By Baozi and Bacon

Author: sweetsonata

Story Link:  By Baozi and Bacon

Genre: Comedy, Fluff

Oneshot/chaptered: Chaptered (Ongoing)

Brief Summary: When two people who are completely different from each other are paired up for a writing assignment about their lives, why not make a blog about it?

Good points:

► Your title suits your genre and would catch people’s attention.

► Your description was good as well; it got me interested the moment I read it. (Although there was a small flaw: you mentioned that they were paired up, which means that they were assigned together. But what you actually meant was Xiumin had no choice but to ask for Baekhyun’s partnership; therefore they weren’t paired up, rather they only worked together out of necessity.)

► Your characters each had distinct qualities, which was good.

► The flow was fine. It was simple so there was no room for confusion.

► Out of all the stories I’ve reviewed since the shop started, your grammar’s the closest to perfect. You only had a handful of minor errors.

► I liked the life lessons found in Xiumin’s blog. I think this is something others would appreciate as well.

► I liked your creative idea to link some words to pictures (these two: a victory dance, fabulous as .). I’m sure others would appreciate that as well.

 ► The development of the love web (who liked who) would be interesting; seeing as how everyone liked someone who was into someone else.

Weak points:

► Here are some of your grammatical errors:

I. Wording

Incorrect: You totally ruining my chances of staying youthful.

Correct: You’re totally ruining my chances of staying youthful. 

Incorrect: …since the whole encounter was just a big waste in time… 

Correct: …since the whole encounter was just a big waste of time… 

Incorrect: I gotta tell you

Correct: I’ve got to tell you

*You may use slang words like “gotta”, “sorta”, “kinda” only in conversations. You mustn’t use such in the narrative because it’s informal.

II. Redudancy

Incorrect: Baekhyun finally seemed to lighten up, now that he found out that someone else found out his feelings.

Correct: Baekhyun finally seemed to lighten up, now that he knew someone else found out his feelings.

III. Rambling

Examples:

1. One day, he could be this tough, strong guy who could whoop someone's with his nunchucks or whatever the they use in wushu, but then a minute later, he turns into this emotional and sentimental priss who can't seem to even take a hit.

2. I logged out after looking at the last comment, which was sorta disturbing, since when I said, "prepare for the worse, since it can bite you pretty hard in the ," a guy had taken it as a ual reference that he went into full detail.

3. Anyways, it looked like he was staring at my direction... until I realized that I'm too antisocial to even wave at the person, so I looked behind me to see that Tao was sitting down on the sidewalk, listening and rapping to his favorite song yet again, Officially Missing You.

4. Since I know about everyone's dirty little secrets, I've been discreetly spying on all of them to see if any progress has made, and by discreetly, I mean glancing over your shoulder and breaking the gaze when you knock into somebody with a cup of hot coffee.

*Rambling is informal, unless placed in a scene during a conversation.

I think this is something people wouldn’t mind in blogs, but not for published works; you must appropriately put periods to prevent long sentences from getting out of hand.

 ► Unfortunately, the story seemed to lack detail. Your idea was flexible—there were a lot of possibilities with this “blogging” idea. Somehow, when I read the story, I think you didn’t utilize it enough. Like for example: you could have stated why their teacher assigned such a writing assignment; for what subject it was for; why other people declined Xiumin until Baekhyun was the only one left free; and maybe even gave Xiumin some crazy schemes to have Baekhyun contribute to the blog (aside from the Chanyeol blackmail).

It seemed that these first few chapters revolved mostly around the love web, than it did the blog assignment.

► The school’s social hierarchy was only mentioned in one of Xiumin’s blogs, which is why it didn’t have impact on me, since he never mentioned it before. There was no sign of him being treated as a misfit prior to the blog account, so it seemed to pop out of nowhere.

► It lacked comedy. This was one of your genres, so I was expecting some humor. Although I did snort at some parts of the story, I didn’t really laugh at anything :( Xiumin always spoke in a sort of sarcastic way, which was good for this genre; but aside from that, nothing was full-on funny to me. I’ll be honest here; my sense of humor is quite shallow. I laugh at every little thing; sometimes a corny joke is thrown in the classroom, and I’m the only one laughing. I think you need to inject more funny parts in the story for the upcoming chapters ^_^ (Don’t worry! I know you can do it!)

Tips for improvement::

► I don’t think you need a beta-reader, so you should just reread your work before publishing it. You’ll see mistakes you didn’t notice when you were writing, and you’ll be able to correct them.

► Since this is about comedy, you ‘ll really have to think outside of the box to get people’s funny bones tickled. There seemed to be more sarcasm in your story, than there was humor. Because of that, I found it a bit dull at one point. I think you need to stockpile on some effective jokes (>_<) Or research about it perhaps?

► How about a co-author?  You might know some friends who could help contribute funny ideas and such.

Enjoyment:

Not so much (;_;)

► I was really expecting to laugh a lot, but I didn’t. Plus not much of the story line was revealed yet, so it seemed to be plain.  I’m sorry that I didn’t enjoy so much (;_;)

► But I did like the characterization and love web; I also sympathized a bit with Xiumin, knowing the feeling of liking someone who already liked someone else.  It’s just that, comedy was the genre, so there should have been funnier scenes... (sorry again ;_;)

Extra Notes:

► It’s only been the first few chapters of the story, so I know you’ll improve as you go along.  I’ve also read the comments and your readers love your fic! So keep up with what they like, and try to add some new things too to spice it up (^o^)

► Also, because the story hasn’t been completed yet, I couldn’t evaluate it fully with relation to its plot. I mean, okay, so they need to write a blog for their assignment. Then what? Is that it? Is the whole story going to just be about their blogs? Or is there actually a storyline to follow? Say for example, it was through this blogging assignment that Xiumin and Baekhyun ended up becoming great friends. Is there any of that? I couldn’t really give it a full review since there’s a whole lot of the story that’s yet to be written. If I were to base the review only on the first few chapters, I’d say that it’s sort of dull and ordinary. Many stories have love triangles and such. What makes yours distinct is the plot, which unfortunately, I have yet to see much of (^_^)

► Baekhyun had yet to contribute to the blog. Maybe you were saving this for future chapters (^_^)? So I didn’t put in under the weakness section, since this is supposed to be a blog about both Baozi and Bacon.

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Overall:

Overall, you had a good title, description, characterization and grammar. The only thing that was off was how you handled the plot and its genre. The story needs to be funnier and made more interesting; you need some fresh ideas and LOL-worthy humor. (This is just my opinion so please don’t take it to heart ^_^ I only want to help by honestly sharing my thoughts on your story. Some people may think differently (like your readers, they LOVE your story), so don’t be glum, chum!).  ^_^

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