Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-2007196-20190614193145/@comment-9041013-20190615173317

As Bob said, remove the gap between paragraphs.

As for the story itself, it's kind of a spin-off so you'd need to appeal for that I think, better check in with the staff.

There's a lot of science stuff going on here, some of it is random, some of it less. It's also very reliant on people knowing what you're talking about. That's a bad move. You know how movies about sci-fi stuff or even basic science stuff suffer from "this is boring nerd talk" moments. This story has it all over. You shouldn't rely on the knowledge of your audience, unless we're talking very very very common knowledge. Otherwise, dumb the science related things down.

I think that this route is kind of meh, because while I knew what you were talking about and I could keep imersion in tact I think I got the point wrong as in my head "That Man" became a very good kidnapper that anyone can come across which kind of struck me. Basically Mandela effect worked on me here. You don't want this, because in your case the story relies too much on too many coincidences.

Both the ending and the beginning have too many coincidal occurences; a good marketing agent should know some psychology and sociology to sell his product, therefore a sociologist turning into a marketer is somewhat pointless and is there only to serve the plot which is meh.

If you can come up with something purely original for your "what if" scenario using the aforementioned psychological tricks it could work far better than using "That Man".