Originally Posted by: hunter60Oh man, what a nasty, little dark tale you've got here! I like it and agree with Jolly's suggestions. I think what strikes me most (aside from a wine bottle repeatedly playing percussion on the side of my melon!) is that the narrative has that horribly busy 'thrum' that one would imagine in the mind of someone who has been driven to the point of lashing out and committing murder most foul in front of an audience.

There are a lot of things that you can draw from this. Your narrator admits to premeditated murder even if he feels that it was that one night, that one performance, that pushed him over. He talks of thinking of many 'creative' ways of killing poor ol' Richard. What I might like to see in the edit are some of those creative ways. Let's see what your boy considers creative. Perhaps grabbing a huge bratwurst from a silver serving tray and cramming it into his gaping maw and then sitting back and watching him slowly writhe and choke on his obvious oral fixation.Or maybe he thought seriously about choking him with wadded up reviews that declare Richard a genius. Or maybe since Richard is such a pompous a**, he's got to have some huge, heavy tomes lying around open in his dressing room. Maybe your boy grabs one, pretends to flip through it and then clocks Richard on the back of the neck with an Oxford collection of Shakespere. But no, he fights the urge until ... until...

Okay, enough. I was starting to have too much fun figuring out ways to kill Richard. See, that's a good sign. After reading your story, I hate Richard too!

Nice descriptions. Nice emotion. I would recommend just re-writing it a few more times and paring some of it. You might want to spend a little more time on the actual killing. You've spent some time building to the moment, don't rush past it. It's the payoff for your reader. Let them share your narrators mix of freedom, revulsion and wonder at what he's doing.

But still, great story.

I dunno. I disagree with extending the killing. I think it would overwrite the act itself, which might defeat the purpose of the piece as a whole. Since this story isn't about brutality and depravity, but rather monotony, I think the killing should seem just as non-chalant and mechanical as the speaker's own mundane existence. I do think the story should go on to show him sitting in a prison cell, overjoyed by the new monotony running his life, but by his own choice now rather than simply "because."