Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-10319977-20160102141602/@comment-5643552-20160108042423

Since I was invited to review this, I might as well leave my opinion.

I disagree with MrDupin's assessment. This pasta is severely undercooked.

It starts with some vague exposition about why the narrator "empathizes with the homeless" because she never grew up with a working vehicle and had to walk around in the cold. This tells me absolutely nothing about the characters or setting, so from the get I have zero emotional investment or interest in the story.

The part where she's being attacked on her way home from the grocery store is where I could see some potential for some real visceral horror, but it's just so poorly told. You spend one short paragraph failing to build up any kind of suspense, and two equally short paragraphs describing the action. This, combined with your tendency to tell rather than show, makes this part of the story about as exciting as reading a grocery list.

And then there's the ending. Maybe if you'd focused more on what leads up to the shocking conclusion, it would have packed more of a punch, but honestly it was just lame. It seems like you were in such a hurry to get to the end that you forgot to slow down and actually tell the story itself.

TL;DR you're going to need to flesh this out a lot before it even comes close to meeting the quality standards.