Evidently you've found yourself a Twelve Step Program and put it to good use. Oh, by the way, my name's David and I'm an alcoholic.
That's straight up good writing. I realize it might be more about the personal meaning for you, but rest assured that you've got some talent.
In this sentence you have repetition of the word "life", which interrupts flow (you could just get rid of "of life" and just have "reality"). Also "worries" and "cares" are a bit clichéd, maybe you could select different words. I see you also have "loose" rather than "lose" in the next sentence, although this may be intentional. Just a couple of pointers. :2thumbsup:
Not to shabby! The first paragraph needs re-written. Too many "I"'s. It unfairly comes across as lack of imagination. Run away from starting sentences with "the" if at all possible, i.e. "I was 16, sitting on a milk carton in the back-alley way behind my current foster parent’s apartment. The sounds of the rude world were echoing against the concretewalls." As an editor, I'd change ". The" to ",listening to the rude sounds of the world echoing off the concrete walls." Your paragrahping needs work, i.e. in the second paragraph, "For the next two years..." is a new paragraph. Little things could be cleaned up. "I sit here writing this story, 5 years sober..." We already know you're writing a story-- it's ameturish to remind us, and in any case , you're writiing YOUR (my) story, not THIS story. Keep it up. Writers write, and your eye for improvement sharpens everytime.
Beautiful writing style. It really pulls on the heart strings. The only errors I could find were simple grammatical (and some people already talked about them). I hope you'll extend it. I'd love to read more about it- maybe in a short story/novella form?
You have a nice style. Your diction is well chosen and you thread it well. I like the coherency of the piece and the sensory images are great, they help the character a lot.
Thanks begun for posting it up dawg pound. You deliver on the daily. --------------------------------------------------------------------- I liked the opening, it definitely demanded attention of the reader. Now, if I compare the rest of the work to the opening I can say it fell short. The imagery was strong through out brother, but some passages were cliché: The sounds of the rude world were echoing against the concrete walls ^Like this. I would love to see you use deeper imagery here to really bring it home. But still, it works for, just a tad cliché. To lower the white flag of my surrender and raise the flag of independence, of fight, of self-control, and of commitment, was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. ^this is hot. Overall, this is nicley written. Though it has a rushed feeling , simply because you covered so much ground in such a short piece-from addiction to sobriety to refection to a new born in matrimony. I think more original imagery and tighter narration could make this better. But as it stands, this is a very nice read. thanks for sharing brad.
no problem...it had some kind of bb code that prevented direct copy/pasting so I re-spaced it as close as I could from the original:sultan:
Not having ever done heroin, I don't think I'll be able to understand this paper to its full extent, but even then it's very very well written. You have an extremely good grasp on the English language, something that's hard to come by in a world of amateurish writing. I can't critique it any way that hasn't been addressed already, so I'm just going to say, "good job," and be done with it.