"Trailblazer", or in LN title terms, "I've reincarnated into my stories as my alternate self, but the world I accidentally wrote into existence has become a mess and I'm not sure if I'm able to bring it back to its old glory!"

From inconsistent themes to cardboard cutout characters, my story has been a mediocre one, at best. Who would've thought that writing about a writer, when you have never written before was a bad idea? Regardless of its plentiful faults, the reception my story has received so far has been great. Much greater than I had anticipated, in fact. And as such, I've decided to make this post.

I've meditated on the thought for a good while now, as I saw my follower count slowly but surely climbing up, and I think it's finally time to rip my own work to shreds. Figuratively, of course.

I began writing for fun and started uploading it here for the hell of it, to see whether or not people would like it, but as I previously stated, a lot more people actually began to read it than I suspected, and I suppose I'm beginning to feel more and more embarrassed and self-conscious about what I post.

All in all, writing has been way more fun, but also way more challenging than I had expected it to be. I think I'll slow down my pace and write more carefully from this point on. And if I find the spark, I think I might re-write the chapters up to this point to a more cohesive standard.

Anyhow, I want to improve, and I can't do that unless I know where I went wrong, so here goes...

An honest review of my own work.

Overall: 2.5/5

Spoiler: Spoiler

Style:

To say that the themes were inconsistent would be an understatement and a half.

The prologue blasts you with misery, yet the first chapter is just friendly banter. The reader has absolutely nothing to latch onto, except maybe the mystery of what the hell adventurers have become. But that's not all that interesting, to be honest. You get to the meat of the story at around 14, and it really kicks off at 17, but that's a goddamn generous amount of reading to give for a sub-standard story.

I also find myself often lacking heavily in the 'Show, don't tell.' department, which makes my story a goddamn bore to read. And despite me going on and on about describing things, often the descriptions, too, are lacking. Funny how that works.

Maybe a 2.5/5 if I'm being generous? It isn't a page-turner, that's for fucking sure, but at the very least I think it's readable and rather easy to follow if you can gut the erratic changes in theme.

Story:

Oh no...

Story? What story? Oh, the convoluted mess that the readers have absolutely grasp of yet? Yeah, that one. The pacing of my novel is abysmally slow. Over 200 pages of the main character being thrown around, yet we still don't even know the reason why MC's stories are an actual world... Though I suppose 'Chrono' and Lumi did hint towards that at chapters 11 and 15 respectively.

I wanted to write a generic fantasy world, and I think I succeeded in that, as well as making up the premise to justify the regularity of the world. However, the original premise of MC being a man who never really had the opportunity to grow up, reincarnated within a world modeled after his own stories, was practically forgotten.

Though him being his character plays a rather big role, his prior knowledge didn't amount to anything except "Oh I know about this :--DD" and he has yet to even meet people from his stories in person, apart from Lime, his slime buddy, to whom we'll get to later. I wanted to write an unconfident character that eventually grows up to become a man, but as it turns out, dumbasses with no promise of growth aren't something people are all that interested in, myself as a reader included.

The only real story so far has been MC dying and reincarnating, becoming an adventurer and getting far more attention from girls than he did in his previous life, living his life of wish fulfillment to the fullest. As if that hasn't been done a million times... If you've read any amount of isekai, you've also read mine by proxy.

That is until the story actually (hopefully) gets to the 'pioneering' part and MC and his friends, and other adventurers organize and territories actually get conquered and re-populated as the technology progresses.

But as that hasn't even begun yet, a solid 1.5/5 at best.

Apart from the 'Trail' system, which I'm quite content with as they have a lot of potential for the future when they become more intense, detailed and longer, and the 'shard of knowledge' system, which has a lot of worldbuilding potential, there's nothing noteworthy about my story.

P.S. Never think of a word and write a story based around that, kids. Do it the other way around.

Grammar:

Well, you'd think I have nothing to comment on about my own text? Heh...

", however," "I started to" "As I". I often recycle the same words or patterns within a few sentences. My descriptions are either lacking in vocabulary, or I describe things in so much detail that it comes off as tedious and even pretentious. The structuring of my sentences also screams of middle school-tier, though that can be excused with the fact that Light, whose monologue works as the narration, isn't exactly a genius in the field of the literary arts.

3.5-4/5. If the lack of variety isn't taken into account, at the very least my grammar is alright, especially for an ESL.

Character:

Both my strongest and my weakest point.

Strongest as in I'm able to imagine extensive histories for each of the named characters, a solid lore behind all the races and all that jazz, but weakest as in I fail to put my thoughts into text and make their backstories into actual stories without making it seem like "Oh here's a new dude. Btw his life was like this and you should know that for no reason at all :--DD" Trust me, there's been a lot of drafts that never saw the light of day, no pun intended.

Even the main character's personality is shaky, though his story so far is rather well fleshed out. And even worse than his inconsistency is that his personality is very much dislikeable. Not to mention his relationship with Lime. I don't think I quite captured how Light regained the memories of his alternate self back when he adventured with Lime, and what effect that had on him and his relationship with the dumb blob.

Not to forget the fact that every single character acts a solid half a decade younger than their actual age is. For futureproofing reasons, I had to re-do the ages. I'll leave the interpretation of that fact up to the reader. Wink wink, nudge nudge. That is unless people really just want to read my story for the action side of things, in which case, please let me know.

Every character feels like a cardboard cutout with no real personality. Grace is your genki fantasy-gyaru, Violet is your christmas cake oppai onee-san with a fetish for younger guys, Seth is your most generic bro #2965, Lumi is your hybrid tsun-kuudere with a gracious hint of autism, and Brigid is just fucking stupid your aho comic relief. (Refer to google or something if you don't speak weeaboo)

Though I had reasons for why the characters act as they do, the reasons might as well not exist if the readers aren't aware.

2/5 Though the current cast is solid, and the personalities are rather easily separable from each other, that's almost solely because they're walking stereotypes.

So...

I've gotten a few 2.5 ratings, and to be honest, I got kinda pissed off about them at first. Even though I suspect that those are just left after something they didn't like happened. Namely, Light either running away or getting sexually harassed by his slime buddy, or the Gods playing 4D-chess. But after careful examination of what I had written down, I suppose that the ratings are very much justified.

I've clearly bitten off more than I can chew, but the story is still young, and it isn't too late for me to correct my mistakes. And that I'll do. Thank you very much for reading my stuff so far!