Good afternoon Flamebird. I have read over your thread a couple times, once before I accepted the position as a mod and now after, and I wanted to go ahead and give you my thoughts on the writing as a whole. Please let me know if you would like further clarification, elaboration on a specific point, or anything that you think I could do better in my way of presenting this in the future for yourself or others. I appreciate the feedback as much as presenting it.

Anyway, onto the thread: Songs of a Lonely Heart

Pros

Post #4 with the interaction between Kylie and Felicity has a very good emotional and personable reaction between two characters. It gives a fair amount of insight into Felicity and her interaction with another character, as well as her character as a whole without revealing everything. In a way, it’s a foreshadowing effect for a reader who has no immediate knowledge of Felicity, a good hook. Very well done.

I really liked the interaction with the initial discovery of Althanas by a young Felicity and learning of the world around her, not the frozen world she was used to. As that continued into the following posts that was very good. It reminded me of other characters in the past that were either from other parts of Althanas or from other worlds dropped into the world. It was fun to see and read.

All in all, I think your strong suit is dialogue with the NPC’s that you have created and building around that. I think you have an opportunity to weave in a bit more of the background story into that through the writing so I as a reader know who the character is a bit more, or your character’s background in alchemy for example, but it all plays out well enough in the story.

Cons

Grammatically there are some tense and agreement issues within the first post that cause the flow of the story to be a bit jolting off the bat. Try to keep in the present or past tense when you write, as the very first post was switching between the two. In the first post (#2 for this thread), there were pronoun issues which were almost like dangling modifiers. I’m also not sure how this frozen ice lady and the brutality of the first opening post had anything to do with the rest of the story as a whole...

In other posts there were grammatical issues that were just words put out of place or misused (post #5). As well as other posts here and there

The overall pacing was jarring because I had trouble following what timeline and who I each post was supposed to be following to start the story. The largest contributor to this was post # 9 which was just incredibly long in comparison to the rest and seemed to jump in timeline for her life I think, but it was hard to tell.

Aside from the above, there is a lot of use of pronouns in certain points where I’m not sure who it, they, or them is referring to.. I found that most of the problem was in the first post, but as the story went on there were points where the pronouns were left dangling at times and I had to reread to try and figure out what it was referencing.