Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28936621-20160705214231/@comment-24101790-20160705221339

I'd start with the fact that I posted this to your talk page when you uploaded it to your user page: "That being said, I would strongly recommend taking it to the writer's workshop for feedback/review as I spotted a number of mechanical and plot issues present in the story. EmpyrealInvective (talk) 20:29, July 5, 2016 (UTC)" Seven minutes later you uploaded it with minimal changes leading me to wonder why you ignored the advice.

Starting with the basics, when you first uploaded it, it had these coding issues which are present at the beginning of this version: "Thank you! " Please use source mode as this can cause some pretty severe formatting issues and even make a story un-readable. Then the version you uploaded next was formatted like this:

Hear that, Tammy?! You're wanted somewhere else, now leave me the fuck alone!

While this doesn't result in a story's deletion, it can still cause issues (like it did here when it combined multiple speakers onto the same line: ""She'll die of a blood clot in the heart in 10... 9... 8... 7..." 'It's a she?!', I asked myself.")

Punctuation issues: You tend to improperly put punctuation outside of quotations. "'It's a she?!', I asked myself.", ""Welcome to the divine Anti-Trinity", it said.", ""Just get it over with", I hear myself saying", ""Oh no... oh Lord, please have mercy, please don't!", I cry.", etc. You also misplaced a few apostrophes. "my boyfriends’ (boyfriend's) mood swings." (Unless you are implying she has multiple boyfriends and then that would need some explanation as it detracts from her previous statement of being milquetoast.), "your brother's girlfriends' name is Troy?", etc.

Wording issues: "It sounds like a child imitating a running train... Yeah, that's it. A running train. Only, it doesn't have the voice of a child" comes off as an odd line in conjunction with this line: "it really does sound like a man, a woman and three children speaking simultaneously." You also tend to incorrectly use who's/whose. " know who's kid is going to be kidnapped", "or who's dirty secret is about to be discovered!", etc. Whose=possession, who's=who is.

Story issues: Starting with the basics, paragraphs are generally more than two sentences long. A majority of your paragraphs are even less than that. "I know everything." / "I know everything, because Tammy tells me everything." / "It hurt. A lot." / "My exterior turned to bubble wrap as my interior burned to mush." / "Want to hear the worst part?" / etc. To have a paragraph as a sentence every once-in-a-while for effect can drive home the importance of lines, but there are at least a dozen instances here and it comes off as padding rather than trying to establish important points.

Story issues: I know you're telling a story over an extended period of time, but you need to flesh out a lot of these. "I was 12, when I asked my cousin not to go to his best friend's house the following weekend. He didn't listen. He never made it to his friend's house and was never heard of since." and "I was 14, when I told my mother not to trust her new boyfriend. She didn't listen. After she broke up with him, their sex tape got uploaded online and she even had to quit her job, because numerous colleagues of hers asked if the woman in the video was her." are the two best examples. These plots really would be a lot more effective if they weren't so anemic. The protagonist's cousin is dead and her mom lost her job, both of these would really be more effective if you covered the fallout and response to these events rather than glossing over them.

Story issues cont.: The frequent asides really tend to break story-flow rather than enhance it. "My full name is Jacqueline Vanessa Caspar, in case you didn't already know that, which I'm quite sure you didn't, since you don't give a crap!", "Is that useful information, Tammy? Do you also need my social security number?! I’m quite willing to give it to you, if you’d stop those awful monologues...", "Who was the first to say that "knowledge is power"? Seriously, who the fuck said that knowledge is power?!"

Story issues end: There are other issues here, but I don't to overload everything all at once. Beyond the narrative, there are also problems with the plot. "I just told two of my torturers where Isis will strike next and they decided to give me the death penalty." Why exactly would they execute someone who clearly has valuable information even if they didn't listen? At first I assumed that Tammy was going to withhold information or provide false information to maneuver the protagonist into completing the sacrifice, but when that didn't happen I was left wondering why exactly a government agency would execute someone who's providing valuable information.

Finally considering that the world is ending, it really makes the opening superfluous. ""So... you want to summon a demon, huh? Hear that, Tammy?! You're wanted somewhere else, now leave me the fuck alone!" to "Do something you enjoy today. Take your family out. Go on a trip to Europe or Asia, or wherever you want to go. Do the one thing you always wanted to do, but never got a chance to— because the world is going to end." really makes it seem like you're burying the lead. I'm sorry, but the punctuation, wording, and story issues really weigh down the story and bring it below our quality standards.