mission debrief operation mama mission requested by kpopcrown length 10 chapters completed 31/01/2016 verdict pass with merit agent dispatched agent gull remember to credit us! archive home Coded by vigour / TRXSH   mission blood rose title

pass with merit

To be honest, I'm a little unsure about this one.  To me, "Blood Rose" rings more of a tragedy, say, something like Romeo and Juliet, than a mafia story, but at the same time, it reminds me of Blood Diamond, which comparatively speaking is a lot more similar to this than Romeo and Juliet would be.  It's short and snappy, which is always good to see in a title, but I'm just not totally sure it conjures up the right atmosphere.  However, seeing the reference to roses in the prologue and in the foreword, it clearly has some kind of significance that just hasn't yet been made clear.  Sometimes the reasoning behind a particular title doesn't become evident until a story is finished, so you've got plenty of room to bring that to fruition and the seed has already been planted.  (And it's always nice when am author doesn't reveal everything right at the beginning of the story.) forecast pass This is a pass, but barely, and mostly because the story sounds interesting (and I shouldn't really judge the description on that but rather its power to pull the reader into the story).

My first comment is that it's too long.  There's way too much going on in there, and it's a bit all over the place.  I'll go more into detail on this in the Training debrief you requested for the first five chapters, but the job of a description is to give the setup and land a hook – the shorter you are, the better.  What you want is the protagonist, goals, conflict and stakes – and no more than that.  The description needs to be pithy, punchy and engaging, and at the moment, it's not.  The first two sentences are great, and then suddenly it reads more like a review of the story rather than an eye-catching read my story now or you'll regret it!  As I said before, I'll go into this in more detail in the Training debrief, but you could easily cut this in half (or even finish it at "...horrors she was about to experience") without losing any impact, and it needs a once-over for language errors.  At a glance, there are several grammar errors and a couple of incorrect idioms, along with a few unusual vocabulary choices, and mistakes like that can easily put somebody off reading.  But, like I mentioned at the beginning, the actual story presented in this does save it, because it sounds intriguing, which hints at an interesting and solid plot.

Regarding the foreword, I'm not a great advocate for putting part of the actual story there.  If the area between "Foreword" and the "next" button extends too much, a lot of readers will actually skip what's there.  The a/n itself is nice and short, which means that people probably will pay attention to it, but the excerpt could probably be cut down, because it currently reads like a second blurb or description, and that can be offputting to the reader because it feels like you aren't confident as an author in your description.  The important part of that excerpt is the change in what red stands for, and even though the accompanying prose with it isn't that long, it could still be much shorter, and I feel that would make more of an impact.  foundation pass I was pleasantly surprised by this one: there were various language errors in the description and foreword, and a few in the prologue, but the frequency of these cleared up after the first chapter or so.  It would really be worth tidying up the front page in terms of this, because you don't want to put a reader off with them thinking there will be loads of mistakes when there actually aren't.  Besides, once you're at chapter 2 or further on, while there are some mistakes, they don't impact nearly as much on the story's readability.  There are still some systematic errors – tense slippage was a big one (the main tense is clearly the past tense, but there are constant instances of the present tense located outside speech or thought when there shouldn't be), as was punctuation surrounding dialogue tags – but the impact on readability from this is negligible, when grammar and spelling is otherwise decent. aesthetics pass with dist-inction I like the poster.  It's nice and simple, though perhaps not as ominous or thriller-esque as the premise might lead a reader to think.  My only real comment on it is that palette makes it a little difficult to read the writing, and the title could perhaps be bigger, but that's really just nit-picking.  The background is obviously made to match and nicely unobtrusive.

In terms of wider aesthetics of the story, the writing font and colour are very easy on the eye and consequently make for easy reading; there's no excess white space or overuse of formatting, both of which can be harsh on the eye, and the paragraphs are all of reasonable length – and more importantly, of varying length, which means that the eye doesn't skate down the page.  While this kind of thing is usually done unintentionally, it's surprising just how many people don't realise how big a difference it makes. plot pass with merit The overarching framework of the plot so far looks pretty solid, and it's also interesting: two psychopathic killers are on the loose and the police are trying to take down a gigantic syndicate. It's quite hard to go wrong with that, and from what I've so far seen, when it comes to the overall plot, I think you'll do just fine. With the most recently posted chapters, it's also really beginning to hit its stride and get down to the main part of the story.

However, while the broad outline is there, there are inconsistencies and lapses in the detail. There a few in particular that could do with being addressed.
1) Two of the – arguably – most important people in Renee's life aren't even mentioned, let alone featured, until five or six chapters in. (Not counting the prologue for this since at the moment it's a bit too disjointed from the rest of the story.) One is the present romantic interest and adopted brother (which, by the way, is only classified or not classified as depending on which country you're in – I don't know what the laws on it are in South Korea, but you can get imprisoned for it in my country) and the other is the best friend. By the time they appear, Renee's already spent several days working, so they could have been introduced somehow in what she was doing after work if you had a scene or two for that.
2) The biggest one: an intern would not be put on a high-profile case like that on their first day in the office. Interns also wouldn't be employed fully having just done a week on the job, even if their performance was outstanding. Maybe if somebody else working on the job in the position Renee takes was supervising her and something happened to that person, she'd have to take it over, but that would be an emergency, not standard procedure. Granted, Renee has credentials, but a more likely scenario would be that she found herself abruptly landed with taking over from somebody who was on that job and then got ill or something, or (which wouldn't fit with the current set-up) was taken on temporarily in a capacity of an advisor (though this would be unlikely s