Feedback: Good, okay or don't give up the day job :)

peaches79

This is something I started ages ago and never did anything with.
I'd love some feedback if anyone cares to comment (realistic but kind!). I haven't ever posted personal work before so this is me being brave
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I can see a tree, from where I’m sitting looking out this window.
By this time next week I don’t think that tree will still be there. I don’t think I’ll be here, and who knows where everything else will fall?
I had a dream last night, you see. I dreamt I saw four horses with fire at their hooves and great noise announcing their arrival. But it was only a dream, I suppose. I dreamt I died and the world was ending.

I just can’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t a dream; that something strange is happening. Something I can’t see or feel yet is approaching with all the silence of a breeze until it hits the leaves of the trees or catches some litter on the street and tosses it about before picking it up in a gust and crashing it into a wall.

Sammy stood up and sighed. She closed her diary.
She must be coming down with a cold she thought. She could usually shake off any feelings of depression at the world easy enough but today it was different. Today felt like the start of a whole new world. And she felt like the only person who knew it. She could hear her parents moving around downstairs, about to start on their daily grind of home to office to supermarket to home. She wondered sometimes if they ever got sick of each other or if they ever longed for someone new or longed to meet each other afresh again. What happened when you knew everything you could about someone? What happened when the cute anomalies of their personality became an annoyance of daily routine? When you loved someone so much, that you married them and had children with them- did the love ever disappear or lessen?

The floor board creaked again. They couldn’t feel anything different, she thought. If they knew the world was changing, they’d stay in bed all day every day for however many days are left and keep on having sex, holding each other and having more sex. Terrified Sex, she smirked.
She shook her head in disgust at allowing herself to think of her parents having ‘the sex’. Perhaps she was really going crazy, she reasoned, maybe her teenage hormones had finally flipped her over the edge of sanity in an oestrogen fuelled haze. Because, come on, thinking that the world was ending and soon too, was pretty whacked out. She decided to continue the day as normal and watch for any more signs of personal craziness.

She climbed the stairs, deep in thought as her mother began her descent.
‘You know that’s unlucky Mam- passing me on the stairs?’
She got no response.
‘Passing someone on the stairs?’ she repeated.
Her mother, with a sad smile touched down in the hall and disappeared towards the kitchen as if she hadn’t seen or heard a word Sam had said.
Perhaps she was just tired? Sammy tried to remember if she had done all her chores the day before- hovering (check), washing (check), recycling….recycling. She’d forgotten about that. She was too busy trying to get into town to go to the coffee shop and meet up with everyone, which she’d just about managed.
It was late when she got back then- too late to go tramping around in the garden in the dark. The bottom of the garden seemed like an eternity of footsteps in the darkness, the one time she had been down there in the dark by herself had terrified her immensely. Besides which, she had never liked the dark anyway. Perhaps Dad had done it for her?
Probably not.

Sammy heard the front door slam and frowned at the sound. It was Friday morning at…she looked at her watch…. Ten thirty and they were still hanging around the house. She wondered why they hadn’t gone to work early and if they had the day off why they were leaving her at home alone for the day. The frown hung on her forehead slowly fading. She looked out the window and saw them getting into the car. Sammy banged the window, but they were in the car now and wouldn’t hear her. Her mum looked up to the window and Sammy made a desperate ‘what the hell?’ hand gestures and shrugged. But to no avail, the red car started and made its urgent way down the drive and off out into the world.

Sammy felt like an abandoned puppy. God, they were acting really stupid for one forgotten chore!

leuler

I like it, it is a good opening and I would like to read more.

peaches79

Thanks I can't remember where I thought it was going though.
I'll have to try to find some time to start up again.

Any other feedback out there?

TommyGrav

It's very well written, no doubt. But when writing in such an offbeat, matter of fact, stream of consciousness way, it's very hard to maintain standard and interest levels throughout any lengthy piece.
But no, credit where it's due, you've clearly got talent, your style is excellent. I would say that you try a bit hard to impress with your metaphors a bit though. Every abstract concept doesn't have to have be assigned an everyday metaphor just for the sake of it, and some of them are a bit tortured and inappropriate.

I like how it starts off as a prophecy of the end of the world, and a meditation on how we waste our lives. This is a bit cliched, but you write about it well. But it then lurches into a very mundane scene with the housework incident. No problem with that, but the way the language changes with it, and becomes so throwaway and frivolous, is a bit weird and doesn't seem natural.

Overall, i'd say you;re an excellent writer trying too hard to make every word breathtaking. Scale it down a bit, just let the words flow, and don't worry about making your writing too technically excellent. The best writing always happens when you're enjoying yourself and just letting loose. The structure of your work just doesn't seem natural to me. You seem to be trying to hard to write as you "should"

But if you've got more, I'd like to see it.

peaches79

Thanks Tommy, excellent critique, much appreciated.
Will definately post more soon, and try to take the feedback on board

Matt Holck

I don't understand the relation of the title

just one more stranger telling me I'm not worth paying for

peaches79

Huh? It was a reference to looking for feedback Matt- that's all