The Club Incident

[dreams_power]

Title: The Club Incident
Word count: ~4,100
Summary: When Kelly's old roommate comes to visit, she starts a chain of events that could break Carolyn.

Comments

Critique, Part 1 of 2

[arkan2]

I’m not sure if this shows in your other work that I’ve seen or not, but in this chapter, you display a marked proclivity for creative dialogue tags. Being imaginative is good, but you don’t want to get too fancy with something as essentially dull as dialogue tags. (It’s kinda like saying “liquid” or “beverage” when you mean “water,” which is something my mother particularly dislikes.) Basically, I’m saying that people are reading for the interesting dialogue, not interesting dialogue tags. Now when using a substitute for “said” really will make the scene clearer, or when “said” is just too mild/inappropriate, then I would say using a little creativeness is called for. Even so, I personally like to think I generally keep my ratio of “said” to “said”-substitutes is about five to own. Make of all this what you will.

It was almost as if she didn’t know how to talk to me anymore, and she was spending more and more time in her room or her ‘office’.Are we supposed to understand why she puts quotes around “office”? Cause I don’t. I can

Critique, Part 2 of 2

[arkan2]

I probably shouldn’t have drank two glasses of vodka so quickly, I had gotten out of the habit of drinking regularly(,) so my tolerance wasn’t particularly good.

I nodded and she lead me down a flight of stairs, taking care to go slow.
Typo here: “led” not “lead.”

A familiar song started to play and we danced like we did at home
This little tidbit of information is presented a bit too casually, in my opinion. You haven’t said anywhere before that they dance together at home, and while it’s entirely believable, it’s not exactly expected. It’s not exactly matter-of-fact for the audience.

I felt adrift, as if I () lost my anchor and was lost in a sea of bodies.
I suspect you left out “had” between “I” and the first “lost.” Speaking of which, if you can possibly change one of these “lost”s to something else, that would probably be for the best.

Someone handed me a pair of boxer shorts and a tank top to cover my naked body. I did so, scrubbing my face with the corner of a blanket. A damp cloth soon took its place, given to me by