User blog comment:DoctorBleed/A Million Little Things of Bleach: On Rejection, Disappointment and Contests/@comment-24101790-20151122071028

Let's start with the basics. Please look over the top five entries in this contest. This will be important when comparing the issues that were present (still present) in the story you posted two weeks before the deadline that you had every chance to review, but didn't. Please compare these to the top five stories that were accepted due to the time/focus spent on revising them. Here are a few of the issues I found at a glance. Please note that I am only responding with this due to your behavior in the past and with this current contest. These are the issues I found while reading your story:

Capitalization errors: “Highschool (high school) seniors”, “"Shhh." He (he) whispered”, etc. Punctuation issues: phrases like “well maintained” should be hyphenated. “Then, he spoke.“ the dialogue is continued on a separate line and needs a colon instead of a period/comma), etc.

Wording errors: “me and my friends” should be “my friends and I”, “Me and the gang were all together, Randy, Troy and Katey.” should be: “The gang (list) and I”, “Me, Jack, Katey and Jared.”, “Him and Lisa”, etc.

Wording issues cont.: “If it were up to us, we would (wouldn’t?) have hung out with the little twerp, but Lisa, our friend Troy's sister, insisted on it.”, “We weren't gonna hurt (him), or at least that wasn't our plan.”, “He shouted and screamed as he (we) leaned him over the cliff.”

Awkward wording: “clothing, His (his) image, brutal act and apparent connection to the missing child I had been responsible for murdering had created a folk legend akin to the Mothman or bigfoot. (Bigfoot)”, “the youngest child in her family and preferred to be called 'May.' her (sic), she named her oldest son after her father”, etc.

Wording issues cont.: “He cried harder than I'd ever seen him before, and I'm ashamed to admit I was really enjoying it.”, “Like it (?) was burning with it. (?) ” as a complete sentence is generic. You additionally begin multiple sentences with conjunctions. Once or trice is fine, but 5+ times gives the story a very incomplete/rushed feel.

Tense changes: “after the events that transpired years later, calling it "luck" is (was) a gigantic misnomer.” Formatting issues: "One of the pills you took was adrenaline. It's not a magic immortality potion, you're still going to die. It'll just take a lot longer. So I'm gonna take my time and paint my masterpiece.” (quotations not needed if continuing dialogue in the next paragraph.”

"You're gonna wanna go to sleep. But don't worry, I won't let that happen.””

Story issues: it seems incredibly off that the protagonist would have the specifics of each murder despite never witnessing any of them. (Remember this is from the perspective of a teen who isn’t present at each crime.)

Story issues: “The last few miserable days of my life were spent huddled in my room at an Akron, Ohio mental institution, living in constant, paralyzing fear, waiting for him to appear.”, “One of the pills you took was adrenaline.” Adrenaline is the chemical, not the drug itself. (Epinephrine for example is a neurotransmitter that is the more reasonable name for adrenaline.) Additionally, adrenaline is not some magical invincibility drug that would keep the person awake through any assault.

Final points: You posted this story two weeks before the deadline. Other authors have sought help for their stories to fix up their grammatical, wording, punctuation issues before the deadline. You did not. Instead, you chose to put the blame on the reviewers for your actions rather than try to resolve these issues yourself. This didn’t sit right with me. Other authors spent time on their stories to fix their issues, you did not. Look at the admissions that were submitted by the other candidates, are there this many mistakes there as there were in yours? These stories were selected because they were better than yours and your frankly sad response forced me to respond (despite having no impact the JtK stories before this). I'm sorry, but most of these issues lie on you, so your reaction irks me to the point I felt I needed to respond. I'm sorry if you were offended, but to be honest, I was offended you would respond this way after taking so little time on your story.