Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24101790-20150221185932/@comment-26027160-20150224184948

Ok. I'll start off with saying that I'm not a native English speaker, so if you find any of my point-outs irrelevant, please ignore them.

"I only know that if I don’t finish reading through her diary that those dreams won’t stop." - That, that. What's the point in the second that? Might "I know that if I don’t finish reading through her diary, those dreams won’t stop." be a possibility? This "same word repeated in a sentence" issue can be detected in several places.

"For her birthday, I gave her what she had always wanted, commiseration in her lie. I didn’t try to correct her, I responded when she called me Joe and at the end of the day, I hugged her and said, “Mom, I love you.” " 6 commas in 2 sentences. If there are several places you lack commas, this is certainly not one of them. "For her birthday, I gave her what she had always wanted, ( use - instead?) commiseration in her lie. I didn’t try to correct her and responded when she called me Joe. At the end of the day, I hugged her and said: “Mom, I love you.”"

"Before I begin, I think I should mention a few things about the diary she had on her nightstand. First off, it was gigantic and more like a tome than a diary. She must have been writing in it for decades. It started around the time of my father’s birth and went up to around the time of her death, I think. I can’t be certain because she had the odd habit of writing titles to her entries instead of dates. " He "thought" throughout the whole paragraph. A thought in a thought? Could he rather assume or guess that the diary ended around the time of her death?

There are more similar issues, but they're not hard to see if you take them paragraph for paragraph.

I'm sorry to be this picky, but you are an experienced writer (in comparison with me) who is able to handle some "corrections".

Your story was good. It wasn't scary, but psychological and tense. I doubt that a kid could handle social services and all the other problems alone, but that's the only question I have to the plot. You don't even need to specify it.

The tense jump in the story could be more polished. I felt thrown out of the story just to be inserted into the supposed "real story". I thought the whole story was written in past, but then the first part of the story turns out to be a "flashback/recap". I can't really explain this; it simply unsettled me. You could fix it by either saying that this is a flashback from the beginning, or mention it just before we "jump" into the present.

Sorry for being picky! I'm quite new to the site, so I expect a bit more from the more experienced authors on the site than from the newbies. I quite enjoyed the story as well (it was awesome), so I only wish it to be as good as possible.