Reddit mentions of Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel

General thoughts

Let's get the disclaimer out of the way first: I'm in my thirties, so definitely not in the target audience for a YA story. Hope you don't mind if I give this a shot anyway.

This was a strange and frustrating piece. You have a great premise, some solid writing and an excellent hook. The only problem is that you give it to us at the very end of your segment rather than at the beginning, buried under a ton of slow-paced exposition. More on this below.

That said, I enjoyed how different this was, with the podcast concept. I also liked your voice and dialogue style for the most part.

Prose

Mostly solid. Spelling is fine, grammar is fine, flow is good, and (to my ears as a soon-to-be grizzled old guy) the teenage narration and dialogue come across as genuine. The problems with this piece are structural ones, not your writing ability. Still, I have some nitpicks:

>My mom, the Good Talk, Mom mom, is the one with the answers.

This is one seriously clunky sentence. Yikes.

You use a lot of dashes, but I don't think you've got the right one. You keep using this one (-) when you probably want this (–). IIRC this is a so-called "en dash".

>I don’t know exactly how to do you know, laundry, but I mean -

For interruptions you want the "em dash", this one: —, without a space:

>I don’t know exactly how to do you know, laundry, but I mean—

Have to admit I'm not 100% clear on when you're supposed to use the one or the other, except that the em dash functions as a kind of parenthesis replacement in addition to marking interruptions. If you're going to make heavy use of them, though, it's worth the time to look up the specifics. Even if your teenage audience won't notice or care, potential publishers will.

You're also inconsistent with the way you write out ages:

>I’m a normal 16 year old boy.
>
>My sixteen year old son has been doing his own laundry since he was nine.

Choose one and stick to it. In my understanding, the second one is preferred in prose fiction, especially for ages and for lower numbers (ie. under 100).

Plot and conflict

We don't really get much of a plot here as such. Instead you set up some conflict and tension between the MC and his mother, and the MC and his classmates, over the mother's role as a podcast host for teens. Which is a great premise, and I like it a lot. At the very end we also get a more specific conflict, where we learn the MC is keeping some kind of terrible secret from his mother. Which brings me to…

Structure and pacing

>Even she, the most open-minded mom in America, cannot handle this particular truth.

This is a great hook. So why is this your very last sentence, when it should be the first? The way you've structured this is pretty weird, and it's the source of the frustration I mentioned earlier. First we get the podcast bit, which is good, but I'm not at all convinced it's the right place to start the entire story. I'd much rather be introduced to the MC and the premise first, and then see the podcast woven into the story, maybe in between chapters as a sort of interlude. By coincidence I've recently read a book that features a lot of segments from a fictional radio show, and that's the way they handled it there. While I didn't care much for that book for a lot of other reasons, I found that an effective use of this particular gimmick.

More importantly, the pacing slows to an absolute crawl when we get to the actual chapter 1. In between exposition about the Good Talk, Mom podcast we get a lot of stuff about laundry, the MC's mother's former job, health insurance, the MC's conversations with his mother and so on and so on. There might be a time and a place for some of this, but the beginning is definitely not it. And I think at least half of this could be cut. Go over this again with your most critical eye and a machete. If I'm bored by all this info-dumping, just imagine how the teenage readership would feel. :P

On a more positive note, you have some pretty good bits in there too. Like the part with the MC, his "banana" and the resulting embarrassment, or the way his mother tries to pry juicy gossip and confessions out of him in overly intrusive conversations. Her control freakery with the laundry is also funny, even if it probably takes up a bit too much real estate a bit too early in the story.

I think you'd be much better served by expanding on this and presenting them as full scenes instead of just giving us summaries, though. Would put us right in the action with the MC and make us feel his annoyance and embarrassment instead of this slightly detached summation.

Characters

We're introduced to three characters in this piece: Tommy the teenaged MC, his mother, a former nurse turned full-time podcast host, and an unnamed 16-year-old boy who appears on the show. (Yes, I'm allowed to use numbers here since this is just an Internet post and not a novel) :P

The mom has the most personality so far, and I enjoyed her character. She's entertaining and engaging, but I can also imagine how hard it must be to live with her as a parent sometimes. So far she strikes a good balance between well-meaning and dispenser of actual good advice to teens, while also being a bit of an intrusive busybody in her own household.

Tommy comes across as a bit of a generic teenager, but his unique situation with his mother and your strong writing of his narration makes this less of an issue. I like how you show his slight exasperation with his mom, while also making him mature enough to be grateful for her good sides.

The boy calling in to the podcast is (probably?) a throw-away character who does his one job and fades out of the story. He came across as believable and sympathetic to me, no problems there.

Dialogue

Not much to comment on here. There's no dialogue in chapter 1, but the whole podcast segment is nothing but, and it works fine. Reads natural and convincing, and the podcast-hosting mom is spot on. Well done.

Setting and staging

Very little so far. I imagine the MC living in some kind of stereotypical American suburb, but the text never really says. We don't get any details about his hometown, his house or his room. If you cut or postponed some of the useless exposition I griped about earlier, you could use the extra space to flesh out the setting a little more.

Miscellaneous

I'm not a huge fan of the title Good Talk, Mom for the podcast. It's a little unwieldy and doesn't always play well with the rest of your text, like we saw in that one monster sentence earlier with three instances of "mom". Maybe this is just preference, though.

>Okay so that’s a lie. I have not been doing my laundry since I was nine years old. In fact, my mother still does my laundry.

This could just be me, but I was confused here on my first read. For good reasons or not, I expected we'd be following the boy who called in, so this threw me off at first. Again, not sure if this would be a problem for others, but wanted to mention it.

Summing up

Overall I liked this as a concept, and your writing fundamentals are good. The execution could be better, though. I could see this turning into a very enjoyable story if you apply some brutal cuts to all the exposition and take advantage of your strong hook instead of squandering it. You also succeeded in making me curious about what the MC's big secret could be.

Best of luck with your writing!