Reviewer: Tanafen Signed
Date: July 16 2016
Title: Chapter 1: A Shrinking Game: The Gift
I will hold back review of the content for this, since I found it unreadable.
You wrote "Jessica" 260 times, and "Stacy" 267 times. That makes it a very difficult text to read from a litterary viewpoint.
Here's a way to rewrite it - to make it more readable:
"Stacy arrives home as Jessica watches TV. She kicks her shoes off, tosses her jacket over the side of the couch, and plops down next to Jessica. She lays her head down on Jessica's breasts, snuggling against her girlfriend. She kicks her feet up and lays on the couch. The night grows late and the two grow sleepy. They retire to bed, thoughts still swirling in Jessica's head until she drifts to sleep."
Stacy arrives home to find Jessica watching TV. She kicks her shoes off, tosses her jacket over the side of the couch and plops down next to her friend. She lays her head down on her breasts, snuggling against her girlfriend. She kicks her feet up and lays on the couch. THe night grows late and the two grow sleepy. They retire to bed, thoughts still swirling in Jessica's head until she drifts to sleep.
That way, you can remove at least half the "Jessica"'s and "Stacy"'s. If not more. My advice would be to cut it down to no more than 100 of each name - preferably fewer.
Author's Response: The characters in the story are two women. I already use "she" nearly 500 times. Many, if not most, of the use of their names are in dialogue tags. Your rewrite of that paragraph consists of swapping one name for one pronoun with a vague antecedent.
Considering I had to read your review a few times to parse what you were doing, I'm going to chalk this up to a stylistic difference: you prefer confusing readers with vagueness, whereas I prefer to let the reader know what's going on.
