On the whole, this piece is quite well written. Clean, efficient prose with pointed description. My comments are mostly minor suggestions. You tell us she is warm but give no indication that he touched her. As such, the information comes from you the writer, and not from the man’s observation. The phrase “dumped in a heap over the grimy linoleum" doesn’t work for me because immediately afterward you tell us she is trussed up on her side—not dumped in a heap at all. One suggestion: “The woman ...

You've got some nice use of the language here and the text flows reasonably well. My biggest problem with this scene is that nothing happens and as a result it's pretty boring. There's no tension. We hear about the crippled woman's boring life and Sophie's inconsiderate husband, and some stuff about her kids but it's really hard to care about all that. It's like watching a mundane scene of these women from the outside. I think we want to be more inside Sophie's head. What's really going on in...

While it’s clear you know how to put a sentence together and have a feeling for words, this story has some fatal flaws. The first of which is that you are telling, telling, telling. Instead of showing the reader who this woman is, her upbringing, her environment, etc., the story is being told as if you the author are narrating. What the reader wants is to be drawn into the story and the most certain way to do that is to show the story evolving from the point of view of the main character. The...

Okay, this is good—really good. You have, by using just the right details in just the right way, created a believable and sympathetic (if sometimes pathetic) character. You make the reader feel her drunkenness, her humiliation, her bravado, and finally, her creative spirit. Without your telling us anything about it, we believe she has recited a moving poem. Your voice is very distinctive and very honest. You stay in her point-of-view almost completely with one or two almost unnoticeable shift...

First let me preface my comments by saying that science fiction/fantasy is not a genre I read much, so I’m not familiar with stylistic approaches that may be specific to the genre. You start with talking about the first sonic boom and work that into the farm scene with the crashing UFO, and I like this approach. This gives us just a touch of the wider context and time, then zeros in on a couple specific human characters before moving to the Earth Watchers (are they Asuras or Titans?). I like ...

I continue to find this story intriguing and, sorry to say, to find similar problems as with the Prologue. The power and impact of the story is weakened by the amount of telling. We would be better off with fewer words and a much more focussed point-of-view. We want to see this story from inside Davy's head--or at least this chapter, since I suspect you'll be doing multiple POVs. But you would have a much stronger piece if the reader had an intimate relationship with the POV character, whoeve...

Great atmosphere. Could be a fun story. However, I see several problems. One is that you go from this omniscient voice telling us the story (rather than showing through events within the story), to a few sentences in Sal's point of view (with some telling in there), to a different scene in both Tommy's and Frank's points of view. I think the back story could be integrated into the story line, but if you are going to keep it, you should put a section break between it and the bit about Sal. The...

This is good, clean writing. I can’t comment on the story as I’m coming in mid-stream, but the author has clearly taken great pains with the writing, and it shows. Point of view is well maintained (one slip, I think). There is very little telling outside the events of the story. The dialog is, on-the-whole, natural. Here are some specifics (I didn’t worry about typos or minor punctuation or grammar). I got very picky because most of the writing is so good. “He’d been purposely obtuse since en...

As with the other chapter I read, the sense of time and place is well detailed. And the mysterious man, the mysterious letter, and the cheating husband are all good elements that leave us wanting to know more. Your point-of-view is all over the place. Apparently you are doing omnicscient POV, but I have to say, I think it weakens the power of your story. We jump willy-nilly from one character's head to another within single scenes and even single paragraphs. This has the effect of making it f...

The main problems I see with this have to do with telling rather than showing, and point-of-vew. I took the first couple paragraphs and rewrote them in a way that illustrates what I'm saying. Disclaimer: This isn't great writing--just easier to show, than to tell: "Abbie drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and snapped on the radio. Maybe the rush-hour traffic report would tell her how long she could expect to be sitting bumper-to-bumper with a good fraction of Atlanta’s workforce. If sh...