"A Time Long Forgotten..." by Black

[Wyvern]

Black,

 

It's definitely nice to see you committing yourself to a story, and the heart and inspiration to write is present in your recent story. Resident Evil similarities aside (zombies/canine zombies, female heroine sporting a large arsenal of weaponry, shot gun blasts that blow off the heads of several zombies at a time, mutant research labs with viruses) your story seems to present an interesting take on the B-movie action zombie formula and is a nice start. I especially liked the mutant house cat reference in your most recent post, as it caught me off-guard and was an interesting and original twist.

 

There are several suggestions that I'd like to offer you for ways to improve and build upon what's a nice start to a story, since you seem very motivated to write it and I'd like to help out. The following things came to my attention:

 

- The tone of the story currently seems a little confused to me. Your ambition to write an excellent story is apparent in your incorporations of action, comedy, horror, and drama, but at the moment the story doesn't seem to have one particular focus. Is the story meant as comedy, action/drama, horror, or a comic spoof of horror and action/drama? Is the story's slant more oriented towards comedy, or is it meant as something more serious with comedy interspersed throughout it? I would recommend staying consistent with one or the other, as alternating between seriousness and comedy in the posts may cause the serious to not come off as so serious, and the comic to not seem so comic.

 

- I mentioned this earlier, but the Resident Evil influence definitely seems apparent in the story. While there's nothing wrong with using Resident Evil and zombie flicks as a point of inspiration, you should be sure add your own original details to really make the story your own. A perfect example of this would be the mutant house cat reference, as that is you using your imagination and applying it to the mutant research lab scenario, creating something unique that really catches the readers attention. Cliches can be used well if you play off of them correctly, but if you simply add details that have already been seen elsewhere, the reader will probably be uninterested in them.

 

- On a more minor note: grammatically speaking, the dialogues might work better without adding the names in front of the quotations to indicate who's speaking. Instead, try to use as few indicators as possible... let the dialogues indicate who is speaking, or perhaps add gestures or actions between the dialogues that show which character is speaking. Elipses are also used rather extensively throughout the story, which is something I sympathize with since I used to use them 90% of the time. You may want to cut down on them just a bit, as they can slow the flow of the story and make the reading more difficult.

 

Those are my three main suggestions. Once again, I'm happy to see you committed to writing this story, and encourage you to continue it! Oh, and by the way, the Black and Travis cameos left me with a grin. ;-)

[Quincunx]

I've been putting off reading this--the large blocks of text without spaces in between clashed with the names in front of each block of conversation--part novel, part movie script, it confused my eyes. Tonight I just plunged in and found a good read, but it does take a bit of an effort to pick up, and entertaining stories shouldn't be something you have to dedicate yourself to reading.

 

The chunks read like episodes of a television show, with all the background handily put into the first post and nothing but action thereafter, with "tune in next week" foreshadowing at the end of many posts. "Jane" always makes me think of Edgar Rice Burroughs and this puts me in a B-movie frame of mind, so I picture one of those action series on the newer networks as I read (but for the love of all that's holy, don't use clips from the video game for your CGI *coughcough*). There isn't enough of the story arc yet to make a season, and probably not quite enough for a two-hour special either, so I'll disagree with Wyvern that the plot doesn't have to have gone somewhere yet.

 

I'll probably post again later once more of the story arc has been revealed.