Talk:Crescent Forest/@comment-25148755-20161207051153

Similar to your story My First House I feel like you have the bones of a good story here that just is not developed enough. First off, I don't care about the travelers. The term itself reads oddly and honestly on my first read through I was expecting the intentional vagueness of their description was going to be because hey were actually not humans. I don't know how many of them there are, their names, or frankly even what they are doing in the woods. "Traveler" implies going from one place to another as opposed to say "hiker" or "backpacker" where it would lead me to understand why they were wandering and got lost. There is a ton of description in the first half of the story that could be utterly thrown out. It isn't particularly relevant, and doesn't really do anything to drive the story forward. The peculiarities of the man are not handled particularly well. If there's something wrong with him, it would be far more effective to have the characters noticing and enumerating those things in their minds while he is there talking to them. As it stands the fact that he has already left before anything is mentioned about it takes away from any menace he would have conveyed...he isn't there to potentially harm them. I'd recommend making the dogs be the creatures. It would explain why the dogs were so intelligent and had such odd characteristics about them. I would inject some sense of dread earlier in the story, the mans description I already mentioned, but also possibly some signs that things are potentially wrong. Maybe the characters notice strange stains at the abandoned building and decide to dismiss them, reasoning it is used for cleaning hunted deer or something. As it stands though, there's nothing that really indicates this is going to be a horror story until the last couple paragraphs, and even there it's handled almost matter of factly. The title of the story, other than being the name of the town we never get to visit, has no bearing on the events at all. The man is given no real motivation to conduct his murders, and since I don't have a connection to the travelers, I don't care. Lastly, you have an almost unbroken cadence throughout the entire story. With rare exception all of your sentences are comprised of one or two clauses of approximately the same word count. I'd recommend going back through and reworking the flow some so it doesn't seem quite so repetitive. All that being said, the concept is a good one and I think can be further developed into something quite solid...I just don't think it's there yet.