Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-17834624-20140721040440/@comment-25148755-20140721155027

I'm in no way advocating for including gore, unnecessary or otherwise. It's very hard to do well and will come off as more disturbing (mostly due to the mindset the author had to be in to write it) or sometimes even funny, but rarely scary.

Fixing the grammatical errors is pretty straightforward. Just go back through and proofread. Tense wise, as the narrator is talking pick one or the other. A perfect example of this issue is where you use both past and present tense in your second sentence. " It was a perfect night, and what I see are perfect, marshmallow clouds."

Logic flaws: I'd have to go back through in a little more detail to find all of them but let's focus on the big one which surrounds the entire premise of the story so far, namely the usb and disk. You state your narrator is a chemistry teacher. Assuming this is high school, the main assignments a student would be turning in are either homework problems or a lab report. Of these, only a lab report would (potentially) be on a disk. The fact that the entire class would be turning it in at the same time and would probably be working in teams makes that this is an assignment unlikely. At the very least your narrator would be expecting an assignment if one was due.

Moving on and assuming that despite all this the narrator assumes its an assignment: as a teacher as soon as she tries to open it and finds its locked, the story ends right there. She would hand it back the next day saying, "Hey, you encrypted your homework.  If you want credit for it make sure I can read it." Additionally it makes no sense for the files to be encrypted anyway. Ostensibly Seth gave his teacher the files with the intent she would read them...why password protect?

Getting past all that, the teacher manages to get access to the file. Its not homework. Once again, this is where the story ends. "Hey you gave me the wrong disk." She reads it anyway and its an account of abusive parents and homicide. That student will be at the guidance counselors office come Monday, the parents will be getting a phone call, the end.

Dread is a poor word to describe what the teacher is feeling. Concern, sure. She wants to help Seth. But dread seems to indicate a feeling of some unknown evil or harmful thing...there's nothing here to really suggest that, just some kid acting weird and giving out usb drives and cds.

Is the narrator a male or female? I keep saying "she" but realize I might be in the wrong there. I'm completely open minded either way but you say "a man can hope" when talking about where the password is located and then talk about "my sleeping husband" later on. If the narrator is gay that's fine, but it kind of falls into the overall difficulty of following the narrative.

Lastly, like I said so far there's nothing particularly scary here. I realize this isn't done yet and that part might still be coming, but really there's no indication of where this thing is going to go. My guess is either haunted flash drive or something with the murderous father (or both) but what you have doesn't really set that up. The whole "I had hallucinations as a child" part toward the end seems like you just threw it in there and is, frankly, a trope that is overused.

If I'm seeming overly critical I apologize because I know people put a lot of work into their stories. That being said, I'd rather be straight up with any issues I see here so that you don't have your stuff deleted by the admins five minutes after it gets posted.