Concrit for jessalae

[jessalae]

I want to receive feedback by:
-Comment on my DW post in this community
-DW private message is also fine

Here are the works I want feedback on (optional: and my safe works are...): AO3, anything except my safe works, which are any Doctor Who and Torchwood fic and my one Bad Bang fic (since it was intentionally bad)

My works' fandoms and content notes are:
Fandoms are mostly big TV/movie fandoms plus some Yuletide-sized fandoms. Fandoms I have more than 2 fics for: Star Trek AOS, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Pitch Perfect, The Magicians (TV), MCU, Fringe (TV)

Content notes: I write a lot of porn. I do have G and T rated stuff that would be great to get crit on as well, but porn is my primary thing. The things I end up warning for most often are medium levels of violence/gore and dubcon of various flavors (aliens made them do it, intoxicated characters, etc). Most of my fic is either No Warnings Apply or CNTW + any non-archive warnings will be in an A/N.

I have these questions for readers: General impressions and thoughts, plus: I know I use a ton of comma splices and long sentences. Is that distracting? Do I vary my sentence structure enough? If you're reading across several works, are there particular writing tics you notice that just keep showing up or are distracting?

I would prefer gentle (5) or direct (1) feedback, or something in between: 3-4, medium to gentle-ish.

Comments are unscreened.

Comments

know your story like I do, part two

[perverse_idyll]

What I Liked:

Oh, everything. You have a great sense of pacing, excellent dialogue, a gift for character voices – Quentin is unmistakable here, and the emotions come through loud and clear in ways I believe he'd articulate them. His tenacity and sometimes annoying directness and unshakeable loyalty, his nerdy literalness and occasional tendency to whine: they're all part of the package. And you're marvelous at mirroring the tone of the show, the sardonic humor, the injection of contemporary disillusionment for the purpose of deconstructing fairy tale narratives of naïvete and nobility. You can conjure up minor characters with a few brushstrokes, while Quentin and Eliot are so present in the story I could often visualize them saying your lines. So you nailed that. You also have a strong grasp of structure, and when I've had minor criticisms, it's always been of what I perceive as a weak point in a scene, not the scene's placement.

Criticisms:

Some of my criticisms cater to my preferences, so they're arguable. Now and then, I wanted more visuals: sometimes of the settings, more often the characters. I know Q can be an oblivious creature, but I needed to see Eliot more clearly than I did. My emotional connection to him in this fic is channeled largely through Quentin, at least until the very end. I believed in Q's longing for him, but I didn't always see what Q saw in him (going by the story alone – the show supplies all those reasons, but the fic doesn't always incarnate that intangible, elusive bond, and I wanted stronger hints that it was mutual all along). The clues to Eliot's side of the story weren't pronounced enough to prepare me for his outpouring at the end, so it felt excessive. Despite that, it only took a few lines for me to get past that and back onboard with the story's emotional climax.

Nitpicks:

You may want to search for dialogue tags that are complete but have been punctuated with a comma instead of a period. For example: "I've fucked this kingdom up as least as badly as you did," he says, "And Margo still gave me a job, etc." This either needs a period after "says" or the "and" should be lower case.

Or at least he respects that Eliot thinks it's true, that they were just momentarily overwhelmed with emotion and ultimately wouldn’t it work.

The bolded words are in reverse order.

A tiny smile, a real smile, at the corner of his mouth when your corny joke actually made him laugh, even as he theatrically turns away to give you the silent treatment

There's a verb tense disagreement, so you might change "made" to "makes."

"My two little homebodies," Eliot says, and lays back. "lays back" should be "lies back."

Eliot meets his eyes, and Quentin stares back, trying to somehow laser-vision his sincerity somehow into Eliot’s stupid brain. One "somehow" should probably be deleted.

***
I don't think I understood how long this was until I just now posted it, so I hope you don't feel battered by a wall of text. It's been so much fun submerging myself in your fic and sharing my thoughts, but in the end this wasn't the sort of story that provoked a lot of eloquent criticism. Since there wasn't much that needed changing or questioning, my actual concrit is minimal, certainly as a percentage of the total word count. I hope you aren't disappointed by that. But I do intend to read more now the fest has introduced me to your work!

Re: know your story like I do, part two

[jessalae]

Thank you SO much for this super comprehensive feedback, I love it! I wasn't sure I'd get any crit on my Magicians stuff since it's all over 10k, and I really appreciate your dedication in tackling something longer.

I completely see what you mean about needing more from Eliot at a few points in the fic. For the sake of context, not argument: I wrote this right after watching 4x05, so how Eliot ultimately ends up feeling about that conversation was extremely fresh in my mind, but I didn't have as good a grasp on how an Eliot in this S3-ended-well AU would be feeling, or how to show the journey he'd need to go through to get to the point I wanted him at. I also struggle sometimes with how to write in tight 3rd person POV and still make it clear what non-POV characters are thinking, and when those non-POV characters are as fully committed to being inscrutable as Eliot is, it's just that much more important to figure out how to portray their thoughts. I will definitely work on that.

Thank you for the nitpicks! Gonna go fix those transposed words and verb tenses now...

And thank you a ton for all the lovely compliments, I'm so glad you enjoyed the fic overall.