Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-31753305-20170417114256/@comment-24101790-20170417121353

Starting with the mechanical issues: you tend to not apostrophize possessive words ("felt my mothers arms catch me", "a large swirling mark just above the young boys head.", " I looked up, and then up again, past the boys worried little face,", etc) punctuation issues with dialogue ("'What are you doing with Bubbles?'.(period not needed)", "'I was so foolish(') she said, 'I almost ruined the picture, such a silly thing to do'.(period should be inside quotations", "me, 'please don't look at it anymore, please try to forget about Bubbles',", etc. Additionally you should be uniform with your decision to italicize words.), and awkward wording ("She was white and worried, and confused and upset by the experience I chose a child's recourse and began to cry." There's a lot of redundancy with the word 'and' here. Additionally at a first glance, it almost feels like a case of misattributing a description to the mother.).

Moving on from that, the plot of the story is also fairly problematic. The idea of a haunted/cursed painting has been done quite a bit and this doesn't really go beyond the premise. The idea of a picture that spreads its infection be vision also slips into Smile Dog territory with the protagonist trying to get the audience to view the image. While it's not the worst thing to have a similar premise, the story needs to be a lot more effective with the ending (it feels rushed) to make it a bit more engaging.

With the twist at the end that the protagonist was trying to get the audience to look all along, the opening feels out-of-place. ("I'm sharing it with you all to prove the truth of it, I'm sorry. I'm not a monster though, I'm warning you now that if you read on it will know about you too, so I'm giving you a choice, which is more than I ever had. So it's up to you, is this just another creepy-pasta, a fun five minute scare, or is there something else here? I am telling you not to keep on reading, if you decide not to listen then its not my fault.")

If they were following the painting's (unknown) instructions it doesn't make a lot of sense that they'd repeatedly warn the audience. I know it's a 'forbidden fruit' thing, but it also feels more counterintuitive than other methods. If their goal is to spread the word, wouldn't there be more effective means (like sharing the image, providing a link so the audience wouldn't view the wrong image, etc) for entrapping them?

In the end, while the story is better written than most of the recent entries we get on cursed items, it still falls into a lot of pitfalls that get associated with these types of stories. The unreliable narrator who in the end betrays the audience and the 'you're next' style ending really also feel shoe-horned in to the story to try and make the plot have more of an impact on the audience, but without proper execution, it isn't all too effective. I won't say this story is unsalvageable, but I do think a bit of re-writing and re-working is necessary if you intend to make a deletion appeal.