Kingdom Come written by poison-kills-poison

 i. COVER & TITLE

As much as I like the aesthetics of this cover, I don't think it's as powerful nor as representative of the story as I think it could be. It's a great cover, but it doesn't hold that oh boy, that's beautiful, I need to read it now feeling that excellent covers have. I'd suggest exploring how you can spruce up this cover in a way that still aligns with your interests. Think more political, while keeping in the image-idea of cities. (I have noticed you've requested a cover from Dreamland, so this portion might be a little useless as of now.)

As for your title, I really like it. It's really my style, but looking at it impartially, I still get the sense it would work well for most readers. I'm not sure what it means yet, but I don't think that's always essential with book titles.

ii. BLURB

I love the hook you have in your blurb, and I do like how short it is. However, I think it's a bit confusing starting with the first paragraph, and it's so broken up after that that it lacks a little bit of cohesion. I would consider trying to condense the blurb. Go through each sentence, ask yourself if those words are necessary, and then see if you can combine the sentences you've deemed absolutely essential in a way that flows just a bit better. Here's my rewrite:

A rigged game is how he described it, and he was right. With the rise of mega-corporations, infertile land and war, it's almost too easy for the ruling political party to rally citizens into believing the saying, "survival of the fittest."

London is one of the fittest. Her uncharted ambition is what has her chasing headlines as a journalist, but she's finding it's hard to make a name for herself in a world where some have plenty and others have none at all.

Emir, on the other hand, is a controversial public figure whose recent announcement is most assuredly going to pull London's world apart. Even so, the pull she feels towards him sits like a loaded gun in the hands of his enemies And they're both learning a hard lesson.

This stairway to power is ruthless.

I'm not sure I've encompassed the same sort of idea you wanted to come across, but I've done my best, as I was a little confused with some of the blurb. I think you could look at what I've written, what you've written, and see what you can do with the blurb on your own, as you know it best.

1 0 / 1 5

i. PUNCTUATION

You do have the occasional misplaced comma, but I wasn't able to pinpoint any persistent errors that you continuously make. Therefore, I would only recommend getting Grammarly to catch those comma errors, and to read your story out loud to find them on your own. You have excellent grammar!

Like many, you use the wrong dash. I know dashes seem like something that doesn't affect writing much, but using the correct form of punctuation is an easy way to establish yourself as a knowledgeable writer, and come off that way to readers.

You use the hyphen in place of the em dash.

The hyphen is one click of the dash, (-) and is used to hyphenate words like father-in-law.

The em dash is two elongated clicks of the dash, (—) and is used to interrupt dialogue or narration.

ii. DIALOGUE

Most writers that have learned dialogue well have one final problem to conquer: the firm line between dialogue tags and action tags.

So what's the difference? Dialogue tags describe how something is said, whereas action tags describe something relating to action and essentially unrelated to the actual words being said. The only thing that makes action tags differ from any other line of action is that they, just like dialogue tags, indicate who is speaking. Some examples:

"Excuse me, Councilman!" I chirp. ('Chirping' is a way of speaking, so this is a dialogue tag, and it follows such rules—lowercase dialogue tag and a comma to end the dialogue. Since you have an exclamation mark and a proper noun to begin the dialogue tag, you have no mistakes here.)

"Hi," He turns. ('Turning' is not related to dialogue, it's only an action. Therefore, it follows the rules of any other sentence. Corrected, it should have a period on the end of the dialogue.)

"Nothing extraordinary," He politely corrects me. ('Politely correcting' is a dialogue tag, as it explains how he's saying something. Therefore, the beginning of the tag needs to be lowercase.)

Other than similar slip-ups, you have your dialogue pretty well down. Just watch out for instances like these.

iii. TYPOS

You have a few typos that affect the overall flow of your logistics. Recall that words like 'starstruck' are typed without a space. Your other typos struck me as a simple lack of re-reading, which we all have. Again, try downloading Grammarly, and that'll catch most of the errors I was seeing.

1 1 / 1 5

i. PACING

There's just too much politics in this story for me to believe most will be able to follow your pacing. For one, I'm not sure what political structure you're using. You use the word province to describe the riding areas, so I'm assuming you're not working with American politics, but the lack of Canadian terms urges me to think you're somewhere else, and therefore I'm not familiar with the political structure.

Politics are tricky to write about, because it's so complicated and there are so many different types, so I would suggest approaching your political storytelling much like you would approach world-building and exposition. Assume your readers don't understand most of the terms that aren't common and introduce them as such. Bettering your introduction of confusing terms will also broaden your reader audience.

Another area where your pacing could be improved is by adding in more characterization and less dialogue. Chapter one is almost completely dialogue, which gives us a lot of information about this world but not so much information about the characters. It's important to give your readers insight into who your characters are, what they like, how they feel and what they stand for before giving us too much plot. I'd suggest adding in more narration into your chapters—especially the first few—so you can establish your characters to the readers quicker.

ii. TRANSITIONS

I'm very fond of the way you begin and end chapters. You know what a good hook looks like, and you use it to your advantage in a very effective way. Your transitions between scenes are slightly more jarring (due to the lack of narration and the heavy dialogue) which sometimes made your story hard to follow. Again, fixed with more narration and special attention paid to exposition.

0 7 / 1 0

i. CHARACTERS

I do like your character descriptions because they get across a lot of information, but they still have the feel of info-dumping for the reason that they introduce most of the description all at once. Consider places where your descriptions would fit into the narration. (Again, this will fix up your flow.) In addition, try thinking of each little way you can make your characters real. What's different about them? What problems do they face? How do they feel about the dialogue/actions being carried out? All important questions to consider when building a character.

ii. SCENES

I do really like your scene description for the reason that it's simple, and I can appreciate that. However, you do tend to describe a scene, then move on, without continuously adding in details. When we write big paragraphs of description, most readers will begin to skim. If we add in little sentences in between dialogue and narration, readers won't even notice that they've received the same information without skimming. Some things to think about there.

0 7 / 1 0

i. PLOT

Political dramas are fairly rare on Wattpad, which gives them a small, very refined audience. As intriguing and exciting as your plot is to me, I'm unsure of how most readers will feel about the heavy plot. So are you boring me? No. But I think you're boring others. Perhaps you're okay with this—after all, I don't feel the need to cater to sci-fi readers in my adventure book, and you shouldn't need to cater to fantasy readers in your political genre. The problem is the action/adventure audience is huge, and the political/drama/mystery audience is not. I think you could benefit from catering to a wider audience. However, it's not necessarily essential for to change your plot at all if you're happy with your audience. I just think your book is very heavy where it stands now.

ii. TONE

Again, your heavy plot gives you a heavy tone, but you do write beautifully. I really like your style and ideas. However, the only problem I'd like to mention here is your jumping between past and present tense. Sometimes you use both verbs, often starting chapters with present tense, then morphing over to past tense. This isn't a great way to write a story, as it gets confusing and hard to follow. Try picking a tense and staying in it, as that's the best way to maintain both interest and understanding.

0 8 / 1 0

I really love the complexity of both your ideas and your storytelling. There's obviously a lot of heavy topics here, and I think you would benefit from more exposition and less dialogue. I'm not exceptional with exposition myself, but I've found the best way to get it done is to rewrite it over and over until you have it the way you like it. However, your logistics are great—just fix up those dialogue tags—and the nitty-gritty way you write is just beautiful.

4 3 / 6 0