Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-32764586-20181013160849/@comment-9041013-20181013171200

Fr0gs are ehw.

Ok, let's do this.

First, Chris, the character, he feels like he's forced to behave far more formal than he truly would like to be. This whole story suffers from a eye hurting dissonance between the character and register of his speech. Why does he talk so formally? Also, if you are going for "Oh this is the internet and people say a lot of crap here, so you might not believe me", go full retard, don't shy away from freely mentioning how this is a Blog post on the internet that might throw off people, also mention how you don't really seek help, or do, or just vent this out somewhere. Makes this all the more relatable.

This kid, he seems like one of those characters in cartoons and anime that was indoctrinated into something and is forcibly emotionless. Describe emotion, don't just tell me "I was scared", describe the fear to me. I want to know what he REALLY feels. He's not supposed to be telling me what I want to know, he's supposed to be telling me what's going on inside with him.

On the topic of register and styling again, He is tired and stressed, his language shouldn't be maticulous. It should be slang ridden and "free of social restrains", perhaps improperly styled in places. You could include purposeful language mistakes and apologies for them. You can disclose his tiredness early on. It does not retract from the impact at the end.

Also, a dead frog would probably smell like a mother fucker. I mean, they're amphibian so they probably smell already when spending prolonged time on the surface, let alone after being dead.

The ending is kind of confusing, why is he suddenly all alone at the current night?

It's not weird that people don't remember the dates of events, I don't keep up with the date for the most part.

It's weird that street lights go out in the middle of the night, they're programmed to go off in the morning or at a certain hour. Computer science... even if primitive...

I liked the nightmare thingy, it was really nice, and unique for a change, and I can't really call it a cheap shock treatment for the audience, as your whole story keeps on repeating the theme of mutilated animals. Now since you did not reveal the stalker thing at the end (which was a shame, since the nightmare bit was a true banger), how about making this a story about a stress build up leading to a kids mind playing tricks on him?

Another possible route is this kid's parent's planning a Halloween prank on him so they do various creepy shit to him at home, like various harmless pranks in the spirit of Halloween season which leads to him going down the rabbit hole for a bit as he keeps seeing these animal corpses, eventually for him to find out, or for them to scare the living crap out of him during the evening of the holiday, ending the story with him questioning them about the mutilated animals only to find out they had never left them there.

You've used some weird terminology there too, what the fuck is "for a lack of better words", it's "lack of a better term" or "phrase".

So yeah, this needs some work, but you can do this.