Title: 'Author’s Pet'

Author: SadisticSinner

Reviewed by: BrenRay

*Date/Time of Request: 08/09/2012 .. 02:39:03
*Date/Time of Completion: 08/09/2012 .. 21:56:02

Individual Scores:

Title (5/5) - I thought that the title was brilliant! Initially I was bit sceptical about the whole ‘pet’ scenario, because that seems to be a very common theme in stories. However, when I took the time to actually consider your story, I thought it was a very clever and creative title. It fits perfectly with the storyline and incorporates both Jonghyun’s character as the ‘author’ (since he is a writer in the plot) and Key’s character as the ‘pet.’ All things considered - this was quite an outstanding title, in my opinion.

Forward/Description (9/10) - I thought that this section was very solid and could have achieved full-marks if it were modified slightly. Your description is perfectly fine, however I thought that you may have given a little bit too much information away when you explained that Jonghyun was a novelist; it wasn’t really necessary for you to say this, and I felt as though it could have easily been left to the reader to discover this. Remember that a description is only meant to ‘describe’ and you don’t have to go into any major detail, since as a reader, I would prefer to learn this myself as the story goes on.

There were a few grammatical mistakes, but none that were serious enough to affect this score - I will discuss these under the ‘grammar’ section. I would say that in the forward, you might want to consider using quotation marks (“...”) instead of - ‘ ‘...’ ’ to indicate speech - It’s not a major issue, but it would give your opening a slightly more professional look.

Beyond this, your layout and overall appearance was excellent and the forward was a wonderful taste of the fluff to come! The font was easy to read and you did not overwhelm me with a large variation of colour. I absolutely loved the poster and background, since I felt as though they complimented a ‘fluff/comedy’ story very well. It might have been more visually pleasing if the gifs and author’s note were included at the bottom of the forward, but this is a personal preference and would be very easily sorted. Overall a very solid opening that would - despite being a story - probably convince me to carry on reading.

Plot (23/25) - I really did enjoy the plot of your story, despite being one of my least favourite genres. So congratulations on winning me over! I try to enter all stories with an open mind, and I’m happy so say that your story was very intriguing. It had a level of originality that drew me in straight away and left me with questions that persisted. I liked that you didn’t give your plot away so quickly and kept the reader wondering and in suspense, such as with the identity of ‘The Seller.’ Suspense can sometimes be over-used in plots like this, so I would encourage you to plan this in quite a bit of detail so that you keep it appropriate. Thankfully it remains effective thus far, but I have seen a lot of fics do this to the point where the reader stops caring.

I had a slight issue with the inclusion of pictures to describe Jonghyun’s house. In my opinion it is useful to use pictures for characters since most author’s have a specific view on this. However when describing a place, I would encourage you to go into more detail and use your own writing to do this. This way, the atmosphere and the scene can be set in more detail and will usually make the story just that little bit more interesting. I’m confident that you have the language skills to do this, so I would encourage you to consider swapping the pictures in chapter 2 in favour of written descriptions. I deducted two points here for each picture.

Characterisation (13/15) - I thought your development of the characters was, on the whole, very good. From the very beginning, whether it was Jessica’s funny but creepy personality, the innovative descriptions of the ‘faceless men’ or the detail that you went into with Key’s first appearance; I was thoroughly drawn in to the characters and found them to be easy to visualise. You use a lot of successful metaphor to describe characters, such as when you make the analogy that Key is like a ‘porcelain doll.’ Personally I think there is a great amount of sophistication in this technique and I would encourage you to continue this for other characters.

That said, I deducted two marks because I felt that Jonghyun’s character could have been shown in greater detail by this point in the story. No chapters so far are from his point of view, but he is obviously the central character and thus I would advise a bit more analysis of him. It doesn’t have to be much, but perhaps you could consider adding a small section describing his physical appearance - beyond the fact that he’s short. I mentioned that you use metaphor quite well, so perhaps this would be an opportune area for you to utilise the technique again.

Flow (5/5) - It’s hard to give you any advice on this section, because your story was very easy to follow and read. I liked that you carried on the clean and clear format as in the forward, with a uniform font as this can sometimes become distracting for the reader. I don’t particularly have a problem with long author’s notes, but I know Jessica might have taken a mark off for this. Some people - although it sounds a little unfair - can be put off a story if there are persistently lengthy foot-notes. To avoid this, I might suggest confining only relevant information to the story in these areas; I myself tend to use blog posts for everything else and I might encourage you to consider this as well.

Originality (8/10) - I mentioned in the title section that I thought the master-pet (particularly when the pet is a cat/person) scenario is quite well-done in the genre, and I still felt that way and that is why I deducted two marks. However you did obviously put your own twist on the idea. I liked that you brought in your own mythological creatures to add a new layer of depth to the story, for example the inclusion of vampires as well as the innovative ‘faceless men’ and ‘The Seller’. I felt as though you had a very clear idea of what you wanted for the story and that is - oddly - quite rare for sites like AFF.

Grammar (17/20) - Your grammar was, on the whole, very good. I found several errors, which I will discuss in detail below; but these did not become so persistent as to make your writing confusing. Most of these issues will be corrected as your knowledge of the language increases, whilst some are simple grievances that could be modified easily to push this mark up.

Some errors that I think could be most easily improved upon include:

1. Tense Confusion. - This is quite a common point of contention for many non-native speakers, considering that English has a great many different tenses. The best way to combat this issue is probably to have someone on hand as a beta-reader to test your work before you update. Have them see which phrases or sentences seem a bit awkward and see how you might re-word them.

e.g. ‘He didn’t was so close to a person for a long time.’ - The correct sentence would read, ‘He hadn’t been so close to a person for a long time.’

2. Verb Confusion. - Your vocabulary is quite varied and thus you use a lot of innovative word choices. However, I sometimes found that you mixed verbs up, resulting in an odd sounding sentence. My advice here would be similar to my advice for combating tense confusion.

e.g. ‘Got off from the car.’ - The correct sentence would have read, ‘Got out from the car.’

3. Idiomatic phrases. - Phrases that have little or no equivalent in other languages. English has a lot of these and you only really learn how to successfully use them by speaking/writing. Simply try and remember how these phrases work for the future.

Examples of idioms I found: #1 ‘half of hour’ should have been ‘half an hour.’ #2 ‘Have so faith’ should have been, ‘have some faith.’

Beyond this, I would also highly recommend you use conventional quotation marks (“...”) when indicating speech. I already explained this under the ‘forward’ section, so will not go into unnecessary detail.

Overall your grammar was pretty strong and the errors that I have pointed out did not really affect my understanding of the story, thus I have removed only one mark for each of the errors that I found to persist. I would highly advise a beta-reader if you do not feel confident in your English skills; however I did think that your writing was clearer than you gave yourself credit for.

Vocabulary (9/10) - You said that you were very new to English, but I didn’t think I got that impression as I was reading. I mentioned before that I enjoyed how you utilised metaphor as a describing technique and beyond this I found your range of vocabulary to be varied and interesting. I found that the imagery you portrayed was clear and lucid and thus would award a good mark for this section. I deducted a single mark simply because I found that some interesting words did tend to be slightly confused in their spelling, however this is easily remedied through either the use of an automatic spell-checker in a programme such as Microsoft Word, or simply the manually-enabled spelling-checker of AFF.

Total Score - {89/100}

Reviewers Notes

Thank you for requesting! I hope this review has been informative and will help you to progress.

So I vowed to leave stories to Jessica, but naturally I was given the first one to review! Oh my life. But I'm happy to say that I thoroughly enjoyed your story, so well done for winning me over. I thought that your English language skills were much better than you gave yourself credit for, so hopefully this score will reflect that and give you some greater confidence in your ability.

You are of course not obligated to include our review in your story, but we would ask that you kindly credit the shop if you do.

(Reviewed by Brendan)

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A link to this story can be found > HERE <

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