Review in exchange for opinion and advice

#1
I've written 24 pages. Looking for an honest and constructive opinion or a detailed review. Mainly doing this to improve my writing and get an idea about what others think about this type of story.  Also to find good stories.

In exchange, I will read your fiction and give a detailed review, if it's interesting enough. 

Mature content warning! 

http://royalroadl.com/fiction/12795/two-beasts

RE: Review in exchange for opinion and advice

#2
Hard to give a proper review of only 3 chapters, especially split between four different P.O.V's. That said, what there is is pretty good, grammatically speaking it's very readable, I'm never lost or confused about what's happening. You've set up some interesting stuff, I'm curious what happens next, and the opening scene was very attention grabbing.

That said I don't know how I feel about having 'the voice of the author' in one of the main characters heads, seemingly at all times. It's too early to say one way or another obviously but that's a bit of a red flag to me.

Anyway I gave you 5 stars for the grammar and interesting introduction, I'll try to follow along for a bit but this does seem like a story that will take quite a while to gather steam and really show itself off (curse of multi-pov).
~writing is hard~

RE: Review in exchange for opinion and advice

#3
This is exactly what I was looking for! Thank you so much for such a detailed comment. Now I know which areas to focus on.

I've already read the first four chapters of your fiction. I gave you a 5 star rating for now. I really liked your synopsis and prologue. Your 'lazy' MC is quite interesting.

The only thing that didn't feel right to me was that you have too many big paragraphs.

I will read some more chapters before giving a full review. But so far I've found it to be interesting.

RE: Review in exchange for opinion and advice

#5
I like the uncommon practice of all reviewers receiving a copy of each others' comments. I have been introduced to some good scholars through such distribution of non-anonymized reviews, and I especially see potential for nasty reviewers to see how critique can be delivered without nastiness, if not actually helpfully. The reviewers' primary goal should not be to block work not ready for publication, but to support the production of work that's good. Now that nearly every review process is managed through an on-line database, distributing reviews should be easy and almost cost-free. Let's make it the norm. It should help us to produce better reviews overall, all the more useful for the author to respond to.

And do we really need to anonymize? Our world is so small that it's often easy to identify authors and reviewers by their expertise, pet peeves, attitude towards other people and writing styles. Let's stop pretending that double-blinding achieves everything it promises.

https://www.thewarofdestiny.com/