Author:Marisa
Reviewer:Cobe

HI. I found your piece on the "read a newbie" page and am giving you a review in affliliation with "RAOK Upgrade Brigade Group"  as part of a challenge for "a very Wodehouse challenge"  . I am just another writer, like you, who enjoys reviewing and reading what others write, so take what you can use and ignore the rest.

In General: I like this piece a lot. You've given us enough details to understand that your character can read minds without actually telling us so. And it flows well throughout. It has some background info to it (which people call an info dump) but because your character is narrating this, it doesn't seem like an info dump.

Character: She is an interesting person. The thought of being able to read minds is intriguing to almost everyone which will make the readers widely sympathetic to her. If you could work in her name somewhere, it would help readers to connect with her on a more intimate level. Since she's at home, maybe she could flip on her computer and the screen reads "Good morning, Sadie!" or something.

I also like that she's a researcher/writer for some kind of publication. Her line "I sometimes wonder if I would still be so sought after if anyone knew the truth behind my most exquisite research." opens so many possibilities for the remainder of the story line. It's brilliant!

Setting: She's in her room in her house. We get to know that she has a cat and an alarm clock, but not much else. It always helps the reader to have a place to put the character so just small descriptive items would help with this. She talks about it raining outside, so maybe she could notice that her room was dark and the blue paint just made it seem darker or her cat could have snuck up on her because the carpet didn't give away his footsteps. I really like the description of the cat though. "something between a meow and a chirrup" That's exactly what a cat sounds like!! Good job.

Voice: We are deep inside her head with her thoughts guiding us through the piece. This is good and you haven't strayed into omniscient voice. My only recommendation is to watch out for passive voice - the use of had, has, was, were, is, etc ... While those verbs don't always denote passive voice, a lot of times they do. Writing in first person makes it difficult to avoid passive voice. I struggle with this myself.

Suggestions: Readers tend to see a large paragraph and skip over it or skim read through it. Because we want words to count and everyone to enjoy and savor each and every word we put on the page, it's best to keep your paragraphs on the shorter side. You could easily do this here and it wouldn't look so daunting to the reader. Rules for paragraph change are usually: when you change characters speaking or doing an action, when a character changes thought subject, when a character changes scene, when anyone or anything new is introduced, and when something in the story line is important for your reader to remember.

Overall: This is a beautiful start to a story with an intriguing character and some beautifully written descriptions. It flows well and is pretty easy to read.

Happy Writing and Welcome to WDC!!

Cobe

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