@MeadowHaven done! Here you go, thank you so much for your support and for participating--it means a lot, and I hope you get something useful out of it.
Since you asked for a 9.9 critical lens, this review might come off as harsh—but I hope you don’t get discouraged, I’m just trying to be as specific as possible to give you an outsider’s POV on your work.
Engagement/Pacing: The engagement isn’t bad per se, but the pacing of the story is jarring. It spends a lot of time on some moments and breezes through others that you could have done a lot more with. If you spent more time writing out how Lu goes about killing drunk rats/what exactly the struggle is/how he gets better, that quest completion would have been much more satisfying. Instead, we get a lot of banter up front between Lu and Morgan and everything in-game is just a speedrun. Try and be consistent with the time you spend on the scenes you choose to write. If you don’t think a scene is important, describe what happened in a few lines and move on to the meat of the story you want to tell—otherwise it just starts to feel like reading SparkNotes/bulletpoints of Luther’s diary instead of his story. His epic journey. His quest. Right now, it’s clear that there are stakes, but Luther seems to breeze right over them in a way that doesn’t feel very believable.
Writing: The story could benefit from a good copy-edit. There are a lot of grammar errors, tense inconsistencies (switching from past to present tense for example—I think where the Game Master was introduced), and spelling errors. For example, at one point I remember reading mopping instead of moping. A general pointer for you—break up the dialogue with narration and your writing will sound much more natural. Right now, your characters are just monologuing at each other, not conversing. I pulled out a section so you can see what I’m talking about here:
“Lu! Lu! Lu! Oh, come on Luther! Get up! Oh great you’re finally awake! Did you forget what day it is? Life Sentence is finally being released today in less than half an hour! You would have had more time, but you kept ignoring my friendly wake-up calls. So, I had to resort to desperate measures to wake you up sleeping beauty!”
“Okay, okay just don’t call me Luther again it makes me sound like a balding supervillain or something, and while we are at it. The nickname Sleeping Beauty dies here and now as well. Also, don’t you dare wake me up like that again I was having a very nice dream. Are we understood? Just keep calling me Lu like always, because I sounds so much cooler!”
Vs.
“Lu! Lu! Lu!” Morgan's voice sounded increasingly exasperated. “Oh, come on Luther, get up!”
Luther groaned, turning his face back into his pillow. “Five more minutes,” he mumbled.
“Ohhh, no you don’t! Did you forget what day it is?” Morgan snatched the pillow away. “Life Sentence is finally being released today, in less than half an hour!” She whacked Luther with the pillow when he opened his mouth to complain. “You would have had more time, but you kept ignoring my friendly wake-up calls,” she explained, without an ounce of sympathy, “so, I had to resort to desperate measure to wake you up, Sleeping Beauty!”
/I stopped here because I think you can probably see what I was getting at
General: In short, your story has potential, but your fundamentals need work. For example: The opening paragraph, in my opinion, has way too many adjectives/adverbs/description—reading it out loud, it gets borderline comical, which I do not think was your intention. I get the sense that you were going for epic, but I think you overshot it by a good margin. A good tool to use for self-editing is to go in and delete all the adjectives/adverbs and re-read your writing without them. It will become clear which ones add real value/meaning/nuance/change the writing and which ones are just filler. There’s a fine balance between too little and too much, and I think you err on the side of too much, which can bog down the flow of an otherwise good story. Instead of an action scene, the first paragraph reads like poetry. That’s not necessarily bad, but I don’t know if that’s what you’re going for.
I can’t speak much to the characters/characterization since you’re just getting started, except to say that after Luther self-identifies as Lu, you should probably stick to calling him either one or the other in the narrative.
I think you have a fun idea and I can see glimpses of the vision you have for this! Good writing is just good editing, no first-draft is going to be perfect. Just keep going, get in all the practice you can, and always re-read your work after a few weeks to see a) what you might have missed, and b) how far you’ve come. I hope this was helpful! Again, this is all just my subjective opinion so I'm not saying any of this is correct/the best way/etc. Just my two cents, based on my personal taste.
