Board Thread:Writer's Showcase/@comment-27008899-20160513000114/@comment-28266772-20160513134626

Okay, so this story has some critical flaws, but at it's centre is a clever  idea that with some reworking could be a pretty good story. Below I've annotated a random paragraph to highlight the flaws that are typical of this work.

"I never told him what I saw, and he never asked [why would he? He'd have no way of knowing, as far as the audience is aware].  A day later I noticed the freezer was gone. A few days after, [there's repetition of the word 'days' close together, the structuring is also repetitive] Jason took me on our second honeymoon to Las Vegas, just out of the blue [qualifiers that indicate surprise should go at the start of the statement so the audience gets a sense of the surprise themselves]. I was so happy I had forgotten the incident, [noooope. People don't forget corpses, not accidentally, maybe on purpose. If it is on purpose, this should be made a bit more clear, or at least hinted at more clearly] for a while anyway. It was when I noticed a few differences in Jason that I decided to do some research [This isn't very believable. The corpsicle doesn't compel her to hit google, but him getting her mother's name does?]. Looking online I found information about "Montauk." Conspiracy theories mostly [the 'mostly' qualifier is unnecessary]. People believed the government had the ability to travel to different dimensions. Some believed there was [were] actually parallel universes, [comma unnecessary] where there are subtle differences, and our government had the ability to travel between them. [you repeat the statement that the government can travel between dimensions. You also state that they can travel between dimensions, and then explain the concept of what a dimension is, which is a funny order to do things]"

So, overall, there's way too much repetition and a very awkward syntax throughout this story. Go through each sentence and think about exactly what purpose it has, and what it's meant to tell the audience. If there's any redundancy at all, delete that sentence. Skip out unnecessary information wherever possible, unless it directly contributes to a scene's atmosphere, or it informs us about a setting or a character. I don't care if she's wiping sweat off her brow. I don't care about her gardening. I don't care about this guy's dietary interests, whether it's his disdain for hotdogs or love for chicken and broccoli. There's a lot of superfluous information here, trim it down.

Good news is, the core of this story is interesting. I would just present things a little differently. For example, skip the details of MIT and his masters in physics. Maybe begin with a conversation where he tells her about his day at work, where he offers a really simple outline of parallel dimensions and how excited he is that his new job lets him experiment in that field (which is frequently called 'string theory'). This sets the scene for the audience, tells us about his job, and demonstrates to us the happy beginning of the relationship.

This way when it goes wrong later we actually feel for the narrator, because we've personally witnessed the happy parts of this marriage. You're showing us a functional relationship, not telling us about it. Oh, and people don't ignore corpses. If you show us that the narrator doubts they're sanity, that might help us understand why she walks away from her corpsicle and ignores it, but otherwise we can't help but just think she's a dolt. If anything the corpse should be the reveal. Husband acting insane would prompt her to do some googling about montauk, and then when she finds the corpse she pieces it all together ("OMG I have a parallel dimension husband") before she then figures, "fuck it, this guy's better anyway" and shuts the freezer door for an ominous little twist about the narrator's true nature.

So, yeah, in conclusion. Great idea, needs some work. The worst issues could be cleaned with a review/proofread, but I think you could take it a lot further with some deeper restructuring.