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 Review #4252355 |
 | Within the Water  [18+] Don't let their ages fool you. They aren't as young as they look.  |
| (3.0)| Hello PureSciFiPlus, my name is Tiggy and I am reviewing your story as a judge for "Short Shots: Official WDC Contest" . Thanks for entering! Please bear in mind that my comments and suggestions are only my opinion. Other reviewers might see it differently.The story had an unfinished feel – it read more like a first chapter than a complete short story because at the end, the readers were left with quite a few questions. For a chapter, that would be great because you want to make them turn the page to find out more. For a short story, it isn’t ideal because they are left feeling that you stopped halfway through without telling them all of it. It was clear how the image prompt had inspired this story, and I could picture it quite clearly as the four ‘children’ made their way around this mysterious place and explored it. For me, it would have worked better had they not all been different. You seemed to spend a lot of time describing the different races, the way they looked and what made them special, but I couldn’t see how any of those features were important to the story and ended up being a little confused by all the descriptions. I had that issues with the way you included everyone’s age with their names as well – after you mentioned in the first paragraph that they were very young, I thought it was a little heavy-handed to mention it again so many times. When I got to the end, I realised why you were doing it, but I still think it’s not necessary. It also created a bit of confusion because they didn’t sound like children when they spoke, which made me think the dialogue didn’t sound very natural, until I got to the end when that part became clear. Of course, the twist at the end made the plot quite intriguing, but it took a long time to even find out what they were looking for and it wasn’t easy to care about the characters’ mission when the readers didn’t know what their purpose was. I didn’t notice many spelling errors, but there were quite a few sentences that sounded a little awkward and you might want to take a look if you can improve them. For example, the first one, A white, with shimmering red and blue small streaks streaking around it, wall about three inches thick suddenly appears between the two rock poles. As this was the opening line, you want to make sure that you hook the readers. This sentence was immediately confusing. The first question I had was, “A white what?” You gave some details about ‘it’ before you even said what it was, so the readers won’t be able to get an image here until they get to the part where you tell them it’s a wall. I would move the word ‘wall’ before the first comma and then describe why it wasn’t just plain white. You might also want to look at the repetition of “streaks streaking” which was quite noticeable. Overall, it looks like you have an interesting idea here, but it felt too big for the limits of this contest. If you wanted to rewrite it as a short story, I would suggest simplifying the characters so that you don’t need so many words to describe them and can instead focus on driving the plot to a conclusion at the end. But the project would probably be better suited for a longer tale since it seems that there is much more to come!    My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
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