Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ShadowDenizen" data-source="post: 2911637" data-attributes="member: 16485">Add Joel Rosenberg's "Guardians of the Flame" series to that list.  And that's a (relatively) high standard to live up to, even though I'm not a huge fan of the "Real People Transported to a Game World" subgenre.But, on to subject at hand-- Your "Blook". (Sorry for the delay: I've been meaning to post this for awhile and am just now getting to it!First, let me wish you the best of luck.  Honestly, I think you porbably have a tale worth telling, that people could enjoy. Personally, though, I found it a bit pedestrian.  (I'm not gonna sugar-coat my comments, since constructive criticism is the best way to grow in your writing-- and I learned that the hard way, as a writer myself!)The inital setup doesn't quite work the way I think you wanted it to.  It didn't really "grab" me right off the bat.  There's such a glut of reading material out there, both online and in-print, that something REALLY has to grab and make an impression on me in order to keep me reading.  Stylistically, the intercutting of scenes didn't really add so much as confuse, IMHO: I agree with the poster who said to start from the beginning, and progress from there. I think that the charcters were sorely underdeveloped, and that's a fatal flaw, especially in this genre.  The readers HAVE to have strong feelings about the characters, or they won't become emotionally invested in the story.  Not only were the characters not fleshed out enough, they were sterotypically geeky: I can understand maybe one of the protaganists being like that, but all of them (or at least that's the imopression I got)?  A few more descriptive lines to at least set their ages and the time-period we're talking about also would have been warranted I think (Easily solved by dropping some pop-culture references or some-such thing), and maybe a few lines in the car scene to give them distinct personalites, flaws or foibles.  And, (though this may be wishful thinking on my part) why not iclude a gay character?  AFAIK, that's something that hasn't been done in this subgenre, and (as a gay gamer myself), I'd be interested in seeing how the mores of this fantasy world differ from (or maybe mirror?) that of the real world?I'm normally a grammar stickler, for the most part, but in a book like this, I think that capturing the way these people talk is paramount, so if the CHARACTER would say something like that when speaking, the rules of grammar can be overridden for "authenticity".I'll try to give more specific nit-picks and critiques if you like (including a largish list of typos), but I just wanted to give my overall "first impression" of what I've read so far:  I hope these comments prove useful, and again, best of luck.</blockquote>

Verification