[Kristen]

Originally Posted by -PoLLuX-

You nearly done with the next chapter yet? I'm not asking you to rush or anything...
(just bored... need something to read besides the haruhi novel)

Heh, sorry. I'm on a different computer now, since I'm home from college, and I had a bit of difficulty transferring my files from my laptop to my PC. I just started my re-edits of chapter 4 yesterday, with the goal of finishing them by today. I'm then hoping to finish my re-edits of 5 tomorrow, and my re-edits of 6 on Sunday. Since I normally don't have anything to do on Christmas Eve, I want to do my first edits of 7 then, however, I don't know how much time I'll have. If I don't have much time then, it'll have to be the 27th.
But re-edits are easy as well, so I may end up doing multiple chapters tomorrow. I don't know.
But I really don't want to post twice in this thread, so any reply is fun.

innominate: Thanks for your critiques. I've learned from the past to not try to explain stuff, and rather implement it, so I'm going to go through each one, looking for suggestions...

Spoiler for Harsh:

I see what you mean by the matter of factly. I've received this criticism a couple other times as well. I know it is something I need to change. The issue is that I'm not a good writer, so I have a lot of difficulty doing this. When I take it for my first review with a professor in January, this is going to be one of the first things I'm going to ask for help with.

I also see what you mean by the development of only two characters. But this actually never hit me before. Maybe this is what the story is missing. I was intending to develop the mother of Yuji's family, and the parents of Nagisa's family, but all of Yuji's mother development came too late in the story, and Nagisa's parents made too few appearances to be developed enough. I've been thinking about how to add in a new character for this and fit her between the cracks (Better with female leads instead of male leads.)

And my little hints at romance were pushing love relationships? I guess I'll take them out. I'm not exactly sure to which sort of things you are referring to, exactly. Could you possibly show me some of the quotes for this?

Spoiler for Not so harsh:

Dialogue tends to be my best friend and my worst enemy. If you were referring to chapters 4-6, that's being fixed. My freewriting forms always tend to look very dialogue oriented. After a few revisions, they look more like chapters 1-3. If they need some cutdown on dialogue as well, that's another thing to ask my professor.

The character thing, I'm not really surprised on. Whenever I write a story, I tend to not have a set plot in my head. Rather, I have some sort of a theme and characters set in my head. Here I had a bit of a head start in that Yuji was going to be a delinquent, and the theme was going to be family (Ended up changing to changes in family ). I usually have a piece of scrap paper where I create a develop the character, from his/her appearance to personality to situation at the start of the story. So, characterization tends to always be my strongest point in the story, but setting tends to be extremely weak.

And yeah, I do write a lot of words. It's shorter in its draft forms at 2500 or so, as opposed to the 4,000 words of chapter 4 that I'm revising right now. Helps with adding descriptions and additional tiny bits of plot. If I'm going to add in a love rival or something later on, that's another 20,000 or so added into the mix.

Thank you a lot for your criticism. While I'm probably not going to apply it until I finish the full revision, it'll be great come later months when I take this to further levels.

Now, to eat my breakfast and watch Clannad. ^_^