The Critique

P.ain--raoool_19

Title: P.ain

Author: raoool_19

Summary: 1994, Barton Le Clay. A naive but passionate teen Jimian Black dreams of growing into a successful artist, but is stopped by his academic career and his obsession for grief, which is supposed to help him reach his creative best. Tables turn when he falls for the Blaschko's Line-infected professor's daughter over a trip, and messes up her life after failing at a runaway plan with her before her engagement. With the police and her fiance on his tail, Jim reaches Vegas where he joins an old friend's business. And what he discovers there changes his life forever. The story of how a common student goes through heartbreak, desire, lust, fears, ambition and passions, all overshadowed by one word: pain, only to turn into the infamous and crippled psychopath J.CK.

Review: Okay the first thing I noticed were your fantastic descriptions. You have great talent in describing places, which is a very precious talent to have. Many authors lack the ability to describe the setting properly, myself included. So huge kudos to you for being able to do that.

Now let’s get into grammar. For some reason, you only have single quotations around the dialogue portions which is incorrect. You need to have double quotations. So for example, rather than:

‘I walked my dog.’

It should be

“I walked my dog.”

Because this is a given in most works, I think it turned some readers off with the excuse of “poor grammar” which is not entirely incorrect but not entirely correct either.

I thought that the time change was a bit abrupt. I understand that you’re trying to leave a cliffhanger with the broken sentence but for me personally, it didn’t really flow. I was slightly confused and had to go back and reread the previous paragraph.

I disagree with the comment about the ending punctuation marks of “?!”—in my opinion, it’s perfectly fine. You’re simply describing an emotion. I know that a lot of people say it’s unprofessional, but then they’re basically saying that emotions are unprofessional so I’m pretty sure it’s okay to use an exclamation point and question mark together. Of course, that’s just my opinion, but I just thought I would just mention it.

Overall, you have a great plot and development going on here. The grammar is a bit of an issue but that is an easy fix. Good luck with the rest of your story!