Grace_Harley1
edit: gonna preface all my comments with this, I probably sound unnecessarily mean, but I'm only focusing on critique, so it may sound negative...
your novel reads like something out of wattpad. Just keep in mind some of the common tropes… and making your character immediately the center of attention while she has a dark, troubling past is not a good way to start. It’s a bit too cliche… like ive been reading wattpad romances since I was in middle school, y’know. Please try to make your character likable by giving them a flaw, and I don’t mean the overdone trope of: ew stepmom. Maybe even make it so that people have valid reason to look at her, not just “she’s pretty”, but maybe: wow, I heard she talked smack directly to the principal, y’know kinda in awe, or in envy, “she’s not even that pretty”. “She’s proud” is kind of weak.
Also hacking???? I get in movies, they make it look so easy, and type type, but actual hacking is like: ooh, found a loophole, let me think of some code to exploit it: a couple hours later, got it. Most hackers would not hack into something unless necessary because it would reveal the loophole they used to access the files/stuff. If one of my friends made a dupe script for a game; they would definitely not be revealing it or needlessly showing it because it could get patched.
Also, why is she the special one: the only one that can hack into the school data frame? No one else? You’re making your character the center of attention, the prettiest, a vampire, a hacker, and what else? While these things can work together, if you put them all in one chapter, your character quickly becomes cliche. Maybe make it so that hacking is one of the secret talents, like the principal addressed everyone in an assembly trying to figure it out. And then she says to herself, oh, yeah, definitely not me. sweating. Also a more interesting reveal.
The other problem is that the flaw is that your characters flaw is making her unlikeable. I said there wasn’t a flaw before, but I mean there’s not a flaw as in what she cannot do well. Her flaw rn, is talking back to people who aren’t bad people (so far) and also pushing away people who do care about her… like the way she talks back is like, I did something wrong, but I’m still gonna act sassy about it, which is quite unlikeable in the real world. Instead, you can make her a bit witty in her sass, or at the very least, not just: “mhmm, yeah no.” Rolling eyes, sarcasm. You can make her: “hmm, do you hear that?” “It’s the sound of my eyes rolling.” Kind of like Azula in the last air bender. She’s obviously a little devil, but still hilarious, which makes her likeable.
The problem with this type of character trope^^ that you have going on, is that obviously, OTHER people have issues, not just your main character. Unless your MC is an orphan who lives in a cardboard box, I can guarantee people in the same school, heck even in her life, have something really bad going on, and her acting self-centered/attention-obsessed, all this together, is only going to harm her. Again, she’s a supermodel and can sing now, as well, and she has people who love and support her, and she’s wealthy.
See how those are all external factors that supposedly make her great and awesome? But those are all external, and characters need to have internal substance to be liked.
“And yes, her stepmom is racist too.”
Do not put that type of character description out. That’s something that should be shown, rather than be told, because it makes it seem like we’re being told: she’s racist, hate her. Instead of her doing something actually racist and bad so we HATE HER.
And she already has 3 guys fighting for her, plus one of the guys has abs.
edit: make that 4 because by the time you said Arlo was a ceo, I was like, he’s ML isn’t he…
