Hello, qoheleth

What I liked

The twist at the end of your story is great. The premise is strong, and you have a good lead up to the actual twist and revelation of truth. That's all good.

What might need work

Personally, I felt you laboured the end a bit. There's an old adage in comedy, and it's to 'Always leave them wanting more.' Instead, you continued the story long after the twist and revelation of truth to go into graphic detail about what happened next. While what happened next is good, it's a little too much. You've overplayed your hand. The thing is, you can't possibly write anything as good as what your readers can imagine for themselves as the two characters' fates. If you bring the readers up to a point where what is going to happen to the characters is strongly implied, (eg. at the moment their clothes are removed, when possibly you could have the aliens take out shiny, sharp looking scientific instruments) then you can end the story there and allow your readers to imagine their fates.

She hated the fact that she would get older and older and need to find a more reputable career. - this sentence appears contradictory juxtapositioned between one that implies she can't wait to give up her current career and a following one that implies she really wants to go to college to study nursing. Think about what you've written here. Yes, it's realistic, but either she's keen to be a nurse or she isn't. Both feelings (of hating to have to give up her current job/of really wanting to be a nurse) are valid, but they are pretty much mutually exclusive.

You may need to learn how to better 'show' a scene to make it more 'real' to the reader, to get them feeling like they're there in the scene with these two characters, to create that 'suspension of disbelief' you get when watchng a film and your favourite character makes you laugh/cry/hurl. Take the following paragraph:

As she walked down the street she saw an ugly, hairy homeless man pushing a shopping cart full of junk. He was in his fifties and had a full beard and mustache. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and he smelled bad. Sophia hoped that the homeless man would just ignore her and let her do her job, but the homeless man just had to try to get something out of her.

First of all, you're doing something called 'filtering'. Filtering is when you place an unnecessary barrier between the reader and the story that effectively serves to remind the reader that the story is not real. Words that cause 'filtering' are words like 'she saw' and 'he smelled'. It's not that there's anything wrong with these phrases, but it's better for engaging the reader if you can avoid reminding them that it's the character doing these things rather than themselves. I know this is a difficult concept to grasp, but I'm going to do a quick re-write of that paragraph to try and show you what I mean.

As she walked along the cracked sidewalk, a wrinkled, homeless man pushed a junk-filled shopping cart her direction. He paused and wiped something slimy from his unkempt, gray beard, then wiped it on his grotty shirt. The breeze carried a stench of body odor and stale urine, and Sophia wrinkled her nose. "For Jesus sake, please ignore me," she silently prayed. "I've only had two johns this evening, and I've bills to pay." The man glanced around, and when his gaze alighted on Sophia, he grinned, revealling an assortment of broken and black teeth. She cringed. Why couldn't life be simple?

The trick is to avoid saying 'she smelled something bad' and instead to say something more concrete 'body odor' and to 'show' her reaction to that 'wrinkled her nose'. And, instead of stating that he's in his fifties, you say things like he's wrinkled or he's got gray hair. Instead of stating 'he's ugly' you show things like 'an assortment of broken and black teeth'. That's how you 'show' instead of 'tell'. The only problem with 'showing' is that it often takes more words than 'telling', but it has the advantage of better engaging the reader.

Hope that helps.

Thank you for sharing!

Best wishes,

Bob :D




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