@Damon-Cavalchini I think it's fine either way. To me, it feels weird to post in the "submissions open" thread since they've long since closed. But if you did, you may get the attention of some contest entrants who aren't following the writing support thread. So it's up to you which audience you want to discuss things with.

@Alfaerin Mielle? Who’s that? There’s a Michelle here, but no Mielles!😂
When the contest was announced, I didn’t even have an idea to start with—and my reaction to The Villainess Turns the Hourglass was so extreme—I just ran with it—I figured that if I accomplished nothing else—I would cleanse my palate of that revenge porn!
I am guessing that “My Life as a Villainess” probably started in a similar way. But unlike that, and my favorite, “Tearmoon Empire”, I want to play Casandra mostly straight—which is tough—avoiding silliness without becoming too dark or making my reader think that this is revenge porn—believable redemption is my goal—I hope by making one of the souls being a 10y/o a naive quest for redeeming her previous life tormentor will be more believable. I also hope that by making her 10 folks won’t be thinking about romantic love so much—there is only the love between friends—at least through the volumes that are currently residing in my head!

Thank you both so very much for the incredibly detailed and helpful feedback, @strangeattractor and @Hylebos. I'm a bit under the weather today and not up to writing a detailed response to all of it atm, but please know I am truly and deeply grateful to you both.

@strangeattractor said in JNC Writing Group Review Thread - The Adopted Princess is Actually a Wayfarer of Worlds:

I feel like my feedback is a little on the harsh side, but I decided to voice some of the criticisms that I might usually hold back from saying, since you said that you want to get published and make money from writing, and want to know what may be holding you back from that.

Oh no, I don't want you or anyone else to hold back on telling me how I can make my work better. I'm nothing but grateful to you and everyone else for taking the time to help me become a better writer. Thanks so much for responding again and clarifying what you meant, especially when you're so busy. I will definitely try reworking the opening chapter with all this advice in mind.

@jazzyjeoff Whoops--I made the topic first, then copied the first post and put it here without changing the link. It's fixed now. Thank you very much for reading and sharing your feedback! I think you may be right about it not being "light" enough, and that's why I failed. I'll see if I can edit the earlier chapters to make them easier to digest and follow.

@Crimson-Wise said in Yet Another PWA JNC Client:

If I don't keep the aspect ratio they start clipping.

The trick is to explicitly set the CSS height of the .rr-image-wrapper to the height of the viewport. You would have to script it to update every time the layout changes, if that's possible in your framework of choice.

rr-image-wrapper

Made some edits to the full version after receiving feedback.
I'm pretty sure the link I provided is still good, but just in case here it is, https://docs.google.com/document/d/12v0ZMkLt2nu2tUoV7hYIbWUJpOPB5XZ2ONqvHA1tS78/edit?usp=sharing
The word count is now 58,965 while all the other information remains the same.

Name of the work
En Passant Grandmaster

Approximate word count
58,965

Short description of the work
A chess-themed novel I plan to enter in the next JNC contest. The novel focuses on the members of a chess club (mainly the main female lead and the main male lead) in Kawaguchi Saitama Japan facing off against members of an underground chess league that can force people to play them in chess death games. Game logs are also provided for reader convenience.

A list of questions you would like reviewers to answer
Mainly to identify parts that are filled with too much dialogue and could be written better, if you think the story itself is good, and if the story is properly paced.

Trigger warning if your novel deals with sensitive subjects
Violence, bullying, abuse, cursing, and some edgy dialogue.

@jazzyjeoff
Sadly I do not have many people to proofread it, and only one of them who did was english native. So... uh, yeah, thats the reason I wanted to upload it in the first place.

And I already have started reading your work yesterday. I had once played with the thought of making something similar to your two minds, but abandoned it since writing two minds at once is too difficult for me, so props to you

@jazzyjeoff
Thanks for the feedback. I never really thought about location as many series I've read/watched tend not to tell the audience that.
I do agree with you that the second paragraph does sound better to start with.

@Damon-Cavalchini Dangit! I liked that line! But you’re right—I don’t think Mia would say it —she would definitely think it—but she is too much of a coward/nice person to say it to someone’s face. I suppose I could have her think it—and then have her say something that could be interpreted as nice—but then it wouldn’t be as funny. Doubble-dangit!

@jazzyjeoff

Hi there,

Thanks.

Feel free to jump in and review. I’ll collate the feedback in my working file version.

@heimdal7 said in How common is it for a ongoing series with multiple volumes out already to have no corrections notifications updates in well over a year?:

The point for the prepubs on site that members can read is for crowdsourcing quality checking for errors before the downloadable version you buy is released.

It sounds like you've drunk a bit too much of the koolaid. The point of the prepubs is primarily to give members an early preview of the translation, quality be damned.

True, early on JNC could leverage it for crowdsourced QC while developing their processes. But now that they're no longer a particularly small publisher (at least in the JP LN translation space they compete in), crowdsourced QC is only one small factor of many. Which, as you note, means that it doesn't factor into some translations.

Let’s keep it to books and their usage of slavery as much as possible.

We are all going to play this very close to the chest. No deviations.

I do feel offering a 100 coin discount for the first volume or two (depending on how long running the series is) of all series currently on catch up would be a good idea. It would encourage people to buy what they’re already dry reading for free and also allow you to pick up the first volume of a series you didn’t have time to get to. Outside of the back end time it would take to set something like this up I don’t see a downside.

My dude, stop worrying about what other people think about what you read or your interests lay and just enjoy them. At the end of the day you'll impress far more people with your enthusiastic enjoyment rather than worrying about what anyone thinks. Most people's opinions don't matter. Consider the manga My Dress Up Darling, people will come along who appreciate your jam, just look for them.

@JeweledPoisonousButterfly someone else will fill the void. Unless becomes prohibited by the expense.

I think if the author just included a few extra chapters about epilogue and maybe allowed White to you know stick around with the rest of the cast for a little bit before being swiped off to be with D then it would have been all right. If the climax had been made into two volumes instead of trying to shove everything into one it would have felt more natural.

@SomeOldGuy said in RightStuff soon to be no more:

My attitude towards them changed after the original ownership change. At that time, I'd had 60-100 items in my watch list, pretty much adding everything as it was posted. I also stopped mentioning them here as a source.

The first big reputation hit for me was when they started pushing ‘shipping insurance’ on every sale - and then when I actually needed to use it, when a blu-ray case got fractured in shipping, they really didn’t want to replace it, and I had to make a fuss.

The first announcement cancelled all "adult" stuff, That was kind of understandable. I wonder if the separate site they set up to handle that stuff still exists?

Yeah, that was a worrying moment, but as you say, understandable.

Then I cut back when the "intermittency" of shipping hit, and started only ordering stuff when it was marked as "in stock", rather than "released but on backorder".

…oh boy, that’s wonderful. X.x I hadn’t even noticed, because my orders with them had dropped way down.

Today, I cleared everything off my list that wasn't in stock today. Fortunately, that included the third AoaB fanbook and a few other "releasing soon" titles. (That's one of the big things I liked about RS... Getting things when they were on the shelf, even if they weren't scheduled to be released for a bit.)

For me, it’s going to be checking all the Nozomi series they have licensed themselves, and see if there’s anything I can’t live without and grab while there’s a chance. (This really sucks. Their releases of old-school anime - Tylor, Dirty Pair, Utena, Nadesico, etc. - set quality standards at the time, and even now they were one of the best.)

@Jon-Mitchell honestly, I personally prefer the interface of the mobile website compared to the app. I like being able to look at the calendar to see what's coming up later in the day compared to just seeing the recent releases. The app is good, and if it was all that was available I'd probably use it, but I have a preference for the website so I tend to ignore the app. They might feel similar.

@heimdal7 Check out this topic:

https://forums.j-novel.club/topic/7300/unable-to-read-manga-on-a-pc-light-novels-are-ok

Short answer: Calibre isn't really a great option for reading manga and there are many other better readers, but there are some settings you can try to tweak.

@BookManiaReader Just to add on, the man died a hero if that bit of info wasn't known.