User blog comment:BrokenTeeth/Yes! I Wrote a Pasta!/@comment-4295646-20111027204351

That was honestly lovely.

If I could make one suggestion for the most dramatic improvement, it would be to cut down on passive voice. Run through it one more time, carefully weeding out words like "was", "were", "be", etc. wherever they can be replaced painlessly with more active verbs. In some cases, the job is practically done for you:

"The pale, nearly translucent skin was stretched over their extremely sallow frame[s]."

All you need to do here is eliminate "was", and suddenly it is no longer a state but an action; the hide itself is stretching, aching, straining over its rawboned host. The sentence is much more alive this way. In that mold, try to revise for a more active voice.