RE: Beyond Doubt: Whispers of the Unseen - Chapter 1

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Beautiful start to a novel! "The valley looked lovely these days"--implying there were days it didn't look so lovely. We are drawn in.
Great setting. The two scouts sent out, and only one returns, but the people decide to build their settlement under a volcano anyway. The image you provide is a haunting landscape. The sharp rocks concealing hungry predators - wow!

One suggestion: I find this to be a little comma-heavy, or clause-laden, but I know, I know, in the fantasy genre, this is the norm.

If this is chapter one of a novel, I might say your opening pages are a bit heavy on the exposition, vs the author putting us in the POV (Point of View) of a protagonist and showing stuff as it happens. This reads like a history, and that's fine, and that's how The Illiad was done, but years of fiction workshops hammered into me this idea that we need action and conflict up front. Noah Lukeman's book "The First Five Pages" is often recommended. Yes, I bought it. I read it. But I keep thinking how I still like Jane Austen and other 19th-C authors who'd be railroaded in today's fiction workshops.

“There are hundreds of good books that explain how to write. Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages is different. Lukeman’s approach is methodical and practical, beginning with presentation and working through common blunders with modifiers, style, dialogue, point of view, characters, tone, focus and pacing….. Let’s hope for a sequel….. The First Five Pages is an excellent resource that writers should keep on their shelves. The chapters on repairing dialogue (including “informative,” “commonplace,” “melodramatic” and “hard to follow”) are especially fine, full of insights that I haven’t seen elsewhere….And even though his task is to explain all the things that writers do wrong, it’s clear that Lukeman genuinely likes us and understands what makes us keep writing, even in the face of repeated rejection.”
–Downtownwriters.com

You have a great setting and you're off to a great start. Keep going!! later, come back to those opening pages and see if you want to implement any of the popular advice from agents and editors and those often-soul-crushing workshoppers. E.g., to pick just one paragrah,

Young adventurers went on long journeys in an increasingly wider area. These journeys brought them nothing for a long time and fewer and fewer young men were inclined to participate in these dangerous expeditions. The question arose whether it was not a waste of young lives. Those that did not come back could have added much value to building the village and the working land.

Not a thing wrong with the prose, the punctuation, any of it. Workshoppers will squawk, "you repeat the word young three times in one paragraph." I've been trained to notice such things, but most readers won't trip over trivial nits.
Just, maybe, a bigger sense of #immediacy might emerge with some minor revisions.
I would never presume to alter your author's VOICE - or impose another author's style. "Word economy" and "lean prose" are still in vogue. Workshoppers might suggest something like this:

Young adventurers risked their lives on long journeys, going farther and wider yet finding nothing. Those that (who) did not come back could have added much value to building the village and the working land. Fewer and fewer young men were motivated to continue these dangerous expeditions. Were they not a waste of young lives?

But KEEP WRITING and worry later about tightening the word count and all that.
This is epic stuff. :)

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DAMN!
That is the best comment I ever received on my work. This is the first "Novel" I write and I do it because I enjoy writing. I have a journalism background but only in study I hardly worked in the field (just FYI).

And you are spot on, but you already knew that. I know I can be comma heavy, but noted and will definitely work on it as I prefer shorter sentences, but I also like a pretty flow. But I definitely will try to improve the balance.

And indeed I am taking the reader by the hand through the history as the protagonist is the village teacher/historian and we move to his POV in a bit. Will leave that as is for now, but I certainly got your point about those first 5 pages.

As you can imagine I worked a lot on getting those first 1000 words in a certain shape, which does not mean it´s the right shape. I am a bit stubborn and not always agree with what is the so-called correct or popular way of doing things, but again your point is very true and I will think about doing it differently.

The repetitiveness just slipped in there, and I am not the best editor, hence it got overlooked but fixed it.

Very happy you bring this up while I only published the first chapter and not when I am halfway or worse!

Now there are probably a million other trapdoors I will step onto but the takeaway is:
Commas
Immediacy, I love to use too many words and they do not always add value
But my biggest trap is that the author speaks too much instead of the characters. We will get to the protagonist soon and it will change the pov. But I will really need to work on that.

Again DAMN,

Huge thanks for taking the time to point these things out, its extremely helpful! Although it does mean that I will be up all night to improve chapter 2 which is due tomorrow 😂

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Ohhh, I hear you - preserving your own unique voice, in the face of opposition.
I failed at that.
I became the centipede that fell into the ditch (when asked how it knows which leg to move when).
Guy T. Martland (author of The Scion, out of print, impossible to find) agrees:

I am a bit stubborn and not always agree with what is the so-called correct or popular way of doing things

I've tried sharing the Elmore Leonard rule about using SAID, over and over again, as opposed to all its variations: iterated, reiterated, vocalized, intoned, shouted, etc (you wouldn't believe how many Martland can use on ONE PAGE). Most really good writers ignore the Elmore Leonard rules. They serve as a useful guideline but not as weapons of mass destruction aimed at forcing writers into conformity. @rhondak can attest to how that works.
I've corresponded with Dave King, co-author of the workshop 'Bible' that fellow writers wield as a weapon to beat "wordy" writers into submission. Dave was sad to hear his book being used that way. It is a sketch, a guideline, not Ten Commandments carved in granite, all violaters flagellated.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print

by Renni Browne (Author), Dave King (Author)

My review:

The "bible" for all writers, the most-recommended of all the many how-to-write books out there. You'll still want your Strunk and White if you don't understand grammar and syntax, but this book is the most articulate, easy to read and understand of the fiction writing manuals. A great investment. Funny thing is: you'll read this and think, "I know exactly what they mean. Of course I don't write like that." Then you'll submit your manuscript to a critique group (most likely, all members are disciples of Browne and King, even the newcomers from Asia or India), and they'll catch you at every little thing you thought you were above doing. But when someone ELSE betrays amateurism in his or her prose, it'll be so obvious, you'll shout, "This is EXACTLY what Browne and King were talking about. The man didn't take off his shoes as he was walking into the tent, unless he's an acrobat." But as Dave King says at his website, he's "a little scared at the influence of Self-Editing--too many beginners take the advice Renni and I give and turn it into rules. We tried to warn against that sort of thing a little more strongly in the second edition, but I think it still happens."

Indeed, I've seen workshoppers who turned advice into RULES which they use as battering rams to beat newbie writers into humble submission. Well, most of us are nicer than that, but there is indeed a sub-cult out there who consume the wisdom in this book and like Moses and his stone tablets, they pound sinners who over-use the was + -ing construction.

This book keeps selling and getting reprinted because it's GOOD. My #1 recommendation to writers. Even published writers say they like to revisit this one periodically. It's amazing how we forget the wisdom we've picked over the years, and get sloppy...

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Sounds like a beneficial read, I am always worried that I feel like a failure after reading those types of books but on the other hand how else do you improve yourself?

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I can assure you: you are not a failure!!
The kind of revisions suggested in the How to Write books would be minor, trivial, simple.
Sometimes though I object to replacing stuff like "She was standing there" with "She stood there."

In most cases it's easy to see where replacing the was + -ing is better, but in a lot of cases, it messes with the pentameter and the exposition.

Workshops can be dangerous. Be well fortified and shield yourself from the onslaught. My prose was polished and even poetic, but I'm not into formula fiction and most movies and novels annoy me with contrived conflict or dumb stuff I can't allow my characters to do, because I'm like a protective mother who won't let her teenager set off on a mission to take down the local sex traffickers.... let the trained adults handle it, kid! And women with stalkers, DO NOT GO HOME ALONE, but they all do. sigh
They just don't listen to me LOL.

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I cant stand dumb stuff myself, their actions need to make sense and or have a drive to take a certain step. But I am sure that even thinking like that I might have them do stuff that is stupid. Well I am gonna polish chapter two once more and then hit publish. Thanks again so much...oh and don't take the failure too seriously, its more feeling stupid seeing all your rookie mistakes.

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If people didn't do terrible and/or stupid things, we writers would have a lot less material to write about.
So many writers stand back and watch - the characters will "insist" on doing their own thing.
You're doing fine - get the story down on paper, all of it. Later, you can worry about word economy and all that. Some would argue against publishing here until the whole novel is written, revised, and polished. However, some really great novels- Henry James - Portrait of a Lady for one - were written and published one chapter at a time. Imagine having to wait a week or more for the next chapter!

first published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan's Magazine in 1880–81 and then as a book in 1881. It is one of James's most popular novels and is regarded by critics as one of his finest.

You can read it for free (it is so long, you may not want to), or you can read just the Intro (linked above).
James writes,

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find. ..... the spreading field, the human scene, is the “choice of subject”; the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the “literary form”; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher—without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist.

All this is a long way round, however, for my word about my dim first move toward “The Portrait,” which was exactly my grasp of a single character—an acquisition I had made, moreover, after a fashion not here to be retraced. Enough that I was, as seemed to me, in complete possession of it, that I had been so for a long time, that this had made it familiar and yet had not blurred its charm, and that, all urgently, all tormentingly, I saw it in motion and, so to speak, in transit. This amounts to saying that I saw it as bent upon its fate—some fate or other; which, among the possibilities, being precisely the question. Thus I had my vivid individual—vivid, so strangely, in spite of being still at large, not confined by the conditions, not engaged in the tangle, to which we look for much of the impress that constitutes an identity.

In summary: an author CAN write and publish a chapter at a time. How long will it take the reader to reach The End? I prefer to consume whole novels in just a few days. No patience... once I enter the world an author has constructed, I prefer not to enter it, leave it, enter it again a week later leave it again.... to me it's like flying from the snowy Midwest to the tropics once a week. Stay a few hours. Fly back into the cold and snow. (Lather, Rinse, Repeat, but you are not old enough to remember that commercial...)

Again, I say, KEEP GOING, and come back later to tighten and trim. :)
From the woman who never takes her own advice, no matter how good it is. :)

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Thinking of Conan the Barbarian, 1932.
Opens with a poem, a legend (in italics), then action and dialogue.
Not saying you have to do that too.
Just that I myself have had editors/workshoppers demand more conflict and immediacy in my opening pages.

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also

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LOL, I guarantee you, those same workshoppers would pounce on this as "verbose" (a door which a dusky hand furtively opened) and too much use of dialogue to convey to readers information that these characters would not "info-dump" on each other. Yet Conan the Barbarian sold millions of books and was immortalized by Arnold.

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