Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-4893169-20150627030850/@comment-26007602-20150627212255

I'll address the accent first, as that seems to be what you're most concerned with.

I actually didn't think it was that bad. I could read through it fine and understood what each word was with reasonable clarity. It did make me read a bit slower, and that got more annoying towards the end, but I think it works fine as an accent: it's consistent and gives a good sense of the voice depicted. I don't know what a "Brummie accent" sounds like, but I have a good idea of what the character is saying. It is distracting, but I don't know if your audience will mind. I will say that it seems a bit inconsistent at times.

"Back in the days of the aud courts, the'er was a Gentry family of minor aristocrats who used ter own all this lan' eya." She seems to say too many words without an accent in this sentence. I don't know if there's an "official" set of accent rules you're following, but it seems like bits of this are out of place. I'd think it would sound something like this: "Bawk in the days ahf the aud courts, the'er wus a Gentry family ahf minor 'ristocrahts who used ter own all this lan' eya." Again, I have no idea if that fits with the rest of the accent style, but I just thought seeing all of these properly spelled words was out of place. This sentence in particular, “I believe they were called Chanterelle...” is missing any sign of an accent.

There is some missing capitalization in her dialogue as well. If you read through her dialogues, when she's telling the story of the house in particular, you can see the missing capitalization after the period on just about every sentence. Don't know if that is part of the accent style, but it's noticeable.

I must ask, is this part of your story complete? (Or is this the backstory to another structure in your series?) You seem to have a lot of build up and backstory to this house, but the character never directly encounters it, which is a bit of a let down. I see that it says "chapter 1" at the top of the page, so I'm wondering if there's more to this part. The backstory isn't particularly creepy on its own, but if there's more to this, then it shouldn't be an issue.

I think you know your audience better than I do, I haven't read all the other parts of this series, so I can't quite comment like one of your more regular readers. This story seems to have a more specialized, niche appeal. It's very well written (Perhaps a bit too well written, more on that in a second), but I don't think it quite contains the "scare factor" that the average readers of this site are looking for (at least not yet). The skunk dream, while I'm not entirely sure if it is meant to be creepy, doesn't really do it for me because there's no context to it. Yes, it's very vivid and descriptive, but it equates to a non-threat. It is a nice opening, but it doesn't really seem like a true danger to Kes, so I don't relate with her fear.

I looked back at the section and I think I overanalyzed that part, so you can disregard that criticism if it doesn't actually relate to your intention.

The backstory to the house, while interesting, doesn't really unnerve the reader because the character isn't in any danger (yet). As I said, it's a good setup, and I hope you expand on it.

That's all I've got plot-wise for this review, but I did notice some things with your word choice. A lot of the words here, while surely used correctly, are fairly pretentious and just confuse the reader. It's too advanced for me (and maybe I'm just an isolated case compared to the rest of your readers), but words like "bucolic", "gorge", "gamboling", and "bureau" (to name a few) really take me out of the story simply because I don't know what they mean. I feel a lot of these words could be replaced with a simpler word that gets the point across. Of course, it's your style and your decision, I just think the writing could be simplified without losing anything.

Hope this helps!