Fleur Du Mal
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Hiyas!
I managed to get myself swamped today/last night so I'm not as far into your story that I was hoping for. I have only read up to the beginning of chapter 2. Nonetheless, I can offer you some first impressions and hope you find the helpful instead of just utterly and completely blunt. =P
I definitely enjoy the humour. Another positive surprise was how well you have managed to build a distinctive charcterization for the Grim Reaper. I didn't yet get a good grasp of the nerd, but that's only due to the fact that I've only started to read this. Yet another good solution was to put the background info into a quite casual sounding dialogue between the nerd and the Reaper; this, imo, helped to reduce the feel of info-dumping the reader significantly.
Since I'm hopelessly overtuned into detecting the verb 'to be', especially in the past tense, I can't help but noting that there were a few spots where you could've used different verbs, imo. Escpecially since you have a strong element of humour in the story, I think that you could take the most out of your descriptions as well and try playing with different rewordings when you describe the setting. I'm mostly referring to the beginning of this paragraph:
quote:
The room the figure was in was a rather large circular room, with a 100 foot radius. The voluptuous room was not of any artificial construction, rather, it was a giant chamber inside a vast cave system. At the same time, the room was decorated with a very “sci-fi” feel to it: high tech comfy chairs next to computer monitors everywhere, odd gadgets adorning random tabletops and counters, cool plasma-lamps on every desk, giant monitors around the wall displaying random videos of places or charts of stuff that seemed incomprehensible to the average observer. The room had a “war-room” feel to it, emphasized by the giant conference table in the middle of the room, with 7 chairs around the large rectangular table: 3 on each side with one seat at the head. It was the latter seat that the figure went to, almost seeming to glide upon the floor rather then walk. After sitting at the head, he pushed a button on the mini-computer in front of him.
I'd suggest getting rid of at least the double 'was' in the beginning. This could be done with a simple substitution with 'sat' but that functions only to cut the repetition, not so much in adding description. So, since you told in the previous paragraph that the figure is swriling in his chair, you could refer to that with some humorous remark and reword the whole sentence. Suggestion:
'The figure sat torturing the springs of his chair in a rather large circular room with a 100-foot radius.'
This version would also cut down the repetition of the word 'room'. Note that I put a hyphen between 100 and foot, as I suspect this is a similar case of compound modifiers as 5-year-old boy would be.
Imo, another obvious spot to try out editing would be the next sentence with two of those sneaky little verbs:
'The voluptuous room was not of any artificial construction, rather, it had formed as a part of a vast cave system.'
or, if you want to hear a little more creative suggestion from me =P:
'The voluptuous room was not of any artificial construction, rather, it had bloated as a geological bubble to form a giant chamber inside a vast cave system.'
There are some moments in the story such as this where you end up repeating a certain word or expression. Imo, you could check for these when editing, especially around descriptive parts.
In this paragraph, you could, for eaxmple, cut down the number of 'rooms' with replacing some of them with 'space':
'The voluptuous space was not of any artificial construction, rather, it had bloated as a geological bubble to form a giant chamber inside a vast cave system.'
'The space had a "war-room" feel to it, empahsized by the giant conference.'
In chapter 1, whilst I like the dialogue, I found myself hoping for a little more descriptions on the actions and how the surroundings effect one them. For example, you mention the root beer and how the Grim Reaper at one point puts it down. Imo, you could add to these points where you already have the pauses in the dialogue. The nerd might, for example, stare at the empty container or maybe it could make a metallic, sharp sound that would cause the nerd to flinch. Or, he could drop a piece of the pie on his trousers and be very uneasy about it -- the Grim Reaper could take out a tissue and pat it off... Possibilities are endless. Something along those lines, anyways. While I think the background explanation is well executed with the dialogue, I did occasionally start to feel like there's just two talking heads in a vacuum. I think more actions and reactions in those spots would make this scene feel more lively. Just my opinion, though.
Lastly a minor detail: in chapter 1, I noticed that here you have used single quotes:
quote:
I said I’d explain. You’re probably what the definition of ‘magic’ is.
While with other similar cases, you have used double-quotes.
OK, those were my intial thoughts, I'll return with more comments as I read the story forward.
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