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Moondust by Stephanie Payne

By Believing, One Sees. 

Moondust screen capture

For as long as anyone can remember, there have been stories.  Stories of fairies and dragons and witches and magic.  For thousands of years they were given the respect and awe they deserved, until recently.  With fairies pictured as harmless little sprites who sleep in lanterns, mythical creatures nothing more than lies told to children to keep them in their beds at night.  The power of magic is not waning, but with only a few still believing in them, life is harder, they hide, waiting for their time to come again.

Meanwhile, out of hiding, in the “real” world, the exiles of Faerie remain.  Some have joined up with Witches, perhaps even without telling them there was a faery in their midsts.  Many of them tire of hiding, and without knowing it, are working towards bringing magic back to the forefront—science to be left behind, where they believe it belongs.

Moondust focuses around Raina Tibbits, an exiled sidhe with more than a few reasons to want to be left alone.  Little does she know that the one thing she can’t be is left alone—for the good of the sidhe and mortals alike.


An abandoned novel

Note: Moondust is unfinished, and will likely remain so.  It contains some harsh language.

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Listed: Dec 1, 2008

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Review of Moondust

Editor: S.A. Hunter
December 1, 2008

The story has an interesting premise: Elves exiled to Australia and setting up shop there. Only problem is that the execution is not up to the premise and there has already been a problem with the updates. A two-month hiatus happened between the third and fourth chapter. There are only five chapters so far.

Raina is a Sidhe living in exile in Australia. Why she was exiled has not been revealed, but Cian, another elf, mentions that she’s very powerful and could level the country. Not much has been revealed at all about the protagonist. She doesn’t need much food or sleep and can do magic, but doesn’t like scrying. Why? I have no idea, but she kicked the welcome wagon out of her house because of it. The plot is very slow moving with ponderous attention given to mundane actions, such as feeding the cat and burning food.

The site looks nice. I like the banner image, the color scheme, and the text is easy to read. Comments are allowed, and the author has set up a forum for even more interaction. I’m not sure about the character tag cloud, but it doesn’t detract from the look. I’ve just never seen the appeal of them.

What ultimately hurts Moondust is a litany of flaws with the storytelling. POV is weak with it shifting loosely between characters. A firmer grounding in Raina’s POV would help immensely. The dialogue is stilted and unnatural. Grammatical and punctuation errors abound, and the prose is clunky with run-on sentences. I’m afraid this story needs a heavy rewrite to make it better, which I hope the author considers because there is potential here. The idea is sound, but the execution needs help.

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Editor: Sonja Nitschke
December 1, 2008

I really wanted to like Moondust based on the description:  fairies, magic, and dragons, oh my.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to enjoy Moondust, and found it rather difficult to read because of the consistently bad grammar. 

Even if I ignored the bad grammar, I had a difficult time becoming interested in [more . . .]

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