The Runouw.Com Connection Entire Official Copy!

[brandoprojectm]

So….review. Yeah. This was kinda tough, since it’s such a long story, but I’ll do my best.

Let’s start with characters. As many of the comments at the beginning said, they were downright fake. Nobody laughs at every single bad joke people say. Actually, nobody makes such jokes at all! “Peed-off-ness?” “Nicolas’ cage?” You’re over-celebrating jokes that might generate a har-har at best. At least that part of the fake-ness is fixed as time goes on. But some of it is not. Your characters react in a way that might be almost non-sensical in real life. You can criticize my criticism by saying “You’re comparing it to real life, aren’t you?”, but isn’t a realistic type story what you’re going for? My suggestion is that you stop loosening up the mood so much when you’re trying to go for seriousness, like when Suki set us up the bomb. What I say? I say that you settle with one mood for every situation, so the characters won’t seem like robots whose mood chips have gone berserk.

Some situations you played out very well, and I’ll tell you which so you can go from there. In the car scene before Niklaw’s party celebrating Mic’s heroics, Sam and Ema are in a pretty strange love situation, and I could actually feel the awkward. It was very well executed, and I have to say you did a nice job. These types of encounters are ones that really characterize the peoples in your story, and you really didn’t include many of those. Work on it.

And this leads me to the plot. I’m sorry to say that it reeeeaaaally needs work. If you were trying to go for an extremely simple and straightforward plot, where one encounter simply leads to another in the same succession, you succeeded. The cliffhanger endings can hardly be called that. You’re literally solving the riddles presented in the story before we can even begin to think about them, which completely does away with the mystery. And in a story like this one, that is reaaal bad.

One thing one can do to improve it is read your own previous chapters over and over, and start thinking stuff like, “What would happen if the car crashed instead?” or “What if the bad guy is Mic’s father instead of a complete stranger we don’t care about at all?” Milk any small details your audience might have missed as much you can, so when they realize what the heck’s going on, they’re really surprised. If there’s one thing that really needs work, it’s your plot.

Here’s one final thing that bugged me. You wrote it in first-person POV, and you KEEP SWITCHING FROM CHARACTER TO CHARACTER. In a story of this type, first-person doesn’t work at all! There are 4 major characters, and we need to see all of their situation, I know, but in that case, 3rd person would’ve worked better. I kept having to go back and see who the heck’s narrating because I keep getting confused. In the writing world, it’s about keeping your story accessible and easy to read for your audience, so they’re interested in it. Stuff like this can put people off from your story completely.

Well, I guess it’s time for good comments. The idea of linking the forums to real life was great, even though it could’ve used work. You could’ve used Runouw’s forum (not my story) a little more, though. You’re calling it the Runouw.com Connection, and all you used were the characters, who almost all of them were conveniently in the same city. I know you said it was Portland based, but be realistic. Anyway, it was something most of us would’ve never thought of, and for the most part, you did it well.

Your writing style is not bad at all. Good punctuation, nice detailing, and wonderful word selection. There are some minor errors throughout the story, but it happens to all of us. I really like how you take time to describe even the most trivial aspects of the characters’ lives, it helps with the characterization a lot.

Hm…final word then. It’s a great story, but it really needs work.

A number score is too simple for things like this…but I’m supposing you want one anyway.

8/10

Wait, hold on. YOU DIDN’T INCLUDE ME IN YOUR STORY! Wait, you did, BUT IT’S AN EXTREMELY MINOR APPEARANCE.

-2293346896/10

jk, obviously

[brandoprojectm]

(Note: This isn't the full review. I decided that at least giving you half of it would make you happy for now, and let you know I haven't been completely putting it off all this time. I'll finish the rest of it later.)

Okay then Moy, here ya are! Looks like whining to the point of me wanting to kill myself actually paid off! Anyway, review time, yah.

So, let me get this out of the way. For A sequel, TRC2 is pretty good. You learned from the mistakes of your first and improved your writing. You extracted some of the major plot points and moved your way up from there. Which is good, and is what all proper sequels should be. Still, even with all of that improvement, there are some flaws here & there, which I will shortly point out.

First of all, your plot. The whole "mystery" part of it was almost completely absent in the first one, in which you presented us with an enigmatic moment and solved it for us before we could even begin to get interested in it. You left almost nothing to imagination. But with TRC2, you....kinda….fixed it. Yes, I never would've expected that Rob is alive. And there are some other twists you threw in, yet...there’s something that feels a bit wrong about it all. It's almost as if the twists you came up with were made up on the fly, even if they weren't, with no clues or hints to lead up to them. In a story that's supposed to be a murder mystery, this is very bad indeed.

Even with all that, as I said before, your plot is mostly original, crazy, and sometimes funny, which I believe is one of the hooks you use to keep your audience reading. While there are some clichés here and there, most of the situations you've come up with are truly creative, and most do what all situations in stories should do: develop the characters and let us know them a little better.

Which brings me to another point: your characters. In my TRC1 review I wrote that your characters, as already pointed out by many users, were downright fake. They felt inhuman, almost robotic, as if they had been programmed to laugh at every lame joke someone made, and with the main characters being the whole flesh and bone of a story, made everything seen unnatural. This time around, though, you fixed it all up nicely, and while the characters still sometimes do things that seem unlikely to happen and a little weird, characters feel more...human. They feel sad, embarrassed, joyful, and angry, as all normal humans do. The fact that you show them in a variety of situations where they show emotions gives the story a much better sense of reality, and readers feel that they can actually relate with the characters. And you seem to have done this a lot more in TRC2, which is a great thing.
As for the characters themselves, they're pretty well crafted. Frankly, for me, the most interesting characters were Ema and Sam. They're pretty much the only characters who have a solid, yet still developing relationship throughout the story. Also, they're the only characters you gave a decent back-story, which is a great way of establishing their whole personality and explaining why it's that way in the first place.
Sometimes, your little in-jokes seem kind of out of place. I know sometimes you feel like joking around, but is sacrificing some of the seriousness you've established really worth it? You gotta know how to
balance it all. And, one more tip. If you yourself know a joke is bad, don't include it at all. >.>

To be continued....

[MICrophone]

…just making sure that you realize this brando, but the chapters written by "Jack Walker" are written by me. In case MOY did get it published, I wanted a pseudonym to go by, so that's what I picked. We co-authored the sequel. So, as long as you're doing this…could you perhaps make some individual comments about mah writing too? >:D

[MessengerOfDreams]

Thanks a million Brando.

And since it's been forever since I last updated, I have some updates.

TRC Version 3 is dead.
All of TRC is getting a huge overhaul in the way that

Spoiler: show

Sam, Ema and Mic will all be members of the site prior to Runouw's death, Ema having introduced it to Sam after they met at school and became friends. They also get the chance to meet Runouw in person and see that he is a nice guy. When he dies, the two friends are rather shaken, being real-life friends with Runouw. At Runouw's funeral, they meet Mic, Suki and Nicolas and they comprise a team that on their own, try to track down Runouw's killer. (This sounds a bit Scooby-Doo-ish at the moment, may be tweaked) Halfway through the first book, Buffy finds out about this (not being a site member in this version) and keeps close tabs on the kids. In the second book, Buffy provides police support in order to maintain most of the infrastructure of book 2.

So, I hope Brando's reviews are not in vain, as I have hopes to tweak yet preserve TRC2 for the most part.

Also, the publish bug is getting to Legacy too. I have hopes to switch out names and plot point details and make it more realistic than fanfictionish and to send it into contests and such as a short story. Maybe. I have ten times the faith in Legacy's plot than I do in TRC at the moment. TRC still is my brain child, and will be completed soon, hopefully.

[TrappedTime]

Maybe something like this?

[MessengerOfDreams]

Too glitzy. X_x

[MessengerOfDreams]

On one hand, he still owes me that review. On the other hand, have you ever wanted to know what a truly self unaware poor ♥♥♥♥ looked like?


........taaaaaadaaaaaaaa

[Megar]

my ♥♥♥♥ word MoD
did you srsly