%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 Review #4786509 |
 |  | The Black Cat's Tale  [E] A Locked Shop, A Tardy Shopkeeper, and Trinkets.  |
| (3.5)  HAPPY WDC ACCOUNT ANNIVERSARY FROM "Anniversary Reviews"   First Impressions: I didn’t see that ending coming! To be fair, I don’t think the readers were meant to. There were hints, of course, but the exact details escaped me until you mentioned the name of a place, the cat, and finally the main character. The journey to these details was quite adventurous, and I changed my mind several times when I was guessing what was going on. The narrator was under the woman’s spell pretty much from the start - well, as soon as she found out what he wanted to sell. She seemed to employ some kind of magic to convince him to sell the trinkets to her, but I was wondering what those trinkets were and if she had good or bad intentions. There were some nice details, like the box for the trinkets, and the words she chanted which were musty with age, resurrected from some ancient, forgotten tongue. That was a great way to describe the spell!  Suggestions: I noticed that you have quite a distinctive style of writing dialogue, for example here: “Yes,” answering quickly, “there are twelve —”. I’m not actually sure if this is grammatically incorrect, but I’ve been told that dialogue tags should really disappear into the background so you hardly notice them, where yours, because they were quite unique, stood out. I would suggest changing the odd one to a more common dialogue tag to mix it up a little. For example, “Yes,” I answered quickly, “there are twelve —” . You also used run-on sentences quite a lot, for example here: Waiting paid off, out of the gloom a person appeared That’s a comma splice where the comma connects two independent clauses that should either be separate (i.e. with a period replacing the comma) or connected with a semicolon. Personally, I would suggest the former. And one final one: This is an example of a recurring issue with the first word in the dialogue which should be capitalised: Before answering I studied her, short black hair framed a pixie-like face, her eyes bore into me, willing me to answer, "yes," producing the small charm, "this is what I called about." As the speech begins with “Yes”, the word should be capitalised. (This is also a very long sentence that should be broken down into two with a period instead of the comma after “answer”.  Final Thoughts: Those are really just minor issues - they were a bit distracting but they are easy to fix. The story itself was intriguing and I think it would be worth spending a bit of time on it to polish it. It almost read like the beginning of a longer tale (that last paragraph seemed to indicate that there might be more to come) but it works perfectly well as a stand-alone story. An interesting read!  My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
|
|||
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
A Review from: "
You have not yet responded to this review.