Talk:Broken Mirrors/@comment-26030957-20150628170544

I can tell that you spent a lot of time on this and that you put a lot of effort into it. It was written fairly well and you show some promise as a writer.

You may want to proofread better, though, for you keep switching from past tense to present tense.

Here is an example of what I am talking about: "I raise the ax high in the air before swinging down and splitting the doorknob. With the lock no longer in my way I kicked the door". Do you mean, "I raisED the ax" or do you mean "I kick the door"? I noticed you do this a few times.

There were a couple other minor typos here and there, like, "My mother has perfectly capable of making a convincing lie" Do you mean, "My mother WAS perfectly capable"? And this, "His back hits the wall and looks at me in complete shock"--are you saying Hank's back is looking at Leon? Does his back have eyes?

You also don't give your narrator a name until a quarter through the story. You have introduced and named all these other minor characters like Doug and Rosemary but haven't named your narrator yet. If you want your readers to emote with this character get his name in there earlier. That's just my opinion, though, and great writers like Raymond Carver do sometimes have entire short stories with nameless narrators. Cathedral comes immediately to mind.

I think you also need to be more specific when it comes to the protagonist's facial deformity. You mention operations and medical bills, what exactly is wrong with him? Elephantitis? Leprosy? Specifics will ground your work and make it feel more realistic. He seemed like the kid in that movie Mask to me, with the long hair and all. Was this intentional? If so the disease is called craniodiaphyseal dysplasia and affects 1 in every 220,000,000 people. Extremely rare. Talk about, "Why me?" Why not start, "My name is Leon and I have a disease that only affects one out of two hundred and twenty two people"--boom, you've just given your narrator a name and grounded the whole thing in reality.

I appreciate that you are trying to give a nice backstory here with the father dying in a car wreck but I feel you are doing a lot of telling and not much showing. Wasn't there a funeral? You need more scenes with dialogue and interaction of the characters to show the dynamics that are at work here. The mother just coming home with Hank one day feels pretty forced. As does Leon finding the heroin. You should do some more research on heroin. A junkie is easy to spot, they scratch at themselves all the time and nod out, unable to keep their heads up. They are always groggy and their voice is very raspy. They also are extremely irritable and crave candy. You need to show this, not just say "she began to lose weight" and then just jump to "my mother was a heroin addict".

The character of Hank felt very flat. You need to give him some personality. Show us their relationship. Have them go out bowling together or something. A great opportunity for dark humor there. A deformed kid with a couple of nodded out junkies, how embarrassing would that be? And learn the lingo, I've hung out with a lot of junkies in my time (don't ask) I've never heard one say, "Where the hell are my drugs?" This made me laugh.

I also found it very unrealistic that Leon wouldn't go to his mother's room to see if she was dead or not. He's not going to check? Really? Watching someone slowly rot away from cancer is very powerful stuff. They wither away and waste to nothing. You need a scene of him holding her hand, seeing her become a shell of her former stuff. And do your research. Just because they were poor doesn't mean the state wouldn't give her aid and put her in a hospital or hospice. Going to a rundown, dirty hospice with cruel nurses to watch your mother rot away is incredibly moving and a missed opportunity. You spent more time describing girls playing frisbee than you did having Leon's mother die.

You say they are too poor to go to the hospital but then you say, just a few sentences later, that he inherited money from his mother. If they were so poor they couldn't afford medicine wouldn't the remaining money have been used up for funeral expenses? And again you have no funeral for Leon's mother. No grave that he goes to to reflect over his lost mother and his forlorn fate.

The whole angel business felt pretty forced and ridiculous to me, but that's just my personal feeling. The broken mirror stuff felt like you were ripping off Thomas Harris' novel Red Dragon.

By trying to humanize a serial killer and necrophile I believe you are missing the point. Ted Bundy wasn't deformed and ugly, neither was Richard Ramirez or Kenneth Bianchi. Karla Homolka was smoking hot. Google her picture, bro, smoking. As was her husband, Paul Bernardo--the Scarborough rapist. These are the people that were the bullies. They are monsters. They are psychopaths. They don't pray for forgiveness, they are incapable of that. As children they torture animals, they start fires, they steal. Most of them also start as peeping toms. I don't mean curious children peeking into the neighbors windows either, I mean chronic masturbators who get off on staring at unsuspecting and vulnerable women while stroking themselves to climax in the shadows.