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RE: Radiant Sky - A Fantasy Short Story

in #writing7 years ago

Hey there,

I think you have an interesting concept here, let down a bit by the disjointed nature of your writing.

I enjoyed the short and somewhat cynical musing on what "home" is. It would be nice to have some background about where these thoughts came from because they're out of the blue. Does the topic of home have relevance to the rest of the story? If it does, it would be good to build the story around it. I'm not actually sure what your main point in this story is. It would be great to give it a thought to connect all of your scenes together.

The few paragraphs in which Eric is hiding from the Synergists has a few interesting ideas: that they are looking for survivors. It would be great if we had more of a background of what they were survivors of, and why the Synergists needed them.

I thought it was nice that Eric would rally his troops for fighting, though we get no indication in the beginning of the scene that he has a group of men behind him, it just looks like an interaction between Jeffrey and Eric.

Regarding grammar and punctuation around speech:
After dialogue in quotation marks, there needs to be a comma and then a dialogue tag, unless the dialogue is the end of the sentence and then it needs a full stop. You're missing an awful lot of punctuation at the end of your quotation marks. Always use punctuation. Some of your dialogue tags, which tell us who is speaking, are not right next to the dialogue, either, and this makes it difficult to understand who is speaking.

I am interested, but this would be improved immensely with more information:

  • Introduce the family
  • Tell us where they are living and why
  • Give us some background on the rebellion - who they are, why it exists, how many men do they have
  • Who is the "you" that Eric is whispering about at the end?
  • How much time is between each of these scenes?

It would be really nice to know more about these characters and their bonds. I feel like that was a running theme through this short story, though it was only touched on.