Mar 28, 2025
Okay, so I have a few criticisms on this.
Overall, I think you have a fantastic idea here and a very intriguing one with what looks like a great basis for a plot. As the first chapter showed, you've got a really good feel for description and prose, and your main character is a simmering ball of anger that immediately caught my interest because you didn't dump his entire history and motivations from the get-go. That mystery really helped pull me, as a reader, into this.
But your dialogue could use some work (especially with those run-on sentences. It helps if you say the dialogue out loud to get a better idea of how much someone can say before getting blue in the face and needing to gasp in air), and the character interactions are a bit stilted and kind of read like high school angsty-boys snarling at each other. There is a bit of difference between the ways they talk, but it kind of wobbles like a skateboard on a log. One moment they are conversing in the Queen's English with perfect grammatical diction, and the next thing ya know they're flippin' swearin' like it's the flippin' eighties in a shizzy back-street bar in the goddamn Bronx. Real people can talk like this, but most people don't because they're generally more sane than I am.
There ARE seeds of potential there, though. There's decent back and forth, and you have an idea of how the rhythm works, which is good. The formatting on the chapter, though, is horrible and most of the dialogue has ended up in a big mashed-up block so you might wanna fix that 😅 Untangling and mentally adding in those gaps, though, I can see you've actually got a decent balance between dialogue and action tags, and the emotional conveyance has improved from where you were doing straight script-like tags that read a little like a "he said/she said" exchange in the beginning. There's a nice rhythm to it that just needs a bit of a touch-up.
Also I have absolutely no idea what they're talking about with these shadow guys. You'd probably actually be better served giving a little info-dump in the prose itself rather than trying to work it into the dialogue, because that doesn't quite work naturally as it reads now. And by info-dump I mean a couple sentences to get across the basic idea so you can expand on it later and keep the element of mystery now, not a history lesson including the last two hundred years of conflict, plus their bloodlines. The concept of people even the aliens are afraid of is a very interesting one though, not gonna lie.
And please, PLEASE, for the love of all things good and holy, please decide on either past or present tense to write this in. I know in fanfiction and Wattpad etc. circles it's totally acceptable to do whatever in that department, and in conversation people don't care about tense, but please, I beg of you, consider the readability 🙏
Overall, though, I honestly really like this concept, and I think it could make a great anime or movie. R is a very interesting character, his world is fantastically messed up, and I look forward to seeing what the deal is with him and his backstory and where he ends up. I said it at the beginning of this book and I stand by it now: this is honestly a really intriguing setup, teething issues notwithstanding, and you've got a lot of great potential as a writer, so don't give up on it! I think you could really make something outta this 😊
