Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28266772-20160902203638/@comment-29709755-20160916182132

Hey, a new version. One that makes most of my suggestions moot.

Now I won't pretend to be as thorough as you, but I do have a lot of little details I noticed which kinda pulled me out of the story.

First, a typo in the first sentence.

 The town of Hallowroots  [is] ''' the sort of place that you enter, flee, and somehow end up returning to despite a lifelong promise to never go back. '''

Next, we hear that Alec hit a kid. I assume it was with his car and he's not just the sort of person to trumpet his recreational child-beating, though we get no indication either way.

The town is described with the words "southern" and "tumbleweed" in the same sentence. When I hear southern I think of the coastal flatlands of Georgia and the Carolinas, the Ozarks, or the swamplands of the Gulf Coast. Tumbleweeds are a desert southwest thing. I have yet to see one east of Texas. You also refer to a field overgrown with wheat and corn. Modern domestic crops need to be pampered to survive. An abandoned field is likely to be overgrown with milkweed, thistle, lambsquarters, purslane, maybe sunflowers if you're west of the Appalachians.

Mister narrator seems super underwhelmed to have fallen through a roof into a corpse-filled nightmare. He has no reaction to anything after the dried-up toes. I would feel better if he had some compulsion to prove himself and he spent his time vacillating between false bravado and shitting his pants.

The paragraph describing the huge hunk of marble is kind of clunky. I'll pick out the two sentences that caught me.

"Jesus Christ such a thing has never been seen before" - The lack of a comma between Jesus Crhist and the rest of the sentence, and the shift to present tense, are both kind of jarring.

" To think they’d hauled that up out of the Earth was an unsettling thought, and I couldn’t help but assume that it was that stone’s radiations that made me feel afraid, and not the shaft itself." Think, followed immediately by though, and the word "radiations", which sounds like something a Russian spy would say.

" And then its lights went off, and I could see it no more." I'm just gonna pick this sentence out as an example. The narrator switches between a grand literary voice and casual conversation. It becomes especially apparent when he gets al HP Lovecraft at the end. I would choose to frame this as a letter or something for consistency's sake, but that's just me.

The story progression gets shaky once Your Humble Narrator gets into the mineshaft. The sights and sounds are interesting, but the actions and motivations of the character become increasingly difficult to fathom. Nobody hung out in Cthulhu's palace because they though it looked cool, they had no choice. I'm afraid you are in need of a MacGuffin to drive it home.

The epilogue does manage to wrap things up nicely, though the build-up isn't what it could be. I hope this is helpful.