Title: The Paths Connected by VickyLory8
Source: Feedback request
Genre: Fanfiction
Fandom: BTS
Mature: N (bullying, child abuse, female issues, illicit drug use, mental health issues, misogyny, occasional strong profanity, physical abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexual references, smoking, mention of suicide)
LGBTQIAP+: G (joke, misconception about a relationship)
Status: Complete
First impressions: 31/40
Digging deeper: 68/100
Final thoughts: Complete

Clicking the "External Link" button below the "Continue to next part" button will take you straight to the book, or click the link in the inline comments here. → 

*****

First impressions: 31/40

Title: 10/10
This is a great title for a time travel book. I like the concept of connecting timelines and individual stories that would otherwise never directly touch, so this intrigues me right away.

Story description: 8/10
Normally, I don't like story excerpts at the beginning of a blurb. There's very limited character space in the blurb preview, so maximizing every character is important. But this is exactly the kind of quote that can hook people in an instant, because it's just so off-the-wall. "So" should be capitalized, though, and you don't need all the extra space between that quote and the section divider for the actual blurb, since that's what the section divider is for.

Moving on to the blurb, the second sentence is basically the first sentence with more detail, so I'd cut the first sentence entirely. There should be commas on either side of "Taehyung," and instead of a semicolon, I'd use a period for a hard stop, because that adds more punch to each sentence, increasing the hook.

And that's about it. Short, sweet, and to the point. You introduce the protagonists and the plot conflict, leaving the details vague enough to pique a potential reader's curiosity without giving too much away, and ending with a series of questions is a very effective way to hook someone into the story. And I can't wait to reach the point where that story excerpt actually happens.

Cover: 8/10
Overall, I like this cover (kudos to Yeontanaaaaaaa for designing it). The imagery all blends really well, and the compass behind the golden glow adds a layer of complexity that isn't evident at first glance. I like the font style, size, and placement of the title, but I think it could be brought out a little more from the golden glow, because I honestly didn't even notice it until I started analyzing the cover. Maybe some sort of border around the letters would help? Something that blends with the golds but is just different enough to add an edge that defines the letters more? It's something to look at, anyway.

As for your name and the graphics credit at the bottom, that text is way too small, and I can't even make out the username for the graphics designer when I click on your book from your profile to pull up a larger image of the cover. Part of that is the coloring, because some letters fade into the background too much. So, I'd bump the size up for both lines and brighten the graphics designer's line to ensure they get the credit they deserve.

First chapter (and everything that came before it): 5/10
Ooh, first fanfiction. It even has the new fanfiction smell. *sniff*

(I did that because the prologue makes me think I can get away with displaying my weird sense of humor.)

I appreciate the undetailed characters chapter. These can get way too detailed *cough* mine *cough*, but really, all you need are the basics. If even that. Names and family relationships. Check.

As for the prologue, I love how you start with the classic horror story introduction of a dark stormy night and then immediately flip that on its head with humor. All seriousness just went out the window, and I feel like that's okay. This promises to be a fun, funny story, and that's just fine with me.

And in chapter one, the fun continues. The dialogue-driven chapter creates a lot of character development right from the start, making it easy for the readers to engage with the story and enjoy it, as shown by all the comments. The school setting is immediately relatable, and the dialogue itself feels natural, like real people would say these lines. Also, having Jungkook give Wonnie the nickname "sweetheart" right away does things to me. I don't know why, but that is my favorite nickname for a guy to give a girl in romance stories.

There's very little description, though, so I'd recommend working on adding that in so the readers can visualize the characters and the scene. Another area for improvement is grammar. I added inline comments about the grammatical errors as I found them, and they're pretty common mistakes involving punctuation, dialogue tags, capitalization, verb tense and word choice issues, but the story is still very clear, readable, and engaging regardless.

If you're interested, you could look into an editing tool to help you find and recognize mistakes and learn how to fix them. The one I use is the free version of ProWritingAid, which is kind of like Microsoft Word or Google Docs because it underlines possible mistakes and areas for suggested improvement in different colors. Then, you hover over the underlined sections, and it tells you what it thinks is wrong and how it thinks you should fix it. It's been really helpful for me to use, and I recommend it over Grammarly, because Grammarly really pushes authors to use the rewriting function and turn everything into AI-generated content, but it's really hard to do that with the free version of ProWritingAid. So, it's the difference between a tutor and someone who writes your homework for you. The tutor is the better option for your personal growth and improvement as an author.

*****

Digging deeper: 68/100

Cover & title: 8/10
See "First Impressions" feedback.

Story description: 4/5
See "First Impressions" feedback.

Grammar & voice: 8/20
First, I love your writing voice. It's very fun and engaging. This isn't a story that takes itself seriously, and you're not trying to write a serious story. You're writing a story that surprises readers into laughing with every other line, and I love that.

There are many grammatical errors, but they don't impact reading comprehension too much. They're mostly punctuation mistakes. The words themselves are usually clear and understandable, so while the placement of a period or a comma can be odd, it's easy to know what each sentence is trying to say. There are some occasional word choice or phrasing issues, which I'll try to point out in the in-line comments as I read, but I think it's better for me to go through the most common mistakes you're making here, rather than me stopping to add an in-line comment wherever I see something.

My best overall suggestion is to look into an editing tool to help you catch mistakes, learn how to identify them, and learn how to fix or prevent them. I don't recommend Grammarly for this. That really pushes authors to use its rephrasing functions, which completely rewrites their content and makes it AI-generated. It's not trying to help you learn. It's trying to do the work for you, which doesn't help you improve as a writer.

The tool I recommend, and the one I use, is the free version of ProWritingAid. It's a browser extension that underlines possible mistakes or areas of suggested improvement with different colored lines, similar to Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Then, you hover over the underlined areas, and it will tell you what it thinks is wrong and how it thinks you should fix it. It also provides links to more information, if you want that. So, it edits, and it teaches. There is a rephrasing function, but it's really limited on the free version (something like five sentences a day), so it's really hard to rewrite an entire story using this tool.

Moving on to the specifics, the biggest area for improvement is punctuation. You occasionally put an extra space between a word and a punctuation mark (or a set of opening quotation marks and the first word of dialogue), but not too often, so I think that's just a typo. You often put a comma after an exclamation mark or a question mark, however, and they don't need that, because they're replacing a period to alter the tone of the sentence. They can stand on their own as ending punctuation marks. And this isn't a common occurrence, but when you end a sentence with a hyphen/dash to show an interruption to someone's dialogue or thoughts, that doesn't need a comma to follow it, either.

Commas are a pain. People have a tendency to either over-use them or under-use them, and you're in the under-using category (I'm an over-user). There are so many rules regarding commas, though, that I honestly don't know where to even begin here. This is an area where ProWritingAid has really helped me, because commas were, are, and probably always will be the bane of my existence. I'm much better now than I used to be, but I'll check this with ProWritingAid before I post it, and I guarantee there will be at least one comma error somewhere in all this. Addendum: Shockingly, no comma errors so far. 😳

The other area where you struggle with punctuation is dialogue, and this bleeds into dialogue tag problems, so I'll tackle them all at once. Basically, all the punctuation for the sentence of dialogue needs to be inside the quotation marks. Think of it like a sandwich. The opening and closing quotation marks are the pieces of bread, and the sentence of dialogue is the peanut butter (or whatever you want to put on your sandwich). All the filling stays on the inside, and the ending punctuation is part of the filling.

Not all dialogue comes with dialogue tags, but when it does, you can often identify it by phrases like "he said," "she asked," and "they shouted." The tags describe who is speaking and how they're saying it. These are often incomplete sentences, which is fine, because they actually count as part of the sentence of dialogue they're next to.

Dialogue tags can come before dialogue, after it, or right in the middle of it. I'm going to start with the most common place, which is after dialogue. Normally, you would end a sentence of dialogue the same way you'd end any other sentence: period, exclamation mark, question mark, ellipsis (...), or, in rare circumstances, a hyphen or dash. If there's a dialogue tag after that last sentence, nothing changes—unless the sentence ends with a period. All other punctuation marks can stay the same. A period, however, needs to be swapped out for a comma.

Also, regardless of the punctuation marks, the first word of the dialogue tag should be lowercase, because it's technically in the middle of a sentence. Of course, if it's a name or other proper noun, it stays capitalized. And this is where editing tools mess up. If dialogue ends in anything other than a comma, editing tools will say the first word of the dialogue should be capitalized, because they see an exclamation mark, question mark, or other ending punctuation mark and think that ended one sentence, and the dialogue tag starts a new one. So, while I love my editing tool and recommend it all the time, you can't trust it blindly. It makes mistakes.

Now, I think it's time for some examples (which I will italicize to set them apart from the rest of this):

"She's my mom," he said.
"So?" his best friend asked.
"So, I can't date her!" he exclaimed.

Those all have dialogue tags. These do not:

"She's my mom." He sighed heavily and frowned.
"So?" His best friend looked confused, as if he didn't understand the problem.
"So, I can't date her!" He didn't mean to shout, but he was too upset to keep his voice down.

If a dialogue tag comes before dialogue, it will almost always end in a comma, because it's an incomplete sentence without the dialogue. You can't use periods, exclamation marks, or question marks in the middle of a sentence, because they're ending punctuation marks only. But the first word of the dialogue tag still needs to be capitalized, because it's the start of its own complete sentence. Basically, the dialogue tag needs the dialogue, but the dialogue doesn't need the dialogue tag.

He shook his head and said, "I don't understand the problem."

If a dialogue tag comes in the middle of dialogue, you use the before or after rules, depending on which sentence of dialogue it's part of.

"She doesn't know you're her son," his friend reminded him. "We're trying to make your dad ask her out, remember?"
"But it's too weird." He shook his head again and said, "I can't do it."

You have a few areas of one person's dialogue getting split into multiple paragraphs, and I think what you're doing is creating a new paragraph after each dialogue tag. You don't have to do that, and it can be confusing when you do, because readers expect an A B A B format to dialogue, where speaker A says something, and then there's a paragraph, and then speaker B says something, and it keeps alternating like that. So, if you have A B A A, it's easy to think speaker B said the last line, and that's where the confusion happens.

Thoughts are another area you can work on. They're basically unspoken dialogue, so you follow the same punctuation and capitalization rules you would follow for dialogue. But showing a visual difference between thoughts and dialogue is important so you don't confuse your readers. Sometimes within this story, I've noticed you'll italicize thoughts and put them in double quotation marks; sometimes, you just italicize; and sometimes, you italicize and bold. Picking one way and sticking with it helps to eliminate confusion, and I think just italicizing works best:

She doesn't know who I am, he reminded himself.

This is another place where editing tools mess up, and not just with exclamation marks and question marks. They get confused about the placement of the comma and think the entire sentence is all supposed to be one sentence, not a sentence of thought followed by its tag. So, just be careful here.

Another area where I think you do it right most of the time is capitalization. I'm guessing the random capitalized and lowercase letters are just typos. But just in case, the first letter of the first word of a sentence gets capitalized, and nothing else in the sentence gets capitalized, unless it's a proper noun. Those always get capitalized. With things like band names, you follow the capitalization rules the band has in their name. So, it's always "BTS" instead of "bts" or "Bts."

You have some run-on sentences here or there, which I think those are mostly comma issues, and there are some incomplete sentences as well, but they're pretty rare. Again, I think an editing tool would help here. You also slip into the present tense in some places, and since this story is in the past tense, it's important to stick with the past tense. Changing verb tense can create confusion for the reader. That being said, dialogue and thoughts will usually be in the present tense, because the person is speaking and thinking in their present time, not in their past.

Plot & pacing: 5/10
This is tricky, because this story doesn't take itself seriously, so I don't think I should take the plot too seriously, either. It's just a fun story. So, I think the pacing is fine for what the story wants to be, and the plot development is okay as well. It's a bit confusing going from the prologue to the first chapter, however, because it's not clear that this is now in the past. I know Jimin and Taehyung traveled to the past at the end of the prologue, but prologues don't always come chronologically before the first chapter, so I didn't assume that's what this story did. I thought there might be more explanation for why they jumped into the past, since that still isn't clear by the end of chapter five. After a while (maybe chapter two?), I figured out this was the past Jimin and Taehyung traveled to, and then things made sense. So, explaining that at the beginning of the first chapter would be a good idea.

Characterization: 18/20
This is definitely a dialogue-driven story, which gives the reader a lot of insight into each character. Jiwon seems awkward and shy, but she has this cute frenemyship with Jungkook that everybody except her knows is a crush. Her friend, Wonnie, is more outgoing, and she pushes Jiwon out of her comfort zone all the time. As for Jungkook, he's smug, confident, and definitely teasing Jiwon all the time because he likes her.

Jimin is pretty similar to his mom in that he's kind of awkward and shy, and Taehyung is like Wonnie, in that he's the one pushing Jimin out of his comfort zone. And setting Jimin up on a date with his mother, because what could be funnier than that? I also like the addition that Taehyung is clumsy and accident-prone, since Namjoon is his father in this story.

That's just weird. Jimin is Jungkook's son, and Taehyung is Namjoon's son. I'm having trouble wrapping my head around that. And Jin goes to school with Jungkook and Namjoon, so he's part of an older generation, too. 😆

Harmony within genre: 15/15
Well, five out of seven BTS members are on the scene, so yeah, this is a BTS fanfiction.

Originality: 10/20
The plot is original, and the story is engaging, as all the reader comments make obvious. I'd like to see more descriptive detail, though. There isn't much of that. I think Jungkook may be the only character I've seen by the end of chapter five who's given an in-text, physical description. Working on adding that into the story would help flesh it out and make it even better. You can start by just focusing on visual descriptions, which are the most common (and where I started when I challenged myself to work on my descriptions), and as you get more comfortable, you can add in sound, smell, taste, and touch to help bring things to life even more.

Chapters 6-end:
Your grammar and descriptive detail improved as the story progressed, which I was really happy to see, but the point when you switched to AI-generated content was a real downer. The beginning of this story had a lot of charm, which it lost at that point. It felt like I was suddenly reading an entirely different story. The characters' personalities were different, the tone was different, and while there's not a problem with adding more serious subject matter to a story that begins in a humorous way, there was very little coherence in this case. The before and after didn't match. There were brief flashes of your original writing style within the AI after that, which brought back the characters and tone I was familiar with, but that also contributed to the disjointed feeling of the separate parts of the story not fitting together.

I already said in the comments the first time you used AI that I prefer your writing style, and that is still true. I really liked your original writing style. It was fun and engaging, and it had so much charm, which I really missed when it disappeared. AI flattens characters out and removes their personalities; it changes the tone of any story to something deep and introspective; it uses flowery language and metaphors that most people don't use; it sounds unnatural; honestly, I haven't yet read an AI-generated story that doesn't sound like all the other AI-generated stories. It gets really boring. And it's an automatic disqualification from any official Wattpad awards and most unofficial awards, too. So, I highly recommend rewriting the AI sections in your own words.

Moving on, it felt like you were making the story up as you went, which is fine. That's how I write. And weird things always pop up when you're writing on the fly, which is to be expected. So, now that you've finished the story, this would be the time to go back and smooth it out. I'm guessing some of the timeline issues and bouncing character perspectives are part of this. For instance, what was the point of Namjoon's perspectives? He had very little to do with the story, and yet he had sections that were in his perspective, sections that didn't involve any of the main characters or the main storyline. So, that was just filler material that had no relevance to the plot.

As for the timeline, there would sometimes be one chapter showing a particular scene in one character's perspective and then move on to the next scene; then the next chapter would go back in time to show the first scene again from another character's point of view; then the next chapter would show a scene that was somewhere in between the two scenes from the first chapter from a third character's perspective—it got really confusing. Instead of changing character perspectives all the time, I think it would be better to just write the story in the third person. Then, you can zoom in on whichever character you want, include the thoughts of multiple characters in the same scene as it's happening, and maintain a chronological order that makes sense to the reader.

With the change in the subject matter, like I said, that's fine, but foreshadowing early in the story is important when a humorous, lighthearted book is going to take a dark, serious turn. I would imagine many readers who started reading the story because it was funny left when the humor did. Letting your readers know right from the start means you hook the right readers, the ones who will read it and enjoy it all the way through. And it's hard to do that when you're just starting a story and you don't know where it's going. So, now that you know, you can incorporate subtle details from the beginning to drop hints about what's going to happen.

*****

Final thoughts:
Jimin wants one thing: to set his mother up with the right husband. So, naturally, he travels back in time with his best friend, Taehyung, to make that happen. And time travel ends up being more complicated than he thought. The pair stumbles along, trying to push Jimin's mom in the right direction, but obstacles keep popping up. Bullying, harassment, manipulative relationships—is it any wonder things don't go to plan? Surprising twists and dark turns take their lighthearted journey in unexpected directions, and when the truth comes out, the end may flip everything you know on its head.