Yusshin said:
Sorry my chapters are so short; I want to expand on them, but 5-10 pages in Open Office takes a while to write.
Quality over quantity. I'm not sure why you're so fond of word count, but in actuality, it really doesn't matter. Attempting to meet a word count in a short amount of time isn't a sign of talent. It's actually a sign that you can cram a chapter full of filler. It's not about how many words you have. It's about what you
say in that mass of words. You won't get published if you have a novel that's got a mediocre plot with flat characters unless your subject happens to appeal to an overwhelming chunk of the population. (*motions to Stephenie Meyer's work*) Trust me on this one. As someone who's trying to get into the industry herself, I've had to do a lot of research on this, and a lot of fiction work by kids who believe they're great authors just because of anything besides the actual quality of their writing tend to get rejected unless you're applying for a vanity press anyway (which no one takes seriously). I'd hate to be harsh on that subject, but it's true. If you want to be published, you first have to have something that will sell, and after that, you've got to sell it. Right now, with your massive passages of near-irrelevant description drowning out your plot, I'd hate to say this, but you'll probably find it difficult to find someone who will be interested enough to look through your work. It's very rare to be Stephenie Meyer or Christopher Paolini – the people who can write purple prose and
still get published – because those people just appeal to a demographic that already exists.
Other than that, you will find that in some writing communities, readers will prefer shorter chapters to longer ones because shorter chapters are easier to get through in one sitting. Hence, concise is often better to be on the safe side.
I must have fallen asleep, for when I awoke, it was already night.
In the last chapter, you implied that the only thing that was hiding the boat was the fog. If that's the case, I'm surprised that no one noticed a random rowboat – and, more importantly, someone sleeping in it – on a patrol in the interim.
Poochyena was fast asleep on my lap,
Didn't Poochyena also have a name in the last chapter?
however, now that I planned to voyage at sea, the idea of being alone in the dark while traversing the sea with a small, measly rowboat was really not tempting at all.
I'm sort of surprised he doesn't find it at all suspicious that the sister of the woman who burnt down his village, killed his parents, and stole him away from his homeland as a child is giving him a rowboat full of provisions and telling him to row across the sea in the middle of a pitch-dark night to escape. This might say a lot about his character, much of which would just be hilarious if it happened to be true.
I bit my lip, causing it to bleed slightly.
Side note, but you'd either have really chapped lips or a really strong bite to cause it to bleed that easily. Besides, what relevance does this have? It's a minor wound, and Shin promptly ignores it.
and yet, I was voluntarily preparing myself to cross a dark, ominous sea at night.
Note: "And yet" is actually redundant. The reason why is because you only need one conjunction (which "and" and "yet" both are) to link two clauses of a compound sentence.
I said crossly, the young girl climbing into the boat.
Here's a case where you actually do need separate sentences. Remember how I said earlier that a dependent clause that follows a comma usually modifies the first noun or pronoun before said comma?
Yeah, you're basically saying that Shin is a girl right now.
In other words, if a dependent clause is completely unrelated to the action of the independent (as in, it doesn't even add more detail to what's going on in the main clause), split it off and form a new sentence.
The loaves of bread were a bit stale-looking but remained edible;
Shin can tell this on sight?
Right now, you're describing what he's seeing. He can't tell whether or not the bread is edible because this would require him to taste it. Because he's not, you can't actually say that the bread is edible. You can, however, say it didn't look moldy or that it still looked edible. You just can't mix what he senses at that particular moment with what he would logically perceive later.
the coins, called pokécent, were the currency of the kingdom of Iris and came in silver,
Again, if it's not relevant at that particular moment, don't bring it up. You can bring it up later when Shin actually does something concerning the economy, but right now, it's smack in the middle of a sentence concerning what each item looks like. In other words, it's out-of-place, considering the subject of this sentence.
Bronze signified one pokécent; silver signified ten pokécent, and gold signified one hundred pokécent.
May I ask why you're using a semicolon in a list to separate one item and a comma to separate another?
I nodded once in confirmation.
If you nod, that usually means you're confirming something unless you happen to be in one of the few cultures where a nod actually means "no." (Given the fact that characters have nodded for confirmation in canon, the culture in the Pokémon world is not one of these.)
As in, the prepositional phrase here is actually redundant. Avoid redundancy because it slows down your writing and makes it obvious that you're cramming in as many words as possible.
"The sun is down, though; before you came, had the rest of the team already eaten?"
Replace the semicolon with a period. These two clauses have nothing to do with each other.
I'm not sure why you keep doing this. In these cases, it's clear that "poochyena" should be a common noun because you keep it lower case, but you keep forgetting to put an article (a, an, the) or a possessive pronoun in front of it. This is the third time I've spotted this kind of error and the third time you've referenced Shin's Poochyena or Alari's Skitty by what they were, so I'm inclined to think this isn't actually a typo.
By this time, I had finished my soup and the cup lay empty on the bottom of the boat.
This is a compound sentence. Note that replacing the "and" with a period yields two separate independent clauses.
From here on out, I think I won't bring up any oddities in compound sentences. I'm going to assume you get the idea and know to use the period test when you insert conjunctions into your writing. That and you do this rather frequently after this point, so repeating myself would probably make this review go on for too long.
my brown eyes, my lightly tanned skin due to constant sun exposure, and my abundant, black hair which took ten minutes to groom properly everyday were engraving themselves into her photographic memory.
This would be another case of cramming too many verbs into a single sentence. By the time the reader hits "engraving," they actually end up forgetting the fact that this is actually a list that leads somewhere. That and, seriously, if you want to describe how each item got the way it was, you'll probably want to separate everything out in sentences so the items on the list don't go on for awhile, if that makes sense. Otherwise, keep list items short and sweet. The reader doesn't really care that it takes forever for Shin to groom his black hair because it actually has no relevance to the story. Just say he has messy, black hair.
but the rest of the team were ignorant prudes who preferred to sit around and chuck books into the fireplace rather than read them.
Fun note about the medieval period, but few people could actually read, let alone afford books. While I understand you're not going for a historical angle, you're also missing out on some prime opportunity for character development if you choose to take the Did Not Do The Research road.
Also, "prude" means "someone who attempts to be excessively proper." As a note, it's the wealthy and prudish who could read, not the lower-class. Hence, someone who would be obsessive about sticking to propriety would probably not be ignorant book burners in a criminal organization. If you meant this as an ironic statement, however, this might be unnecessarily ironic, just because of what kind of people you're describing as "prude." Calling a slight pervert a prude would arouse a few chuckles; doing the same to a pack of bloodthirsty criminals... not so much.
Leaving would leave Alari with only her pokémon to comfort her loneliness.
I should note that at this point, you've spent two paragraphs describing the concept of literacy in Espion, and in the time that this happened, absolutely nothing actually occurred. As in, you've been describing the backstory, but during what should be an emotional or otherwise exciting time in which Shin and Alari say goodbye and in which Shin rows for his life across a huge body of water, you've basically failed to have them move. While stagnancy in the name of backstory is okay in a slice-of-life novel like anything by Jane Austen, you're writing an action scene. Shin needs to start heading out because he's putting the two of them at risk just by sitting around in a boat.
Basically, that's what I mean by too much exposition and not enough action. Relevant information is fine, but when you spend paragraphs upon paragraphs detailing nothing but backstory and world-building when you should be having your characters do something (or at least say something to each other), that makes your writing feel as if it's sitting there, stagnant. My point is a little relevant information where it's meant to come into play is all right, but don't drown out the actual, present action of the story with nothing but backstory.
In the distance, a pokémon of an indeterminable species emerged from the water rapidly and created a misty arc as it plunged back in.
Unless that fog is going to be important, you might as well not actually mention it at all, even for ambiance. Otherwise, you create a
Big Lipped Alligator Moment. (TV Tropes link, but the gist of it is it's not good.)
She had invited all of my friends from school
Again, fun fact about medieval times is that school actually didn't exist in the same way as it does now. There were no school houses or schools for kids. There were only private lessons that the wealthy could undergo.
While I don't argue that it's possible for Shin to actually be the son of a lord, this would also mean that he wouldn't have lived in the village because his parents would have been wealthy landowners with large tracts of land. In other words, the burning of a nearby village would have been irrelevant because Shin wouldn't have been there.
As a note, up until this point, I've also assumed that by "medieval," you actually mean "medieval European." While it's possible for you to be delving into a world that's got a medieval
Japanese theme, this point (about landowners and whatnot) would still actually be true. The only change I'd have to make about this commentary up until this point would be that I'd have to headdesk more because there'd be even more inaccuracies to point out if you were actually going with a Japanese setting. (For example, cursive writing.)
In general, while you say this is a medieval setting, it's very hard to swallow because it feels like you're blowing off a large part of what actually makes a medieval-themed setting. So far, the only indication that this is at all in that kind of world is the fact that there's a castle. Otherwise, there's nothing in this work that would make me believe it doesn't take place in modern times. You have the characters experience the same conventions and institutions (such as an organized educational system) as a contemporary setting, you clothe your characters in modern clothing (when it's perfectly possible to get references for clothing used in the canon's medieval setting by watching the first parts of
Lucario and the Mystery of Mew or the episode "The Ghost of Maiden's Peak"), and so on and so forth. I'm sorry to say this, but if you base a world off an actual historical period, you can't do things like this, even if you say it's not a historical piece. You actually have to do research and take into account that there are several major differences between then and now because otherwise, it's not actually medieval-themed at all.
At the risk of being blunt, as I've said before, not doing the research and using the "it's a completely different universe" excuse just comes off as lazy, especially since the medieval period has actually been touched upon briefly in canon. (Hint: It's a lot like our medieval periods, only there's Pokémon and magic.) Not to mention it comes off as lazy because there's a lot of prime opportunities you're missing. You could actually make Shin and his world very interesting just by doing a bit of digging about the feudal system and the way education actually worked back then. It really doesn't take forever to do, either. Some of the facts I looked up for this review were found within five minutes on Google. If it adds depth to your characters and setting, it's five minutes well-spent, right?
Both of us avoided the sheaths of our swords during the embrace as to prevent any possible injuries, for the sheaths weren't of the best quality.
Sheaths are meant to hold swords. Many were actually made of leather (European) or wood (Japanese), which is actually pretty difficult to cut unless you happen to have sharpened your sword recently. (Well, wood, you can't really cut at all with a sword that you aren't actively using.) Also, given the fact that Alari is the sister of the leader, one would assume she'd have a high-quality one either way.
"I'll miss you, too," was the equally solemn reply I received.
Again, you're stepping into redundancy. A reply is a response received by another person, so it's not really necessary to say that Shin received the reply. Not to mention he's the one telling the story, so if he didn't receive the reply, then it wouldn't be here.
Thank you is not a hyphenated term.
I promised her, giving her a very serious gaze. She stared at me.
Avoid inserting sentences about other people into paragraphs that contain dialogue, especially if the sentence about the other person directly precedes more dialogue. The reason why is because you inadvertently imply that the other person is the one who's saying that.
For example, you're actually implying that Alari says that last quote because you mention her staring at Shin.
"Shh, Khail," I hissed at the frightened pokémon harshly. Poochyena quieted down after locking with my intense glare. "Good boy." I looked around at the surroundings; water was all I could see. The fog blinded my view beyond a few meters and I squinted my eyes, trying to see as far as possible. I sighed and relaxed my eyes. The fog was particularly thick tonight. Navigating would be more difficult than I had imagined.
This could actually be multiple paragraphs. Note that the first couple of lines (up until the last quote) are all about Shin interacting with Khail/Poochyena/whatever you call it, whereas the rest of this quote is all about what the sea is like. That's two different topics. You start a new paragraph every time you start into a new topic, so you'd need two paragraphs here.
Also, seriously, if he has a name, use it in the narration. This is especially important because Shin's the one narrating the story in the first place, so he would call Khail by its name. That and it's just consistent if you give the thing a name and stick with it. You can call it "the poochyena" or "my poochyena" on occasion when you're using it as a descriptive term, but refusing to call it by name is a lot like deciding to have Shin constantly be called "Human" outside of quotes.
The fog caused my hair to become drenched;
Wet, yes. Drenched, however, implies that it's dripping and heavy with water, and fog just doesn't do that to hair, no matter how long you're in it.
however, I would need to shift your direction
"I would need to shift my direction," not your. Shin's talking completely about his own actions here, not about a hypothetical situation.
I noticed this earlier in the paragraph, but here, it's particularly clear that you're not talking about a specific location.
As in, basically, when you mention the cardinal directions (north, south, east, or west), you only capitalize them if you're referring to a specific region. For example, the southeastern corner of the United States is called the South because it's a specific region name. However, one would say that one needs to head south to reach it because in this case, "south" isn't a place name.
Same concept here. "East" is not a specific place name. It's a direction that Shin is heading.
Behind her and her sharpedo came two rowboats, probably lowered from the main ship, filled with members of the Espion.
If your dependent clause is describing another dependent clause, you've got one too many. Dependent clauses are meant to be attached to an independent clause. Anything else ends up being wordy, and you might as well just split the sentence.
Yusshin said:
This is my longest chapter with almost 5000 words! That's almost double the length of my normal chapters; I hope you enjoy.
Quality, not quantity.
Seriously, though, I'm up to page sixteen on my review. Granted, I'm a harsh reviewer, but up until this point, I have to say I've really read better fics that were actually much, much shorter. (Yes, I'm perfectly capable of giving positive reviews now and then.) So far, you've got a lot of filler text and problems with redundancy, so you end up drowning the action. If it took you ten thousand words to have anything happen, you've got a problem.
Point being, once again, it doesn't matter how many words are in your story. What matters is what you do with those words.
And yes, the spoon wasn't invented yet.
So, you neglect to have a spoon, which was actually a device that's been around since prehistoric times (even canonically – see the episode "The Ancient Puzzle of Pokémopolis"), but you're perfectly okay with peppering the story with things that didn't exist at all during the medieval period?
At this point, I've decided to stop pointing out smaller errors, as I've been doing for the past seventeen pages. This review is long, yes, but there's a lot of material to cover. From here on out, I'm only pointing out things that really stand out to me. I might not even actually finish all five chapters due to time/length constraints. Either way, we'll see, and if I feel like there's a lot to cover by the end of the third chapter, I'll break it off and continue with the next two chapters later.
The light was said to be the bright glow of a magmar's skin.
Relevance?
Her eyes trailed over to where Asmar was examining a stone. It promptly threw it away, chattering to itself in disdain. As another wave crashed against the sand, its ears perked up, and it scampered away into the thick fog.
I'd just like to say it's not a good thing when this is the most exciting or otherwise engrossing thing that's happened so far.
(This is just another note about infodumping and going on for paragraphs describing absolutely everything. Only describe what absolutely needs to be described and make the characters do something. Don't make your story be mostly description. Otherwise, a reader's going to just skim through your work looking for the elusive bits where characters are doing more than just standing around and staring at an ocean. I get the feeling this is what people have been doing so far, aside from the ones who actually wrote lengthy reviews.)
The poochyena in her arms, as motionless as ever, coughed at one point,
...So, it was motionless but not really?
mostly due to participating in tough activities such as chopping down trees and building houses, forming foundations, and lifting tall, cut tree trunks.
If you're going to launch into a list, it's usually a good idea to not start off by inserting a conjunction between the first two items because this implies that the list only has two items on it.
If, however, this is another dependent clause that's meant to modify a dependent clause, you'll want to play around with the wording and perhaps separate clauses into their own sentences. As you can see, it reads oddly because the structure is ambiguous.
Also, do not switch perspectives in the middle of your chapters (or, for that matter, randomly in the middle of a fic at all). If you begin in first person, continue the story in first person. Do not randomly switch to third person and then back to first. The reason why is not only does it slam a reader in the face with how abrupt the changes are (if they happen mid-chapter), but it also sort of misses the point of why you're doing the story in one perspective or another anyway.
In other words, if you start in first person, you're doing it to show the reader only what a character knows, and you can't switch perspectives just because it becomes problematic to you. You have to maintain one perspective throughout the entire work and show them only what the character has actually experienced. Otherwise, you divorce them from the character and lose the effect you were trying to build.
There's some exceptions to the above rule, but it's very rare to pull it off. When it happens, meanwhile, there's usually a very specific reason why that's usually more than just "I need to see this scene, but my character was unconscious during it."
Also, I'd like to point out the sheer unlikelihood that getting blasted in the middle of a sea will result in you getting washed ashore. Unless he happens to be made of wood
(or is a witch), a grown man will most likely sink. This is because the movement of the water, combined with the weight of the man and the fact that one can assume that an unconscious man will not assume a position that would make him float (read: on his back or on his stomach and not pointed straight down), will probably pull him under unless he happened to be near shore anyway. (Even then, it's not a sure thing that he'd wash up.)
I estimated him to be around 5'8",
Ignoring the part about modern-day measuring systems, I'd like to note that this is a trap that gets a lot of new authors. It's seriously not necessary to give readers an exact height because even if it's a specific measurement, it doesn't actually paint much of an image, especially if you happen to work with the metric system. That and it's really sufficient to say "the man was tall, just a little taller than myself." People will be able to visualize that because those are familiar descriptors.
Also, it just looks fairly amateurish to use numerals and measurement symbols for height, especially if you do it smack in the middle of a flowery description for everything else.
She then gently tossed them into the pot which accepted it gratefully.
Aside from the fact that having a pot accept something gratefully is a rather awkward image that calls to mind scenes from
The Brave Little Toaster, the carrot pieces seem to have gone from plural (tossed
them) to singular (accepted
it) in the space of a line.
After all bowls were correctly placed on the table, the woman seated herself beside the man and lifted the bowl to her mouth with her wrinkled hands.
Besides my note about spoons earlier in this review, doing this is a good way to choke and die, actually.
Also, have you ever tried eating stew without actually using any utensils? You don't get far, actually. You'd be able to drink the broth, yes, but heavy, wet food bits + any surface = they're not going to slide towards your face all that easily.
He placed his bowl in a lowered compartment of the counter that was filled with water.
Considering you call it a sink later on in the fic, it seems rather unnecessary to go into flowery descriptions about what it is. Shin knows it's a sink. Don't cram your story full of filler just to make your word count look impressive. It just ends up looking rather silly because you end up going into too much detail about something that's actually very simple within your own universe.
Then I realized she most likely already knew, for one of them had changed my clothing, of which the shirt has the infamous symbol of the Espion stitched into its back. The sword they had removed also had the infamous kecleon painted on the hilt.
So, wait. Espion is infamous in the area. The elderly couple actually recognize the symbol. This organization is known for torching villages and killing everything that moves that isn't either a small child or a fellow member of Espion.
...And they didn't just leave him to die because...?
Seriously, good Samaritanism can only go so far. If, for example, you found a man you
knew without a doubt to be part of a gang that likes to burn down entire neighborhoods, kill masses of innocent people, and steal babies for funzies just lying on the street, would you personally help him? Let's be honest here and not self-righteous, and let's assume you know or otherwise have just cause to believe everyone in the organization did that (because Shin did the entire pillaging thing too). The answer, most likely, is no, you probably wouldn't.
I bring this up because there's always such interesting potential for conflict with someone who recently sprung from a criminal organization or otherwise villainous group. If you're wearing the brand of a group of mass-murderers, you just won't be accepted into normal society right off the bat, and that's really a concept that can add a lot of depth to your story while at the same time creating potential for both plot and character development by forcing a character to face the obstacle of having to either grow beyond what he was within the organization or prove that he's separate from their ideals. In other words, it makes life so very hard for a character, and the more obstacles a character actually faces besides the typical hero-versus-villain one, the more your audience will actually care about the character and want to see what happens, even if their interest is founded entirely in schadenfreude.
Also, yes, I noticed the part about how Khail loves Shin. This, of course, is rather moot because it's rather difficult to gauge how much love something that's unconscious feels towards something else that's unconscious.
I'm going to stop here because I've hit twenty pages, and there's a maximum word count limit to every post.
First off, grammatically, there were a lot of errors. You seem to be very fond of semicolons to the point where you use them where they shouldn't go. Moreover, you have a
lot of oddities concerning compound sentences, placement of dependent clauses, commas, and even the usage (or lack thereof) of pronouns/articles before a common noun. There were, on top of this, issues with capitalization.
I'm going to be very blunt and say I've read your beta profile here and Serebii, and I must say you've really got to do better. This is actually why I'm being hard on you, truth be told: because although you say that your writing is clean of grammatical errors, not all of these look like typos just because of how frequently they happened.
My advice would be to go back and brush up on all the rules. It takes only a quick Google search to find guides, so I won't give you ones for every single rule you broke repeatedly. However, because I promised a guide to semicolon usage,
this breaks it down pretty simply.
Beyond that, what you really need to do is either get a beta or slow down and read your story aloud like I said earlier. Careful proofreading (by forcing yourself to slow down) on top of learning how things work can help you polish up your writing and actually
earn the title you're trying to claim make things easier on your readers' eyes.
In terms of plot, have you ever seen Mystery Science Theater 3000's take on
Manos: Hands of Fate? No? Well, if you're unfamiliar with MST3K, it's basically a show where a guy and a bunch of robots watch a movie and make witty comments. If you're okay with that concept, you basically don't need to know anything else about that episode except
this scene, which actually goes on for awhile before this twenty-second clip.
Why do I bring this up? Because I felt like this for about half of the story so far. Your descriptions are very pretty and very flowery, and your background is very detailed. However, there's just one teensy little problem: your characters are not doing anything. Seriously, in two chapters, if I removed all of the unnecessary backstory and overdescription, I'd probably cut your fic down by half. On top of that, you don't actually get anywhere until the very end of the second chapter. While the first couple of chapters of most works of fiction are usually for exposition, you spend so much time working on the minor details that you're crossing from building up the actual plot into a zone where you completely forget the plot for long periods of time just to talk about something that probably won't be particularly relevant later on in the story. This is, in fact, a bad thing.
On that note, no, I didn't find this story particularly interesting in terms of plot or character development because of how little of each there actually was. You spent a lot of the time describing things, so your characters didn't do much of anything at all. There was Shin's escape and subsequent landing on the island/acceptance by the couple, yes, but you crammed this in what little spaces weren't taken up by superfluous information that it almost seemed rushed. For example, Shin's process of leaving wasn't marked with him weighing the options and coming up with a detailed plan or with him even risking detection and gathering supplies. It was marked with him almost instantly agreeing with Alari after she said he could do it, followed by him falling asleep in the boat.
Meanwhile, what about that battle against Lumina? I couldn't tell if she was swimming or in a rowboat at first (an irony considering how much detail you put into everything else), and when the Hyper Beam happened, you didn't actually describe it past a light. Shin literally didn't do anything except jump in the water, and what's more, Sharpedo didn't actually follow him. If no one escapes from Espion, it's rather weird that they just let him sink instead of making sure he doesn't get to shore in one piece by taking off a limb or four.
This is, of course, aside from the plot oddities I've mentioned earlier (like why the old couple decided to drag Shin to their house). Also, for that matter, the theme inconsistencies that I won't get back into because I've ranted that subject into that ground.
The characters, meanwhile, seemed rather flat for reasons I've already explained. Shin goes from brooding to doing things for the sake of keeping the plot going (agreeing with Alari almost instantly despite earlier reservations, for example, love or not) to getting embraced by the old couple right away. There's no psychological damage (aside from the brooding) that he's suffered thanks to what must have been a childhood of trauma, and he certainly doesn't seem, up to this point, to face any real obstacles besides the aforementioned hero-versus-villain bit in the Lumina scene. I'm not just saying it feels like things are handed to him. It just feels like he's not really all that alive, just because he doesn't really have to do much. Literally, even. (*motions to him falling asleep in the boat*)
Meanwhile, the other characters barely got much screentime thanks to all of the backstory and whatnot, but from what I can tell, there's not much to say. Alari is the typical romantic interest who will probably serve as a sort of princess in a castle who needs to be rescued from the evil organization. Lumina is the typical vain villain: murderous, sensitive on a level (considering her reaction to comments about the uniform), and doing things (like pick up random surviving children instead of killing them) for funzies. Murrey seems like a typical rural-type, complete with the stereotypical stalk of grass in his teeth, and his wife is the typical motherly type. In other words, not much character development anywhere. (I'm not even touching the Pokémon. Aside from growls and pawing, they were really barely even there.) Remember that characters need to do things in order to seem real, and you want them to seem real (as in, people with emotions and interesting reactions to the world around them) to entice your readers to care about them. Instead of having them follow a track for the sake of your plot, do something that really brings out the traits you want to present the reader. Is Lumina evil and murderous? Have her send Sharpedo after Shin when he falls in the water. Is the old couple a typical old couple? Have them react to an Espion member based on what they know about Espion, not based on what you need to have them do. Characters should act, not serve as puppets to the writer.
However, what about positives? Did I like the story at all? It has redeeming qualities here and there, I admit. Although the description drew on for paragraphs, you seem capable of building it. Polish up your research, and you also have the potential for building backstory and an interesting world. Also, this was fairly readable, even though I have to be hard on you because you went and said that grammar is your strong suit
and that you're looking to get published.
The frank truth is that you have the potential to be a good writer if you worked on it, but you're not there yet. You still have quite a bit of work to do before you get to that point, so do yourself a favor. Don't brag about your credentials in reviewers' or beta readers' threads. Work on your skills and produce something that really displays your abilities to the best of your extent (and none of these "my word count is impressive enough" or "I can describe a character's outfit in a half a page" shenanigans), and then, we can talk about credentials.
Also, word count. It's not impressive unless you're doing NaNoWriMo. Sorry to say it like that, but it's true.
