my name is Tiggy and I am reviewing your story as a judge for "Invalid Item" . Thanks for entering! Please bear in mind that my comments and suggestions are only my opinion. Other reviewers might see it differently.
First Impression:
A bittersweet story. The main character found success but not love (at least not with this man - she might have found someone else later in life but you didn’t say). It sounded like she was happy but always thought about the man she met in the bar and spent an evening with. They even talked about the future - and then they never met up again. It seemed strange how they almost met or spoke on the phone a couple of times afterwards. There was something odd about how she didn’t approach him when she saw him or how he rang her but never said anything, for an hour. You didn’t explain this, and as you didn’t use the whole world limit, I felt that this might have been a missed opportunity to make the story a little clearer.
Suggestions:
I noticed a few small errors:
Tjernobyl's catastrophe, the biggest nuclear disaster went down that twilight.
I believe there needs to be a comma after “disaster”. I also wasn’t sure how this was related to the story, but I might be missing something.
"Here you go, I am Chris by the way".
I would make this two separate sentence with a period instead of the comma. And the period at the end should be before the closing speech marks. Same again here: "Caitlyn".
feeling comfortable in eachother's company
I think that should be two words, “in each other’s company”.
Final Thoughts:
I wonder if the story might have benefited from a bit more dialogue. I didn’t really feel like I got to know the characters very well in this short tale because the part where they lost touch took me by surprise. It might have helped to know a bit more about them which is easiest to show in dialogue with the appropriate facial expressions and gestures added. Chris’ behaviour was quite odd and a few hints earlier on would have made it easier to understand him.
Overall, I thought this was a good story but a bit of an edit might help to make it easier for the readers to understand.
Review #4783066
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You responded to this review 10/29/2024 @ 4:08pm EDT