SCP Foundation

EDIT: Updated link.

http://scp-sandbox-3.wikidot.com/letters-to-my-future-self

Hey, I just finished my first tale draft. Would love some insight and critique on it. It’s medium length.

Thanks for any response!

Make sure to add the following before your draft before posting:
"[[>]]
[[module Rate]]
[[/>]]"
It will make a rating module so I can upvote it because, as far as I can tell, it's pretty good. (But then again, you might want to get a review from someone more experienced than me before posting. Have you asked on chat yet?)

Okay, got a request in chat and did a crit swap. Here are my thoughts:

• apparently written by PoI-████ > you might want to use "believed to be" or "identified as" rather than "apparently", since the reader has no other context at the start of the piece
• was apprehended > try "discovered" or "recovered". I think only people can be "apprehended"
• box in SCP-████'s previous residence > how does this relate to the PoI though? The audience at this point is going to be very confused about the setup here.
• An excerpt of said letter is included below.. > ellipses have three periods, though you might just go with a colon or a period here so it seems more formal.

The rest of the piece I won't comment on since it's meant to be a personal written piece and informal as a result. That said… I'm not really sure about the premise for a couple reasons:

• Why would this person write a letter to themselves that meanders around and goes the roundabout way to giving them the key information about Julie and the mindwiping? I can understand grieving, but if they want the letter to be useful, why spend so much time with the introspection?
• The start and the end seem a little… trite. A lot of "letters to yourself" are kind of similar in format, starting with the "please keep reading" and ending with "please don't forget [thing here]" or the like.
• I personally like to believe that the Foundation wouldn't just amnesticize the writer and send them back assuming that they would just go on living without someone so important to them. Would make more sense to take them into custody as leverage/bargaining in case "Julie" acts out while in containment. Or, as I personally believe, let them live together in a sheltered and monitored environment where they're taken care of. If money was an issue, the Foundation offering them free room and board in a place safe from concerns like mugging and pollution would be pretty good incentive.

I dunno. Might not be the piece for me, I guess. I do feel like it might make more sense if the letter was written while Maria is actually in Foundation custody, being taken care of as a guest but extremely unhappy anyway. The Foundation tries small doses of amnestics to keep her calm so she doesn't get separation anxiety I guess? But when they don't work, she writes letters (you can try more than one so there's more of a passage of time present if you like) on the sly and hides them in her room. The Foundation recovers those letters after the most recent dose of amnestics. Or something like that.

Personally I agree with a lot of Zyn's sentiments. This feels like a very generic piece. Conceptually, the biggest issue is that the entire piece has no real twists or turns. It is a straightforward talk about how the foundation's actions affect friends and family of the anomaly. I can guaranty there are dozens of other tales following the same premise. You need to try thinking up something that separates your article from other similar ones. Because this article is so personal, I think you have the best idea of what would work for your idea. Find a way to flip peoples idea of these kinds of articles! That will give you something interesting to work with.