I NEED TO KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU'RE THINKING.. ABOUT MY STORY!

The author of this is Thomas Alan? Don't be so confusing! Get your act together! .... Yes.. that is the author.

I just had a look: agree pretty much with sirat and stace. The style of writing tends to kill the story. The underlying plot is good though. I've nothing against somebody having an individual style but this one just seems a bit wacky, and not too well proof-read. I think you've got some pretty good advice from the people here, you should aim for a more natural style of story-telling.

Okay, I'll give it a shot. I've just read "Relative Freedom" which is at: http://www.abctales.com/abcplex/viewstory.cgi?s=21299 I'll say right away that I think the plot is the best thing about this one. It tells the story of a woman who suffers from a mental illness and commits suicide, leaving a set of memoirs with whose help one of her twin daughters is able to lead the other through her different kind of mental affliction, out of her mind-forged prison and into the metaphorical sunshine. I thought there were good possibliities in the idea and the opening, concerning the mother's elaboutate and freakish suicide, is very involving. After this though the pace flagged a bit, detailing too much incident in my opinion which advanced the story only very slightly. The word count of about 3,500 could easily be cut in half without loss. I thought the characters came across quite well, the stronger twin, the weaker one and the mother all seemed quite real and plausible, but I had major problems with the language, both the dialogue and the narration. The dialogue is very strange in places. the characters seem to talk a weird psychobabble to one another. Example: “Clare, if you just give them to me.. I can read them, and achieve some closure on mom being gone, then eventually I’ll feel better!” There's similar stuff in the narration too. Some of it is psychobabble, some of it just very odd, at least to my ear: She was afraid to confront the fear that manipulated and suppressed her Pouring a tall glass of straight Vodka, she washed down two Valium to elude her reality. Anna confidently snatched the instructions, and she imposed her will out of the house Maybe it's just me but the structure of some of those sentences seems very strange, like a bad translation from a foreign language. In other places the structure just seemed logically flawed or the meaning uncertain: the cab slowed to a stop in the steeped hills (what are steeped hills?) and the shadowy faces of the voices she heard (voices don't have faces, shadowy or otherwise) Anna awakened from sleep to experience a nightmare (surely you can only experience a nightmare if you ARE asleep?) She could have a panic attack while driving the car and wreck (strange use of the word "wreck") The day was dark, with no mention of the sun (no sign of the sun?) I hope I've given enough instances as it isn't very nice to go on and on, but there are numerous other examples. The impression I get is that the author wanted the language to sound profound or clever, and has put on a special writer's personna that isn't really himself. I think it would impreove the piece infinitely just to tell the story in plain English, the way you would tell it to somebody in the pub, and let the characters speak plain English to one another as well. The plot does carry it along though, I was interested to find out what was in the memoirs and how Clarissa was going to end up. Hope some of that is helpful.

Gotta throw in with sirat on this one. First, nothing will stop my reading faster than a usage error. It just looks like you didn't know any better, and "Melinda's thoughts winded through the vast labrinth of her mind" is a mistake easily found in proofing. Also, it seemed to me that the words were more important than what they were conveying, almost like a vocabulary lesson: use as many of these words in a story as you can. The premise is sound. Some editing, even of the most beloved words, would improve this greatly.