mission debrief operation mama training requested by kpopcrown length 5 chapters completed 02/03/2016 key areas to watch tenses, dialogue tags agent dispatched agent gull remember to credit us! archive home Coded by vigour / TRXSH   mission training Report: blood rose All quotes are taken in the context of Fair Use for commentary, in order both to review and to enable the writer to identify the passage easily.

Disclaimer: the purpose of Mission Training is to help identify mistakes in order to hone and improve writing skills.  This is why it is Mission Training.  Think of it like a Master Class.  (If an error is consistent, then it won't be pointed out every time it crops up; instead, its existence will be identified (with examples) and then the general rule on the correct version will be explained so that the author can identify it themselves in the future.)  Mission training currently covers the front page and first five AFF chapters of a story.

Description
First two lines are great.  Leave as is.
A good description should aim to introduce the protagonist, the protagonist's goals, the conflict (or what will prevent them from achieving those goals) and the stakes (what is at risk/what they will lose if they do not achieve those goals), in as little space as possible.  Of course, you can have variants of this (e.g. introduce antagonist, antagonist's aims, introduce protagonist and why they're going to have difficulty stopping the antagonist).  Looking at Blood Rose's description, you have the (an?) antagonist (Kim Jongin), the protagonist (Choi Renee), the protagonist's aims (to be a prosperous detective) – all of which are clearly define and outlined – and then it kind of gets a bit vague on conflict and there aren't really any stakes, and there's also information that appears unnecessary padding it out, such as the reference to her being the heiress to two multimillion-dollar companies.

Conflict and stakes are ultimately what will get your readers to start reading, so you can't afford to be woolly on them.  Identify what they are and clearly put them in.  You can probably also afford to cut out, or at least pare down, a lot of the information on Renee herself.  For example, "Choi Renee has just graduated from the Korean National Police University.  With a stellar degree in Computer Science and Information Technology under her belt, but not nearly so much experience, she lands an internship with the National Police Agency – only to learn that no amount of time at the university, no number of exams, no quantity of crash courses could ever prepare her for the horrors she is about to experience."

Exactly what you put into the description is for you to figure out – I'm not going to write it for you.

Language & grammar – there are a couple of odd vocabulary choices and shifts in tone, which I think may be due to not having English as a first language.  This isn't a criticism so much as an observation (in fact, considering the number of native speakers who don't know what "exquisite" means, let alone use it, your vocabulary is impressive), but it's something worth thinking about.
  » "...the story about an exquisite chase..." – the primary meaning of "exquisite" is "extraordinarily beautiful or delicate", and usually refers to a physical object, e.g. jewellery.  You might use it of taste/food, or of the way a story is written, but you wouldn't use it for the story itself.  Given the context, "thrilling" might be better.
  » "...finished her four year degree..." – in order for the description to make sense, "four-year" is treated as a compound adjective and so has to be hyphenated.  (Basic rule with that is that if each descriptor would make perfect sense and retain the same meaning without the other ones there, they're left unhyphenated.  If they wouldn't, unless they're an adverb ending in -ly or another exception to the rule, they're hyphenated.)  
  » "...fresh new degree..." – one or the other; you don't need both.  "Fresh" probably isn't something that we'd pair up with a degree, either.  "Fresh out of university" would be lovely idiomatic English, but a fresh degree makes it sound like it's a vegetable or something.
  » "...she steps into the thresholds of..." – threshold rather than thresholds.  Again, it's not really something we'd say: we usually step over thresholds or through them or cross them.  Here, you could actually get away with "she steps into the intelligence department", or perhaps something like "she crosses the threshold into the intelligence department".
  » "But hey, what could go wrong?  She was the heiress of two multimillion dollar companies." – Two things here (well, three): "but hey" is a very abrupt drop into a colloquial tone that so far hasn't been used, and it jars.  Better to put it as "what could go wrong?" or "what could possibly go wrong?" and drop the "but hey".  "She was the heiress" means that she used to be the heiress but is no longer – you're writing the description in the present tense, so it's best to stick to it.
  » "...horrors she was about to experience." – Tense slippage – should be "is".
  » "In reality, she is barely coping up." – I think you've mixed up two common English phrases here: "barely holding up" and "barely coping".  Either will do, but preferably not together.
  » "Kim Jongin's disappearance, and the possible existence of a syndicate is what she faces on her first day at work." – The main clause here hasbeen split on either side of the comma. You could get rid of the comma (which would mean changing the "is" to an "are" as it would make it explicitly two things), or put another comma after "syndicate", both of which would be perfectly acceptable.
  » "...she realizes it was bigger than she imagined..." – tense slippage again – should be "is".
  » "She wasn't playing with mere gangsters..." – same here – "wasn't" should be "isn't".  (In fact, the two following sentences both have verbs in the past tense that ought to be in the present.)
  » "...a snap of two fingers." – The idiom is actually "a snap of a finger" or "a snap of the finger".

Foreword
The impact of the foreword would be brought out best if it was shorter.  After your reader's read and been hooked by the description, they want to start reading right away, not get bogged down in something else before the start on the story.  You could quite easily get away with "What does red ... It stands for love, Renee" and "His answer was always the same ... [until the night of her high school graduation] What does red ... blood, Renee." and it would have more or less the same impact (but you'd want to make sure you didn't have two consecutive sentences starting with "he would", because that stilts the flow).  I'm personally not a fan of story snippets in the foreword, but some people are.

Language & Grammar
  » "What does red stand for, Oppa?" The six year old would ask. – phrases like "six-year-old" are always hyphenated in English, otherwise the meaning is that you have six things/people who are a year old.
       » Non-sequitur, but I thought I might also take the opportunity to clarify dialogue tag rules, since this was something that was consistently wrong throughout the story and I'm not going to correct it each time it crops up.  I don't know if you're writing it on a tablet or something, but here is the basic run-down of how a dialogue tag functions.
         a. There is no tag.  The speech stands on its own.
         b. There is a tag with a verb to do with how the speech is delivered, e.g. asked, said, shouted, groaned etc.
         c. There is an action tag, which does not relate in any way to the manner in which the speech is delivered.
     Telling them apart isn't actually too hard.  a. is simple: the speech will be in a paragraph of its own.  For b., the action (speaking) is integral to the speech, so you will have a verb of utterance, and if the tag is after the speech (e.g. "blah blah blah," he said), then no matter what the punctuation mark (whether it's , ? ! —), it only has the stopping force of a comma.  You can't use a period mark.  Consequently, the next word does not have a capital letter.  c., the action tag, is separate from the speech.  If the action tag comes before, then the action is done first, then the dialogue said.  If the speech comes first, then the dialogue is said, and then the action happens.  With the latter, the punctuation mark at the end, no matter what it is (. ? ! —) always has the stopping force of a period, and 
                   no commas can be used.  For example: "Don't do that!"  She turned away.
This means that there is a fundamental difference between the near-identical-looking "I wouldn't say that if I were you," she laughed, and "I wouldn't say that if I were you."  She laughed.
In the first, she is laughing as she says it.  In the second, she says it, and then in a separate action, she laughs.
  » "What does red represent, Oppa?" She would quietly ask. — The "she" shouldn't be capitalized.  Also, the phrase "she would quietly ask" outside a conditional clause has the connotation of doing something on a habitual basis, and this is clearly a one-off, so it ought just to be "she asked quietly."

Prologue
  » "New York City was never the place of peace." — "The" implies that there's only one place of peace – the indefinite article is a better option.
  » "It is what attracted thousands of people." — This should be "it was what attracted thousands of people."  As a general rule, if the narrative of your story is in the past tense, there shouldn't really be anything in the present tense that's not either in direct thought or direct speech.  You have a fair few tense slippages here and there and it's just something to watch out for.
  » "...take her daughter to walks in the park" — I think this is a typo, but I'm not sure whether "to walk in the park" or "on walks in the park" was intended.
  » "6 year old" — when it comes to age, unless it's in the thousands or above, age should be written out, not put in numerically.  As mentioned before, "six-year-old" also requires hyphens.
  » "Her parents were bountiful on money." — A bit of an unusual word choice – "her parents were rolling in cash" (colloquial) or "her parents had copious amounts of money" would work better.

Chapter 1
  » "...clenched jaws greeted her on her first day as an intern at Seoul Gangnam Police Station" — the "her" here ought really to be the character's name, Renee.  Otherwise, your reader has a passage of at least 300 words to get through before we even know who the main character in this chapter is.  This is okay if the main character for that chapter isn't introduced until that point, but unfortunately our main character here is obscurely introduced via pronouns within the first fifty or so words, and then refer to via pronouns sixteen times before we get her name, and two other characters who aren't as important as her are introduced by name before she is.  It also means that it's not totally clear that Renee is she/her being referred to, because there's no direct link between the name and the pronouns in the reader's mind.  It's the kind of thing that will throw the reader but would be instantly rectified with with    with the first "her" being "Renee" instead.
  » "...too busy pouring their noses onto their laptop screens" — idiom – unhelpful that the English language has quite so many homophones, but it should be "poring" rather than "pouring", and the expression is "poring over" rather rathrather than "poring onto", so it would be "too busy poring over their laptop screens."
  » "...a shrill scream echoed" — not necessarily wrong, but we'd be more likely to say "a shrill scream rang" as "echoed" has a connotation of distance.
  » "That's what she thought" — this is one instance of tense slippage I am going to bring up.  I know that when learning English, people are taught to use abbreviations where native speakers would naturally use them, but this is one instance where written and spoken English diverge.  In written English, when we using the auxiliary verb "to be" in past tenses, we don't abbreviate the third person singular because the form with the "s" ending would render it identical to the present, meaning that "he's" as "he is" would be indistinguishable from "he was", or "she is/she was" with "she's", and likewise with "it's."  You would eliminate a large number of your tense errors purely by ensuring that these abbreviations aren't there (so, writing out "that's" as "that was", etc.).
  » "The man with the broad jawline looked like he