Oct 17, 2021
I think this is a chapter which deserves my long 'good, bad & ugly' chopping block treatment. So, here we go.. :)
The good:
The characters you have developed, the permeating mystery and suspense of the plot, Hiro and his friends, the 'in media res' way you started deep in (or, perhaps, close to the end of) your story in your prologue, the questions about what happened with Hiro's childhood (girl-)friend at high school and the other questions about Hiro's 'Gramps' and his secrets; were all these salt bowls meant to keep something evil in that room from getting out or to prevent it from getting in? By and large I liked the curiosity and questions you inspire in the readers.
The bad:
This chapter is much less well-written than your prologue, to put it mildly. Many grammar and other errors killed my immersion right from the very start ("Among other questions, -->found themselves<-- lingering through his mind as he searched the backroom." and later examples like "Yet, he embraced it, grasping at her right arm tightly, -->he thinks.<--").
I see that you started writing it quite late, so I suppose you did not have time to edit it well, or at all perhaps. You had roughly 3 weeks to write the entire thing, so lack of editing was to be expected. So, my editing input is intended to let you know what you should keep in mind after the contest ends, not as a.. "Why did you do / not do this or that baka?" 😛
The complete lack of dialogue tags was quite confusing, since I barely understood who was saying what half of the time. While writers should not overdo it with editing tags completely eliminating them is I think a step too far. And last but not least..
The ugly:
This is undoubtedly that long monologue of Hiro with double quotation marks, while he was cleaning. It is an internal monologue fully presented like a dialogue. This is a double offence when combined with lack of dialogue tags in the actual dialogues, which multiplied the confusion.
For almost the entire monologue I could not tell if he was talking with someone else or himself; the lack of tags in the actual dialogues meant that his monologue could well have been a dialogue, since whoever he was talking to would probably be revealed... eventually.
You might use either single quotes (' ') for internal monologues or none at all, but you still need at least a couple of 'thought tags' to let the reader know that this is actually a monologue or a series of thoughts.
Since your narration is third person omni you could have easily set up Hiro's internal monologue in third person and then switch to first person, making though the switch clear.
Well, that is all from me for this chapter. I have no idea if and when I'm going to have time to read your next chapters, since I started writing again. Not a web novel, I'm writing a sci-fi short story off-line to sell to a magazine - hopefully 😊
As for the contest, I'm looking up the latest results now.. I think, despite the shortcomings I outlined above, the good parts of your novel outweigh the weaker parts (which are easily fixable), so I just cast my 5th and final vote of Prompt #2 to it, which is the 312th vote in total. It looks like Wolfy and Pearly are moving into the finals, but don't let that bring you down. Keep on writing! 😊
