Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-39934715-20190706161054/@comment-39934715-20190707101708

BloodySpghetti wrote: Interesting story; I do like how you went for an existing tale and made it your own. That's a good path to walk on. You've used enough folklore to make it into a Bubak and yet, added your own elements to make it standout from our typical Slavic Boogeyman tales. Good job on that.

Unfortunately, your English needs a bunch of work; I recommend using grammar checkers like Grammarly because you got the idea right but the wrong spelling. It was mostly a case of similar sounding words with different meanings. Had some overall linguisting mishaps but it wasn't anything too bad. Mostly the wrong spellings of certain words. Work on that.

This whole thing kind of felt like an older horror movie; which in my opinion is good. While one can suspect the grandmother, she doesn't exactly come off as the villain for sure until you reveal her to be the villain. So that's great and not many people can pull that feeling off.

You do have some jumpy parts where it feels like you just tried to come up with a certain thing and just run on to the next part; whenever a family member went missing it felt rushed and random. Kind of like, "dad disappeared and yeah... life went on". Try to add a little meat to these events and somehow let the readers know that they have impact on the whole story. Otherwise it just feels like everything is happening but even you are not convinced of things so why should we be?

The ending felt kind of rushed; "I ran away, got a family, came back to the place where my innocence was stolen..." Maybe try to make it sound like it actually bothers him in the long run or something.

I do like how the Scarecrow ended up being a living thing, wasn't expected and came off pretty nice.

Oh and, for the love of God, PLEASE DO NOT USE CAPS TO ACCENTUATE EMOTION, seriously, use punctuation and existing font mechanics, make it bold, make it italized, give us an exclamation mark. The caps make it look unserious and at points almost comedic (not here, but in general).

(And seriously, Vodka lane, coming from people who have a whole festival to get drunk, really now...? The whole exposion kind of drags itself, but meh... I guess you can figure out a way to cut it down somehow) Yeah, I probably need to read over again and correct the grammarical errors. I actually have been using Grammarly, so I feel it saved me form at least half of those errors. I'll start fixing some of the grammarical and spelling errors. Anyway, thank you for you're feedback.