Hello! I want some opinions about my novel in progress...

Quite frankly, here's my biggest critique. SHOW NOT TELL. You have a habit of voicing the narration as if you're really not sure, and is if you keep adding things to clarify. This style just bores us, the readers. We don't care what you're *telling* us. We want to *see* it.

Quote:

Claudius didn’t understand women. Even more plainly, who does? He didn’t understand. She often flirted with him, but he thought she was only joking. She would sit in his lap and talk to him about how much she different things such as why they should have more color options for carpet and whether or not they stood a chance of being the dominant race of the universe.

Again, some showing here is necessary. Telling the narration from a past point (this happened, and therefore this) makes it stagnant, and makes her character weak. YOU NEED TO LOOK HERE:!

Check out the "TOC about writing", (google it)
read specifically: Mistakes in Writing, A checklist for critiquing science fiction (I bet you'll find a lot of things that you're doing here), Writerisms and Other Sins, and hell everything else on that page. It's gold.

Axe your intro, it's crap. We don't want a cartoon like overlook of the world. SHOW US why it is like that. Show us that it's in ruins. Only narrate in such a broad sense if ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. If in the first few paragraphs of your novel it's not EXTRAORDINARILY important information, save it and show us what we want to see - the characters.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

no it is not any good. Never ever dare use an apostrophe in naming anything in a novel. It's overdone, it's cliched. NO apostrophes, NO dark Stone of Evil, No Great Wizard to Save Everyone in the Pinch of Time. Lord of the rings did it. Robert Jordan did it. Guy Gavriel Kay did it. Try to find something else to grace your novel with.

Think about the culture of your world. How did THEIR language develope? What sounds are predominant? Try to convey how they VIEW the planet in the word itself. A harsh place? Something with k sounds or whatever. Soft and magnificent? lots of vowels with a g or whatever. You decide.

There's nowhere I can't reach.