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     Hi. I'm looking for someone to proofread what I have of a story so far, I'm laying down the foundation and want to make sure it's good. Also, if anyone else is looking for proof readers feel free to ask here. I'm open to proof read, and I'm sure there are others who are too.

I'm open to procrastinating- I mean, proofreading. You can ask Unscapabledeath for how I do with it if you need a character witness.

K. I'll make you a coauthor so you can read it. Please PM me or post in this thread before editing something, and I'm not finished so don't expect a full blown story.

EDIT: Ok. You're a coauthor now. And ty.

I would like to, and we'll see if it gets blocked again for "inappropriate content"

Ok, I'll add you too one sec.

EDIT: and there ya go :)

ok, I'll read it tomorrow :D

I can attest that Liminal excels at procrastinating proofreading.

Just finished a quick grammer and spelling check. Sorry, I probably should have done that before asking for proof readers ._.

Okay it’s late here and I wrote this all out without proofreading it (ironically enough) but I wanted to post this tonight. So I apologize for any sleep-deprivation-induced errors or inconsistencies.

I realized halfway through this that by "proofread" you may have meant a line-by-line sentence edit rather than general feedback. If so... oops. Hopefully you can still use this.

(By the way, people with the browser extension can read an unpublished game if you have it on “sneak preview” (which you do) without needing to be made co-authors.)

FEEDBACK:

Overall: I like what I see. Your foundation is solid.
This is very good for your age (which I believe is 12?). I remember being 12 so I know that being told something is “good for your age” is always kind of annoying, but it’s affecting how I frame my feedback, so I may as well be honest about my thought process. There are a lot of really cool things here. There’s also a lot that is very unpolished, but that's expected.
I wasn't planning to sit down and write this review tonight, but I got pulled in enough to write this wall of text about it, which is a good sign that it engaged me that much.

SPECIFIC THOUGHTS:
= Good opening. In the first few lines you establish what the protagonist’s life is normally like, and then immediately pivot to something new and interesting.
= I chuckled at “so this is gonna be like science class but worse?”
= The explanation “Now narrow down trillions of times…” is clunkily explained. I was able to get what you meant after parsing it out, but I’d recommend editing that passage to make sure what you’re saying is crystal clear.
= Nitpick: Most water is also a compound including dirt and other dissolved minerals; though you’re right that a far greater proportion of it is H2O.

LANGUAGE:
Decent. The language is unpolished and the phrasing is sometimes clumsy, but you’re doing all the basic important things right:
Basic grammar and spelling? Check, with only a few errors.
Varied sentence structure? Check. There’s
Sentence flow and ease of reading? Mostly check.
Periodically I would run across a sentence or especailly a line of dialogue that felt unnatural. Taking your writing to the next level will probably just be a matter of practice and editing.

Character interactions: While the dialogue could have been more polished, I liked many of the exchanges you set up. You introduce the characters quickly but coherently; I didn’t have any problem telling them apart and I knew who everyone was.

Information delivery: I’m seeing a lot of clever things you’re doing with your sentence structure. You’re carefully interspersing your worldbuilding with the action and dialogue to prevent infodumps. A lot of the dialogue is still pretty infodump-y, but it works in the genre, and the work being done in other areas makes it more tolerable. There's certainly room to improve this, but it's a good start.

Foreshadowing: It’s tough to comment on this with two pages, but I got the impression you were building up several storylines to follow up on.

Descriptions of unusual elements: Your description is pretty good when describing mundane things, but it’s very spare and confusing when you’re covering your new worldbuilding elements. I often had to re-read your explanations to be sure what they meant, and the ice fist thing was pretty confusing. I suspect what’s happening here is that you have a very clear image of what’s happening in your head, and don’t realize that what you’re putting on the page isn’t enough to communicate it to the reader. I’d recommend beefing up the description of these sections, and examining what you have carefully to see if it’s actually enough to come up with the scenario you’re trying to communicate from scratch.
Edutainment: Since this is an edutainment contest, you might want to put some more effort into including education about how atoms work. Contest entries can suffer in the rankings if they stray too far from the theme.

On the whole I liked the flashbacks section. I thought it got a little tell-y; where you very directly tell the reader some things that would be better left subtle. But you follow this up by providing clear and well-written examples. Each of the little vignettes paints a clear and resonant picture.
The backstory itself, I’m undecided on. I think you can get the same mileage with a less tragic backstory. Having the mom AND sister die AND the dad being alcoholic is probably overkill—picking any one of those would probably suit your purposes.
I’m intrigued by telling a story about a kid who’s been a bully; that’s an interesting plot line & suggestion of a future character arc. But if that’s the case, I would have expected to see more bully-like behavior from the protagonist in the first few pages. I didn’t get that at all, they seemed pretty polite and friendly. Or anything that wasn’t polite I just chalked up to being whisked away from home.
I thought it was weird that the backstory & protagonist missing their home wasn’t mentioned until now, but now I think that’s probably okay since the backstory & nature of the flashback sequence suggests they’re pretty repressed.

There’s a number of things about this story’s worldbuilding and character actions that are strange. I actually found this sort of charming in most cases—possibly because they’re strange in the exact same ways my own worldbuilding and characters were strange when I first got into writing. So I don’t think you really need to change much here in this instance, but I’m pointing them out so you can take note of them:
!) The premise is pretty absurd. Our narrator was randomly brought to another planet, and the first thing the people living there do is decide “Well nothing we can do! Time to teach you magic, starting immediately.” I don’t actually mind this in this story, because A) It’s pretty funny, and B) this is an edutainment game-story. A weird premise that’s brushed over to get to the meat of things is an accepted part of the genre.
!) You just skip past the 24 days it takes to count to a million in 2 lines, with no time at all spent on what adjusting to life on a new planet is like. This is also fine for the same reason as the absurd premise being okay.
!) It’s utterly absurd that Flow is straight up refusing to teach you for forgetting what water is made of. This is hilarious. I love it.

WORLDBUILDING:
Your worldbuilding is very interesting. There are lot of really cool and thought-provoking details here; as there were in your thunderdome story. The basic concept seems to be psychic matter-manipulation powers that require a solid conceptual understanding of atoms in order to use them. This is a cool idea.
I particularly liked the thought exercise of counting to a million (which is hard as heck by the way—I tried to do it once for weeks, and only got up to 33,000). That's a cool training exercise.
I could nitpick how there’s a lot more to understanding atoms than just what’s shown in the story; or I could nitpick the way that how the telekinesis actually works is kind of handwaved with the concept of the “mental plane”. I don’t actually think these things are problems for this story though—we’re invited to focus on the atoms & training; not the details like this.
This lets you have a fairly well-defined set of powers characters could potentially access: anything you can do by manipulating atoms. And you have a pretty clear route for how they do this: by mentally understanding the concepts in play at a deeper level than most people bother to. That’s all good.
I think you’re likely to hit problems with the fact that “manipulating atoms” is a totally limitless superpower. Anyone with that power is basically a living god. And with the relatively short amount of time training seems to take, everyone is likely to be a master in multiple areas of this. It seems like shifters will be fighting each other which is good; because normal humans wouldn’t stand a chance. But I think you’re going to have a hard time writing coherent fight scenes or other challenges. A battle where both sides have the superpower to “do anything” is very difficult to stage. It’s going to be hard to communicate stakes and limits to the audience, and hard to deliver on your promises.
That said, if you’re committed to telling a story about a group of godlike immortals who fight each other, this is an equally interesting premise. It just means this is going to be a different kind of story than the traditional “superpower training” genre. Instead you’ll be dealing with the social and psychological consequences of these worldbuilding elements. I’m curious to see where you take it!
Pragmatically speaking, it would also probably end up being non-flashy skills that end up being useful rather than the cool-looking ones like manipulating tendrils of water. (For instance, you can kill someone pretty easily by manipulating atoms in their body—no ice axe necessary.)

TL;DR: I like this. It's a solid foundation for whatever you plan to do next. There is room for improvement in a lot of areas and it doesn’t have the polish I would expect from an older author, but there’s a lot of interesting concepts and things you're doing right. Keep up the good work!

Thanks a lot! This is very helpful. :D

EDIT: it took me 8 min to read that XD I would explain why there's so much tragedy, but it'd be a spoiler.

No promises on quality or usefulness, but if you want another proofreader, I can spend some time going through what you have.

Sorry I only saw this now. I would appreiciate it, can you read it as is or do I need to make you a coauthor? Also, I forgot to ask for an age rating. I set it to all ages, but I really don't know if little kids are allergic tradgety or something.

shouldn't be too bad, maybe a 3 for now?

k.

Which story is it? If it is set to preview allowed, then I can read it without you needing to change anything. 

It's set to preview. It's Shifter.

Thing to note. You can just set a story to allow previews and send the link to people you want to proofread

Yea, but I don't have people to ask (exept for blister) which is a main reason I started this thread in the first place

Right I just noticed you were making some people coauthors, which gives people the full power to edit anything they want to on your stories. Someone with ill intentions could fully delete all progress. Not to say anyone would actually do that but as a general rule for proofreading it's better to do it the preview way.

I saved a copy on google docs in case someone does that. I've had work destroyed before, it's not happening again so easily.

goodnight_a's profile description says they like proofreading, maybe message them?

I don't know...

just an idea, it is your story after all :D

Yea. I'm just worried the profiles are outdated and I may disturb someone who wants to be left alone.

yeah, that too is a good point, but I don't think they would be disturbed, not everyone at least. Some people might be happy that someone wants them to proofread their story.

maybe...

Good point

Hey, I cant make it to where my profile description or storygame's descriptions show paragraph breaks. Is there a way to fix this?

Actually just found out you're supposed to use < p > or < br/ > for the paragraph breaks in descriptions

I found this after looking at a post over a year old by Will11, that Mizal responded with:

"< p > or < br/ > for paragraph breaks, and < b >< /b > or < i >< /i > to enclose bold or italic text." Without the spaces though

that's a way, but I tend to only use those for story games.

true, I did both for now, it also isn't too hard to use.

You don't need it for a storygame, line breaks are remembered there just like on the forum.

I find it annoying that it is like that, but it does make a little sense. Is there a page or forum for different colors? I want to be able to turn some of my text red, but I didn't find much help in the forum's on this

To do things like color text you need to do some more advanced html using the style parameter.

Here's a basic guide to colors specifically, but you can do a lot more with style like alignment, fonts and text size:
https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colors.asp

Thanks

Just be aware that some people find colored text REALLY annoying, it pulls you from the story and puts focus on the text itself imo.

And keep in mind also if you *must* use colored fonts of any kind, a lot of people are reading in dark mode and it may not show up the same for them.

Even pasting directly from Google docs can cause issues there since Google will psychotically insert code to make black text black.

Do I need to change anything so the people reading in dark mode can see it?

Just be mindful of using really dark colors that will end up blending into a black background.

Oh ok, so no dark colors then, I will probably only use red then other than the normal text.

Question, is Shifter sci-fi edutainment or fantasy edutainment? I know it doesn't really matter because it goes into edutainment either way, but I'm curious. I thought it was fantasy, but multiple friends said sci-fi.

There's this less known by name genre called "science-fantasy" which is a subgenre of sci-fi. It can often be confusing to people unaware of the term. Star wars and Warhammer 40k are both in that category

Oh! Thanks. I also didn't know there was edutainment until this site. Well, I knew some edutainment but I didn't know there was a seperate genre for it.

Science-fantasy isn't an edutainment thing, it's a science-fiction thing specifically. Edutainment is a category completely separate from genres like fantasy, sci-fi etc.

yea