Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-31477126-20170823183346/@comment-24101790-20170823185523

Starting with the basics, this had nothing to do with the deletion of your story, but it's still important to learn. Using visual editor while posting a story/comment results in these coding errors appearing on the story and it makes editing difficult and can cause formatting issues (possibly even rendering the text unreadable): "I don’t hate the dark anymore. I hate the light that illuminates it. The light that confirms your fears. "

Capitalization: "An affliction that means the mind wakes up before the body, Leaving (leaving) the sufferer fully aware of their surroundings but unable to move." Grammar: it's=it is, its=possession. "I’d spend my nights bathed in it’s (its) comforting glow."

Wording issues: "It was the thought of all those things that hid away in the darkness: the monster under the bed and the creature in the cupboard." (it feels like this is missing some words), "Every one waiting to drag my limp body away from the loving embrace of my family to some dark hole where it (they, as you use the plural earlier) would feast on my young bones.", " It was an old battered thing, time it powered up you could hear the motor of the fan arthritically jump into life.", etc.

Story issues: "I even looked up the science behind it on the internet, hoping that if I knew why it happen (sic) it would assuage my fears." feels at odds with "Then, for my 10th birthday, my parents deigned to buy me a computer." Also the wording deigned feels out-of-place here as it generally implies condescension (a trait that they haven't really been expressing up to that point).

Story issues cont.: "I remember the familiar feeling of pressure on my arms and chest. The feeling that my body was wrapped in cotton wool. And the noises, they too were different." First and foremost, "they too were different" implies that something was different other than the initial symptoms, but the preceding sentences only talk about the familiar sensations. Additionally, you really haven't talked about experiencing these familiar sensations up to this point with the only real physical description you've given is more of a definition: "An affliction that means the mind wakes up before the body, Leaving the sufferer fully aware of their surroundings but unable to move."

Story issues end: The largest issue in the story however is the plot itself. We have quite a lot of sleep paralysis stories here. While yours comes off as being a personal account (perspective wise), it still feels a bit flat due to some missed opportunities to bring a more visceral/emotional perspective for the audience to relate to with more detail about what they're experience and how uncomfortable it is making them. Also the ending feels a bit anticlimactic without more build-up of the entity. "the room was awash with pale blue light and, as the start-up sound played. I found myself looking into a pair of huge milky eyes." Just describing one feature really doesn't paint a vivid picture and the confirmation that there is something else going on beyond the realm of typical sleep paralysis gives the story an incomplete feeling as it begs the question about what they're doing in response to this possible threat. Originally they were just unsettled by the sounds, now that they have a physical confirmation that something is at play here (due to its re-occurence), it feels a bit anticlimactic to just end it there.