The Diaries

Skilful use of prose, stylish and descriptive.

I like the way you brought the non-incidental cafe girl to life, I could very much picture her in my mind.

I read it twice but found the actual underlying story hard to pick out. There's no doubt you have writing ability, but I would prefer to see a few simple sentences thrown in there to help prod the story along.

I have the same habit sometimes, being seduced with the romance of sensual storytelling, I have to discipline myself to remember that storytelling is also a big part of it

Well done, I enjoyed your style, and the technicalities of the piece. Would like to see a secondary character flushed out and explored.

This is a wonderful piece of prose.

You're writing is incredibly sensual. The flow of your sentances keep your longer descriptions engaging, rather than tedious (as is often the risk with such things)

This story felt like a short dip in a steamy bath. I actually finished it feeling a little dizy. I especially liked the beginning part, with the woman. It was intesnly honest and personal to your character.

I found the description of the clothing, partiularly the "$30 shoes) abrasive. It flet like an interuption from the more liquid dsecriptions in the rest of the story.

This piece was very cinematic, which i always enjoy. You could stand to tighten up your style a bit, but it is a very solid bit of work. I have a little advice for you; try reading your pieces aloud, to evaluate the flow of your phrases and your punctuation.

Nearly everything. Which brings us to:

The first paragraph I think was the most painful; it seemed like you were trying a bit too hard to be descriptive. Description need not always rely on adjectives - a well-picked verb or noun is usually ten times better than a phrase with four or five adjectives, which can drag down the writing and make it seem forced.

Luckily, this was ironed out rather quickly and I have no major qualms with the rest of the piece.

It has a shaky start, but quickly asserts itself into a piece with a unique mood and a good sense of storytelling.

That was fantastic. I definitely didn't expect something like this to come from someone whose writings are almost always comedy. To be honest, when I heard you were writing something that wasn't humor, I never thought it would work. (No offense.) But you've proven me wrong, and any doubt I had in your descriptive writing capabilities have been erased.

The imagery, the vocabulary, and your writing style are all great. I particularly enjoyed this little metaphor: "The contact of our skin is electric and ignites the gasoline already racing in our veins, making us both casualties to the inevitable explosion." It's a bit wordy, but it's probably better than I could have done.

The rest of the article is anything but wordy, and I mean that in a good way. Your writing is concise enough to keep the interest of the reader, and describe the thoughts and feelings of the character without going on and on forever. Case in point: "I have other goals, other priorities. But they aren't here, and she is." The character does a complete mental one-eighty in two short sentences.

For such a short piece of writing, you character also has a surprising amount of personality. You managed to fit a whole lot into a very small space, probably because you're writing about something that we can all relate to. (The thing I'm talking about, of course, is sex, but you managed to do it tastefully and with as few clichés as possible, which I like.)

Although the descriptive language and writing style used in the article is very good, there were a few sentences throughout the story that just didn't seem to flow. The best concrete example I can find is the use of informal or colloquial phrases (such as "next to no traffic" and "accidentally on purpose") which seem to clash with the professional tone of the rest of the story. I'm probably the only one who had a problem with this, but I still need something to fill this space.

There are also a few errors that caught my eye, such as missing spaces, repeated words, and spelling mistakes. I suppose these kinds of errors are all but inevitable without the help of a professional editor.

As you can tell, I liked it. Although the article didn't follow the typical formula of a short story, as there wasn't really any defined beginning or end, it gave us a vivid glimpse into another person's life. Very well done, and my apologies for writing such an obscenely long review.