Yay! My very first request <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/b/b…" width="15" height="15" alt="" data-embed-type="emoticon" data-embed-id="366" title=" (Big Grin)"/> I had originally planned to read your sci-fi story but I got some sort of error message about it being a PDF or something, but that’s okay because zombies are cool too.

As with my previous critique I will start off by pointing out ten things that you did right:

_1) You told this story in thirds person. There are times when the first person voice can be the best way to go, but often times—especially in zombie lit—writers revert to first person way too much. Blah blah blah, back in the day things were so different, blah blah blah, sob story, blah blah blah—we have already heard it all so it’s better to go with something new.
_2) You ended it very well and the last four sentences were perfect. Well done.
_3) You do not have too many characters. Three characters are perfect for a standalone story like this one.
_4) The story is not too long. There are about three distinct scenes within this story and you aim for 600-1200 words per scene then the story should be 1800-3600 words. Your word count was 2355, which is pretty much in the middle of that range. As a side note I think it is always good to include the word count in the description section because it gets the reader in the right mindset for what kind of story to expect.
_5) Grammar and spelling is correct for the most part.
_6) SPOILER ALERT - You did not use a Daywalker style cliché where you just create some ‘special’ monster and act like it is a big deal – END OF SPOILER ALERT
_7) Your female character is resourceful.
_8) For the most part you did not overdo descriptions.
_9) Your writing style does not come across as pretentious, self-indulgent, or preachy.
_10) None of your characters gave a longwinded melodramatic speech like that sheriff character from “The Walking Dead.”

Vision *** - It is a good standalone story but I think it had much more potential. There are three things that come to mind when I think of how to write a compelling story: plot, characters and setting. Your plot deserves 3.5 stars, your characters 2.75 stars, and your setting deserves 2 stars.

An alternative to the undead paradigm (i.e. “The Last of Us” game) is fine but I think you are going overboard with the whole “Zed” thing. If they walk like zombies and talk like zombies the reader will expect your characters to call them zombies.

You need to tone down the gay jokes. Halfway into the story it started to feel like a hybrid of “The Walking Dead” and “Modern Family.” Characters who are gay for the sake of being gay are no longer new so I would suggest building in some more subtlety there. A great example of a movie that handled gay characters well was “The Mexican.” All that I could take away about your bride character was that she was a bride character. The real trick to writing a story like this is to be able to think like a first person narrator for each character but then pull it off as a cohesive third person narrative.

One way to set yourself apart as a writer is to give your story a regional kind of feel. As an American I loved “28 Days Later” because it had a British kind of feel to it that made it seem all the more realistic. “True Blood” is great because it has a unique setting, and “World War Z” (movie) was great because of the different settings it included (Newark, NJ was my favorite).

Originality *** - I usually give at least four stars to people who write stuff other than fan fiction but what you did here seemed to be more like a merger of “The Walking Dead” and “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” as opposed to taking something like “The Walking Dead” and making it all your own in a unique new setting. Just as two wrongs do not make a right, two clichés do not equal originality.

Technique **** - It’s good for the most part. I don’t usually do this but since this my first request I included some line editing:

“never got [a] chance to throw it”

“Craig grinned, referring to last New Year’s Eve when Tom had drunkenly attempted…minus two eyebrows” that whole description is out of place and clashes with the flow of the story. Either remove it or move it to a distinct flashback scene.

“She was still there, looking frightening, yet, as fearful as he felt, while she slashed the Zeds”—bad sentence. Change it.

“his husband[‘]s”

Impact *** - The last four sentences deserve 5 stars and the rest as a whole deserves 2 stars so I think that somehow averages out to about 3 stars. First, you need to trim down on some of the dialog. I would start by cutting out the Hawaii/Bride/Gays character development conversation and also tone it down on the swearing. It’s like playing a song where every other note is accented.

Regarding Tom and Craig: No one is familiar with them in the beginning so it is better to describe them without naming them and then let the dialogue bring in the names. If this were fan fiction then you could go straight to the names because pop culture already did all the work as far as getting mental images set up in people’s heads. If I had written this I would have started out with a pigeon eating something under a bridge and then watched from the bird’s POV as it began to fly above a post-apocalyptic city before noticing a couple men on a roof.