shatteredsmooth

Content Warnings: Mild language, some witnessed nudity / sexual content (AKA the mc walks in on her roommate in bed with a girl) Hi Everyone, Sorry this was late! It's over the word count, and I was trying to trim it, but I ended up making it longer. :-( As usual, I'm more focused on content than grammar. Please don't put too much time into line edits because more often than not, the content feedback prompts me to delete things. I feel guilty deleting things when people (myself included) have put time and effort into correcting grammar. What I am more interested in is: Does the plot move forward enough? This chapter is still a little on the quiet side. Ch. 4 has more things going wrong and more action. Are there feelings? Does M seem to connect with both potential love interests on some level? Where does my logic cease to make sense? Okay, there is one line level thing I would like feedback on. I tried to describe a lot of facial expressions in this section to convey emotion because M isn't reading Mi's mind. I am bad with facial expressions in real life, so I am bad at writing them. Any other suggestions you have are welcome! Thanks! Recap / Changes Ch. 1 M, Angel-Elf-Human hybrid is nervous about her first day of class, so she goes out for a jog and ends up saving some random guy from a Demon. The next day Mel's hung over from healing the guy. She meets a girl, T, and then realizes guy-she-saved is the TA for one of her classes. Ch. 2 (last time -- revised) Wanting to know if Mi recognizes her, M follows him and strikes up a conversation. M tries to stop reading his mind when she realizes he doesn't remember enough from the previous night to recognize her, but she is having trouble controlling her telepathy. Later, she goes to a LGBTQIA mixer with her roommate and the girl she met in class. Ch. 3 (this time) M meets Mi on a rooftop. T has a skateboarding accident and breaks her arm.

Your garden looks awesome! I always have trouble keeping things spaced out because even though I know they are going to grow, I hate seeing gaps of empty space. I love lilacs! I have a baby lilac bush but it hasn't flowered yet.

I had red and orange bell peppers on that one. I sautéed them before putting them on the pizza. I'm not a fan of green peppers or hot peppers. Only sweet ones that aren't green. I am very picky about my peppers. My favorite ones are these red ones I grow, Thunderbolts according to the seed package. They're red, long, skinny and super sweet, and I won't have any until August or Sept. because they grow so very slow. And I am completely procrastinating getting my chapter ready to send. I edited with a pen and paper. Typing the changes is proving tedious, and I keep adding things I didn't plan to add. My eyes got a break from the screen Friday, but I am making up for it now.

Alas, it is not bacon. I have bell peppers and onions on the pizza, because I do need vegetables. It was crispy! Thank you!

He said it was the exact same recipe but instead of shaping it like a baguette, he shaped it in a disc and let it sit on the counter for an hour, then stretched it. Oven is at 500 F. The pizza stone is on the bottom rack. The cookbook he got that recipe from had multiple baguette recipes and I think this is the only one it suggested using for pizza dough. But I'll double check, and ask which book it is, because he has a lot of bread related cookbooks.

All the talk about pizza yesterday...I needed pizza. I have never made good pizza dough, probably because I suck at following recipe. However, my spouse has spent a lot of quarantine researching all things related to bread and pizza. The dough is actually made from a baguette recipe. I did the sauce, which involved thawing frozen sauce cubes I made last summer with my tomatoes.

I loved that series! It's actually driven me to seek out other stories based off of similar folklore. Anya and the Dragon was based off of similar folklore, but it's mg, so it's slightly less deadly and not as dark. The dragon is adorable. I recommend it. If I get 50 pages in, I finish the book unless it is really, really bad. Based on reading the 1st chapter and the last couple pages, I can usually tell if I am going to like a book.

It seemed like an interesting concept. The hard cover is still sitting on my porch with the dust jacket marking where I stopped reading. I used to always finished books I started, but my TBR is massive now so a lot of times if I don't like something about the first chapter, I just stop.

@Snakenaps Last year I stopped reading a book halfway through the first chapter because the dog died. It was Girls of Paper and Fire in case you want to avoid it or skip the first chapter.

I think I saw it when I was a little kid, but I only remember little fragments of it. I've occasionally thought of re-watching it because I'm not sure how many of the fragments I remember are actually the movie or a dream it caused. But I hate it when animals die in movies or books or anything. So I think I will not watch it.

This is truth. I'd always rather have too much than not enough. Deleting things...well, moving things to the file of misfit lines.... can be so much fun.

Sorry I'm so late! As I read: "Dark bread and slapped sweet butter on it." Yum! "Chamomile..." Double yum, getting some of this ready to drink now. I like the mom! "I've got to call C...what happened" So I get she is trailing off, but something about the line tripped me up and made me reread. "Irene stood...fix this mess" There is something a little awkward about these last sentences and it is hampering potential for emotion. There was decent emotion in the scene, but playing around with the last few sentences could increase the impact once you get to that phase in the writing process. I didn't getting all the details about all the employees before I actually saw them. I felt like there would've been more impact if I was seeing them and learning their stories simultaneously. Granted, I'm not entirely sure I needed to know all their stories. For someone reason C's alcoholism surprised me. If it was set up in Ch. 1, it got lost with all the other information presented in that chapter. Or maybe I just forgot over the course of a couple weeks. It could be WRS. "...ashes, of smoke, of dead dreams." A sad line, but one of my favorites. Lots of emotion packed into it. A lot of the reaction to the restaurant burning down and people loosing their jobs seems extra relevant to present day right now. Overall, there were some nice moments in this chapter, but I felt like something was missing. The arc wasn't complete or just wasn't there. We needed to see the fallout, but I expected by the end of seeing the fallout from the fire, that I would know what Ir was going to do about it. I kept expecting the unicorn to show up in the church or someone to contact her there. That doesn't actually have to happen, but without there being some clear sense of what's next, I'm left floundering. As a reader, I need something to propel me onward.

Oooh that sounds yummy!

I started gutting this chapter this morning. I reworked the scene so she is having trouble keeping her telepathy off-- something that tends to happen to her for a couple days after she's healed people. But then she catches something concerning in his mind and pays more attention, or he starts thinking about something that bothers him and she shields for a few minutes to give him some privacy. I like your suggestion about making the self-interest more apparent, so I will try to work that more into the parts where she is intentionally mind reading. Another thing I changed this morning. Since less of the mind reading is intentional, her running into him is no longer accidental. She accidentally hears him thinking of the food trucks so she decides to go eat there too, and try to keep him engaged in conversation / read his mind just long enough to figure out of he recognizes her, then ends up talking longer. I'm trying to find a balance where she is clearing using her ability to protect herself, but not being overly invasive beyond that. I left off reworking the conversation. I'd already taken out one of the part you flagged (about the name memorizing) and it looks like the "strong reaction" bit is going too. This has disappeared, but now I think I am going to put it back because I think it carries a little more weight than Star Trek & Star Wars convo that replaced it. I wasn't thinking it was date so much as a "We're both already going anyway so lets talk while we're there" . Yesterday, I did make some changes to the first chapter so there is a little more connection between M and T in ch. 1. I haven't made any big changes to the mixer since I submitted the first time, just little things. I haven't fully decided what I'm doing with it this time. This morning I left off at M and Mi ordering from the food truck. I like your suggestion about T being a little miffed that A is there. Thank you!!

Today? Yes. It didn't stick, but it snowed for most of the morning. I don't normally get snow in May. But in the winter, there is plenty. This year was light on snow, but we definitely had some. Well, I'm guessing we live in different countries since you're using Celsius.

Hi Emi ! Welcome! Yes, that is true. Especially when it snows and May and it's too cold for me to write on the porch.

The five or six outdoor cats in the neighbor do use the beach as a litter box. The dogs are always cleaning up after the cat, and then think I'm going to let them lick my face. They all blur together...we basically rebuilt the house from the inside out. My spouse did a lot more than me. However, I can say with 100% certainty that my absolute least favorite was the insulation. I will be happy if I never insulate another wall in my life. I did like demolition, specifically ripping the bathroom apart before we actually moved in. There is something very cathartic about sledge hammers and crow bars. I also liked finding things in the walls, like letters, bottles, and a chipmunk skeleton. To be honest, sometimes I wish we actually hired contractors to do more than just the plumbing and foundation repair... Too much work, in my opinion though DIY was a lot cheaper than hiring contractors would've been. The dog fishes. I don't. I kayak, swim, float, and boat when the engine decides to start. Some years the boat is more cooperative than others. Last year it ran well until it broke down in the annual boat parade. Most winters I get to ice skate at least once, but this year I didn't. 100% to the last thing.

Yes! I can barely keep up with my seven hundred and something square feet. I can't imagine having a house two or three times that size. It also limits my ability to accumulate random things. It's also cheap to heat, now that is has insulation. Of course, the house may grow sooner or later...probably sooner, because we can't go on vacation and my spouse keeps maxing out his PTO, and we've mostly finished renovating the existing structure. We've been talking about building a second bathroom on top of the existing bathroom for a few years. It might happen this spring. Currently, our only bathroom is downstairs, and it's a bump out, basically in the 40s or 50s, someone replaced part of a wrap around enclosed porch with a bathroom. So we want to put a bathroom and a closet on top of it. Currently there is NOT A CLOSET in my bed room. But the house is lake front, with its own little beach, so who needs closets when you have a lake...

That reminds me of my spouse's childhood bedroom, except instead of horses, it was Star Wars lego. A lot of it is still in his childhood room because our house is very small and needed A LOT OF WORK when we bought it.

@Snakenaps I don't collect anything, but my mom, who is an antique dealer (part-time now, used to be full-time) buys and sells collectibles that aren't exactly antiques. She's found some Briar horses that have sold for over $1,000. I think she makes more money off of collectibles than actual antiques. Last week she bought some tea-set off of FB marketplace for under $100 and it for about $1500 on ebay.

I'd also like a spot for Monday if there is room.

That's okay! Not everyone needs to have the same reaction to a chapter. Good point. I will most likely take that part out. good idea! I hadn't fully realized I did this when I wrote it. It's not really how I want to the conversation to come across. I will definitely change it. Some of the others pointed out some big problems with the interaction between M and Mi as well. That scene definitely needs work. Thank you for the feedback. Fair enough. I will work on this as revise the scene. This bothered me as well Definitely planning to tone this down / take a lot of it out. She was. I'll probably take this line out. Err yeah that line's also going to go. Yay! Her roommate always gets all the action snicker snicker. But yeah, that is a problem in this scene. I will revise accordingly. Thank you very much!

Hooray!! I really appreciate how you broke it all down. That gives something really concrete to work off of as I revise. Not everyone fits into neat little boxes all the time. I feel like this is kind of representation is just as important as representing any identity. A couple weeks ago, I read a book where a character had a similar moment, and it really spoke to me. Thank you!

I meant to answer this question too. This does come up in Power Surge. N isn't allowed on Earth until E "discovers" the supernatural themself. I forget exactly how it's worded. I added it here because I'm considering adding a scene or two with her in act 3. If I don't add that, I'll take it out.

Somewhere in the manuscript, I think these places have names, but I couldn't remember and/or find them. Very very happy to hear this! I loved your comments so much! They were helpful! I'm also glad to hear that the pacing is working better. I will work on adding more detail to the party in the next revision. Thank you very much. I think this is one of the missing threads I couldn't get my finger on before, and maybe the root of why the interactions between M and T fall flat. I'll work on developing them more in these chapters. I wanted to make sure that it felt like she was doing something to move the b-plot forward, which involves figuring out what he is involved in, but it sounds like I took it too far. I can it tone down. In the next chapter, she does realize she got carried away, feels very guilty and doesn't do it nearly as much. Ok, point taken. I'll change this. LOL So do a lot of the other characters. A little in between. She does recognize some facial expressions, but has some trouble reading certain ones them when she isn't using her telepathy. I'm not entirely sure if that makes sense. But I was thinking that because when she was younger, she couldn't turn the telepathy off, she relied on it too much and now has trouble reading people without it. Thank you for the comments, @Mandamon. This gives me a better idea of what's not working and how I can tighten it up.