Hi, love! I'm the poetry judge for the "Newbies ONLY Short Story & Poem Contest" , but for June, I might just help out with the story judging as well. At any rate, I'm reading the stories! I thought you might like some feedback.

Things I Like:

You have lots of atmospheric details in this piece. They certainly set the right tone for horror.

There is a chaotic sort of vibe here that is also fitting for someone who is disoriented.

Observations & Suggestions:

There are times when the "Keep going!" self-pep-talks get a bit stale. It just happens far too frequently to be effective for me. The majority of the story is a description of her being hurt and trying to keep going. That is alright, but after a while, I felt like just scanning the rest until something happened. A full 6 out of 8 paragraphs are pretty much the same thing-- hurt, confused, stumbling around. You wrote it well, but it became slightly dull I guess.

There was a bit of repetition in the word choice too, which didn't help matters. "Spun" appears 3 times in the final two paragraphs (the "spun, swaying dizzily" was sort of overkill, by the way--- just cut the spun and you'd be down one "spun" and not lose meaning). "Dirt"/"Dirty" was used a whopping 9 times. "pain" and "burned" were used twice each. It might not seem obvious to most people, but I am very sensitive to repetition. It tends to bore me, reading the same words to describe the same type of sensation over and over. To me, it is a cue that the piece could be shorter and say exactly the same thing.

The action finally came when she ended up at the cabin. Remembering the horror from before and the "oh no! the cabin!" bits were the best in the prologue, but they were only a small fraction of it.

Through all of it, I never really cared what happened to her. I don't know anything about her really. She's probably going to die... but that's about it.

As far as mechanics go, there are some grammar snafus here and there. Tons of missing commas is the most obvious. It could use an edit for those.

On the mechanics side, the biggest issue for me was the use of "she". Again, I'm sensitive to repetition, and the "She did this" "she did that" "she was.." got really monotonous for me. 56(!) uses of "she" in just over 1000 words? Way, way, way too much.

She swallowed. She tripped. She wanted to sleep. She didn't want to die. She had to get up. She pushed. She tried. She was weak. She was alone. She might die, but she wasn't dead. She bit. She heaved. She had left. She swung. She gritted. She stumbled. She took. She knew. She was weaving. She was stepping. She knew she was standing.

This is three random paragraphs in your story... in a row with only a few sentences in between. Now, it that good? Intriguing? Fun to read? I wanted to put this into perspective for you. This is how it sounded to me as I read it, and this is just a small fraction of them. Sorry if the illustration seems harsh, but it is important to not overuse pronouns. Pronouns are, by their very nature, boring place holders.

Overall, the piece was sort of fun to read but not really. The repetition, both in word choice and content, was difficult for me to get past. In the end, I felt like you could have written the exact same thing and to better effect with half the word count. It isn't bad, but it isn't really good either. It could be a really exceptional prologue with some revision though, and if you decide to revise, I would be happy to give it another read and change my rating if appropriate.




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