Sup Zakyrie the Valkyrie I've always wanted a penpal so
1. Book
God of lies
Eastern fantasy
How do we do this?
Sorry for the late reply.
So, I got a lot of feedback from the thread I posted on Webnovel that mirrors this one. I already selected 3 penpals having read a few chapters of each person's work and given them ample commentary. And... I'm sort of fully booked right now. Sowwy about that.
I did read 3 chappies of
God of Lies. It's pretty funny and has a somewhat unique premise. It reminds me a lot of God is a Game Designer (on webnovel - but it was dropped unfortunately) with the MC being in a world that he created with the ability to manipulate its code. The function in chapter 3 looked pretty realistic btw, well done!
But the grammar was just... why are there so many run on sentences? Please work on your punctuation to insert full stops and commas and even semicolons where needed. It's really important and would dramatically improve the quality of your work. And then the third person POV switches from omniscient narrator to character specific without any warning. By chapter 2 the MC's thoughts are literally part of the prose with no distinguishing factor, like
asterisks or
italics to distinguish inner thinking from actual description.
It's a beloved trope to jump between omniscient narrator to a particular character's thoughts in Eastern Fantasy fiction, especially with side characters whose motivations wouldn't be made clear (due to lack of screen time) without the quick dip into the pool of thoughts in their head. So I'm totally in favor of manic POV switches, but there's little to no warning when it does happen, not even paragraph separation, which makes it a jarring experience more often than not.
To remedy that issue of properly rendering a character's thoughts, I suggest using some sort of demarcation, either italics or single quotes or double quotes. I prefer single quotes because it makes it easy to distinguish it from dialogue which would then use double quotes. Italics would be ideal for thoughts, but then you run into the issue where Webnovel (assuming you plan on or already post there) doesn't have any text formatting (no idea why they don't). You can however, use unicode brackets - here's a handy list I often use:
https://unicodelookup.com/#bracket/1
And some samples:
《 I'm looking real cool right now. My acting is just THAT good 》
『 Where's the fire!? Oh wait, it's just me. I'm soooo hot! 』
⦊ I will rule this world hahahaha! Blurgh. Almost swallowed my tongue there, better be careful! ⦉
Dunno how I feel about emojis in novels, but it certainly matches the comedic tone that you've set from the story's inception so definitely keep them if your audience likes them. And since they can be rendered as is in unicode, you shouldn't have a problem when you decide to compile your work into ebook format.
Lastly, I feel that while the hook (programming powers in a Xianxia game world) was actually good and the main character introduced fairly well, there is a marked lack of tension in the initial chapters and no sense of direction or real motivation in the MC - maybe that changes in the later chapters, but a small fix, where the MC talks about exploring the world he creates and surveying it and / or judging the work of the freelance design guys who took care of mob characters, and to make sure they did a good job or just to see what nifty stuff they worked on etc would at least give the MC some much needed drive and possibly add a bit of tension by introducing danger or conflict in the form of "what I don't know could kill me." Anyways, those are my suggestions, feel free to use what works for you.
Hope you do find a penpal that loves your story and can help you polish it to perfection.
Keep up the good work sir!
P.S. I highly recommend
Once Upon a Spirit Sword Mountain - it's a Xianxia comedy that I absolutely love and I think you might like it too. You can find it on Webnovel.
