CM, I think it would be cool if you made this an annual tradition like the sexiest NSer thread.
Everyone else, hi there.
I just want to offer some unofficial brutally honest feedback. If you don't like my feedback, you are free to ignore it. It's just that some people in here really don't know what they're doing, and it might be helpful if someone told them what they are doing wrong. Or it might crush their soul, but this is meant to be a helpful reality check, not a soul-crushing attack.
New East Ireland: That's not a story. It's a scene. It has no plot. It also has a severe shortage of character development. Who are these people?
JuNii: You have a lot of mechanical problems, like sentence fragments and so forth. I'm unclear on whether you are writing about wolf-people or just wolves. You say Artimis's mother “calmly put one hand on her shoulder,” but if they are wolves it ought to be a paw rather than a hand. It seems like you've thought a lot about the mythical setting, the organization of these wolf packs, etc.; but you need to put more emphasis on developing the individual personalities of the characters. It's obvious that you are interested in the world you're writing about, but I skimmed the last few paragraphs because I wasn't interested in the characters.
Yesopalitha: You're trying too hard. There's a lot of dramatic tension, but you don't need to have that level of tension in every scene. It gets to be a bit one-note if the whole story is like that.
Manahakatouki: Some of the writing is a bit hackneyed, but I have seen worse stories that were professionally published. The next time you write a short story, you might want to try submitting it for publication. Minor nitpick: "harmful pestilence" is redundant.
Foamy XIII: It needs more of a plot. Some of the word choices are a bit clumsy because you're faking a 19th century style and not quite getting it right.
Nationstatelandsville: Not too bad. It's a decent story idea, but the writing doesn't grab me.
Zeth Rekia: It's incoherent, it has problems with sentence structure, and the character-development leaves something to be desired.
Theseonia: You're trying way too hard. Some of the individual sentences are beautiful, but when you agonize over every sentence, it makes it a bit agonizing to read. When you're writing dialog, you might want to use "he said" and "she said" more often so it's easier to keep track of which character is talking. You have a lot of blocks of dialog alternating with paragraphs of narration, where each block of dialog is close to the same length, and each paragraph of narration is close to the same length. You should vary the rhythm of the story more. You don't have much of a plot, and your characters aren't particularly compelling. The ending is amateurish over-the-top crap. The ending would be a lot more emotionally powerful if the woman in the story was a more engaging character. This story would be better if you expanded it and described some of the events that led up to this scene.
Dragosovlkiav: I'm sorry; I can't read that. You've misspelled words in both German and English, and it looks like you are trying too hard to make your story gritty.
Maineiacs: You write well, but you are trying to cram in too much plot in too short of a space. You said you were planning to turn this into a larger work, and I think that is what you need to do. Compressing it into a short story didn't work.
