Hi, love! I'm usually the poetry judge for the "Newbies ONLY Short Story & Poem Contest" , but I have judged the short story section in the past. I might end up doing it again for the June entries, so I'm giving them all a read. I thought that you might like some quick feedback (though I do emphasize quick because I have lots of stories to read).

Things I Like:

This story has lots of sentiment and a little dose of humor as well (no pun intended). You have lots of great details in this piece as well. By the end, the reader gets to know Rusty as a main character, which is a feat for an animal story!

I enjoyed watching the story unfold. I'm not an animal person, but I think that everyone can relate on some level to caring for someone you love-- whether it's a person or an animal.

The ending was fun and wrapped the piece up nicely.

Observations & Suggestions:

As much as I loved the story, there were times when the plot wandered a bit. I did like some of the details and anecdotes mentioned when the story wandered, but they still struck me as belonging to a different story.

The "Miss Fanny indulged Rusty" paragraph (third from the bottom), for instance, has some really sweet details in it, but its placement and content seemed a bit out of place at the end. Months had passed already... and now we're talking about general life with Rusty? It slowed down the pace.

This wandering happens now and then and made the story seem overly long. It might not even be the details so much as the placement within the story that made them seem out of place. Something to think about when revising.

I wont harp on this either, but the grammar needs work. There are unintended sentence fragments (e.g. "Always having a deep interest in each boy and girl and feeling that in some way they were hers."), missing commas, and other issues. I know that not everyone is a grammar nut, but it does make reading difficult at times.

This last observation is probably the most important if you intend to edit. You use "she"/"he" far too much in this piece-- for my taste anyway. Those pronouns get the best of everybody sometimes. Sooo many sentences have "she" or "he" as a subject that it becomes distracting and monotonous after a while. It seemed like some paragraphs were just packed full of pronouns. It can be very difficult to avoid, but I would try to remove as many as I could. Sometimes, it might help to use synonyms ("the woman", "the lady", "the cat", "the animal"), and other times a slight rewrite might allow you to remove a few.

Overall, I think that this is an enjoyable story. It could use a bit of reorganizing for the sake of plot flow. A grammar edit and replacement of some pronouns would help readability as well, but you do have the foundation for a great little piece here!




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