Aries Rising | ESPearl

104 13 9
                                    

BLURB:

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BLURB:

Royal propaganda. Shapeshifter and cyborg rights. Interstellar border disputes. Space pirates. When the galaxy is united under one leader, there's always something threatening to send the entire regime crashing down, and Nicky Walker is about to be the last straw: just add a stranger named Aries and the guitar of his dreams.

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YOUR COVER: (10/10) Your cover is professional, creative, and representative of your story and genre. I can see the references in there for your story and blurb, and it draws in the right readers for your story. Kudos to your cover designer!

YOUR TITLE: (9/10) Because I've only read the first chapter, I didn't get to capture the full meaning of your title. However, from the little clues sprinkled in the blurb, cover, and your first chapter, I can see that your title was cleverly created to represent your story, and your readers will have a moment later in the story where they realize how the title connects. As long as your title does do that, then you're all good in this section.

YOUR BLURB: (4/5) I appreciate the short length of your blurb. It is concise and free of grammatical errors; I can see the effort put into your blurb. I have to say it is a bit vague, and as a reader, I'm not sure if it'd be enough for me to choose to continue. How can you structure your sentences to be memorable and intriguing? Try to define the triggering action of your story and provide more details that may bring in more readers.

YOUR HOOK: (5/5) You brought me straight into the mood of the story and into your character's mind. Your writing was free of grammatical errors, and I got a taste for your writing style and use of diction. The hook is a very important part in the story, and you executed it perfectly.

YOUR GRAMMAR: (9/10) I noticed that with your dialogue, you often used one dialogue tag to lead into another dialogue. For example, you would say something like, "'Hello,' the woman trilled, 'Fine day, isn't it?'" You'll notice that because you ended the dialogue tag ('the woman trilled') with a comma, the next dialogue is still part of the sentence. Technically, this is incorrect. Since this is one whole sentence, the beginning of the next dialogue shouldn't be capitalized, as it's not the start of a new sentence. To correct this, you can either write it as, "'Hello,' the woman trilled, 'fine day, isn't it?'" OR, you can turn this into two separate sentences and write: "'Hello,' the woman trilled. 'Fine day, isn't it?'" I've pointed out some examples of this in your chapter critique.

You had some comma mistakes in your writing (hardly any). Commas are used to separate different clauses. There are two types of clauses: Independent and dependent. They both have subjects (who/what is doing the action), and a predicate (the action being done). The difference between the two is that an independent clause can stand alone as its own sentence, while a dependent clause depends on another clause to make sense. If more than one clause is joined together, they should be separated with a comma. For example, this sentence, "I cried, then Billy ran away," there are two different independent clauses. One is "I cried," and the other is "Billy ran away." You'll notice that they're separated with a conjunction and a comma. You often misuse commas in this sense or forget to add them. Commas can also be used to separate an introductory phrase or word before the main clause. In the sentence, "Today I went to work," the independent clause is "I went to work," and you'll notice that it has a subject "I" and a predicate "went." The word "today" is excluded, and needs to be separated with a comma. The correction is: "Today, I went to work."

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