blushiemagic
Member
- Joined
- Nov 5, 2025
- Messages
- 40
- Points
- 18
So it sounds like I’m right to worry about the slow pacing and the first chapter being all over the place. I should probably try to be more focused. Currently things don’t get more focused until partway through chapter 2 (although then it gets bogged down by standard starting-litRPG and introduce-isekai-setting stuff).All of my feedback is biased and to be taken as the opinions of an amateur author.
Overall: Decent writing. Kind of boring. Repeating words. Needs chopping.
The Good:
This story does pretty well grammatically. You are a decent word crafter, and I can tell you put some thought into the construction.
The Bad:
While it is true that you are a decent word crafter, I would not say the same for storytelling. It's good that you start with stuff happening, but the verbosity of the prose makes it hard to read. I think that this story would benefit a lot from cutting, especially in the first chapter. I won't lie, I also dislike starting with a dream sequence. Maybe some other readers would find it okay.
These sequence of dreams and waking up or falling back into wakeness, it just doesn't do it for me. I find that this kind of thing doesn't work as a hook, so not only is the wordiness slogging, the plot is as well.
I honestly don't have much more to say because this was more boring than anything, and it was a struggle to get through 1 chapter. I apologize for not giving much feedback, but boring is even harder to read than horrible writing.
Chop out repeating words and whole blocks of text, and it might be better. Thank you for submitting, but I would not read more.
I might try rearrange things so that the second dream is all in one sequence at the end of the chapter. It was originally broken up to show the impact on MC’s life, but then I added the first dream and that already adds enough stakes that breaking things up isn’t necessary anymore. Alternatively I could get rid of the first dream, because it’s super out of place compared to the next few chapters (mood/plot whiplash) and a bit early to introduce the main “antagonist”… but doing that would get rid of any sort of urgency for a long while, so I’m thinking the first option’s probably better.
Unfortunately nothing can be done with starting out with dreams, since (as implied by the synopsis) all the dreams turn out to be real.
I’ve been having a hard time trying to figure out what else can be trimmed; it used to be a lot longer but at this point nearly every word serves a purpose. I guess I could get rid of the parts that summarize stuff that was previously shown-not-told… but I have second-hand trauma from reading comments that misunderstanding readers leave on other people’s stories
I’m sorry this wasn’t to your tastes, and thank you so much for powering through anyway for the feedback!