Welcome back, Pongo! I was wondering where you'd hopped off to!
This is good 👏 Nice and robust depicting Kylie, the vibe, and her environment. I've run on many wooded suburban trails, including up near Philly where grandma lived, and it all felt true to life. Smiled at the reasoning for Tig's name. So sweet.
Exquisite choice of antagonist too. Wonder where in the world Euryale is about now.
At the sentence level, some descriptors, prepositional phrases, and sentence fragments can be tightened imo, but they don't hamper the read too much. I was more wary of a getting-out-of-bed opening, though you pulled one off and played off it well. "permanent sleep, preferably" was intriguing.
Ha! This story has- regrettably- taken MUCH longer to complete than I initially thought!
Thank you for the thorough review. Regarding Tig- he's a bit of a tribute to my own grandma's dog, who was also an English Springer Spaniel. His name was DIGGER (three guesses as to why, and the first two don't count), and he was alive when I was born. He slept under my crib and I would throw him table scraps from my high chair. He passed away when I was very young, and sadly I remember little of him, but I loved him and he loved me. My first dog, in a way.
I agree that the prose is a bit lackluster in places. Morning-routine openings are also pretty risky- usually because they're just quite boring- but think this one works. Initially it was only two paragraphs, but needed to expand it a bit to illustrate how glum Kylie's life is.
It's definitely not my magnum opus, but I've had a lot of fun writing it. Glad you enjoyed!
This was very good overall. It lacked dinosaurs, however.
MASSIVE oversight on my part, I sincerely apologize to all my Mesozoic-American readers for this blunder!
Welcome back, Pongo! I was wondering where you'd hopped off to!
This is good 👏 Nice and robust depicting Kylie, the vibe, and her environment. I've run on many wooded suburban trails, including up near Philly where grandma lived, and it all felt true to life. Smiled at the reasoning for Tig's name. So sweet.
Exquisite choice of antagonist too. Wonder where in the world Euryale is about now.
At the sentence level, some descriptors, prepositional phrases, and sentence fragments can be tightened imo, but they don't hamper the read too much. I was more wary of a getting-out-of-bed opening, though you pulled one off and played off it well. "permanent sleep, preferably" was intriguing.
Looking forward to the next chunk!
Ha! This story has- regrettably- taken MUCH longer to complete than I initially thought!
Thank you for the thorough review. Regarding Tig- he's a bit of a tribute to my own grandma's dog, who was also an English Springer Spaniel. His name was DIGGER (three guesses as to why, and the first two don't count), and he was alive when I was born. He slept under my crib and I would throw him table scraps from my high chair. He passed away when I was very young, and sadly I remember little of him, but I loved him and he loved me. My first dog, in a way.
I agree that the prose is a bit lackluster in places. Morning-routine openings are also pretty risky- usually because they're just quite boring- but think this one works. Initially it was only two paragraphs, but needed to expand it a bit to illustrate how glum Kylie's life is.
It's definitely not my magnum opus, but I've had a lot of fun writing it. Glad you enjoyed!
>petrification
Can't wait for the next chapter! Did you have an approximate word count in mind when you were writing, if so, did you exceed it?
Looool yeah there might be just a teensy bit of that coming up!
I initially envisioned it being ~35,000 words, it wound up going just over 40,000. Which is okay, necessary to tell the story adequately.