A Mother's Grief by Alex Sivier - Short, Horror - In the zombie apocalypse, a grieving woman finds hidden strength in a time of danger. 4 pages - pdf, format 8)

Hey Alex.

I'm a little iffy with zombie apocalypse as I do love the horror side of but they all kinda follow the same pattern in terms of story.  I decided to give this one a look though.

I'm not sure why you didn't name your characters.  With names like WOMAN and GIRL, it's harder for the audience to connect with them.  Even if the names of your characters are never used in dialogue, it's best to give them names anyway.  Also, "hugging her daughter, GIRL (8)..." just sounds funny to me.  It's as if her name is actually Girl.

It's best to steer clear of parentheses with dialogue unless absolutely necessary.  The "moaning" I can buy even though I don't think it's really necessary but the following parenthesis from WOMAN should definitely go in an action line.  If you want her dialogue and the action to happen simultaneously then you could cut her dialogue in half and put that action line down.

Stay away from "we see" or "we hear" or "we" in general inside action lines.  As it's written in the action lines already, we can see and hear everything described within them so it gets redundant.

Your action descriptions were pretty good.  Easy enough to picture though you're going to want to keep them at four lines or less.  It's one of those damn screenwriting rules but I think it helps to quicken the pace.  So split up the big blocks and I think it'll really quicken the action you're gunning for.

So the story wasn't really anything new to me.  Your basic "someone you love is changing and you'll have to kill them" zombie story but overall pretty good.  A few grammatical errors.  "ARMCHAIR is in lying in front of the door" should be something like, "ARMCHAIR lays in front of the door".  Also, stay away from passive writing and stick with active.  "thrashes" instead of "is thrashing".

That's all I got.  Hopefully this helped a bit.

-Johnny