HappyEnding

Been reading your stories since you were posting back on VCL. I dearly love the subject matter of your stories and try to read each one. I would like however to give you some of what I hope to be detailed constructive criticism from what I have learned as a writer and gleamed from others.

If there is one problem I see with your writing in general it is an excessive amount of wordyness and adjective use and length.

You do a fantastic job of letting the reader see the scene, and your descriptions are often amazing but you can go into to much detail about things around the characters and the world in general. Take for instance you opening. It’s close to four pages and by the end of it I still wasn’t quite sure if the main character was Japanese or Japanese-American because you were throwing out so much information at the reader.
You talk about
1. WWII
2. A hidden WWII
3. Oni
4. Ghost dancers
5. The bombing of japan
6. Code talkers
7. Godzilla
8. Egyptian Mau
9. Neko’s
10. And several other things

You then start into a very complicated description of the character and why he is the way he is (a character I happen to like BTW). It’s just too much sometimes, and I often have to Google some of the things I read about.

There are also occasions were you rightly realize that the reader might not know what you are talking about so you give them a paragraph or two of background or definition. Sometimes you have to do this, but it is very distracting for the reader and breaks the rhythm of the story and adds length and clutter.

An example on Pg 12
“In MMORPG terminology, a Meat Shield was another word for a Tank, or a character class that was most apt at taking damage.That was me to a T... only... I had no damage mitigation, per se. I’ll explain more on that later.Suffice it to say that very few people knew that I could take a punch so well. Giving it back was something different, but I could definitely take a bunch. I usually won fights by attrition.”

That’s a whole paragraph that does nothing other than tell the reader about an “in” word you decided to use, and doesn’t really serve any purpose. Character asides to the reader are part of writing in the first person but I feel like sometimes you have too many when the character is constantly commenting on the things around him or her every three seconds. (It happened more in this story I think because it was set in Japan with all that country’s strangeness). It breaks the flow and gets the readers mind going in all different directions.

This is compounded when you add complicated characters to the story that have asides with both the readers and the main character at the same time. I liked the character of Daniel at first being this game master type being, but as the story went on he just became annoying as I tried to keep track of all his powers, quips, and such.

Your best writing in my opinion is your early stories like “Natasha” were you have a vastly slimmed down world and focus on one main character with perhaps one or two more major characters. The best advice I can give you is “brevity is the soul of wit” which basically means that simple and short beats long and complex every time.

I understand that your world is sprawling and complex, and know from experience that such a world can place a great burden on the writer if he feels like he has to reference every little thing he has created but you don’t. Simple clean and streamlined always makes for a better read.

Hope this helps, because I didn’t mean to offend. In the end if you like the way you write and do so for your own enjoyment, you shouldn’t change just because a voice on the internet says so.