There is some really nice imagery here and some very sweet writing. I do feel this would work better as a prose piece, rather than poetry. I would also advise you to be careful of descending into cliches and 'purple prose' as there are parts of this which are borderline saccharine and trite. Overall, good start but in need of revision. As I read: If there is light from the brightly shining moon, it's not "pitch black darkness". "mystique" Do you mean mysterious? Mystique is strangely abstract...

This is really lovely. The intro was very well done and the connection made at the end was done with just the right amount of delicacy. Your dialogue is natural, not overused, and provides a good sketch of your characters. The one real critique I have is small and entirely a matter of personal taste, but I would have preferred a touch more ambiguity in the relationship between the two characters, at least in regards to the repetitiveness of their discussions. "Truth, afterall, was that which ...

This started out reasonably, despite the grammatical errors (that continue throughout) and the missed opportunities to give the reader an actual picture of what you're describing. The dialogue needs to be tagged so we can actually tell who is talking as we read it, not just upon looking back. Your main character is eminently unlikable, which may have been your intention, but he is also not particularly interesting. To be honest, not much in this story is interesting to me. There is a solid ba...

I'm not quite sure what this is, to be honest. Short story, prose poetry, what? Regardless, I found the prose too purple and meat of the 'story' itself off-putting. This is straight out of the most formulaic, unrealistic bodice-ripper. "symbol of man", "lotus blossom", "woman's heat". These types of phrases leech all reality out of what you're describing; though I can understand the desire not to become crude, there is a way to describe sex in a more visceral way without crudity. More realist...

Just to start off- the problem with self-inserts, or even characters the author identifies too closely with, is that they are often poorly drawn, idealistic and unrealistic. They become charicatures, unable to be judged as harshly as needed by the author and the relationships between them and other characters become flawed and in turn damages other characters. This is true in your story. The 'alchemist' is an incredibly minor character in this story though perhaps not if you intend this to be...

This has a lot of major grammatical problems and I have to admit that it made it extremely difficult to read. There is a lot of missing punctuation, over punctuation, and sentence structure is often very poor. Watch out for both sentence fragments and run-on sentences. I don't think the very short, matter of fact sentences ("Then he whipped her." "I panicked." etc) are helping this story as they read as very emotionless and are often examples of you 'telling, not showing'. It also needs a tho...

I like a lot about this. The rhythm, evocative of folk ballads, is entirely appropriate and adds a lot to the atmosphere of the story. For the most part you keep a hold of this quite well but there are times when it falls off or changes markedly; I found these times a bit jarring. I'm confused as to why the children would wish to hear the story the mother tells, night after night, when it would be not simply a scary story but a frightening and depressing reality. There are a number of lines t...

Writing in an accent is extremely difficult to do and in my opinion you've failed here. If you do this, there needs to be a reason for it and the language you use needs to be appropriate. So, is he speaking English with an accent or an anglisiced version of Scots? If it's the former, the accent is unnecessary and the language does not fit to the latter or is inconsistent. It's difficult to comment on some aspects of this, being as it's part of a larger work I haven't read. I wasn't particular...

Sentence structure is generally bad- confusing and choppy. It breaks the flow of your story and at times becomes nonsensical. For example: "Her red hair streaming in the wind over her naked form was given to the shades that had once been men." Punctuation is not terrible but needs some work. Random capitalisation needs to be taken out. Be consistent with the capitalisation of spirit, body, mind. Discreetly not discretely. <-Pet peeve. Watch 'there' and 'their', they were mixed up a couple ...

I had a lot of trouble with the pacing of your story- for me, it dragged quite badly and I thought it too bogged down with descriptions of the minutiae. Are two paragraphs necessary to describe getting out of the truck? While your descriptions are clear and often interesting, the problem with describing every action in exacting detail is that the readers thoughts are moving faster than your story and you are not satisfying that. I don't particularly like the first-person narrative in this pie...