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Apr 2021

So I read the first four episodes and must I say that you did a wonderful job! Everything from the music to the descriptive scenery to the raw emotions of the characters. Your novel is very well made for what I've read so far and am already interested in the character dynamics between Sister Nina and Zayne. I already have so many questions about these characters and I can't wait to see what you have in store for them!

Honestly, keep doing what you're doing. You have yourself a new sub!

I totally understand, I have a high tolerance also and so it was a learning curve for me too. Tapas doesn't give very much detail as to what is considered mature when it comes to violence :weary: I would say the first 3 are pretty graphic. You have the vampire getting blown up, Nina getting attacked, then also Zayne rips the vampires heart out. I was told to look at it like if it were a movie, what it would be rated, and go from there.

In my story there's a scene where my MC breaks someone's arm. There's not a lot of blood, but it is a graphic depiction and so I marked that chapter "mature". Not sure if that helps, but I've also been learning from other writers who have violent chapters what is considered "mature".

I read the first two chapters (I can only read so many novel chapters in a go) and overall I really liked it! It worked very well and I was very impressed by how the action was handled. I am not too good at following action sequences, but this managed to remain exciting while also being something I can follow. Also the balance between exciting things happening and the main character's thought process was absolutely nailed. Going in I wasn't expecting western style stand off between a nun and a vampire but it was a happy thing to come across. The writing's perspective feels both badass and well done. Also the music just... chef's kiss, best seasoning to the story. I felt like I was watching a very strange and wonderful movie.

Okay, I guess I have to mention some negatives. There were a few words that got a little overused, one of the big ones being "filth" it took me out of it a. little, but it wasn't huge. There were also a couple of times when descriptions of things got a little confusing. Overall it just seemed like the chapters just needed another once over for editing.

So... yeah. Story was very good, very creative and well thought out, just might need a little bit of wording tweaking. Really nice work.

Here's my novel if you wanna take a look:

Okay finally read you @NotBeatrix

First all ooooooh the music ! Like this isn't what I usually listen but this is so good and so fitting to the story ! We can see it's not chosen random and that you take time to choose your track with care.

OOOOOH I love badass sexy nuns. Gave me some Chrono Crusade and Trinity Blood vibes, 2 animes I love a lot. I immediately vibes with Nina and can't wait to see more of her.

The immersion is so well down, you are very good at planting the scenery, describes your characters feeling, express the brutality and violence of your battles, I love that.

You know how to end a chapter, these chiffangers ?! Naaah love this !

Anyway I subscribed, can't wait for next chapters ! :smiley:

To conclude:do absolutely not let discourage because you don't have many subscribers yet ! You deserve so much more and it will come! Don't stop and keep what you are doing cause you're doing it the right way.

I am coming back to this :sparkles: @NotBeatrix

I left you comments and likes as I read and also made notes so I wouldn't forget anything :sweat_smile:

Overall, I love your writing style. You do well to establish and maintain your character voices. I also love your use of descriptions and your utilization of figurative language and rhetorical devices, especially for the more tense and emotional scenes. This all makes an engaging read, and your plot is interesting.

Here's some feedback that I noticed throughout your episodes:

In episode one, you compare the canyons to mountains. I'm not sure if that's the best comparison since mountains reach high and canyons are steep into the ground. Most people wouldn't look at a gorge, basically, and compare it to a mountain, and since they're ground level in this stand-off, it makes less sense that the canyon is above them. Unless that bit is referring to the mountains, then the sentence should be tweaked to avoid confusion.

(These were in episode one and all that I read)

-You have a few typos and tense slips I noticed as well. Overall, tense slips dramatically decrease over the course of the episodes, but there are a few sentences where maybe you missed a word, or there was some subject-verb disagreement, but those are no biggie and quick fixes. Also, comma misuse, but not as much from episode two ongoing.

-You have many "can feel" sentences throughout, so I'd be mindful of those and other filter words. You can cut them out entirely and cut straight to the action of the sentence.

-When you write numbers, spell them out instead of putting the number if they're under 100.

Episode two, you had a "With unsteady breaths, I fight to breathe..." sentence, be mindful of repeating words so close together. I would have liked a bit more about savant and pierrot vampires since it was mentioned so much. I understand it may come up later, but it's something I honed in on, so just a bit more context clues would have been nice. This might be a "me thing," but I'd prefer italics or single quotes where you have 'Nina'; both are redundant to me. I don't know offhand the "rules," but if it's a matter of your style, do what works.

Episode three, the only things I picked up on that are a little throughout are some typos and missing words. Another thing is dialogue. When you use em dashes, you don't need a period; the dash is the punctuation. For sentences with intruding beats, ex: "dialogue"—intrusion—"rest of dialogue." you put the em dashes outside of the quotes. Pro tip: use ALT+0151 to create em dashes (learned that from twitter :smile:)

Also, with dialogue, I'd say you can add in some action tags that aren't always:

"dialogue." [action sentence ending with a period.] "something else."

Usually, I do something more like:

"dialogue," [person doing some action], "rest of dialogue."

Typically if the first bit is a dependent clause, I do it like that.

Episode four, my only note is to stay away from using food to describe someone's skin tone/color. You referenced the girl having "caramel colored skin." There are various ways to describe skin, and this comes across as offensive for various reasons.

Episode five, the "sweat like a dog" line threw me off a bit. Me being nitpicky again, probably, but dogs don't sweat, and the phrase is a conflation of "sweat like a pig," but style and all that.

Episode six, my only note is that I would have liked a better transition from the flashback to the present. I liked how it tied into the present with Nina remembering the rattlesnake and the girl biting her though.

Like I said, I enjoyed your story, and I can tell the work you put into it. I noticed little slips we all make and anything else I think are quick fixes to tighten things up. You have a solid start, and I'm interested to see the rest. And the cliffhangers :doggo_shook: you implement them well

1 year later

Hi there, my apologies that I fell off the bandwagon with this thread! Did I ever complete your review? If I did not and you are still interested in receiving a review after all this time, please drop your book link here! I'll be sure to give a detailed and helpful review you deserve because I do not like leaving things incomplete! :grinning:

Hi there, my apologies that I fell off the bandwagon with this thread! Did I ever complete your review? If I did not and you are still interested in receiving a review after all this time, please drop your book link here! I'll be sure to give a detailed and helpful review you deserve because I do not like leaving things incomplete! :grinning:

Hey! My apologies that I fell off the bandwagon with this thread! Did I ever complete your review? If I did not and you are still interested in receiving a review after all this time, please drop your book link here! I'll be sure to give a detailed and helpful review you deserve because I do not like leaving things incomplete! :grinning:

Hii my apologies that I fell off the bandwagon with this thread! Did I ever complete your review? If I did not and you are still interested in receiving a review after all this time, please drop your book link here! I'll be sure to give a detailed and helpful review you deserve because I do not like leaving things incomplete! :grinning:

My apologies that I fell off the bandwagon with this thread! Did I ever complete your review? If I did not and you are still interested in receiving a review after all this time, please drop your book link here! I'll be sure to give a detailed and helpful review you deserve because I do not like leaving things incomplete! :grinning:

Apologies that I fell off the bandwagon with this thread! Did I ever complete your review? If I did not and you are still interested in receiving a review after all this time, please drop your book link here! I'll be sure to give a detailed and helpful review you deserve because I do not like leaving things incomplete! :grinning:

Did I ever complete your review? If I did not and you are still interested in receiving a review after all this time, please drop your book link here! I'll be sure to give a detailed and helpful review you deserve because I do not like leaving things incomplete! :grinning:

THANK YOU. I appreciated your detailed review and I would like to apologize if I fell off the bandwagon with this thread! Did I ever complete your review? If I did not and you are still interested in receiving a review after all this time, please drop your book link here! I'll be sure to give a detailed and helpful review you deserve because I do not like leaving things incomplete! :grinning:

Okay. So I've just finished reading the first few chapters of your book. Here are some of my thoughts and impressions as I was reading.

FIRST THOUGHTS AND IMPRESSIONS:

  • Really ominous beginning, I get the feeling something bad happened but I don't know what yet. Now, I'm curious to find out....

  • Hmm why are they all huddled by a fire? Are they not able to make shelters for themselves?

  • What is this 'End' everyone is talking about? Curious...

  • Do they have to be outside if that's cold and foggy? Why is it so foggy in the first place? Some nuclear event? Many, many, questions!

  • Man, it seem like they are all sad, depressed, and have nothing to do but to struggle to survive.

  • Man it sounds like they are living in a rough world

  • I wouldn't be able to survive in a world like that.

  • The details on the characters are pretty on point, I can feel person has a distinct look and personality.

  • I feel like I can feel the dirt and grime off the pages, that's how apocalyptic the setting feels right now.

  • This kinda reminds me of the tv show The Leftovers, especially when Ruby talks about leaving her bf and feeling like there was no point to it. One of the characters in the tv show the Leftovers has an affair and they lose that person after a similar cataclysmic event and they feel like there was no point to it, there was a kind of of grief from it too like Ruby.

OVERALL THOUGHTS FOR EVERYTHING:

The writing descriptions for each character is perfect. It really gives you an idea of what each character look like. They all had a distinct look and sound in my mind while I reading. The nicknames were also perfect, I feel like it really showed just how damaging this 'End' was on the minds of the survivors. The line you said were they said their old names were no longer of use was just PERFECT. It was the chef's kiss and I really liked that line because it added to the dark, grim, rough imagery in my mind.

As a reader I really got the feel that whatever 'The End' was, it truly changed the world and in the people in it forever. Another thing I liked, was the way you use charged words with sharp imagery like 'they huddled like maggots' and 'a skeleton of what was' really added to that dark uncomfortable end of the world imagery you were going for. I also liked how you could see each of the characters had unique personalities and yet you could still tell their minds and hearts were damaged. I liked too how some of them still had such a chaotic humor which helped to lighten the load of the heaviness in each chapter, so I appreciated that.

With that being said, I would say the biggest thing I noticed was that there wasn't much details on the setting. You described them sitting around a makeshift bonfire but I could not really picture where they were. Are they in open field? Are they in an abandoned lot? Or where they next to some area where there was broken debris? I know you mentioned the metal pipes, but I was little lost on where those were coming from. I would also mention the chapters are short, which made it a little hard to ground myself on what was happening because the next chapter either continues from before or just jumps scenes and that also made it a little hard to recognize the setting.

Another thing I would mention is that some of the formating of the chapters are little far too spaced out which makes it a little hard to read at times. I also noticed some grammatical errors here and there along with some weird sentence structure. I would also say, as much as I was starting to enjoy the characters in 'The Group' I also noticed there were a lot of character names for the first chapters and it was just a little bit hard to keep up with so many characters and then to introduce another character just made me a little confused is all.

So, final thoughts? Well, while apocalyptic stories aren't really my kind of tea, I think this story already has so much potential! You do an awesome job of using emotional charged words and descriptive imagery to create a world that is unique and dark, and with some polishing of the setting, some of the grammar, and the character introductions it will be even better.

:grinning: