Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24982950-20170505155251/@comment-32461413-20170709170952

Wow. This was quite a story with a pretty sad ending. Now, I don't know what competition you're submitting it to and being that this review is two months later since you posted the story; I'm not sure if the deadline has passed or if it is too late to edit the story. In any case, I will still provide feedback as it will help you in your future writings and if you decide to revisit this story again.

I'm going to begin with basic grammar. You have a lot of commas which I don't feel are needed. Read your story out loud while carefully looking at the punctuation, you will find that there are a handful of places that don't need the pause.

Another piece about grammar, you need to separate the dialouge into different paragraphs. There is a chunky paragraph in your story where both Andrew and Serena are talking, but their dialouge is all contained in the paragraph. This makes it look chunky and it makes it more difficult to follow who's speaking.

Looking at the story, I think it is written pretty decently. There are few points I want to bring up however.

First off, why does Serena pick Andrew to accompany her to the farmhouse? It is mentioned that she has various clients and suppliers, wouldn't she be better off picking one of them as that would eliminate the fear of her being turned in to the police? I really like Andrew in the story, but I think there should be an explanation why she didn't try to get someone else. Perhaps she didn't wish to have any contact with them. Maybe Andrew was naiive and could easily be tricked, etc. Nothing huge, but just a little explanation to her decision to pick that particular person. I think an explanation to why she even needed a getaway driver would also be benefical. Assuming that his only purpose was to be the getaway driver and not neccesarily help with anything else, why couldn't she be her own getaway driver? It would make her life much easier to not have to drag someone around and also keep them ignorant of her plot.

I also question how much narcotics she is picking up and how she is planning on storing them to keep them away from Andrew. I see that towards the end it is mentioned that it is in her bag, but I feel like the bag should be referenced earlier; just to provide some resolution to this question before it even becomes one.

What exactly was the object that flew in the window hitting her? There wasn't any resolution to what that was. Was it a rock? A bird? A ghost? Additionally, where did it come from? Right now it seems like some random object conviniently flew in there just to startle her without a purpose.

Otherwise, I really enjoyed the story. It wasn't particularly spooky, but it was dark and depressing. I think you do a good job at explaining most things as to why they happen. Just keep in mind the grammar issues and resolving those few issues that I found with the story itself and I think you should generally be in good shape. If you can still submit this to the competetion, good luck. If not, I hope my feedback was helpful anyways.