I thought that I might as well give you a review too, since I stumbled upon your portfolio.

Some things I Like:

The voice is incredibly strong in this piece. I can almost hear the character speaking. In my mind, it is a teenage girl, by the way. I'm not sure if that is what you intended, but that is how it sounds for some reason. Regardless, it is strong and consistent throughout.

You have an interesting style that I think is engaging. Your word choice kept me interested, and the pace is quite fast.

I like some of the imagery that snuck into this piece... particularly 'becoming a machine' in the last paragraph. Quite clear and an interesting way of putting it.

This seems like the beginning of an interesting story.

Observations & Suggestions:

I don't entirely understand what is happening in this prologue or why it is happening. I also thought it was a bit strange that the character would be describing the person chasing her while being chased.

The "how he twisted my lips" line confused me a little. I thought maybe you meant "twisted his lips"?

The use of contractions made the piece feel a little sloppy at times. Maybe I'm old school, but I tend to think that contractions belong only in dialogue.

For me, the most obvious and distracting aspect of this prologue is the constant sentence fragments. For instance:

A tickle. After months of being on the run, of living in the Skille period. An all too familiar pattern followed my leaps. Just a stroke away from freedom.

These are in just to paragraphs, and there are far more scattered throughout this short piece. The first one was very effective, but overuse tends to get boring. Also, it makes the writing have a choppy flow-- all short little sentences or non-sentences. I would highly recommend using fragments sparingly and trying to use more varied sentence structure.

Overall, I think this is an interesting start for a story. It isn't perfect, but it could be very good with some revision. The writing itself also shows real promise. If you decide to make changes, I would be happy to give it another read and change my rating as needed.






My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .