shatteredsmooth

No rush! I haven't closely read through the feedback yet from the past few weeks any, and will most likely be waiting a couple more weeks before I actually revise. I'm taking a little break to finally apply beta reader feedback to the middle grade book after procrastinating since March...hopefully this is my last round of content changes before querying.

@Snakenaps Juniper is beautiful! Cats are usually very good critique buddies. Thank you for getting caught up on my submissions.

I think something might not be clear in the wording of the conversation they had about boundaries. It's supposed to specify that hugging, cuddling and certain kinds of touching is allowed, just no making out or sex. The only time it goes beyond the original physical boundaries set is the kiss. I did redo a lot of the dialogue from the chapter where they first spent a night together, so hopefully I fixed the issue already, but I'll take another look at it just in case. I'll need to clarify in the previous chapter. Blueboard. Spelled it wrong. I was setting up for something that I'm thinking of taking out, so I might go and cut back a lot of this. She never said this or implied this as far as I know. So in general, M making a lot of bad decisions in this chapter was intentional and a side effect of the Demon messing with her head. I realize from some of the comments that the previous chapter did not accurately convey how much damage she took. She's not fully aware of it herself. As I revise, I'll try to find a way to show that she isn't quite thinking clearly before she starts drinking. I've toned down the mind reading in some of the earlier chapters, but when I do another pass over all the previous chapters, I'll spend some time on the arc of their relationship. Hmm okay, it obviously wasn't on the page, but she went to T first because this was exactly what she wanted to do, but T was already asleep, and she didn't want to wake her up. I was also considering that her reading T's dreams were her head all tainted with Demon energy actually caused the dream to turn into a nightmare. Of course, logically, there might be some issues with her running to Mi if she was aware of that. But this whole arc with T still definitely needs a lot of work. In a previous draft, when Mel got back to the dorm, A & T were together, in the middle of something, and Mel almost walked in on it. Glad to hear this. I mean, it's not actually in the chapter. Maybe it wasn't really the right word to use in the description, either. I just meant that Mel gets a sort of payback for all her mind-reading / invading Mi's privacy. She'd been taking the train home and being driven by other people. I'll clarify. I think it's a valid criticism. Thank you @kais @Mandamon and @Turin Turambar for the feedback!

Sorry I'm a little late! Overall, I like the world you've created and your characters definitely seem interesting, but I'm getting the impression you're starting the story a little too soon. Not a whole lot happened and there was a lot of repeated information. The line about taking on a new identity would be a good hook / opening line. Take my comment about the starting point with a grain of salt, because you know the book. I've only read this chapter. At first I was a little confused about the prologue. I got that the character was very depressed, and it wasn't until almost the end that I figured out she was in her own barracks or bunk, but just too depressed to leave, and not in a prison or hospital. It was a little unclear about how the dead person died. Had the mc killed her? Or found her dead? Based on the first chapter, it was clear why the prologue needed to be there, so I'm thinking maybe it can go. There seems to be an anti prologue trend going in traditional publishing, but if you self-publish, then you can do what you want. I'm not sure if using Vulcan as a last name is a good idea because of Star Trek. By the time you were getting to describing C's fake identity, I was feeling overloaded with everything you had been telling me about her. "...know can't just come..." You are missing a word in this sentence. "...should have been paying better attention to her surroundings..." I hadn't realized she wasn't paying attention. I liked N's thoughts about her name, and the rhyme she made. When we switched to N's point of view, I was assuming it was after the seen from C's point of view and then was confused when she got the note. I didn't like seeing the last scene repeated from N's point of view. I didn't get any new information from it that I didn't already know. I am curious to see where this goes next.

Content Warnings: Alcohol use and maybe some swears. Hi Everyone, I'm still processing some of the feedback from the last two weeks, so I haven't made any major changes yet. However, I'm sending the next chapter anyway. Sometimes I find it easier to revise when I have feedback on a chunk of chapters instead of just one or two. I'm not sure if this one starts in the right place, and am wondering if it has some excess backstory, but otherwise, I don't have any specific questions, just the usual sense that something is off and can't place what it is. I'm open to whatever feedback you have. Thanks! Sara Recap: Ch. 1 The night before classes start, M saves a guy from a Demon. Next day, she meets a cute girl in class and realizes the guy-she-saved is the TA (Mi). Ch. 2 (revised) M follows Mi, chats with him, reads his mind to find out he doesn't recognize her and talks to him way more than she planed. Later, she goes to a LGBTQIA mixer with her roommate, A, and the girl she met in class. Ch. 3 (revised) M meets Mi on a rooftop. Tasha has a skateboarding accident and breaks her arm. M and T almost kiss. M heals Tasha's arm, but messes up and uses too much energy. M flees to her room, but Ally has company. Ch. 4 (revised) M missed the masquerade because Mi's ghost hunter friends went missing. Turns out they summoned some demons. M almost died fighting them. Ch. 5 (Revised): Mike said the ghost hunters are alive. M goes out for pizza with Ally and Tasha, where there is lots of flirting. Mi shows up and begs her to go with him to meet the ghost hunters. Fearing he's in danger, she goes, but their office was empty, and then a possessed driver tried to run Mi over with a car. Ch. 6 (Revised). M was alone with Mi. They cuddle and talk a little about feelings and a lot about the paranormal. Ch. 7 (revision in-progress): A sparring match with T turned spicy. M's mental shields and telepathy malfunctioned at a very inconvenient time. Ch. 8 (last time / revision in-progress): M had dinner plans with Mi, but she gets called away to hunt a demon. There was a telepathic battle. She got some information from the demonand her head got messed up. Ch. 9: This time: M's telepathy and shielding are working right, her phone is broken, and she has an extremely low tolerance for alcohol. Ch. 10: Next time: M has a hangover. Mi fixes her phone. Karma.

That is very exciting! But fires and round up sound horrifying! Jumping back to the weather conversation, because I like weather, humidity is 94%, but its only 71F/21.6 C. I'm out on my screen porch, and everything (including myself) feels cold and damp. The good news is we got over an inch of rain yesterday, so my rain barrels are full again.

Oh, you have the humidity AND the heat. I will stay here in New England, thank you. I'm a little over 10 degrees cooler right now.

30% humidity is low for me. I was just thinking it didn't feel too humid, so I checked the weather station and it's 61%, though temp is 76 F, which is comfortable. I'm pretty sure I hiked a mountain once in ninety-something humidity. We went through a low cloud that day too. Above the cloud, it was nice and breezy on the summit. I was drenched, though, between sweat and the moisture. Right now, 60°F/15.5°C would get me in a sweatshirt, but when we get random 60 degree days in the middle of winter, I break out the shorts.

Yikes! That is hot! I hope they get it fixed quick! I don't think I've ever experienced 110°F! Maybe it's gotten up to 100°F a few times, but mostly, the hottest it gets in my area is the low nineties a few times a month. Mostly, summer is high seventies to mid eighties with nights in the sixties. We have window unit ACs which we haven't had to turn on in a few days. Granted, go twenty miles southwest and the temps are few degrees higher, and another twenty or so miles northeast into the Maine coast and it's cooler. Since my mom moved to Maine she has not stopped complaining about the nights being cold.

I'd like to submit again on Monday if there is room.

I sometimes get baby commercials when I'm starting a new book because I spend so much time on name website, but I've never really been a target for them, even when I was in my twenties. Lately, the adds, especially of FB, seem to be mostly either dog products or pride things, which is a little too accurate. There were a couple times the dog adds almost suckered me into getting some dog bed or leash. I have some addblock that keeps me from getting popups at least.

I thought of a question to pose here while I was editing my next submission. I notice that I tend to have paragraphs where I intentionally start three or four sentences with the same phrase. In the most recent case I noticed, there were three consecutive sentences that started with maybe, but I had done it on purpose. What are your thoughts on this kind of repetition?

LOL sometimes I pry mine out with a fork or a spoon. OR just my hands if a few have already been removed.

@Snakenaps I saw a water snake in the lake this morning and it made me think of you and your pet snake. I tried to take a picture, but it swam away to quickly when I got close enough.

I am guilty of the overusing of names! Very guilty. Part of it stems from when I started writing stories in third person from the point of view of characters who used they/them pronouns, and I was terrified people were going to be horrible confused, so I'd use pronouns as little as possible...and then seeped into all of my third person writing. It's much less of an issue when I write in first person. M-o-t-h is one of the best characters @Robinski has created, based off of the ones I've read anyway. There may be even better characters lurking in stories of his that I have not yet read. Yessss!

I just shared the Google doc. :-) It wasn't drastically different from the original, but I reworked a lot of the dialogue and added a few things, including a world building detail to set up for something in Ch. 8.

@Snakenaps and @TheDwarfyOne You are both incredibly talented! I don't draw, but my plants are getting big and I have a few cucumbers almost ready to pick! Usually, its mid or late July before I get any.

The short story and Book of M are not at all related, so it doesn't really matter order they go in. Different characters. Different universe. It looks like Ch. 5 was the last one you read? I rewrote 6 since I submitted it, so let me know when you get close to starting and I'll send you the newest version.

I while back I read an article street dogs and dump dogs in different parts of the world, and what happens when natural selection starts replacing human interference and breeding. The result was dogs likes him. There is some variation in fur color and length, but his size, build, and scruffy look was pretty common, especially with the dogs shown from central and south america. I don't remember all the details about why, but the part that stood out was the medium size (he's about 50 lbs, but very well fed unlike strays) was efficient. Any bigger and they need too much food, and if they're much smaller, they're easier prey(I think, but I could be remembering wrong). He isn't from any of the areas in the study. He's from Tennessee. A lot of the southern states in the US have issues with dog over population, especially in poor rural areas where people don't have or spend the money to spay or neuter the dogs and let them roam. A lot of the rescue organizations pull dogs from shelters down there and bring them up the northeast where there more demand for pet dogs, especially puppies. Anyway, I think some of the same dog evolution that is happening with street dogs in developing countries is also happening the rural areas of the US.

Tavi is a mutt. His mom was found abandoned and pregnant with a litter of puppies. The mom kind of looked like a cross between a Scottish Terrier and an Airedale Terrier, but she was probably more mixed than that. No clue what the dad looked like. The person who adopted Tavi's sister had a DNA test done to try and figure out what mix she was. It was mostly "unknown terrier mix" with a little bit of boxer, golden retriever, and husky. The sister looks exactly like him, but her fur is a golden-yellow color.

The wolfy dog is adorable! My dog is weird and does not like dogs that have pointy ears if they are bigger than him, so we always have to give the wolfy ones wide berths on the walk, no matter how friendly they are. He also hates great Danes, and gets along okay with most other dogs. I like it when people in my neighborhood have hives so their bees pollinate my garden and fruit trees, but I wouldn't want to have to deal with the hive myself. And my dog likes bees less than he likes big adorable pointy eared dogs. No hives in my future, though I do love honey.

Content Warning: Language for some swears Violence for a physical and psychic battle with a demon. Mel doesn't exactly win the psychic battle, and it's traumatic. Hi, This chapter moves away from the romance for a beat and ventures more into the Demon hunting side of the story. This is probably one of the darker chapters, if not the darkest chapter, in the whole book. There is a new world building / supernatural element introduced: "Between". In the first draft, it had been mentioned earlier, but I am 99% sure those hints ended up edited out of the chapters you all read. I kept thinking, "oh, this isn't the right place to introduce this, so I'll move it" and never found the right place to put it. Is it okay mentioning it for the first time here? If not, maybe I could introduce it in Ch. 4. Let me know what else is or isn't working. Thanks! Sara Recap: Ch. 1 The night before classes start, M saves a guy from a Demon. Next day, she meets a cute girl in class and realizes the guy-she-saved is the TA (Mi). Ch. 2 (revised) M follows Mi, chats with him, reads his mind to find out he doesn't recognize her and talks to him way more than she planed. Later, she goes to a LGBTQIA mixer with her roommate, A, and the girl she met in class. Ch. 3 (revised) M meets Mi on a rooftop. Tasha has a skateboarding accident and breaks her arm. M and T almost kiss. M heals Tasha's arm, but messes up and uses too much energy. M flees to her room, but Ally has company. Ch. 4 (revised) M missed the masquerade because Mi's ghost hunter friends went missing. Turns out they summoned some demons. M almost died fighting them. Ch. 5 (Revised): Mike said the ghost hunters are alive. M goes out for pizza with Ally and Tasha, where there is lots of flirting. Mi shows up and begs her to go with him to meet the ghost hunters. Fearing he's in danger, she goes, but their office was empty, and then a possessed driver tried to run Mi over with a car. Ch. 6 (Revised). M was alone with Mi. They cuddle and talk a little about feelings and a lot about the paranormal. Ch. 7 (last time / revision in-progress): A sparring match with T turned spicy. M's mental shields and telepathy malfunctioned at a very inconvenient time. Ch. 8 (This time): M has dinner plans with Mi, but she gets called away to hunt a demon.

I've found so few books with this specific kind of ace rep and don't exactly know other ace people in IRL, so I'm not really sure if I'd call it a hallmark of the identity. I'm just basing Mel's level of comfort/discomfort with how I was at 18, but I feel like I might be over doing it a little. Hmm so if it had been Mi she was kissing in this scene and her shields slipped at that point, and he was feeling the kinds of things T was feeling, she would've had the same reaction. It was the intensity of what T was feeling paired with that M wasn't expecting it that triggered the reaction. If her and T had just been cuddling, there would've been no issues with the telepathy. I think in Ch. 5, M was reading T's mind while cuddling with no issues while T was talking about the masquerade, and that was more comparable to the mind reading she does around Mi. However, I can see where you're coming from this. It looks like the telepathy is fine with the guy but a problem with the girl. I need to think about how to address this best. I mentioned getting rid of it because I'm worried I just don't know enough to get it right. But if I do more research, and have some help, hopefully I can make it work. All the specific notes you left look super helpful. Thank you very much. :-)

I am certain I would've bit someone if I was Virgil. I'm glad you got him safely back into his tank. Maybe he will be hungry from his adventure.

https://marvelcinematicuniverse.fandom.com/wiki/Triskelion It's just a building from a comic to movie adaptation. I'm not sure how widespread the association would be.