It brought him to a very suspicious page with another link. He clicked that one too, and he was directed to a webpage that told him to go outside. He did, and he waited there for three hours. Then he went back into his house to eat lunch. He reached for the handlebar of his refrigerator and his hand grasped thin air. He looked at the blank space where his refrigerator once stood and found a note.
It said, "Thanks for clicking on the link and allowing us to steal most of your stuff! We were very poor, and we needed some stuff to sell. All we had was our computer, so we decided to spam a few selectively absentminded people and ask them to go outside. While you were outside we stole your stuff. ( ^_^ )
-Your very friendly neighbor, Buockett Muce
Let's work on sentence structure a bit today.
ReplyDelete"It takes a unusually long time to load, and then it opens." should be changed to "It takes _an_ unusually long time to load _before_ it opens.
"He sighs and clicks the back button on his browser. He moves his mouse down to the correct email and it opens."
Those two sentences should be combined into, "He sighs, clicks the back button on his browser, and opens the correct email." It's a lot more concise, and it avoids the repetition of two "he"'s in the sentences.
"Bob was so dumbfound by the title that he continued to scroll down the e-mail. On the very bottom of the e-mail, there was a link."
...should be changed to "Doubfounded by the title, Bob continued to scroll down the email until he saw a link at the very bottom." This avoids having two "email" words too close to each other - it flows better.
"He lived his normal life of sleeping, playing, and eating for three more days, then his curiosity overcame him."
That phrase is awkward, because no one says that you live a life of "sleeping, playing, and eating." Instead, maybe you should go with, "He went about his days as normal, until his curiosity finally overcame him and he clicked on he link."
One weak link in your story is where he goes outside and waits for three hours just because an email tells him to. What made the link so convincing? You should put something in that explains why. (But by showing, not telling, of course.)
"He reached for the handlebar of his refrigerator and his hand grasped thin air. He looked at the blank space where his refrigerator once stood and found a note. "
should be changed to:
"He reached for the handlebar of his refrigerator absentmindedly, but his hand grasped thin air. There was a note where his refrigerator had once stood."
That paragraph had too many sentences beginning with "He." You need to transition better so that it doesn't sound like: "He did this. He did that. Then he did this again. Then he did that to compensate."
Overall, doing good! I enjoyed the twist, and I'm wondering where you'll go with the story next. =)
How's "Stories of your life and other's" going? It's a collection of short stories, so I want you to pay attention to the way Ted Chiang, the author, uses language. How does he structure the rise and fall of his plot? How does he describe?
I also want you to look at the beginning word of each sentence for an entire page. You'll find that there aren't that many repeats - any good writer will avoid using the same word within 40 words of each other.