First Timer

Sean welcome to ABC. Before jumping in and asking for feedback, read some of the excellent prose on here and provide some feedback to others. Reading others work will help you to improve your own. Juliet

Hello Sean, welcome to what you will find is a very interesting and helpful site. Well I have found it so anyway. You have asked for good honest feedback for your first posting.....Well you may not consider my comments good but I do assure you they are honest and meant to be helpful. 1...It clearly is a first short story. It reads as such and my first comment must be that you should read it again as if you were not the author and reading it for the first time. 2...You should then run the story through your spellcheck to correct the mistakes, and make a point of doing that on everything before posting on this site. This will avoid the sort of errors evident in this piece. 3...You are clearly trying to describe a catastrophe of such proportions that you have become overwhelmed by the desire to describe it in detail, you need to rethink the descriptions you give and their relationship to each other. Was everything reduced to rubble? Not possible because the source of the bombardment would have destroyed itself long before...... That sort of relationship. 4...I thought the idea of the end of the world being marked by a ticking clock very symbolic and I liked it very much. 5...Put bluntly Sean, in my opinion you need to spend more time on this and every other piece you post if you intend to ask for criticism. You won't always like what you hear but you should be able to gain from the comments you get. Oh yes! and not all comments will be as gentle as mine.

Hi Sean, the premise of your story reminds me very much of 'There Will Come Soft Rains' by Ray Bradbury. If you aren't familiar with it, you can find it online here: http://tinyurl.com/3h8o8 It's a very good story, that really puts to work the idea that you've begun with in your story. Cheers, Mark

And it's from about 1950 or thereabouts. Cheers, Mark

Hi Sean You say this was written some time ago - I assume you have done some others since. I will be honest and say that this one read a little bit like a writing exercise rather than a finished story. There was some good imagery and the germ of an excellent idea, but it didn't really get beyond describing the event. It would be interesting to see how you might develop it. Look forward to seeing more of your work. Margharita