Short Stores // 200 words at a time
 

Hi, my name is Travis Brody. I'm a long-time lurker of the site and I've decided to start writing every day. I'm a huge horror fan and like to call myself a writer even though I haven't been writing nearly anything lately. I have some downtime at work and have decided to use that downtime to write 250 words a day and figured posting my writing on a public forum could only be beneficial.

Basically I'm going to write whatever comes to my head, then login the next
day and edit what I've wrote according to critiques that make sense to me and post another 200 words.

The Skin Taker

"Gotcha, found ya, now I'm gonna eat you!" Charlie cried out as he arched his back to avoid my outstretched arms. "You're such a baby! You better hurry up before the real skin taker really does come for you. He won't come out in the day time because the sunlight hurts his skin, but there is nothing to keep him away when the sun goes down." The Skin Taker was a creature I had made up to torment my little brother, not that I needed to go to such great lengths mind you.

It was rather easy to torture the little brat. He deserved it, he just had to follow me everywhere.If I jumped off a bridge he would probably jump too, and he would make every second of the fall as annoying as possible. "Wait up Sis, my legs hurt" I started walking faster until he stopped trying to catch up to me and sat down under a tree to sulk. "You're going to make quite the little snack for the skin taker... I'll wait for you, just hurry the hell up" I sat down to wait for him and closed my eyes as I listened to the sound of crunching twigs draw closer as my brother hurried to catch up.

http://th05.deviantart.net/fs47/300W...ra_Monster.jpg

*The Slender man who inspired this creature after I was reading about him today*

good luck getting those beneficial critiques, new jack.

200 to 250 words is a bold challenge. I wouldn't say you couldn't find priceless advice on these boards (I've found some) but it's going to take a bit of work on your part. Write some more and come back and tell us a scary story-but now you totally have to keep it under 250 words. Good luck.

judging by the fact that 200 words have gone by and we have no idea where the characters are or what they are doing, I would say this is going to be around 5-8,000+ words in total

this person has 2 posts though which leads me to two conclusions:

#1 asshole
#2 an hdc regular who wants to see how much we will make fun of him before they come out of the writer's closet on their real account. (Travis Brody? really)

I'm sure there are horror fiction forums for 11 year olds to post their stuff. If you are 11 and want critiques of your work taking into account that you are 11, please post that you are 11. If you are not 11, then your language is awkward, you do nothing to engage the reader and your narrator is nebulous and possesses only one personality trait. If you're going to give somebody 200 words you have to make them work.
"The skin taker is eight feet tall with flaky puke green skin, rotten breath and a single glowing eye in the middle of his forehead. He wears a bowler hat and and a spotless black Victorian longcoat and carries a large black briefcase and a doctor's bag full of instruments. Nobody knows who he is, why he keeps the skins or wear he got the bizarre medical equipment he uses to peel them off. Nobody knows because I made him up to scare my brother. My brother was an insufferable pest and I was tired of him following me around. "

I was so going to say Travis Brody was the best character in the whole story too :)

Thanks for the tips, but the description of the monster is trivial and I don't think most children would use words like "insufferable" even through internal dialogue. I'm not in the business of waving around an english major, I'm in the business of writing stories that I hope people will enjoy. If I sound 11 than that is terrific because that is how old the girl in my story is, her brother is around 7 years old. My story isn't about a scary creature and how scary it is, give me more credit than that.

I'm going to try to keep expanding the story 200 words at a time. I would appreciate more constructive criticism because each one of these entries will be rushed and need to be rewritten. I appreciate you taking the time to critique, doc_faustus. I also enjoyed your description of the made-up monster.

210-aboutbmw

Yarr copy and paste be a cruel mistress :(