law instead of that more liberal law derived in England over many and more recent centuries of time.

Worse yet, his greedier son further beggars the land with ruinous wars and, seeking to pay for these wars, plunders the monasteries and creates his own bastard heresy to sanctify his deeds.