[BL] Check out my First Story.

Tananas143

Active member
Joined
Feb 26, 2021
Messages
5
Points
43
Hello! I just posted my first story, Welcome to Alternia, and I wanted to see if anyone likes it because I been having doubts.

I don’t mind if you don’t like it and I actually encourage you do give your honest thoughts. So, please give me any feedback!
 

Ruyi

༺ aureate sect ༻
Joined
Jan 22, 2019
Messages
104
Points
83
hello hello!

was just reading it and it looks pretty interesting, i like all the details you put into worldbuilding the MMO world (and using the announcements for chatrooms was a nice touch).

i will suggest one thing: break down your bigger paragraphs into smaller ones, especially the ones with dialogue! maybe it's a formatting issue but a new paragraph for every line of dialogue from a new speaker is both standard and much easier to read.

jiayou~
 

Tananas143

Active member
Joined
Feb 26, 2021
Messages
5
Points
43
hello hello!

was just reading it and it looks pretty interesting, i like all the details you put into worldbuilding the MMO world (and using the announcements for chatrooms was a nice touch).

i will suggest one thing: break down your bigger paragraphs into smaller ones, especially the ones with dialogue! maybe it's a formatting issue but a new paragraph for every line of dialogue from a new speaker is both standard and much easier to read.

jiayou~
Thank you for your feedback. I was also thinking about breaking it down to smaller paragraphs since that seems to be the prefer style for web novels.
 

LinXueLian

Always Handsome
Joined
Feb 19, 2021
Messages
522
Points
108
Yo! Since this is a BL title, I'm gonna give a crack at giving it some feedback. :blob_uwu:

While I'm not really familiar with the LitRPG format, I'd say you might want to continue for a few more chapters to see if everything works out, since you're literally sitting on a gold mine here. Isekai and LitRPG are pretty popular genres in SH, and I don't think I've seen too many BL titles take on a seme protagonist coupled with these gamer terms - in terms of concept, I'd say you're on the right track overall.

What you have going on is pretty fun for a casual read. This character:
he may look like an angel but he is certainly a demon the crawled from the pits of hell.
Is me in a nutshell. Except I'm handsomer, of course. :blob_shade:

In terms of critique.... uhhh. :sweating_profusely: I don't generally give them since it's not really my thing to point out errors, but I suppose I'll try. Like the others have mentioned here, one of the flaws you seem to have is the readability of your story. Large blocks of paragraphs are very confusing to the eye, especially when multiple dialogues are involved.

Since a lot of readers are on mobile devices nowadays, it's not a bad idea to break them up dialogue per dialogue and maintain short paragraphs to reduce strain to their eyes.

Aside from that, I'm spotting a relatively high number of SPAG errors as well, which may have contributed to the current dwindling or low readership you seem to be experiencing. Here are a few examples of that found in the text:
he may look like an angel but he is certainly a demon the crawled from the pits of hell.
The number 7 spot goes to a sexy princess, that is obsessed with hair
but is way to shy for my taste
I play too, why don’t you tell me your username and ill add you.
And so forth.

Grammarly and MS Word won't catch them all. I'm ESL, so I know using machines to pick out our grammatical errors for us is a terrible habit we tend to pick up over time. One of the ways is to counter this is to manually go through the document again in order to edit and proof it ourselves.

It's either that, or you can try converting it using text to speech applications so you can listen to it and catch your errors using an audio technique. Alternatively, you can pay a professional editor to proof your story. If I'm not mistaken, editors are paid by amount of words. It can get pretty pricey, so unless you have a Patreon account or a method of sustaining this, it's probably not something you'd want to do for too long.

It's tempting to post a story raw because we're excited (I'm super excited too!), but I wouldn't really recommend posting it immediately after writing it up. I still spot errors in my own works after sifting through them three times. But if it helps, combing through it at least once or twice manually does pay off in terms of readership.

It shows our readers we care about their comfort, and that usually goes a long way in building reader trust. They don't always comment on our works, but some might recommend it to others if they notice the effort we've made. And that's what we want! Readers~ :blob_melt:

All in all, good luck! It's not a bad concept! Once you get the literary stuff ironed out, I'm pretty sure you'll have a comfortably large readership.

Ganbatte~~ :blob_happy:
 

Tananas143

Active member
Joined
Feb 26, 2021
Messages
5
Points
43
Yo! Since this is a BL title, I'm gonna give a crack at giving it some feedback. :blob_uwu:

While I'm not really familiar with the LitRPG format, I'd say you might want to continue for a few more chapters to see if everything works out, since you're literally sitting on a gold mine here. Isekai and LitRPG are pretty popular genres in SH, and I don't think I've seen too many BL titles take on a seme protagonist coupled with these gamer terms - in terms of concept, I'd say you're on the right track overall.

What you have going on is pretty fun for a casual read. This character:

Is me in a nutshell. Except I'm handsomer, of course. :blob_shade:

In terms of critique.... uhhh. :sweating_profusely: I don't generally give them since it's not really my thing to point out errors, but I suppose I'll try. Like the others have mentioned here, one of the flaws you seem to have is the readability of your story. Large blocks of paragraphs are very confusing to the eye, especially when multiple dialogues are involved.

Since a lot of readers are on mobile devices nowadays, it's not a bad idea to break them up dialogue per dialogue and maintain short paragraphs to reduce strain to their eyes.

Aside from that, I'm spotting a relatively high number of SPAG errors as well, which may have contributed to the current dwindling or low readership you seem to be experiencing. Here are a few examples of that found in the text:




And so forth.

Grammarly and MS Word won't catch them all. I'm ESL, so I know using machines to pick out our grammatical errors for us is a terrible habit we tend to pick up over time. One of the ways is to counter this is to manually go through the document again in order to edit and proof it ourselves.

It's either that, or you can try converting it using text to speech applications so you can listen to it and catch your errors using an audio technique. Alternatively, you can pay a professional editor to proof your story. If I'm not mistaken, editors are paid by amount of words. It can get pretty pricey, so unless you have a Patreon account or a method of sustaining this, it's probably not something you'd want to do for too long.

It's tempting to post a story raw because we're excited (I'm super excited too!), but I wouldn't really recommend posting it immediately after writing it up. I still spot errors in my own works after sifting through them three times. But if it helps, combing through it at least once or twice manually does pay off in terms of readership.

It shows our readers we care about their comfort, and that usually goes a long way in building reader trust. They don't always comment on our works, but some might recommend it to others if they notice the effort we've made. And that's what we want! Readers~ :blob_melt:

All in all, good luck! It's not a bad concept! Once you get the literary stuff ironed out, I'm pretty sure you'll have a comfortably large readership.

Ganbatte~~ :blob_happy:
Thank you for taking your time. All your critiques are very valid and worth looking into. I’m going to reformat the chapters into a more appealing way before I completely give up on this story. For some of those grammatical errors I actually remember some of the ones you pointed out, but I guess I forgot to correct them, I should work on that too lol. This is the first novel I even written and I already learn so much from just writing 3 chapters. I also began to read other novels differently, which made things become more clear.

I plan to basically do an overhaul of what I already put out, as I still don’t have a lot of confidence the way it stands now. Asking others for feedback helped alot. Thank you again for taking time out of your day to read my story. ❤️
 

LinXueLian

Always Handsome
Joined
Feb 19, 2021
Messages
522
Points
108
Thank you for taking your time. All your critiques are very valid and worth looking into. I’m going to reformat the chapters into a more appealing way before I completely give up on this story. For some of those grammatical errors I actually remember some of the ones you pointed out, but I guess I forgot to correct them, I should work on that too lol. This is the first novel I even written and I already learn so much from just writing 3 chapters. I also began to read other novels differently, which made things become more clear.

I plan to basically do an overhaul of what I already put out, as I still don’t have a lot of confidence the way it stands now. Asking others for feedback helped alot. Thank you again for taking time out of your day to read my story. ❤️
Oohh no problem and thank you! :blob_teary: I was so worried about giving critiques, I hate sounding harsh since writers are also trying their best to share their stories and their hearts. I sort of forget to correct errors sometimes too, so I know how you feel. Our heads are probably already dry after writing so many words, hahaha... :blobrofl:

All in all, good luck! Yeah, give it an overhaul first, and then see if readers keep coming back. The only problem is promotion, though... :blob_hmm: On this site it's a bit hard to promote and get new readers. But it's still worth a shot unless you're already completely unmotivated to complete it. First-time writing is hard when the story is long. When I first started out, I wrote one-shots to warm up. You can try doing a bit of that on the side and see if that also helps.
 
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