Commentary on "Logged Into Love" by Sky Acton

I struggled to read Sky Acton’s “Logged on to Love” for a number of reasons. I know we’re not supposed to talk about grammar on our blog, but the common misuse of ‘to’ and ‘your’ and the constant tense change, sometimes multiple times within the same sentence, was very distracting. There was also the assumed understanding of the apparent role-playing game and all the workings of a chat room; none of it was explained to someone, like me, who has never experienced it firsthand. I think the key problem, which I’ve seen in many papers, was too much self-placement in a story that wasn’t outspokenly autobiographical or a memoir. When someone places themselves in a story, they are very prone to leaving many details out because they seem blatantly obvious, but they forget that to the reader everything is new.

As for the story arch, technically it was there, but it was so packaged and foreseeable that it hardly kept my attention. The chat room love idea is a good start, but nothing really happened. He didn’t contact her, she became sad, then he contacted her and she was happy again. If it’s going to be about a game and a chat room, I would have liked to have seen the game be a part of the story. Maybe his character attacked her characters village and she hated him in real life for it until he proved his love by showing her that he was somehow protecting her by attacking her village. Acton could have showed the reader how the game life transferred into her real life by showing awkward conversations with real people then popularity and success in the game. Or Acton could have shown the main character in a room filled with people and things happening with the main character completely unaware of it.

I know it was a rough draft but I would have liked to have seen more effort put into it.