I am the creator of this story. https://chyoa.com/story/Garvog.30776 I haven't really gotten any feed back at all yet other than a few favorites and likes. I don't think it is the best I can do and probably could use a rewrite or two but would still love to see what people think. I have mainly been just looking for spelling errors rather than put it through multiple drafts like I probably should. I have other stuff coming that should be a bit more polished but I am not sure how much of a difference it will make unless I watch some video's or something.
I checked it out, I think it has a pretty decent sense of humor and I appreciate these sort of "work your way up" stories. My tip would probably be to reread your chapters before you post them (or after, joys of editing), not just for typos or that sort of thing, but also, just kind of speak it out in your head. Sometimes, you'll find that either the dialogue is a little clunky or hard to follow and think of fixes. I should do this sort of thing harder myself. I find messed up italics tags leftover from months ago all the time in mine. I think the dialogue is your best strength, as it is usually funny, but I think you should try to add in commas or ways to break things up. There's a lot of sentences that seem to go on breathlessly without pause because they're missing commas or other forms of punctuation. As an example: "Well I don't think I can do much about that you will have to try again tomorrow." Could go down better as: "Well, I don't think I can do much about that. You will have to try again tomorrow." Anyway, I wish you the best with this and your other stories.
Someone paid? No, I don’t have any money to spare right now but otherwise I would love an editor. I really should work through it some more either way although punctuation has always been my weak point.
So I had a question about the grammar in one of my sentences. Here is what I wrote initially and it is someone talking which is part of the issue. "Tell me if you see any plants other than cacti, rocks, water or people." Here is what I wanted to make it. "Tell me if you see any plants (other than cacti), rocks, water or people." Which I believe works grammatically but I am not sure if people would get how someone would say something in periphrasis or not. Like I would probably have it be her saying that she want's to find plants and as an after thought say but not cacti, then here are some other things I want you to tell me about. I could rephrase it like. "Tell me if you see any plants, rocks, water or people." As I flew away I heard, "NOT CACTI!" I gave her a thumbs up and kept going.
That is a tough question actually. I would say your initial sentence is correct grammatically, and so is one with the brackets, but it does sound awkward to me reading it because the 'plants other than cacti' kind of distracts at the beginning of the list by being longer and more awkward. You might want to put the plants bit last instead so "Tell me if you see any rocks, water, people, or plants other than cacti." That just feels more natural in my mind. Maybe though your speaker doesn't necessarily need to specify that they're not looking for cacti at all as that feels like the awkward part for me. They could just say "Tell me if you see any plants, rocks, water or people." and assume that because the person they're speaking to is in a desert everyone understands that cacti are not what they want. If you're going strictly for humor, the last one probably works best though, with the shouting after about Cacti, as it implies the speaker has panicked at the last moment and realized they need to tell the listener who they probably think is slightly dim-witted that cacti are not included in the plants they're looking for. That's how it feels in my mind, and it could be funny if included in the right way. Hope that helps!
I kind of feel like that is accurate of the characters right now. One is someone from a desert, (Sandra, a human) and the other isn't(Garvog, an imp like demon). Garvog is pretty book smart although Sandra might not really believe it yet. After this I should make a mental note that Sandra is a bit more trusting of his knowledge until something comes up that he doesn't know then maybe make a condescending joke. Also Garvog might very well joke about there being a bunch of cacti but that could happen either way. I am not going to do it this time but I might throw it in later. Thank you.
