Although I thought this piece had some good sassy dialogue, especially in the Cleo's Class restaurant scene toward the end, I thought the chapter as a whole had a certain slackness to it. After all this is your intro to what will be at least a seventy thousand word work or more and we ought to feel that it is headed somewhere from the begining. All you've done is to suggest that sisters Brittany and Cleo will have, I presume, their potential romances develop parallel, but you haven't put in e...

I'm giving it a lowish score though I'm not sure this is fair as you label it a novel treatment rather than a sample, which is how I shall proceed to review it. I'm not exactly the best audience for this sort of thing, but I'll do my best. Right off it seems you don't do enough to set the scene of the bar in motion before leaping into the mysterious, leathern hardbitten past of this Spikehorn character, whose name you repeat so often it truly numbs the inner ear. The exposition that follows m...

You've obviously done some work on this piece, it moves logically and coherently and has a real dramtatic thrust to it. Also, I think the subject of what it's like to get an abortion is a terrific one. The problem here is that the writing isn't too terribly inspired. Thankfully you don't muddy it up with some of the expository bloat I've found in the other things I've read on this site, but here you've got opportunities for characterization that you don't use. You're gray style and the proces...

A Cheek Is the Same as The Soul I think it's fair to say I loved, loved, loved it! I was glad to see so many other commentators on the story appreciated its tangy uniqueness as well, though I couldn't help noticing a certain silliness in some of the remarks. Many seemed to think that though the story had a "clever" premise it was overly ornate and wordy. One critic thought the whole thing simply a case of an author's having gussied up a poor beggar with a lot of fine frills. Another thought a...

Over all I thought this was a very well done piece; I don't give it a ten because I'm not into this sort of genre. You built a good deal of atmosphere and suspense and did it with remarkable economy. My own quibblings are few and minor. In the third paragraph I'm not sure why the rattling sound makes the boy's "spine ache"--this visceral description seems meant to be expressive but is not to my mind precise. In the same paragraph you have an ominous sound travel up his neck carried by unfortu...

I thought the conversational tone of this piece was very well done and I liked the idea of telling the weight loss problem from the point of view of the husband. The dialogue was very good I thought. My problems with the story are small but very niggling none the less. I think you might have characterized Tammy a little more and maybe broken up that just-a-working-class-regular-Joe thing with more specifics than sports and beer. I assume there are supposed to be space breaks in between the se...

I rather liked this bit of perveristy, as you called it though I think it is more scenario-essay than it is a story. Or perhaps it's part of something longer? I think I knew about half way through that narrator was going to kill the guy who came on to her, though I think this sort of goes against the basic premise she starts with that she is one of those lesbians who are more into women than hating men. The end makes it seem like she's getting revenge on him for the annoying pass when the nar...

This is not my kind of story, but I must say you got a whole tear-jerker novel into just a few thousand words, which I greatly admire. There was one thing I absolutely loved about the story. When you shifted your first person perspectives, between the dying woman and the boy in the hospital, the viewer thinks at first he must be her son. The surprise of the boy's turning out to be a friend of her son's was a nice neat little trick. On the other hand the dialog is a bit flat. I think the sugge...

I thought this was a good piece. I liked all the low-rent atmospheric details, like Father's special chair. This kind of modern gothic tale is not easy to pull off and I thought you did it nicely and quite economically. My favorite parts are when Martha's beast boy calls her a slut and a whore. The central problems such as who made the mess in the kitchen Martha has to clean up with the nice vivid image of the Stonehenge of bottles, and why she is practically enslaved to her family all fall n...