Simulacres by Robin Johnston - Short, Sci Fi, Fantasy - As he prepares to die a forgetful old man wonders why his wife has not aged one day. 17 pages - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Hi Robin - hope you are well

I enjoyed reading this, some nice imagery in there (The blood against the whitewashed house for example) and the curiosity of it made me want to keep reading to find out what was going on.
The ending, for me, fell flat - this seems more like a teaser for a much larger story as I left with so many questions that I'm a bit unsatisfied.

Just a couple of nitpicks:
- Marie being "ageless". I get the character is ageless, but the actor playing her won't be, so I would put in an age so the reader and the producer can visualise.
- Pg 4 you are missing a character name before some dialogue
- I would rethink the P.A.U.L character, to make a robot like that look good will probably take some $$, and as it's only 7 pages you might benefit from a budget-friendly alternative.

Anyway, best of luck with it.

Hey Robin,

I’d like to echo pretty much everything Matthew said as I really enjoyed it too. You did a great job of setting the tone with the writing and that’s not easy, especially in something so short.

I think Matthew is right about P.A.U.L too. Perhaps a character who is almost too perfect looking might work better. Easy enough to communicate he’s not human with movement, voice, perhaps even lack of emotion or maybe not blinking etc too.

Again, like Matthew the end didn’t quite work for me. I can see why you took that choice and I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong, but I think you could make it more impactful in other ways. For example it felt unnatural to me that he’d ask a robot he’s scared of who some bloke is in an old photo of his Mrs. After all how would the robot know anyways?

I’d probably have ended it along the line of the old man asking if he’s going to be ok, and the robot telling him he’s going to be more than ok, or something like that.

Hope that helps in some way and good luck with it. Lovely little script you have there.

Cheers