Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25033184-20140608215811/@comment-24077689-20140609162847

To the soundtrack of Tom Waits, MORGAN’S BACK AND IT’S TIME FOR A MOTHER FUCKING REVIEW.

Boy, howdy, you are not off to a very good start. “From the day I was born I can remember that dreadful gift”, first of all this line is A) a bit obtuse, you can’t remember being a baby, man.   B) lacking all manner of necessary punctuation and C) is followed by something I actually have trouble calling an ellipsis because it’s made of five periods. It’s like you wanted the pause an ellipsis would give you but you wanted it to be reaaalllly long.

The ellipsis is not your friend. It’s not there to build suspense. I have a couple blogs about this. It’s a major pet peeve of mine.

This first line actually reminds me of a really awful film noir movie called D.O.A (Dead on Arrival) in which the narrator goes into a police station and says “I’d like to report a murder” the police officer looks at him and asks him who was murdered and after a ridiculous, long pause, he looks up dramatically and says “ME!”

I guess I should probably review the rest of this story or something.

You pretty seriously need to proofread this. Like, I have trouble believing that if you proofread this you would have actually thought this was in good enough shape to publish. If you are at all familiar with our quality standards, you’d know it’s pretty far from it. Little misspellings, misused punctuation marks, glaring lack of punctuation, you don’t even capitalize correctly much of the time.

Just in this first paragraph, you misspell “heroes”, you confuse “drugged” and “dragged”, you don’t punctuate almost at all.

Woah, look at that, he grabs a knife and starts killing people with zero resistance. You also have a couple of tense issues. Oh, ho, ho, totally didn’t see the voice being the narrators. This story has almost nothing to do with the reading minds thing. Like, living with an ability like that your entire life would give someone a semblance of control or discipline.

This is another typical pasta. Like, even with an original concept of the ability to read minds, you basically use that as an excuse to lead into useless gratuitous violence. Nothing sets this story apart. It’s just another shock piece, and it’s not even all that shocking. It’s predictable, juvenile, and on top of that it’s short. It’s fortunately short. But if you took this concept, treated it with more care, and put more effort into developing a story that doesn’t devolve to “Yeah, I murder everybody”, maybe you could have a decent story on your hands. Maybe.