Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-27007772-20150202214631/@comment-27007772-20150203181628

Unersame wrote: So I’ll just include my thoughts as I’m reading.

First paragraph (not the notes part):

“Trees, lacking all leaves, moved and swayed with the wind”   -  I think that ‘lacking all leaves’ could be left out, it seems to be awkwardly worded, in my opinion. Could be changed to “The trees moved and swayed with the wind; the snow and freezing rain covered their naked branches.”

“The snow and rain were halted, but the chilled wind carried on through the cracks in the window frame.”    -  through the cracks in the window frame? Is that supposed to be ‘of’ ?

Also, 'were halted' , 'were' should be deleted 2nd paragraph (probably won’t be organizing them by paragraphs starting from now, as there’s dialogue and short one liners coming up):

“The chill pushed its way into the bedroom of Jackson Wilkerson, as he pulled the blankets even higher to his ears for warmth.”    -   the wording, ‘as he pulled the blankets even higher to his ears for warmth’ could be improved, I think.

You could put a period before ‘as’. Then add something like, “He pulled the blankets higher, covering his cold and red ears.”  Not the best, but, just providing suggestions.

“Jackson began to hear a creaking noise in his darkened room- his door.”  -  ‘in’ could be changed to ‘from’

 Next paragraph:

“It sounded like to many footsteps to be a normal person.”   - ‘to’ changed to ‘too’ , just some typo

“There stood Natalie Sutton and Joseph Kaufman, long term friends of Jackson's.”  -  ‘term’ could be changed to ‘time’. Term isn’t the best use for the description there.

 Next paragraph:

“With a comical sigh, he stood up slowly from his bed, stretching out his back the second he stood up.”

<p class="MsoNormal">You could omit ‘the second he stood up’. Then delete ‘out’. It’s not really a necessary description, what you wrote in, and it’s also somewhat awkwardly placed.

<p class="MsoNormal">“He was fully clothed, excluding a shirt.”  Again, the wording. Can be changed to “He was almost fully clothed and only missing his shirt.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> <p class="MsoNormal">Next paragraph:

<p class="MsoNormal">“throwing it on right away”  -  ‘putting’ it on right away

<p class="MsoNormal">“With slightly dropped eyelids”  -  this is weirdly phrased, again.

<p class="MsoNormal">So far there are a ton of little mistakes. I’m doing this while at school (high school), and I get free time frequently, but I don’t want this review thing to be so long.

<p class="MsoNormal">I think I’m going to stop micro analyzing this for grammar and wording, because there are way too many of them. Also I want to pay attention to the story.

<p class="MsoNormal"> <p class="MsoNormal">I don’t understand why Jackson just threw away that interesting piece of brass. It couldn’t be worthless could it? I know I always keep interesting stuff I find, even interesting rocks and things like that. But I don’t know, could just be me.

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">Oooh, natalie’s a goner.

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">Well, it's kind of interesting. Obviously i would like to know how it is explained in the next parts, but there are a lot of tiny mistakes. Perhaps you could get a friend to read this and point out some stuff. Overall, the story was somewhat suspenseful, it was decent, not terrible, but not excellent.

All of this was taken into heart, thank you. Best criticism I could have possibly asked for. I'm having more people looking at it now. Also, I have decided to move the beginning of part 2 into this, so it wraps up the story of this area, and doesn't end on a major cliff hanger. Expect the end result to be about twice as long.