Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-30208660-20161012173648/@comment-24101790-20161012175324

I would suggest posting your story to the post rather than having to go back and forth to look up examples. That being said, I think this is going to need a lot of work to even stand a chance at the spinoff appeal.

Starting with the spacing issues, you need to properly space between sentences. "easily.It was in October that it happened. I was battling a trainer called ‘Black_Skull’.", "people.My opponent had the choice of heads or tails.", "It was obviously a basic Pokémon.When his cards were revealed, his active Pokémon was an", etc. You also need to work on your paragraphs as you broke the story into two paragraphs, but cut off one sentence mid-way through:

his active Pokémon was an Absol-EX and his benched Pokémon was an Yveltal.

Additionally a proper paragraph is five-ten sentences long. Any more and it feels like a wall of text, any less and the story feels anemic.

Let's start with the most obvious issue: "If I’m honest, it was more… mildly creepy than absolutely horrifying." This story feels more like an odd encounter than an actual scary story. There really isn't any sense of tension or impending danger as it just seems to be a player glitching out a game to win. Without any real tension, this makes the story relatively uninteresting.

This carries over to the character itself. I'm not quite sure I understand why a shame like Black Skull ("I was battling a trainer called ‘Black_Skull’. I passed this off as a pretty edgy teenager with a username put in place to scare little children.") would scare children. This is compounded by other lines like: "As we drew our cards, he had the sleeves with the scratch on as well as the same deck box. I hated things like this, as players like him got all of his prizes by scaring off people.". I'm not quite sure I understand how this would be enough to scare off a child.

Then there's the ending: "My deck was devoid of any cards. They were just gone. He had destroyed them. Black_Skull… I will never forget that name." It seems a bit of an overstatement to say that the protagonist is never going to forget their name as it just seems like someone glitched out their game to win. It comes off as petty or alarmist if the person is that rattled (despite saying they weren't in the opening) from the events.

I'm sorry, but I don't think this is likely to pass the appeal. Even after correcting the mechanical issues, there are still quite a lot of issues with the story itself. It's not really effectively told and it just seems to focus on someone cheating rather than really building up any spooky events. I think this is going to require a drastic re-writing, revision, and fleshing out the plot if you're looking to attempt an appeal.