Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28428152-20180718070434/@comment-28428152-20180722213935

BloodySpghetti wrote: "To my surprise, both James and Clay, who had never been camping before, seemed to struggle immensely with the concept of pitching a tent. They also didn’t seem to understand how to hold a flashlight steady so that people could see what they were doing." - Logic, knocking your friends are inexperienced for something and still getting surprised by the fact that they are inexperienced at it

"It was not no bell witch" - so it was the bell witch?

"It felt like half an hour... suprisingly it was just a mile long" - yeah, if you think you did not cover much distance, no matter how long you spend covering that amount of distance, it was probably a small amount. That's how it works in many cases.

These are just the early examples of what you yourself called botched things in the story.

Even when I slammed face first into the creek by the campsite and gashed my face open n the rocks, "Open n The Rocks" - new musical movement?! eh

As for character development, the characters who essentially don't really have any development are shown as multifaceted. Uriah was pretending and we learn that, there is no real development and Mike, well he has virtually zero change to him. He started off as a "broken" kid with bad coping mechanisms and stayed a "broken" kid with bad coping mechanisms. Not to mention Clay and Max are basically your typical cardboard supporting cast members.

It takes too long to get to the point of something interesting to happen, I'd say the build is way too slow. Perhaps add some "natural oddities" along the way to tenderize the readers as their making their climb to the climax of the story. The action sequences were done pretty well. Noice descriptions and a complex scenery which actually befits the whole idea of this greater evil represented by the Wyrm. I can't complain about the action, but it's somewhat annoying that your evil guy has to be like almost a universal evil boss kind of thing. Why can't it be some local demon you made up? why do we need the interference of Godly (as in THE God/master of the universe type) like powers for a good horror story? It felt a lot like It's lore, where It is almost verified to be a very fundemental to his universe type of monster. Maybe start off with lesser evils and slowly climb up the scale.

I don't really like the name "Wyrm" considering this story and the nature of the creature, if it has many-a-name, why won't you come up with some more american sounding names? Like they have Chupacabra in Spanish speaking regions and the name is quite simple "Goat Sucker" or the "Jersey Devil" because it's a flying chimera-dragon from NJ. So many come up with a name that is less strickly west european and more I don't know american, or even scandinavian, given how the characters seem to be Midwest Scandinavians (judging by the last name Erikson) who moved to Tennesee for whatever reason.

I think some of the formatting is just useless, the highlighting and bolding of words is fine but that weird thing with a word in the middle of the "imaginary" pageline... it's so useless and I would probably find it weird even in a physical book.

Well, you summerized it up yourself, there are things to do with this and you aren't really happy about it which shows. So you either sit your ass down and work on it til' you are happy with it, or put it in the drawer for a while. Also, I am not really taking a piss at you here, I'm actually trying to make my review lighthearted in a way because you seem to beat yourself up over this a little, just take it easy, take your time - you know what you feel went wrong and you can fix it and make it into a great story.

Good luck!

P.s this currently holds a count of just below 22k words, and in most markets Novellas go from 30k to 60k as an acceptable length. ADD MOAR VORDS TO DIS, Mate! Yeah, a major fix-up to this I'm adding is making the characters actually feel real, because reading back over when I was done I realized that there wasn't much reason to care about the supporting cast, and also the dynamic between Mike and Uriah was meant to be highly prominent, but by accident it ended up taking the backseat.

And yes, I do get what you're saying about it feeling like lore, but the reason for this is that it is lore, as all of my short stories take place in the same universe, as will all of the books that I plan on writing, and the Wyrm and the Mother do pop up every now and then in the timeline, with the Wyrm having been mentioned in two of my stories on here already and the Mother appearing in another one, though in a different form. Mike and Clay will appear later as well, with Mike actually being a driving force in the future of the timeline, so part of the reason for this feeling like lore is because part of the purpose is also to set the stage for the future and explore The Wyrm and The Mother in a bit more depth, as for the most part they are usually only mentioned, rarely seen, as I think it realistically would be with some kind of higher powers.

And yes, I do also feel that the climax just explodes out of nowhere without sufficient buildup. It's just like, "oh hey, a couple of spooky things happened and oh shit now there's this fucking demon trying to destroy everything."

And honestly I just think Wyrm is a really cool word