Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-5614678-20160717051943/@comment-28266772-20160718143745

I found it sticking out of my neck about two months ago. I was standing in front of my bathroom mirror when I saw it. It was bulging out of my neck. [<- Redundant sentence] Roughly the size of a quarter and as thick as the tip of my thumb. It was bright red, veiny, and has [had] a couple [of] small white hairs growing out of it. It didn't really hurt, but it was very itchy. Scratching it made the whole area around it red, but it felt good. It was a very ugly little boil, but it wasn't causing me any kind of trouble. Last year I got a bad cut on my knee, and it got infected. But after a while, the infection went away on its own, so I wasn't concerned. [<- this feels like a very childish way of saying, ‘infections heal’] It kind of looked like a bug bite, but I never saw any bugs in my house.

The morning after, I woke up to find three new bumps. One was on the back of my knee, one was on my elbow, and the last was on the bottom of my big toe. Looking again [at] the mirror again [redundant ‘again’], I noticed the one on my neck had become bigger. The thin little veins pulsing on it had grown bigger [bigger is redundant – just say ‘grown’] and started to become black. It was almost like a little miniature egg. I also noticed that [at/on/near – either way missing preposition] the top of my back, there was a giant red spot that looked almost like a [no need for ‘a’] sunburn in a big circle [the imagery of a circle is redundant considering you just told us it was a giant spot] between my scapulas [that’s an awkward and not very realistic way to say ‘between my shoulder blades’ which is the more natural term for that piece of anatomy]

At that moment, I was really glad I lived alone. If I had a wife or a roommate, they might make me go to the doctor or a hospital. I hate those places. They're so sterile and lifeless, and I don't like being put to sleep so some people I don't know can poke and prod me. Looking back on it now, maybe going to the hospital would have been a good idea.

My body was having all kinds of problems, [the timeline isn’t super clear at this point] at least a couple new ones every day. First, my skin became very rough and dry. Lotions and creams didn't really work too well - they were all too intense, and they made my skin burn. They left it red, hard and cracked when I wiped them off. That wasn't good. The areas where I scratched my bug bites were already nasty and red ''[you keep repeating these descriptions, look at some other words you can use. Try blotchy, patchy, sore, pulsing, glowing, sensitive, puss, oozing, goo, stretched, swollen, gunk, fragile, repulsive – like seriously mine some adjectives and don’t keep going back to ‘it’s big and red’]'', and they weren't clearing up at all. I gave up on the lotions, because I certainly didn't need any more problems.

My back ached just about all day, every day. I couldn't tell if the pain was coming from my muscles or my spine, but the pain was sharp and hot, like a bunch of needles or knives were stuck inside me. The pain made it very hard to stay still for very long, and moving seemed to make it feel better, so I'd spend the entire day pacing around and not getting anything done.

Hair was a big problem for me. All the hairs on my body were very itchy and irritated. These little, squishy white clumps would appear out of nowhere and get tangled up in the hair on my head, my back, and my armpits. So, I just shaved it all off, and that solved the problem. It was weird how easy it was to remove the hair, and I didn't even feel it.

My fingers seemed to grow longer each day. Well, I guess "growing" isn't the right word. They were becoming very lanky and slender. It was more like they were being stretched. But even though my fingers were growing, they seemed to leave my fingernails behind. The skin and flesh of my fingers were growing over my nails, making it look like they were shrinking or getting shorter. But actually, they were the same length, just falling inside me. Eventually, my nails were completely engulfed. [At this stage it becomes noticeable, and I can’t help but wonder why this guy just hasn’t gone to get help]

My mouth was always so dry when I woke up in the morning, and as hard as I would dry [try?], it would never get much better all throughout the day. I drank lots of soda, but it didn't help. The good thing was the soda started tasting better and better. I always had a sweet tooth, but for some reason, I liked sugar more than ever now. [David Cronenburg’s fly is popping into my head right now]



I kept getting these weird cravings for food. For safety reasons, I always cooked my meat well done. But now, I had a craving for rare meat. Very pink in the middle, almost bleeding. They have this thing called "Bleu Rare" meat - it's where you cook the meat only until it looks cooked on the outside, but the inside is completely red [again this feels like a childish way of saying ‘raw’ – also in English it tends to just be called “blue”]. I liked it a lot. Beef and chicken tasted really good like this, [how is this guy so fucking clueless?] but pork was the best. I also had cravings for fish - particularly oysters. Anything that had a strong scent, like aged cheese or strong meat, really tasted good to me. One night, I smelled the garbage, and it smelled good to me, so I ate out of it. It tasted pretty good.

The bites were still a big problem. I'd get at least two or three new ones every day. I loved to scratch them. It felt really good, and all the muscles in my body would tense up and relax at once when I did it. I had to start taking it a bit easy, because the scratching was starting to make my head fuzzy. I mostly scratched while lying in bed, because scratching made me dizzy and would often cause me to fall down. The redness would never go down. My whole body was covered in weird red splotches now. [you keep coming back to ‘red’]

Even though the big hairs on my body weren't grown ''[growing? What exactly does this sentence mean?] ''back, I was getting tiny little new hairs all over my body. There were very short, and almost always stood up like the fur on a scared dog's back [those are called the ‘heckles’]. I like rubbing my finger [fingers – running my finger through them sounds all sorts of awkward] through them, it had a nice little tingly feeling.

One day I woke up and my tongue felt really, really weird. It felt big, awkward and lumpy, like it didn't belong in my jaw. I opened my mouth, and it came tumbling out. It was three times longer than it was yesterday, and it was forked at the end, sort of like a lizard tongue. I had to roll it up like a hose to get it to fit in my mouth now, and I had to hold my jaw tightly shut to keep it from falling out. It kind of hurt a little.

My complexion was never that great. I always a pretty pale guy. But it started getting so much worse. My skin was losing any color it had. It slowly started to fade into a pale white color, and then it became light gray. Eventually, it was a dark gray. [again you fail to convey a consistent or reliable sense of time’s passage] My skin was very hard and leathery, almost like a lizard. The good thing was I didn't have to worry about the bites anymore - they were all gone. I ran a rock from my yard against my skin, and it couldn't break it. The rock actually started to erode a little bit.

Emerging [from] my shins and upper arms were these little black pincers that were very hard. They almost felt like they were made out of bone, but a hollow kind of bone material, like a chicken [do you mean chicken bone?]. My fingers had become incredibly sharp and pointy at the end. Sharp enough to cut glass. I couldn't make a fist anymore, or I would risk poking my palms and cutting myself.



<p class="MsoNormal">Something bizarre started happening to my mouth. It puckered up and grew longer, forming this weird sucker thing. My tongue could stick out of my mandible sort of like an anteater. My weird food cravings became worse and worse, and now I was waiting for food to turn black and smelly before I ate it. It tasted really good when it was aged.

<p class="MsoNormal">I didn't even notice at the time, but it was becoming harder to close my eyes. They were growing wider and wider, and my eyelids were completely retracted at all times. I couldn't blink both eyes at the same time anymore. I had to blink each eye individually. Eventually, my eyes grew big and bulged out of my face like golf balls. They were a thick, black color. It didn't impair my vision, but it sure felt odd.

<p class="MsoNormal">The little black spikes that were growing all over my body had now begun to combine into a rough, scaly armor-like surface that covered most of me [haven’t you already covered that this guy grew scales when his skin eroded stone?]. Thousands of tiny little hairs started protruding out from all of it, forming a fur-like pelt all over my body. A pair of tall, lean, fuzzy antennas stuck up from the top of my head, and my ears were completely encased by the black scaly substance.

<p class="MsoNormal">I looked in the mirror, and I didn't like what I saw. I smashed the mirror with my hand, but my hand didn't bleed. I did get a small little cut on one of the exposed parts of my arm, but whatever came out of me wasn't blood. It was a thick, brown, sticky substance that couldn't be washed off.

<p class="MsoNormal">The one good thing that came from all of this was that I became much more flexible. I was able to slide under surfaces and through slender openings that I couldn't make it through before. I like [liked] to crawl in the heating vents and slide around inside them like a slug. I could see through the vents into other people's apartments. I liked to spy on my neighbors a bit, see what they were talking about or what they were doing. It might sound bad, but it was one of the only fun things about my condition.

<p class="MsoNormal">There was this beautiful lately [lady] in the apartment across from mine. I liked to watch her fold laundry and sleep. Last night, I may have taken it a bit too far. I snuck into her apartment and sat on her chest. I wanted to be  nice [<- double spacing] and close to her, to feel a real human again. To run my hand against her soft skin and understand what it was like to be a normal person. Just then, the oddest little urge came out my [what?]. I stuck my tongue out, and I began to lick her neck.

<p class="MsoNormal">Then, by accident, I seemed to have stung my tongue into the flesh of her neck, like my tongue was a scorpion tail or something. It didn't hurt her, and she didn't wake up, so I never got in trouble. Still, I'm a little bit concern. Because once I dragged my tongue off her, I noticed a little bump on her neck. It was about as thick as my thumb used to be, and roughly the size of a quarter. It was veiny and had little white hairs growing out of it. Just like the one I had.

<p class="MsoNormal">-

<p class="MsoNormal">So aside from some awkward wording and basic mechanical errors I really enjoyed this story and thought that the ending, especially, was pretty awesome (and freaky). I just think you need to work on your wording and descriptions and try to avoid redundancies and repetitions. Also you need to be more clear in how you convey the passage of time – maybe this whole story would work better if it was like a diary, or had the guy going over what changed each day. As it is there’s no real narrative structure and you tend to flicker back and forth between disparate ideas such as his skin thickening, or his need to scratch the lumps, or the changes to his arms etc. I think it’d be better if he just said something like “Today I woke up and found that my arms have changed in this way,” and then “today I woke up and my skin had changed this way, and my arms have gotten even weirder” or something like that but not just the constant switching we see here.

<p class="MsoNormal">But yeah, cool story! Best of luck with future versions.

<p class="MsoNormal">