Hi JLS,
I’m honored to read and review 'Mr. C'
Title and Description: Your title and description work well together, but seeing Mr. C alone is kind of bland. I know figuring out a title and description are both hard for me and I've been known to change them several times while I'm trying to get something that doesn't give too much away, while enticing someone to come in to read the story.
Contents: You've captured the story of a seemingly guilty school maintenance guy, with an alter ego that you've led the reader to believe that he's the serial killer in the community. Thankfully the twist at the end reminds the reader it isn't fair to jump to conclusions about anyone. I'd hate to think of a serial killer sulking around in a school, which made it a great choice.
You've captured the innocence lost of one of your young characters, and the conversation between children (albeit hard to follow without tags). You've captured the fear of the mom as she goes down into Mr. C's basement. The plot points all work well together.
Thumbs up: You've captured a sense of terror, and building intensity through your tale.
Please remember, I'm just a writer like you, and always take reviews with a grain of salt. You have to decide what is best for your work and follow your heart.
The hard part...
Conventions: Commas, voice tags to know who is speaking, spelling, paragraphs, spacing.
If I were to hazard a guess, correct me if I'm wrong. This was a story begging to be told, but you haven't gone back to edit it to get all the kinks out. If that's where its at, then it's time to polish it up. There is something special in your story. I really enjoyed reading it, but there were places where the conventional errors pulled me out of the story and I started wanting to fix it.
One thing that I do consistently, is I go back and read each paragraph, and sometimes I break it down and read a piece sentence by sentence out loud. That is an easy way to see if you've left out any words and you can check for commas, speaker tags, and stuff like that.
One of the teacher's that I worked with husband is dyslexic, and she would go back and proof read his letters to parents and such, from the bottom up. It helped her focus on punctuation an meaning of each section. I've found out that it works when working with a first draft and catching things that my fingers just couldn't keep up with my mind.
I think that's the biggest thing, I think your mind was going faster than your fingers.
One of the things I would do with my students is to break it down. Try to remember that your audience is basically stupid. They don't know anything that's inside your head. You have to tell them everything... correction, you have to put your pictures of the action into their heads. Use your senses, you really started using them when describing the smells toward the end, and how delicious the dinner was, go back to the beginning and see if you can add some of those details to the beginning.
I know I've given you a lot to take in and process. I really think if you put a little effort into proofing and adding some of the details you see in your mind's eye to your written word you'll have a terrific tale!
Keep writing. Keep sharing. Composing stories that have a person sitting on the edge of their seat with bated breath are a work of art, and Mr. C is heading in that direction!
Thank you for sharing your work here on WdC. I'll look forward to reading more of your work in the future.
Amay
 
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