I’m a little confused. The summary states this is Joe’s blog, in other words, a blogfic. When I started reading it, it had the resemblance of something that could be someone’s blog, we’re talking in the first few paragraphs, and then it quickly launches into full story mode. My question is, who would actually write their blog like this? It’s chapter fragmented, not blog post fragmented. The author had a decent idea but didn’t follow through with the execution. Or didn’t quite know how.
At least the writing isn’t bad. It’s actually quite decent albeit lacking. The story at hand is scant at best (another reason why it’s hard to believe this is a blogfic, it’s nearly all dialogue). I can see it’s trying to capture the whole ‘this is a blog with a story, not a story blog’ feel but again I ask, who would actually write their blog like this? Who doesn’t go off on descriptive tangents and relays what happened almost exclusively in speech?
I read my counterpart’s review after I did my reading on this story and it alerted me to the fact that the confusion I had about this BriAnna character (not to mention all the others that just seemed to appear in the story without any explanation) lay in the character biographies in the sidebar.
No. I should not need a reader companion in order to understand characters. If the information is pertinent to understanding the character, it should be included within the main body of the work. Additional information links are supposed to be just that, additional information that’s not necessarily vital to the story but could round it out for you. If you need additional posts in order for readers to get your characters because the information isn’t in the story, you need to re-evaluate your writing. I don’t care the style the story is written in.
Despite all of this, I was somewhat inclined to read more but I just couldn’t figure out why I wanted to. I think it was simply for the fact that it was exceptionally fast reading. If I let myself, I probably could have clicked through the entire site in the span of an hour. But I wouldn’t. I didn’t really care what I was reading about, the plot was moving so fast that I didn’t have time to get interested in anything and the story was so skeletal that I just didn’t care to fill it in myself. That’s not my job, not when there’s so much to fill. If the author can’t be bothered to write the story with the pertinent information already included, I can’t be bothered to read the required links in order to "get" what I’m reading. That’s not how reading (or writing) works.
Perhaps it’s because the author is trying to stick to this "blogfic" idea but the thing is, right now it’s neither blogfic nor story blog. The writing at hand isn’t believable as a person’s blog and the story is way too thin to be a genuine online novel. The balance is off. It needs to be reworked into one or the other, not an attempt at both.
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