Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-29105568-20160801215402/@comment-24101790-20160801222312

Starting with the basics, this is a large wall of text. You need a complete space between paragraphs to prevent the wiki format from combining them all together. The story I deleted had it separated so each paragraph was a single sentence (which is also wrong. Remember a typical paragraph is five-ten sentences long. Any more and it comes off as blocky, any less and it feels like you're padding. Onto the mechanical issues and the story issues that resulted in your work being deemed below quality standards. There are a lot of capitalization, punctuation, grammatical, spelling/wording, awkward wording, and story issues here that really weaken the overall quality here.

Capitalization: ""Michael!" She (she) shouted", ""Oh Mariam! What will I do?!" She (she) cried out.", ""Mariam.." Escaped my lips.", etc. Remember you only capitalize a word after dialogue if you are starting a new sentence or the word is a proper noun.

Punctuation: ""She wouldn't be gone if it wasn't for you." was pinned to my mind." (also a double negative) Grammar: It's=it is, its=possession. "The morning sun was rising, blinding me with it's (its) beams.", "The dress reached her knees and it's skirt was pleated.", etc.

Wording: "My heart remains to ache, my hand clenched. The stinging feeling in my palm from my bitten nails digging deep into my bare pale flesh." It feels like you switched the comma and the period accidentally as the second sentence relates to the latter half of the first sentence. You tend to have a lot of fragmented sentences here: "But the sound of her filled the room.". "My fingers slid along the ball joints on her body, which let her limbs bent (bend) however possible.", "I let out a low grunt before shuffling lowly (slowly) back to bed.", "They decided that was (sic) should go camping the local woods.", etc. I would strongly suggest reading this over as there were a lot of other issues present.

Awkward wording: There are a lot of awkward wording instances through-out the story. "I couldn't pity myself. I didn't feel worthy of so.", "I peaked (peeked) at the desk table, which used to be covered in stacks of papers with nothing but her messy scribbles and "family portraits" and her crayons which were always broken in half because of how hard she pressed on them.", "She tried  yell (sic) for help, but nothing came out.", "I could feel pain in his voice, the tears forming at the corner of his blood shot (bloodshot or blood-shot as it is a compound word) eyes." etc. A lot of these issues are present on your dA page too so I would recommend proof-reading there as well.

Story issues: Here's where a majority of the issues were. "Michael! Can we go outside, please? It finally stopped raining and I want to see if I can find a rainbow!" "Mom said it was okay!" "Michael! Come on! Pretty please?" As this is all one line of dialogue and there's no interrupting actions, it should be joined together. You tend to do this a number of times throughout the story and it comes off as trying to space out the story and make it seem longer than it actually is rather than adding emphasis to lines:

"But it was getting harder to seek them out as it was getting

darker..

darker..

dark."

Story issues cont.: How is the brother recounting all of these events if he wasn't present for them? "It was pitch black and without a source of light, she quickly lost sight of her tracks." It really is never explained and comes off as a pretty large plot inconsistency. How is he remembering all of these events if he wasn't there (including the tone of her voice, the man's description, what happened in her last moments, etc.)

Story issues cont.: Speaking of inconsistencies, you tend to shift perspectives which is odd considering you don't ever state that perspectives have been changed. Take this line for example: "She was too tried to scream for him to stop, I knew he wasn't Michael." Who is the narrator here. If it's Michael's sister, she shouldn't be referring to herself in third person. If it is Michael, how does he know about this even and why is he referring to himself in pronouns?

Story issues cont.: The latter half of the story is really rushed and the lack of any real sense of conclusion really weakens the story. In the end I'm left wondering why Michael's just sitting in his room and gagging the doll rather than trying to communicate with it or getting help. With the inclusion of the character bio in the description, this feels more like an OC series without any real focus on telling a complete story and rather just telling the background of two characters. I'm sorry, but this story needs a lot of work and really isn't up to quality standards.