I especially like that you put endnotes at the end. That's what I've done with some of my work.

Looks like I finally know who's been stopping me from turning my ideas into work.

Plot & Overall: I love the concept of this story! As a writer, I find it especially entertaining and relatable. There’s nothing I would say to change, plotwise. Stylistically, just remember to only use adverbs if they make something clear that the context does not; otherwise they just take up space and are distracting. Sorry if I messed up any of the line numbers. I tried to count carefully, but mistakes happen. Thank you for the opportunity to review your work. If you have any questions about my feedback (I realize I didn’t fully explain all of the changes I recommended), feel free to let me know.

Chapter 5: Line 4: Replace “on his own” with “by himself” to avoid repetition of “own”. Line 8: Replace “there’s” with “there are”. Line 11: Replace “it in Explanations’ hands” to “to Explanation” Line 15: Put quotation marks around “What if?” I think you should change all of this chapter except for the last two paragraphs to past tense, since it is describing things that have already happened. The last two paragraphs are good in present tense because they are happening currently.

Chapter 4:Words to cut: “up” (line 3) “solitary” (line 7) “accidentally” (line 13) “in the process” (line 13) “with conviction” (line 24) “matter of factly” (line 36) “in exasperation” (line 37) “even” (line 53) “really” (line 59)//// Line 4: Add a comma between “dry” and “packed”. Line 13: Move “desperately” to after “tugged”. Line 33-34: “…he could feel a certain feeling of considerable weight, a feeling of importance, responsibility from it.” could be more clearly worded as “it had a feeling of considerable weight, a feeling of importance and responsibility”.

Chapter 3: Words to cut: “roughly” (line 1) “hurriedly” (line 6) “Just then” (line 13) “distinct” (line 14) “abruptly” (line 18) //// Line 1: Replace “could just recognize” with “had just recognized”. Line 2: Here you refer to the shadow as “him”, while before you have only referred to the shadow as “it”. Line 27: Remove “(that was magically, still burning)”. It not necessary to explain why the fire is still burning. Line 27: Paragraph indent. Line 33: Remove at least one of the “just”s Line 37: Replace “is here” with “am here” Line 40: To avoid the repetition of “look”, this line could be reworded as “Discouragement gave the shadow a strange look before saying,” Line 42: Replace the comma after “continuing” with a period. Line 42: Add a comma after “simple”. Line 50: Remove “of the vial”. Line 55: “At least the fire’s out” should be in italics because it is a transcribed thought. Line 56: Here you use “his” to describe the shadow again. It doesn’t matter if you pick “he” or “it”, but you have to stay consistent with whichever one you pick. (I personally liked the ambiguity of “it”.) Line 57: Remove “with a bolt”. Line 66: Replace the comma after “mirage” with a period and capitalize “it”. Line 67: Remove both “just”s.

Chapter 2: Words to cut: “then” (line 17) “awkwardly” (line 19) “resignedly” (line 25) “thoughtfully” (line 37) “wonderingly” (line 47)//// Line 1: to avoid repetition and unneeded words, this could be rearranged as “A loud and exasperated voice rang out:” Line 5: replace “came to” with “entered”. Line 7: insert a hyphen in “fifty-five” Line 21: Place the period after “Only” outside of the quotation marks. Line 25: Add a hyphen in “good-natured”. Line 35: Remove “asked Explanations quizzically”. Line 38: “weave” should be replaced with “weaves” because the Dreams Department is one entity, and thus is singular. Line 50: Replace the comma between “summer” and “Grammar” with a period. Line 57: Replacing “come to” with “report to” would sound more realistic and professional.

Chapter 1: When writing, your goal should be to remove all unnecessary words. This allows the words that are important to receive more attention and makes your prose more polished and effective. Read each line and ask yourself “Are there any words I could remove without changing the meaning?” Common words that can be removed are “that” and adverbs such as “really”, “rather”, and “very”. Anything that ends in an “ly” is suspect. Words to cut: “really” (line 1) “So” (line 9) “rather” (line 11) “completely” (line 16) “that” (line 18) “awkwardly” (line 23) (the context makes it clear that the shadow was awkward) “impatiently” (line 28) (context suggests the receptionist was impatient.)//// In line 1, you use the word “it” to describe the shadow, but the first “it” in line 2 seems to be referring to “where [the shadow] is headed”. To avoid confusion, replace the first “it” in line 2 with “the destination”. In line 3, you mention “crowded apartment buildings”. But throughout the chapter you say that the city was empty. For this reason I assume you mean that the apartment buildings were crowded together, not crowded with people. To make this clearer, you might say “apartment buildings crowded together”. In line 5 you have a misplaced modifier. Due to the structure of the sentence, it reads like you are saying the shadow was covered in dust. Unless this is what you meant, you should rearrange the sentence to say “Everything was falling into disrepair, covered in dust from a bygone time:” In line 6, replace “built” with “constructed” to avoid repetition, since you’ve used the word “buildings” twice in that sentence. In line 7, add a comma between “dry” and “cracked”. In lines 7, 20, 24, 27, and 33 you have used a hyphen (-) in place of what should be an em dash. The hyphen is only used within hyphenated words. The em dash is used when dialogue is cut off or when separating sentence parts. It looks like this — and can be obtained by pressing the ALT key and then 0151 if you’re on Windows. If not, you can easily look up the keystrokes for whatever your system is. Line 12 can be reworded to replace “an empty and rather boring waiting room” with “an empty, boring waiting room” to improve flow and avoid “rather”. In line 18, “seemed to share in common” reads more smoothly as “shared in common”. In line 27, “the” in “the receptionist said” should be lowercase. In line 31, “said the receptionist thoughtfully” could be replaced with “the receptionist mused” to avoid using an adverb. Try to take out as many adverbs as you can, as they get repetitive quickly and often repeat information that can be drawn from the context.

I loved this the 1st chapter sucked me in. I see so much in your character. It is definitely original! Cant wait to read more.

Once again, you prove yourself a master of Creativity. How true is this story. It has a very Pilgrim's Progress feel with the names of the characters, and its refreshing to see this kind of Originality showing up in a story ;) Well done and keep it up!