New Year's Nightmare by Nadine - Thriller - Content loner Quintrell Malone inherits millions of dollars with his only confidante, his strong-willed mom Deshonda. A stalker that emerges, forces them to confront the dark side of sudden wealth. 77 pages - pdf format

New writer interested in feedback on this work, please be nice

Among your stories, I have a new favorite. I like this more than Pyramid. The surprises just kept coming. I tried to guess what was going to happen next and kept guessing wrong.

The ending seemed a little flat, though. I thought Q and his mom got away too easily. That can be fixed with a little imagination. You can have Q and Mom just barely getting away rather than have the cops mope about them being guilty.

There are a couple of issues…

Switching between Mom and Deshonda was a little confusing at times even though you started out combining the two. It slowed down the reading. I would suggest that you keep it as Deshonda in all of the dialog titles for her. She can be referred to as Mom in her dialog with Quintrell. In the action text, I would use Deshonda.

There are a few places where you stack out your dialog paragraphs by a single person. I would consolidate the dialogs under a single heading. For example, on page 27, you have Dmitry speaking three times in a row without any action or anybody else speaking in between. All three dialog instances should be combined into a single entry. The same thing on page 36. You have Mom speaking twice with nothing in between.

On the top of page 44, you have “Quintrell feels his pulse on Dmitry’s neck.  Dmitry is  dead..” I would word it as Quintrell checks for a pulse on Dmitry’s neck. He doesn’t  feel a pulse because there isn’t one. I would end the action text there. There’s no need to tell us that Dmitry is dead. Quintrell tells us that right after.  Just have Quintrell tell us.

On page 43 at the top that reads rather awkwardly:
“Deshonda speechless, walks backwards into the apartment as Dmitry walks towards her as he still points his gun at her. “ I would break that up into 3, smaller sentences. I would try something more like, “Deshonda is speechless. She walks backward into the apartment as Dmitry walks toward her, keeping his gun focused on her.” With more thought, I’m pretty sure you could do better than my suggestion but I think you get the idea.

On page 61 you have a bad parenthetical. Quintrell is slightly sarcastic and he is speaking to Detective Sandoval. I’m not sure if the “slightly sarcastic” is truly necessary or if the “to Detective Sandoval is necessary. If I had to keep one, it would be the “slightly sarcastic” and it should be on the line below the QUINTRELL dialog header, not on the same line. The reason that I don’t think the “to Detective Sandoval” is necessary is that the detective just spoke to Quintrell and it seems logical that Quintrell is answering back.

I hope you find my suggestions useful. I look forward to your next story. I'm not so sure you can still consider yourself as a "New writer". While you are still learning, (we both are), you're doing quite well. Your formatting improved immensely after you switched to Celtx. Personally, I'm hoping you rewrite Pyramid in Celtx. The better formatting would do it justice.