Pretzel Poem, self described poet and (even though she doesn't want to admit it) pretzel maker moves to the town of Sweetwater from her Canterlot home. She then meets the daughter of the saloon owner, the beautiful and feisty Clementine.
Can the uptight Pretzel get the free spirited Clementine to notice her?
Will Clementine choose Pretzel or will be forced to marry the greedy landowner, Big Oil?
Will Big Oil and his henchmen, the Bloodhoof gang take over the town of Sweetwater?
Can Pretzel compete with the dimwitted sheriff?
Read to find out!
Chapters (4)
Thoughts as of having read part 1:
Pretzel Poem seems like an interesting character. She's striking me as somepony real, and with a sense of Canterlot entitlement and fussiness that sets up a contrast to the rough small frontier town environment that has a lot of potential for developing conflict, so that's a good start.
The formatting of the text is messy. When you're writing paragraphs, don't add line breaks (AKA use the return key) in the middle of sentences. Best practice is to let the text automatically wordwrap and use a double return at the end of each paragraph to separate it from the next one.
A number of grammar corrections need to be made, a lot of which involve missing or out of place words. Getting a good proofreader would help a lot with this. Said tags are also problematic. Try studying the rules for when a line of dialogue should end with a comma or a period. For example,
Grammatically this doesn't make sense. The period at the end of the dialogue in quotes needs to be a comma in this case. The quotation marks contain the thing he said, and if there's a period at the end of that thing, starting a new sentence, then the "he said..." part becomes a sentence fragment. On the other hand (hoof), if it was changed to not something 'he said' but rather an action he performed, such as,
Then a period is correct here, since the part in quotes is a complete sentence by itself and then the text following it is also a complete sentence, not a fragment. This is just something I tend to notice a lot because for a very long time, I was really bad at this myself, mostly because I didn't bother to just go read the rules. What I've explained here is far from exhaustive and you'd be best off using a Google search or something to find something better written that explains more about the proper grammar for dialogue and quotes, but this might get you started.
Finally, I thought that more should have been done with the love-at-first-sight scene. It seems like it was too short and too sudden for the thing that's probably going to provide the pivotal character motivation and generate the story's source of conflict. Also, scenes like this are one the of best sources for creating emotional interest and investment in the story. These, especially in your first chapter, are the hooks that give readers a reason to read any more of the story. They really have to pull. There should be a detailed exploration of exactly what happens to Pretzel Poem here. On a purely personal opinion, I'm not a big fan of just dropping a character head over heels instantly into love, it's just kind of jarring and forced. There has to be at least a little bit of buildup and a somewhat slower realization by Pretzel Poem about the way she feels over the course of some time - maybe she doesn't realize how hard she's hit at first and walks out of that saloon in relative calm, only to find that through rest of the day and the night she can't get the thought of Clementine out of her head. Maybe she fights it and thinks this is a silly thing that doesn't happen to her, and she slowly discovers that this time, it has, and she can't really do anything about it. Be sure to do justice to both the internal and external social uncertainties and complexities of her feelings, because that's what's going to sell your story as something really interesting and worthy of reading and recommending.
Interesting. You have an inventiveness here that's nice - going with OC characters is bold, but they're all pretty fleshed out, and your story is one I want to hear more of. Really, you just need to nail down some of the technical aspects that wdeleon mentions and it'd make things tremendously more readable, taking a lot of unnecessary work off the reader's shoulders.