I'm Not Evil, Really

Me: What kind of feedback do you want? General or nitpicky?
John: Both.

After much goading from me, John from work has given me the first three chapters of his "science-fantasy" novel. Though, I think he's going to stop calling it that since I mentioned there's no such genre.

I've gotten about half way through chapter one and I'm starting to have some hesitation about returning it to him. I've written all over it. Really. I got a little carried away with trying to be helpful, so I've circled, underlined, and crossed-out like crazy. It looks like I hate it. I don't, I really don't. *Sigh* I'm going to have to do some serious prefacing before I hand it back to him, something along the lines of "Yeah, it's going to look like I'm the antichrist, but I just got carried away."

The jist: his story is interesting so far - a person from our world plopped into a fantasy realm premise, with a fun twist of the stranger having amnesia. The part that needs work is the storytelling. He has oodles of info-dumpy exposition, likes -ly adverbs (especially "quickly"), and explains just about every single line of dialogue in terms of "he asked with a puzzled expression on his face" stuff. Nothing that's irreparable, but plenty to be polished.