Before I actually read this, I'm gonna state this: I DO NOT WANT TO READ THIS. I KNOW IT'S NOT A GOOD STORY AND I WAS ALWAYS BAFFLED AT HOW IT GOT SO FREAKIN' POPULAR. THIS IS GOING TO BE ROUGH.

Ok, first impression of the first chapter: the prose itself is good. A bit overdone, perhaps, but at least I never used the word "orbs" to say "eyes" or something, right?

The storyline is rushed. The whole thing is rushed. "Here's my characters, here's exactly what happened to them, and now look, there's a strange man. Yee-haw!" Still better quality than a lot of stuff I've read on this hellsite, though. I'll give myself that.

Oh, gosh this is dramatic. I'd forgotten about that. I prided myself on being SO historically accurate but my characters are the children of an Irishwoman who'd married a Scotsman, moved to Scotland, then BACK to Ireland, then were abandoned by their alcoholic father, and most of the children DIE while they live in squalor in America!

I'm gonna close this tab and just read the rest of it because if I keep making snarky comments as I read I might die. I'll write a reflection once it's all read. Hopefully I don't cringe myself to death.

OKAY. Now I've read the whole thing again, so here goes:

It wasn't as bad as I expected. My prose itself was pretty good throughout, although it got repetitive and sometimes the descriptions were really odd. But generally, not as bad as I expected. It was definitely too dramatic, though. And so rushed! I can't believe this was a years' worth of work and I read all of it in half an hour or so. There were more crazy events than Cymbeline and they all happened so quickly. It's also a shame that I didn't develop my characters, I just described them. There wasn't enough time, I guess, what with me writing a sensationalist story and shoving so much telenovela-type action into so few words. I think it must clock in somewhere around 10-15k words, so it's not exactly a short story, but still far from a novel.

I also think I relied too heavily on flashback. Perhaps that was the development of Anne as my narrator, because she focuses so heavily on the past, but it overall screwed up the flow of the story. And I was so eager to show off my knowledge that Irish folk songs existed at all that I just sort of shoved them in there. All the events are glossed over and anticlimactic, but there was potential, I guess. It was a sensational sort of story in the Victorian sense, the dramatic kind that Jo March wrote for the Weekly Volcano Press, the kind that were published one chapter at a time in newspapers. And I'll admit that it was definitely better written than a lot of stuff I've encountered on Wattpad. That makes me sound cocky, but come on. We all know it's true, and false humility gets me nowhere.

That being said, I still think this is the worst of my works. It's overly dramatic and rushed, with little attention given to character development and entirely too much to sob stories. I'm glad I wrote Ladybird and Saturday's Lady, because they really do delve much deeper into character, even though I remember Ladybird being pretty bad too.

I'm also glad I ditched the accents. I remember in my first drafts I wrote this horrible accent, and it was really, really, terrible, and it's still in the original version Mahri and I tried to co-write. That was truly awful. So I'm really glad I took those out for the most part. I wish I could have gone on to talk more about Irish and how it's their native language like I did in Saturday's Lady, but to be fair at this point I didn't know Irish had been widely spoken in Connemara at the time the MacEilans were alive. I also made some feeble attempts to talk about religion, but they felt forced and a little out of place. I don't know.

The worst scene was describing a Welsh Rarebit. To this day I'm not sure what a rarebit is, other than a food made with bread and cheese, but why on Earth did I feel the need to describe it so much?? What was I thinking? I guess if that was the worst scene, MWIR was not as bad as I thought. Still objectively not good, and definitely one of the worst of my works, but overall not bad. It's very much written by a thirteen-year-old girl. There are no deep themes, no character development, just drama. I guess that explains why Wattpad liked it so much. I've found deep themes often go unappreciated, which explains why The Flower Crown Princess or An Expectation went relatively unnoticed.

Oh, well. C'est la vie, yeah?