Hello, this is whiskerface, and I’m here to review "Invalid Item"  . This review is only my opinion; so feel free to discard or ignore anything here.🙂
I had difficulty reading your chapter because of the layout. The sentences consistently ran across the page in an entire line to half line pattern. This distracts the reader and makes your work seem choppy. The narrow layout of the page makes this worse. I suggest you reformat to a wider page and give your sentences the space they need to be a smoother read. Anything that distracts the reader is a problem, so keep that in mind when you edit.
There are problems with grammar and punctuation. In your opening sentence, you wrote “At least a hundred bullet is headed for Jessica”.
Bullet is plural, so add the letter s. Since it’s a plural, use are for the verb. Use the word is for the singular. If you wrote “A bullet is heading for Jessica,” there would be no problem. By announcing the number 100, you’ve announced it is plural. This is an easy fix. There are a number of problems like a period being where a comma should belong, so read through for errors in spelling, punctuation, and usage.
The phrase “professional killers” needs no capitals. Usually, names and specific titles require capitals. Professional killers is neither. Also, you use this phrase repeatedly. Vary your descriptions. Are they thugs or goons? Hired muscle? Are they ex-military or former criminals eager for housing, food, and no desire to go straight? Another approach is writing several lines describing them. For example:
The squad leaders were...
Highly trained, intelligent, fixated, mentally imbalanced, wearing body armor, untiring
The squads were composed of...
Ex criminals, homeless people, anyone willing to kill, abducted college students, a mixed bag of dangerous folk, desperate people, folks with terminal illnesses
Jessica knew...
They despised her, they were cannon fodder, the older ones pushed the newbies to the front, they weren’t aware of her skills, enough of them would wear her down
So, sticking in a more detailed paragraph of what Jessica faced will save a lot of repetition later.
Your writing is wordy and repetitive. You restate points about people are trying to kill Jessica, Jessica fights back, these people are professional killers who plan to kill Jessica but she fights back, she kills them, she kills more of them, and so on. Don’t beat a point into the ground. Let your readers do the work of making connections. State something to your audience, then back it up with action. Have Jessica pull a gun to reinforce the idea that she’s fighting back. Show what’s happening instead of only telling. Use vivid, sensory language. There are resources that assist with this. One is:
https://jerichowriters.com/show-dont-tell/
Your overuse “to be” verb forms. Go reread your first few paragraphs and count how many of these you included. Avoid overusing words in general, and employ specific words for a clearer point. Laughed is vague. Giggled, hooted, barked, cackled, shook are more precise. Use a thesaurus.
No reader wants every thought, question, or decision laid out for them. Stick to the major points and decrease unneeded interior monologues. Don’t describe every room or every decision or every time Jessica reloads. That becomes annoying and turns off your reader. I found myself skipping large chunks of the story because it felt like more of what I’d read before.
You have too many adverbs. Adverbs water down writing. Be brutal. Excise all you can. Turn mumbles softly into murmuring. Make silently into noiseless.
Make Jessica human, not superhuman. No one can fight without sweating, bleeding, turning down a blind alley. Give her a limp. Let her dehydrate. Give the bad guys something positive, like knowing the layout of the building better, or where the weapons caches are. Let her feel fear or frustration. Jessica can have memory lapses, pain from old injuries, or other problems to overcome.
Write a believable situation. You have sentences and paragraphs that say Jessica won’t kill them but will kill them. That’s nonsensical. Jessica killing men, then disarming them, then checking to see if they’re dead is pointless. Either she knows what she’s doing or she doesn’t. Anyone still alive would have killed Jessica while he was still armed.
If you are going to write about guns, know something about them. Automatic weapons are machine guns. You pull the trigger once and it keeps firing. Just about everything else is a semiautomatic, with one pull of the trigger delivering one shot fired. Name your weapons and know the features available with them. This applies to other situations. Never have a truck when you can have a Toyota Tundra. Don’t talk about ice cream but Raspberry Ripple.
A few last thoughts. Decide what needs to be said, then figure out what isn’t necessary. Write only what you need to make the point. Remember, you’re planning a series of books. You can add to Jessica’s story in other novels. Vary your sentence lengths. A four word sentence may communicate an idea more successfully. “ He stopped short.” It also keeps the reader reading. Anything that makes the reader distracted or unwilling to keep reading is a problem.
As I said before, this is my opinion. I hope I helped. This is a great idea for a novel. Keep writing! Whiskerface
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| (4.5)
| (4.0)
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