Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25073641-20160228125651/@comment-24101790-20160308031735

Here's what I found at a look-through.

I believe "eastern standard time" is treated as a proper noun and should be capitalized.

"Animals did their things. Trees and grasses (grass) swayed back and forth as the wind blew softly" While grasses is an accepted term, since you are referring to it collectively, grass sounds a bit more fluid. (Like trash vs. trashes)

"This time, he drank sleeping pills" Drink is more for fluids.

"They got the answer after four weeks (and) five days."

If you quote a complete sentence, you should properly capitalize it. "“it’s going to be a long day.”", “hope will never die no matter how hard you try to kill it.", etc.

Run-on/overly complex sentences: "When these organizations released their public statements regarding this specific topic, as well as their explanation, the people of the world could have been figures of question marks, trying to figure out what the alien and scientific words meant.", "Only a scarce bit of info was gathered regarding her identity, not a social security number, not a bank account within the United States, almost nothing; this concludes the woman was an illegal immigrant from South America.", "The battleground was as desolate as a dystopian city in a post-apocalyptic novel; buildings torn down to debris, cars flipped over and set on fire, mangled corpses of unfortunate people bathing in their own blood, sprinkled throughout the blood-stained road and pavement like cheese in a pizza… he had seen more than his stomach could withstand.", etc.

Awkward wording: "His inner girl would scream and fall ill ever she conjured the nightmarish image of that thing.", "– he like to think of these twisted things.", "trees are not so known to provide a sharp insight of… things." (Do you mean sight? If so, it still needs re-wording) "Now he knows (knew) where those shrieks came from.", "Her morale had run out to dangerous amounts." The biggest piece of advice I can give here is to read the story aloud to yourself and see where you hiccup/stagger on lines. Generally it's in those places where you should revise it.

Story: I tend not to go too in-depth on incomplete stories as the finished product changes a lot from the initial one, but since you requested, here's my opinion. I would agree above, you really should cut back on the ellipses. You use them about 60+ times in the story. That doesn't mean you have to cut them all out, but a lot should be weeded out to prevent the story from coming off as melodramatic. (Noothgush gave me this bit of advice: "Don't use an ellipsis where a comma or period would work just as well.")

Story cont.: I liked the variation of characters, but if you have a wide-range of perspectives, you might want to break them into chapters as opposed to injecting dividers into the story. That's about all I can really focus on as I tend to take the story a a whole rather than focusing on parts. Hope that helps, you can use control+f for easy searching to find and revise issues that were pointed out.