I will take you up on this offer! Thank you in advance! It's genre is dark fantasy!
Raised as a slave in a forsaken realm where time seemed frozen, Regina resigned herself to her fate. Her existence was a stagnant cycle until a mysterious stranger shattered her quiet acceptance. 'Come with me,' the stranger beckoned. Driven by fear and the promise of escape, Regina made a...
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Hello
@daight, my first vic— ekhm... my first volunteer
I stopped reading your novel at chapter 5 and here are my thoughts about it:
The good:
Overall your narration is quite good and except for a couple of cases, I didn't too have many issues following the events. The story managed to catch my attention at the beginning and made me curious as to where you're going to take it.
The not-so-good:
Color coding.
Firstly, when deciding to color code anything in your writing, you need to keep in mind that the colors have to work in both light mode and dark mode. The shade you chose for your dialog completely doesn't work in dark mode. I had difficulty reading because of poor contrast between the text and the background and it felt very straining on my eyes. Red and green that you chose is also too dim, so everyone reading in dark mode is going to have a hell of a headache.
Now, the second problem is that according to your legend:
green: item, bracket [] : skills
except in chapter 3 you mention weapons (and magical items) wielded by some characters and while naming them (the items) you write them in the brackets [] and in green. Green is understandable, since it's an item, but the brackets suggest it's also a skill?
What I'm trying to say is that either your legend is incorrect or you forgot how you decided to code your magic items.
To be honest, I'm against color coding anything in writing like this. Your job as a writer is to make sure that your readers will be able to tell what is what in your novel based solely on your writing. Words are the only "coding" you need. Call me a boomer, but people have been reading traditionally published books, that don't allow for any fancy formatting and they were able to tell what is dialog and what is narration just fine.
Dialogue and dialogue formatting
I won't list every rule regarding formatting dialogue, since there are tons of sources on that online, so I'd highly recommend looking into that. I'll only mention the thing that is the most prominent across your novel.
When writing dialogue, action tags should be placed in the same line as dialogue.
"Oi, get me some more beer!"
Gregory bellowed, hurling an empty bottle in Regina's direction as she was busy doing laundry.
The correct way:
"Oi, get me some more beer!" Gregory bellowed, hurling an empty bottle in Regina's direction as she was busy doing laundry.
In chapter 2:
“If we head north, we'll be deep in the heart of Zayvar’s Forest!”
Regina murmured softly, her voice tinged with unease.
If you mention that Regina "murmured something softly" this should be reflected in the dialogue too. Meanwhile you end Regina's sentence with and exclamation point, which is used to indicate exclamation or a strong surprise. "Murmuring softly" contradicts both.
I noticed only one example of that, but it was jarring enough to take me out, so decided to bring it up.
Repetition
Try using character's names less frequently. I've seen much worse cases of that than yours, but it's still something worth keeping in mind. As a rule of thumb, you want to call the character by name when changing the subject of narration. For example:
"That girl belongs to me! Don't you dare take her from me!"
Gregory's voice trembled with a mix of fury and fear, his bravado crumbling in the face of the stranger's intervention.
Gregory, consumed by fear and rage, desperately wanted to confront the mysterious man cloaked in black but found himself paralyzed with terror.
Could become:
"That girl belongs to me! Don't you dare take her from me!" Gregory's voice trembled with a mix of fury and fear, his bravado crumbling in the face of the stranger's intervention. Consumed by fear and rage, he desperately wanted to confront the mysterious man cloaked in black but found himself paralyzed with terror.
The goal is to make the sentences flow better, so the reader can easily follow the events without losing track of what's going on. The paragraph already indicates that the sequence is about Gregory, so calling him by name again in the sentence directly after the first one is redundant. It breaks the flow.
Another thing to work on is the overuse of "as" -- "as they...", "as she....", "as he...". It's a pain in the butt, but it's good to try and keep the repeating phrases further apart, otherwise it breaks the flow.
While on the topic of repetition, I would like to point out another bit:
The wolf reacted swiftly, unleashing [Wind Crusher], a powerful whirlwind that tore through the surrounding roots and trees.
The wolf, undeterred, unleashed [Wind Crusher], a powerful whirlwind that tore through the wall of roots and nearby trees with ferocity
Deja Vu. These two sentences occur within 6 paragraphs from each other.
Show don't tell
In novels you don't have to obsessively worry about "showing" instead of "telling". There are parts in your novel, that would benefit from being narrated instead of told in dialogue.
“My lord, you have been appointed as the lord of this town, Dormati, for your first assignment. Isn’t this a wonderful opportunity?”
Maybe it's a matter of preference, but to me this sounds unnatural and forced. From the character's perspective there's no reason to specify the town they are in, because both him and his Lord are perfectly aware of this.
It feels even more unnecessary when right after that you write:
Vialdar, his second-in-command and captain of the guards in Dormati, replied respectfully.
And then again, right after that:
Euratus Magni, a noble recently assigned as the lord of Dormati, found the position beneath his stature, considering it nothing more than a small port town.
You could remove the first two mentions of the name and it would still be clear for the reader that Euratus Magni is the new ruler in this town called Dormati.
Plot development, characters, events,...
I'm not going to go into too much detail in this part, because this post is already going too hard on word count.
Your story goes fast. Fast. While there isn't anything wrong with fast paced stories, it's a bit problematic when the reader feels like they are reading "Novel Speedrun Any%".
In chapter 2 Richard is fighting with the Lord of the Forest. The fight starts slowly with Richard probing how does the wolf react to different bullets of his. The Lord proves to have good defenses against them, so from the looks of it, the battle is going to take some time. Even Richard himself mentions this:
"This isn’t going to be easy."
and
"Just how strong is your [Wind Shield]? None of my bullets even touched you,"
You're building up the tension, making the reader believe that it's just a beginning and the fight is going to start for good at any moment now. Except literally 2 paragraphs later:
"You have passed,"
the wolf declared solemnly, ceasing its aggressive stance.
I'm not gonna lie, I was disappointed as hell.
Another part that was very jarring while reading, occurred in chapter 3.
We get to see the court meeting that is supposed to happen every month. Since it happens as rarely as once a month, then there surely must be a lot of matters to take care of during it and it would probably take a couple of hours or even the entire day. Instead, the meeting lasts literally 5 mins and then everybody just casually leaves without having anything done, because some "Nian" has arrived and it's supposedly a big deal or something. It's simply unrealistic.
The last thing I'm going to mention are the characters.
You introduce a lot of characters in a very short time and don't spend time on developing them outside of giving them a handful of tropey attributes. By chapter 5 I still have no idea who any of the characters are and you are already moving on to throwing even more of them at me.
Overall, despite the harsh evaluation, I think your novel has a lot of potential. Nothing I mentioned is unfixable and also a lot of them are just my subjective feelings, that you should treat more like pointers rather than a hard set rules.
Now I'm going to sleep, because it's past 2am and brain no workey anymore. I'll continue tomorrow
