Looking For Pre-Readers For New StarTrix Rom-Dram-Com · 8:39pm May 16th, 2020
Hello, friends! After several months of off-and-on-writing and plenty of procrastination, I have finally finished the first draft of Killing Me Softly, a 4,569-word StarTrix romantic drama comedy told from Trixie's perspective, and I'm looking for some people to help me polish it! This is the longest one-shot I've written in six years, and I legitimately have put a lot of work into it, so I'd really like it to shine! (And ideally make it to the feature box.) You know it's serious when I of all people am looking for prereaders! So, what will I want help with? I've compiled a list, not necessarily in any sort of order:
- Basic spelling, grammar, syntax errors, etc.
- Does Trixie sound like Trixie? Does Starlight sound like Starlight? In the epilogue, does Twilight sound like Twilight?
- How well does the story flow? Are there parts that should be cut? Are there parts that should be lengthened? Are there parts that should be moved around?
- Are there any types of sentence construction I overuse or underuse? Do I use adverbs too much?
- In large part because it's just hard to stay serious with Trixie for super long, this story starts as a drama and then the last third sort of morphs into a light comedy. I don't feel like I can really do anything about that without completely rebuilding the story; do you feel it's too jarring or that I can change things here and there to make it a smoother or gentler transition?
- How's the ending? How's the story's message? I'm not seeing any obvious themes or lessons in this story other than the very elementary "communicate with your friends", and that worries me a bit.
- This being Trixie and Starlight, I found myself using variations on eye rolling, the word "deadpan", and various synonyms for laughing a lot. How did I do with variation?
- In actual dialogue, I found I was using certain words a lot, including "really", "yeah", and probably others. Where in the dialogue should word substitutions or deletions happen?
- Even more broadly speaking, how is the dialogue in general?
- Do I do a good job of balancing the dialogue with scene and action description and Trixie's inner monologue?
- Is Trixie too coherent for being this drunk?
- I put this in first person present tense. Does that work?
- Trixie uses variations on "great and powerful" a lot. The capitalization scheme I eventually settled on was to capitalize the adjectives when they precede a name, and keep them lowercase when they don't. Do you think this schema words, and am I consistent in it?
- I really want to keep that link to the video of Trixie saying "Not exactly straight, Starlight", but is there a less intrusive way I can do so?
- Are the pictures too much? I like them.
- How is the short description? How is the long description? How is the weather where you live right now?
- Any other general or specific observations? What do you like about the story? What do you dislike about it?
I tend to be pretty stubborn so I may not listen to all suggestions, but I at least want to be aware of what is good and bad about it. This isn't my magnum opus or anything, but it is my baby and marks my return to serious(ish) writing after several straight years of shitfics. So yeah, I would love two to ten people to look the story over and offer their feedback, anywhere from "yeah, this is good" to detailed paragraph-by-paragraph notes, whatever floats your boat. I wrote it in FimFiction, but for this I'll port it to Google Docs so y'all can comment on it. If you're interested, either comment on this blog or PM me, whatever floats your boat. Thank you so much in advance, and have a wonderful rest of your day! 
As the
proudsuccessfulwriter of Three Sorceresses, a one shot where Starlight and Trixie are drunk that's a shipping-based comedy, I would love toevisceratepre-read you story.Sounds cool, I'll do it.
I like the idea of helping: there's a reason my sister and her friends used me to review their grad school essays after they were happy with their spelling and grammar. However, I'm not sure if I'd be willing to use Gdocs unless it's possible for me to leave anonymous comments: proper internet paranoia and all that (I do have a PUBLIQ e-mail address, but it's on a self-hosted domain and not GMail).
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Coolbeans. I'll make the doc tonight.
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You should be able to do stuff anonymously, but if not I can just email you the story or drop it in a paste bin or give you the unpublished story password or something.
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Once you have the link prepared, I'll try commenting on the GDoc anonymously (will sign with —P).