Talk:Echoes from Blasphemy/@comment-4715955-20160128220855

The main issue with this story is it goes on forever, and it's mostly boring while it does so.

I can see what you're doing: making the speech and narrative sound biblical in style. But this can be done without using so many words and sentences that simply aren't necessary. The story is so dense with flowery prose that it feels like the author is just flexing a muscle, enjoying hearing themselves talk. If you go through this from beginning to end, eliminating every word and sentence that isn't absolutely essential to getting your meaning across, you could probably reduce its length by at least one-third and still retain its central ideas.

I really thought the whole thing was just gonna be a twist on Jesus and Judas and their relationship, but I kept waiting for the part where that impressed me, and it never came. The idea feels sort of half-baked in its current state, and the excessive wordage doesn't help. Once the Devil shows up, the whole thing drags and drags with exposition. If you condensed all that into a short, quippy exchange, it'd probably work better, but the story still wouldn't carry much weight on its own. It feels like a chapter of a larger work, and not a terribly engaging one at that.

I like the idea of turmoil in Paradise, and God's apparent abandonment of everything. There's probably a better and more engaging way to cover that topic if you keep playing with it. This effort, in the end, sort of feels like a first draft of a single chapter, or rather, two unfinished short stories mushed together: one where Jesus and Judas trade places, and one where the Devil is the defacto god of everything, neither of which is really pulling its weight. And in both cases it comes off a bit like an author going "isn't this clever?" It's not, really...but it can be engaging with a lot more work.

Reducing the word/sentence count and narrowing the focus will help improve it, or at least help you think of a better story in the same theme.