First of all, I would like to start with my sincerest apologies and heartfelt thanks to my dear readers. I want to announce my intention of rewriting this series here, and I shall provide the reasons why. While I understand this is a terrible thing to do to those who have read through all twenty-six chapters, it is far more difficult for me to choose this considering I have spent literally hundreds of hours typing those very chapters you have read.

Let me explain with the familiar review & rating system here (which I will copy & paste into the review box of the fiction):

Style: 2/5

While I do not think the story had been written in a terrible style, I do not think it deserves to be called good or great either. The styles used to write Chapter 1-26 occasionally changed which marked my unsteady steps as a first-time writer.

There are a few First POVs in the early chapters which are not really needed, but were written during my experimental stage. Now, I’ve settled on a third person POV that is semi-limited but centring around multiple characters.

Although I have started to grasp the edges of the “show not tell” technique, there are an overabundance of telling in the story. Telling, I believe, is not a bad thing despite what some people might say. Sometimes it is easier to understand and imagine that “the flower is beautiful” rather than describing the flower with a long sentence. While it is true that the reader may have their own idea of beauty, the author obviously intends to appeal to the reader’s sense of aesthetics and is imploring them to attribute the quality to the flower in their minds as well as visualise their own interpretation of it. However, like I said, I’ve overly abused telling.

The dialogues are… not cringe-worthy but I’d say they are lacklustre as compared to the majority of works that I have read. True, I’m no expert at this but that has nothing to do with the marks.

Info dumps. Damn info dumps. They are only a miniscule percentage compared to the total content that I have written but they are sort of an artefact from my first days of writing, which cannot be removed unless I do a complete rewrite. When writing this story, I failed to realise that I should’ve gradually exposed relevant information as the story progress rather than giving a damn overview of locations and systems in chapter 1.

*Sigh*

Story: 1/5

I’ll give the story in my head a 4/5, from its beginning until its ending. Hey, it’s an awesome story that covers four worlds, five factions and… nah, I won’t spoil.

Sadly, since the draft here is not particularly finished and it had yet reached the parts I consider to be good in the story, a measly one shall suffice.

The story I have in my head is the very reason I left my ‘leeching’ status behind and decided to produce something. Unfortunately, I did not do it justice.

I kept my story on a loose leash, with only a dozen or so key points that needed to be reached over five arcs. Rather than giving it the feeling of “uncontrolled development” that I aimed for, it slowed the pacing of the story by a whole lot. The story was good (in my opinion) in the first arc and gradually degraded in the second arc although my writing style had improved significantly. It had been six chapters worth more than 60k words in total since the protagonist entered the Academy, and only a week had passed. Talk about terrible pacing, huh?

World Setting:

Frankly, since I started writing the story with shaky steps, it suffered from a lack of effort put into building it. It’s believable enough, but it clearly lacks plenty of details to set it apart as unique or good.

World Logic:

I’ve introduced plenty of tiers and systems to measure one’s power levels in the early chapters but I found that I rarely rely on them as I progressed along the story. Yes, there are some loopholes which I intentionally put for plot development in chapter 24 but really, I figured there’s no real need for the stereotypic system to be explained with such detail in the beginning.

Although I’ve tried to repair my chapters, I came to realise that the problems are more deeply rooted in nature and could not be fixed with simple style repairs. Hence, I have to rewrite it.

Grammar: 2.5/5

Yes, grammar. I can actually spell grammar before providing a rating about it, yay me. I give it a 2.5 for normal. As it is impossible for me to detect my own mistakes here, (excepting for typos that could be detected with word processors), I shall not comment too much on it.

The vocabulary is decent, but not vast. This could be a plus or a minus. A plus since it’s quite simple to understand (in my opinion) and a minus if the words are repetitive. Although I made an effort to reduce such repetitions, I tend to use similar ways of describing things from chapter-to-chapter and it’s pretty noticeable for me since I’m the one writing it.

Character: 1/5

*Sigh*

Although I avoided having some one-dimensional characters by basing them on some real people I have personally met, it got more difficult as the list of characters grew.

Protagonist:

Chase is a good boy, a loner and also shy due to his years of confinement within his house. Traits like these don’t really cure themselves that quick, so I don’t have any problems with him despite receiving some complaints. Like seriously, you don’t go from sheltered loner to bloodthirsty badass in the space of one year. His personality does change a little bit in some of the recent chapters, but it was done intentionally to portray him going through puberty (You know, mood swings and stuff)

I kind of like him, actually.

Other characters, Main or Side:

Some are flat, especially the heroine…. (because she terribly lacked scenes to really introduce her). Some are okay, quite enjoyable for me to think of their traits and the likes such as Aaron and Gillian. Some are problematic, since I did not think carefully before introducing them. As a result, I have about 2-3 characters at the moment which I have no idea what to do with.

This is not a harem, but this fiction terribly lacks girls. I might be unconsciously sexist, O_O or it might simply be the fact that I am a guy and I'm not very confident in portraying a girl's character. Yes, I need to fix that as well.

Overall : 2 + 1 + 2.5 + 1 = 6.5/4 = 1.625

They say we usually add a positive 10% when we judge ourselves whether it be appearance or this fiction here, so let’s deduct that: 1.625*0.9= 1.4625 rounded off to 1.5

Hence, overall= 1.5/5

With the rewrite I intend to fix several issues:

1. Those damn info dumps, I’m going to avoid using all of them.

2. Those flashbacks, which could have been done in a better way

3. Using the 3rd person POV more effectively without unnecessary 1st person POV.

4. Use more “show, not tell” wherever I can and to the best of my abilities.

5. Plan the story better to avoid the current blunders I have made

6. Develop the world more

7. Get rid of the redundant system I’ve made

8. Avoid over-describing unimportant things

9. TRY to improve my grammar

10. TRY to improve the characters

11. Split every chapter into three parts for more manageable proofreads / repairs (if needed)

I shall release the rewritten version after I finish the second arc of the story in that version. This would take a few, if not several months to accomplish. I apologize once again to my readers, for I am sincerely sorry about this.

Thank you for reading Armus: First Draft