All Comments on 'My South African Tomboy'

Dude, your writing actually gives black people a bad name. Oh, and Canadians too.

...that you can write so much and never improve!! No dialog, rambling, multi-subject sentences and paragraphs, racist and religious predacious, it never gets better. GET HELP, mental AND writing needs much work.

1957 loads of shit!!!!! Your garbage is endless!!! There is not one single poor category that hasn't bear the burden on being branded by your shit.....you have a serious problem. the love of my life is black...and I showed him your shit and he is just horrified by you.... it is sad ..so very sad to even think of you as a black man he said...or a human being.

My first piece of advice is that you should ignore the comments posted by Anonymous. I don't mean that your story is beyond criticism or that Anonymous makes no valid points. You should give short shrift to the comments because the person making them is not interested in helping you to improve as a writer. The criticism about the lack of dialogue is on target but the critic fails to tell you why dialogue matters. Dialogue matters because it serves to make the characters come alive in the reader's imagination and it allows us to see beyond the characters' words into their motivations etc. That is, what makes them tick. The biographical stuff about your family, for example, should be taken out because none of it advances the narrative of the story. We have no idea of the effect the family's history and experiences have on the story's narrator and, more importantly, what any of it has to do with a chance meeting with a schoolmate. Also, we don't need to know what brand of beer the narrator prefers to drink unless the writer intends to convey the narrator is a beer connoisseur, which he obviously isn't because of the brand he settled on to drink. The scene between the bouncer, Mina and the narrator is contrived and psychologically suspect. Mina and the narrator have absolutely no idea what the bouncer is thinking. The bouncer needs to do or say something that warrants Mina's comments. Then, again, he wouldn't last long as a bouncer if he was going out of his way to insult and antagonize paying customers. Maybe, the bouncer is giving the narrator the side eye because of the outlandish outfit the narrator is wearing. The bouncer may be a G.Q. sort of guy and seeing another guy sporting a grey necktie with a red silk shirt offended his sense of sartorial taste. Rewrite the story and think things through.

I'm offended as a black south African woman (the zulus taught me to dance? Really dude?) and I'm offended for everyone else you mentioned in your story .. You don't have to bash other races,religions,nationalities or in fact anyone to write an interracial story.. Your stories seem to perpetuate hate and discrimination and that is really off putting. I realise you may have experienced some s*** in your life but it's really no excuse to write the way you do, and this is coming from someone who has also had crappy experiences. FYI I'm from bloemfontein and if you know the history behind it you can pretty much guess what I have gone through and what I still go through, but that hasn't turned me into a hateful offensive individual, please don't allow your experiences to continue to poison you like this.. It is really disgusting