Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35692997-20180527091632/@comment-9041013-20180527101649

Ehh

Let's start with the fact that this is too short for me to care about Erin, nothing happens, then her phobia of dogs kicks in, and she commits suicide because Prototype like monster dogs are worse than just dogs. If anything, as a person who owns a dog and experiences this silly phobia people have from anything larger than a Chihuahua, I am rather annoyed by this character. I also have an allergy to Bee venom, I still do not freak out due to seeing Bees. Even more so, the fact that Erin's stalker is more than just a dog, makes it sensible to be freaked out and thus "Oh it's just a monster" thought creeps to my mind, thus I still cannot care about her.

You should add a paragraph or two explaining "The incident" and some of what Erin had to go through, include some actual hardships and perhaps tragedies to make me feel for this woman.

Also, the big wipeout happened basically yesterday, and this woman, is such a badass for surviving isn't really good. Half a year shouldn't be too hard to survive in a world where humans simply "poof" away. Make it a few years rather than half a year. Check out what would happen to our physical civilization once there are no humans to attent to it, there's actually a full series on that called "Life After People".

You mention her being a commander of a group of people, where are these people? it's kind of pointless to mention them if they don't play a role in the story, especially since you don't really display any ingenuity or creativity with her, which in turn, would prove in a way she can be a capable leader.

Now as for Erin's phobia and the antagonistic monster, you don't really need a monsterous beast, you could go for a pack of wild post apocalyptic dogs trying to hunt her down. This would help to play into her phobia, we could also see fleshbacks of the source of her fear. Wolves actually hunt their pray by chasing it to death, they chase it until they manage to catch up to it (considering they tend to hunt on larger and somewhat faster animals) and then they eat it while it dies from Shock. You could include all of these factors into a scene where a pack of wild dogs that appear to be half lupid half Molosser like weird looking aggressive dogs. The scene should start with a seemingly chance encounter by a dog and Erin who starts panicking as the dog follows her until she falls into a trap laid by the pack who chace her into her suicide, or kill her, I think that if you go for suicide, you should mention how the dogs find her corpse and eat it, since well... it'll make people feel for her more.

Now, you've some phrasing issues that I've come across like "there was no human sound" as if all humans are gone, only for you to mention there are a bunch of people still alive. Switch it to something like "no human sound could be heard" that leaves the possibily of humans being still an extant species viable. "it moved faster than it looked like to move." - bad phrasing, do you mean, "It moved faster than it appeared to be able to"?

You have to do a bunch of work on that, but this could be turned into a great story.