The Writer's Gradebook | Closed For Requests

Welcome!

NOTE: Este will not be reviewing until the summer.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: For those requesting reviews for their personal stories, please keep in mind that we do not read erotica. If your book is labeled 'mature', you will be asked whether explicit sexual content is present and whether it can be glossed over without taking away from the narrative.

Here's what to expect.

There will be negative reviews, positive reviews, glowing reviews, reviews that stink like something foul, mediocre reviews... you get the picture. No story is too good or too bad for us to try our hand at reading (I suspect I'm going to regret saying this later). We'll come up with our own stories to analyze, but all of you are free to recommend some to us—even your own book, if you dare. We're going to do our best to dissect things in a way that is as constructive, and hopefully polite-ish, as possible, but there's no guarantee that we won't lose a few marbles along the way.

Ginger (hi!) is the slightly more savage and slightly more off-her-rocker out of the two of us. Her reviews also have a good chance of being longer. She gets bored easily and will be nitpicky about mistakes, but she can ramble on with constructive criticism for a while, and always does try to find something good in every story, even if the thing itself is atrocious. She has the uncanny ability to tolerate terrible writing for an impressive amount of time just for the comedy in it. Her attention span is shorter than Este's so she doesn't like slower-paced plots, and she'll be extremely judgy about descriptions and covers, so watch out.

Este is likely to enjoy a thinner range of genres, but when she likes a book, she really loves it. She gets emotionally invested in a story pretty easily, and can get into some serious ranting about what she did and didn't like afterward. She'll probably be nicer and make fun of people less, but don't be fooled into thinking she doesn't have high standards, because she definitely does. Her reviews will generally be shorter than Ginger's because she gets less hung up on details and specifics. She only likes cute romance, so Ginger will be forced to dredge through the muck of weird werewolf-billionaire stuff.

Now, the grading system is simple. You get scored out of 100. An A, B, C, D, or F, just like it was back in school. We hope we won't encounter too many Fs, but... with this site, you never know. The difference between a D and an F is the pretty much difference between the Twilight films and the She-Hulk TV show: one is a comical level of quality but has some enjoyable elements if you don't take it too seriously, and the other slowly drains your brain cells until you descend completely into madness. A C is a passing score, but even Ds have the potential to be salvaged with some elbow grease and rewriting. Contrarily, there is no turning back from an F.

The people who wrote the stories we review will probably never actually see what we think of them (unless they specifically requested us 😀), so these reviews are for you. The aspiring writer looking for advice while you dream up your first draft or work through revising your second one. 

Plenty of people are just writing on this site for fun and don't particularly care about the opinions of other people, which is completely legit, but we are here to provide feedback for the sake of hobbyists and those who hope to make a future career out of their writing. We're just a couple of amateurs here to help you figure out what to do and what NOT to do by using good, bad, and mediocre examples. We're not here to offend people, even though we may have opinions that you might not like, and we're not going to diss anyone without accompanying constructive criticism.

We may use direct quotes from the books we review, which will be noted and disclaimed. We obviously don't own any of the stories we'll be going through, and we're acknowledging that ahead of time so no one comes at us for copyright infringement.

Give us a vote or pop into the comments to say hi. Thanks for your time!