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All I Ask
How It Rates
Description
Charlize Wayne is an obese women who finds herself isolated on a beach with her son, her hunger wins over her logic as she goes through the pain of having to survive by eating her own child.
Comments
Okay, so I gave you a thumbs up, but I have some reservations. A couple of style and grammar points:
Periods are your friends. Take some of those longer sentences and put periods in the obvious places. Your fifth paragraph on page one starting with "Charlize lounges comfortably..." That's a long sentence. Make "Her free hand moves..." the start of a new sentence. You can do this in several places.
Watch your past and present tenses. Either all or nothing, or at least only change when there's a reason for it.
Stick with your analogies. We're seeing life through an untrustworthy (Charlize's) perspective. Those sentences starting with "Meaning..." or "And by that I mean..." delete them. Have faith that your reader will make that jump from candy bar to rock.
Spell out your numbers under 100. Change 2 to two. 3 to three. Etc. It's petty, but easy.
Consider taking focus away from Charlize's weight. You don't want to seem like the guy picking on the fat kid.
My last issue with this is that it barely meets the sci-fi requirements of the contest. Where's the non-human character? Are we calling Charlize non-human due to her actions? This feels much more like a twilight zone/outer limits/tales from the crypt than a true sci-fi.
So why did I thumb it up? Because it's a sick, twisted, creative idea. Your ending ties in your beginning and gives us some moral balance to this otherwise mess of debauchery. It's hard to down vote that kind of creativity, for me anyways. A lot of other people might be turned away halfway through the story when things really get nasty.
Thumbs up. Great concept. More savagery, please. I think Charlize could have been classified closer to non-human if you just made her thought processes and decisions even more alien and depraved. I would go all in on this one.
Cool, I'm glad you guys like the concept. BTW Cole was suppose to be the non-human character. when Charlize had put his body back together, he had become soul-less, which was actually the simulation machine malfunctioning as her brain is disconnecting with it, which is why her son had actually turned on her because the simulation was going haywire. I didn't write that in to the story exactly but I had always had that in the back of my mind as the reasoning. And also it's kind of a stretch, but my idea of a utopian society is actually being isolated from society, if that makes any sense.
Okay this was a weird one. I dug the idea though. More of a horror story than SciFi. Until the end of course. Speaking of, I thought that end revelation was interesting but just sort of ended. I felt like it needed more, just not sure what exactly. Maybe have it be a little longer and show what exactly they were doing. Was it for war, to be a spy, an assasin? I wasn't completely sure. Also theres some issues with sentences being too long. They need to be broken up a bit. Otherwise, cool story.
Bit conflicted about this story, but liked it, because the setting was so interesting.
Kind of like a story that starts out mildly realistic bur then devolves into a surrealistic nightmare. Think you might have developed the reveal at the end more, though. It feels like you started out with a really interesting story, regardless of genre, and then kind of glommed on the sci-fi at the end.
What if you started the story with an anonymous hook relating to the test scenario that you can reconnect to in the end? Like the scene at the end of 'The Ususal Suspects' where they in the end reconnect to something they said in the very beginning that we didn't even think of then.
This is grotesque and surreal. I found it a tough read in parts, with the horror section difficult to swallow (excuse the pun). Is the obesity angle needed here? I'm not convinced fat people are any more likely to turn cannibal in such a short space than skinny people. The ending pretty much negates that anyway. I agree with Klahol about the ending. It needs more development, as it does have a tacked on feel.
I'm not sure what I just read. A woman decides to kill/eat her child after a single day alone? Even in a computer simulation this doesn't make sense to me.