Talk:Tempest/@comment-28266772-20200219123446

So you’ve got some niggling little errors here and there. The worst by far was the tense swap in the first paragraph:

“The tires of his Bronco slosh (present tense) to a halt under a neon sign. The door chimed (past tense)…”

But there are others, so I’m gonna knock off 2 points because I think it’s something you should have caught.

Style: You’ve grown a lot as a writer and there are some great little touches but you do need to re-focus on the fundamentals. Some of your sentence structure is sloppy (A spray of frost and a few cubes missed their target), but for the most part the descriptions and language is creative and engaging and well put together. I just think you might want to accept that you can make good creative word choices and now start focusing on creating more lean, focused, original narratives. 4/5

Creepy sauce: The static cliché kinda bothered me. And for the most part I never got a sense of overt threat in this story. Plus the ending felt like a total sucker punch. The end result is that you lay down some pretty weak creepsauce, and then you go “ta da” and reveal it’s all a dream and just… well… I think sometimes telling a tale of someone in danger is all a horror story needs and I think you’re better off trying to master the more fundamental parts of horror (threat, danger, fear, hostile environments) before worrying about creating your own dark psychological equivalent to The Shining or Session 9. 3/5

Enjoyment: the strength of your creative writing carries this piece. 5/5

Use of theme: Oof. Death is literally the real life cosmic horror story and even in terms of the tarot where death is often associated with change there is just so much you could have done with this. It just kinda bums me out that all you could wring out of this concept was a PSA about drinking. 1/5

13/10 with 1 point knocked off for mechanical errors so 12/10

My advice is look at the work of Mike MacDee and try to get your stories out of your characters' heads. Focus on things, events. danger, action, etc. You've got a good story here but the psychology orientated premise really lets it down.