Saluti, signori e signore. The circus is in town. Grab the kids and come on down to, Il Carnevale de Artiglio. A madhouse of the strange and entertaining, led by a bipedal creature with a single crimson claw. But beware, everything has its price, and the ringmaster isn't the only one pulling strings.
In light of the new episode, I have put an alternate universe tag on here.
[Inspiration for Kleng came from a character that my friend, Invader created. He hasn't technically released anything with him in it yet, and Kleng doesn't really act like him. But Invader would be angry if I didn't credit him. You can find his stuff here. Invader's Deviantart.]
Chapters (4)
Dat cover Art!
A creepy carnival filled with darkness, mystery, and strange horrors? I like.
cover looks like a ponified SCP-049
Yeah, I know I messed with the chorus and lyric placement, but it just seemed to flow better this way.
I'n case anyone's never heard this song before.
Good.
HOW DARE YOU NOT CONTINUE
3381871 Alas, my computer is busted. I'm writing this comment on a kindle fire.
Well, you asked for some constructive criticism on this story. Here's some areas where I could think of to improve:
First, read this. I feel like this should be required reading before anyone writes anything, because I see so many stories not get the punctuation for dialogue correctly.
There's something... off about the writing style. Something rubs me the wrong way about the prose, and I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what it is. I know that saying that there's a problem but not saying what the problem is hardly conducive to improving, but that's all I can really say. One thing I can say more definitively, though, is that some of the paragraphs are too long, this chapter in particular. When I see walls of text, my mind stops reading and I start skimming, which is not good for a story.
Also, is there any reason the indentation is just one space rather than a tab? I know on the Internet a lot of times people don't bother with tabs at all for paragraphs (in fact, some text boxes make doing so almost impossible if you aren't pasting in, as putting in a tab will move you to the next text box instead) in favor of just double spacing between them, much like I'm actually doing in this comment now that I look at it. The problem is that having only one space is a weird sort of "uncanny valley" for paragraph indentation, where the fact it falls between the two normal versions (either no indentation or a tab-length indentation) makes it look really off.
It's hard for me to offer up much criticism for the story itself, because at this point the story feels like it hasn't really started. There's a circus in town, they're going there, and some parts of it are kinda creepy. That's all that's really happened; no real conflict has been introduced. Outside of having something to do with the circus, I don't feel like I know what the story is about. I mean, if not for the story description indicating something especially wrong is going on, I might have concluded after these parts that the whole story is just a fun romp to the circus, with a few kinda weird bits for some reason. While to be fair the story is still in progress, 8,000 words is a fair amount of time to go without establishing anything other than "they've gone to the circus and it's slightly weird."
And speaking of the story description, I think it could use some fleshing out, like maybe an extra paragraph being a little more clear what's going on. Now, I'm just speaking for myself, but vague story descriptions have really never been something that makes me want to read the story, and if I were to have stumbled upon this story by chance and saw the description, I most likely would just move onto something else. It's not as big a deal if it's just a short comedy, but if a story is going to demand a bit more time from me to read, I want to know its basic plot before deciding if I want to devote time to it, and the story really doesn't tell me anything other than there being a circus in town. Maybe that's just me, though; maybe other people are more intrigued by cryptic descriptions.
4970249 Thank you very much for your advice. The tab vs doublespace thing is really a bit of a personal preference, tabbed paragraphs always look a little odd to me, as that's generally not how I see it done in books.
Same goes for the larger paragraphs. The paragraph size is honestly something I've been trying to break myself of.
Also, thank you for the dialogue reference. Those rules always get a bit muddy in my head for some reason. It's good to have a reference to go back to.
All in all, thank you for your critique. I will do my best to correct what is already there and perform better in the future.