Welcome to Gaia! ::

Raoden looked around in awe. He had never seen a place such as this before. The beautiful scenery was breathtaking. There were trees and flowers blooming everywhere, and though the building looked old, it still had its own special charm. He slowly walked through the grounds, taking in as much of his new surroundings as possible. Although there were many people bustling about, Raoden didn't feel even a bit nervous. After he had passed through the great, heavy wooden door he quickly found and walked up the stairs, eager to see where he would be sleeping.

Very good.

This is a very good solid sentence. Its clear and to the point, but gives the readers a very clear image of whats happening. Here you are in a new surrounding processing the things around you. Good. This last section is as well.

The first calls back to a pre existing character condition that you had informed me of prior (you should put that in his bio, the whole nervous thing) and the second is brilliant. You take into account that this is an abbey, a rather old place made of stone and thus probably would have huge wooden doors. You call attention to that then gave yourself a lead in to perhaps what your next post would be about, mainly exploring the second floor.

Now the issues, small, but its good to get past them.
You start out with three short sentences. When writing you want to give your reader variety. It helps steel against boredom and also helps the paragraph flow better. They aren't bad sentences by any means, just perhaps weak in that order.

Also, you kinda just blew into the area with no explanation.
Where are you from?
How far did you travel?
What are you wearing? What do you look like?
When did you arrive? (what time of day)
Who are you? Everyone else besides me that might come in here knows nothing about you. You should find a way to convey the personality of your character in your post.
You did a good of explaining your character's state of mind, but what about the physical? Images are poor excuse for the picture you can paint in your reader's minds.

Id like to see you answer some of these questions in detail in your next post. Work it in, make it flow as if those items belong there.

Continue on. This is good work. Just in the day you've visibly improved. We'll deal with any other issues as they come about.

You said in your thread that you were totally new to the whole rping bit. First of all, you have a good base to start with and are about at par with the other person Karieda that I am helping out in this thread.

Your character seems to have some good personality, but you fail to answer a few key questions.

What do you look like? Physical appearance is important, it helps people interact with you, notice you.
You mentioned that you had traveled far with this destination in mind, but where did you come from?
What is that past experience that you are referring to? Did you get lost and left behind somewhere in your past? This is optional information, but it would be interesting to know.

I also need a pm from you perhaps telling me what you want to get out of this. Some sort of goal. If you just want to do semi literate, then you probably don't need too much work and could go about just as you are.

ab·bey
1. a monastery under the supervision of an abbot or a convent under the supervision of an abbess.
2. the group of buildings comprising such a monastery or convent.

mon·as·ter·y
1. a house or place of residence occupied by a community of persons, esp. monks, living in seclusion under religious vows.

Given this definition you should expect the place to be rather bare. Architecture might be extravagant, but in general things are going to be plain. I mentioned that sleeping quarters where on the second floor. Thank you for pointing out that perhaps I should have alluded more to what they consist of, Ill change that right away. Most people in the area are going to be servants of God and thus will also be in plain clothing. You may wear whatever you wish. I will add a library full of dusty old books on the third floor, but past that most of the learning you would do in such a place is self guided unless you seek someone out. I have presented you with Aniur so that you might ask her fighting techniques. You may also create an npc and interact with it in order to learn about a god you might make up, or history of the area. I left everything pretty open for a reason. First, there isn't much for you to miss and second you have a variety of interaction options open to you. You may create special abilities if you wish to practice in that type of rping because of that openness.

Very good questions though. :3 You're really thinking about the state of your character and how he fits in to everything. *laughs* This also brings up another important point though. Always be willing to change your original settings post. Sometimes you have things in mind and forget to post them if you happen to be in a rush. Never be ashamed to change or add things based on what people are asking. Of course, sometimes we post at 3 in the morning and we'd lose our heads if they weren't firmly attached to our heads. Not the problem in this case, just carelessness.

On the surface this is a strong post. Its probably the best I've seen you do so far and is excellent to see. :3 Few little problems to clear up though.

Rambling:
You have some good visual things going on here, but its very jumbled. I feel like you're pulling 10 ways at once when you mean to pull one way and then another. How about this, first talk about the vases themselves. Get your visual point across. Then slide in after that how it pertains to your character.



Could become



I used just about everything you had in that sentence, just in a different order. One other thing about this. You should state that he is walking/walked down the hallways or you can cut out the walking part and just keep one singular hallway. It helps solidify what your character is doing. If you are standing still at a cross ways for the halls, then you should say so.



Another good sentence, you can strike that first and in place of a comma though. Both cheap and plain are descriptive words.



Otherwise, good.

And


Here I will assume you meant stared and just added a 't' on accident. Not the main problem. You use looked twice when you don't really need to.



Again using your own words just in a different order. I would like a comment from you on this. Does this portray what you wanted to say correctly? Or do you have something better in mind? :3 Good job though over all. You just had some very small issues to clean up. Your ability to use what I've already taught you is really shining through.

So, before you make your next post please answer these questions, ask a few and then we can get on with it.

Also, do you think you're getting out of this what you were looking for?

((When I said 'started', I meant it as 'he was startled'. Only I used it so that 'startled' was the verb instead of 'was'... He hadn't expected to leave a mess, and velt guilty of it, thus showing that he would make a very good 'housewife', so to speak. And as for my RPing, I'm getting better now that I know what I was doing wrong, and how to fix it, but I still need practice.))

Raoden had discovered where the cleaning supplies were kept from one of the stable boys. Actually, the boy had lent him his. He hurriedly procceded to clean himself up, then cleaned the floors he'd tracked dirt onto. After he'd returned the cleaning tools to the boy he ran back up the stairs, dumped his pack on the bed nearest the doorway, and ran back down the stairs to the kitchen, hoping he wasn't late. What time had she said dinner was at? He was in such a big rush and was so nervous that he didn't spare much thought for his surroundings. He was now starting to run out of breath.

:3
Okay. I think because we've broken this over use of was you can go back to using it in certain cases. This would have been a case that you could have used it. If that was the case though, this would have flown better:



Note that this is near the end of the sentence that you're using was. In this case, you were doing another action then mentioned a state of being, so lets expand your use of the word was. You have a new state of being, but you can't say he's being startled, in this case you can use was.




The word then of course is optional. Very very good. I hadn't even thought of the word startled. This is why I love rping. So many different points of view all coming together. I love finding out what people are imagining.

And now on to your current post.



You know, I like this post, a lot. If flows so well with the last one that you could have put the two together for one big post. Oh, one other thing about the post before this though, separate thoughts from your actions so people understand they're thoughts. Sometimes Italics isn't enough. Go ahead and post another, this last post has no huge blaring problems so I'm going to just let you pass on this one. :3