First 13

"Did I tell you my wife is talking about having a baby? It terrifies me. How could it not? Knowing that at any point our genes, our embryo, our baby, could be pushed out of the womb. What right do they have? Of course we could get an early amnio done but then if it's not a damn Cuckoo and the amnio causes a miscarriage anyway - we've gone and killed our own baby. Wife is dead against it. She avoids answering me if I ask if she would terminate if DNA tests confirmed it was a Cuckoo. It doesn't help that they look so bloody human-like. She doesn't see them as aliens. Just kids with disabilities, slightly odd. Me- I look at them and see slimy green skinned, bug eyed creatures from outer space. Yeah, yeah, I know they look nothing like that but just the thought of it repulses me.
I know, I know. This is all far more personal information"

Great command of voice.
Swift and clear introduction of characters and conflict.

I'm intrigued to know what type of "Cuckoo" this will be, understanding the reference to how these birds are brood parasites (lay their eggs in another bird's nests, and the hatchling disposes of the host's true offspring)--and further intrigued with how the first-person narrator will act if he finds himself a cuckold [though you seem not to imply this, my mind tends toward the psychology of this].

I'd read on.

The only quibble...amnios have a very low risk of loss of pregnancy. They are relatively safe.

Thanks History! I had known amnios had a relatively low risk of causing a miscarriage though I did think the risk was higher than it actually was when I looked it up. Question - would the risk increase the earlier you did the amnio (say if you really needed to find out at around 6 weeks into the pregnancy) or does it stay the same?

Edited because I reread the forum rules and noticed that we're not to quote from the 13 lines in our responses. Sorry!

You may not quote from the complete manuscript, though (if the author emails it to you for feedback), because that has not been posted here on the forum.

Cheers,
Stacey

The She avoids answering me... sentence is tricky with all those ifs in it. I suggest you look for a way to rephrase or chop into two.

The "our baby could be pushed out of the womb..." line doesn't really make sense to me. I took it to mean (and this is because I read exclusively speculative fiction and thus I take things literally, as most spec fiction readers do) that there's some sort of biological process that pushes embryos out of women's bodies here in this imaginary world. Since a fully-gestated baby isn't an embryo anymore, it's not like I thought this was a euphemism for birth. Was it meant to be? The phrasing is odd...could be pushed? That's now how I'd think about birth. So...it confused me, which made it hard to read the rest of the passage. You might want to clarify that or clarify your intended purpose with that line (I have the vague feeling you're giving us some info about how cukoos work, but I don't really know.)

Cheers for the feedback KayTi! I agree some of the sentences are a bit clunky - will have to rework them

I wonder if it would be easier for readers to know what I'm getting at if I included a definition of cuckoos (the birds, not the aliens in my story) or brood parasitism at the start of the story?

I originally had the wording "pushed out of the nest" - as that is what some cuckoo birds do - lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and the young cuckoo will evict the host species eggs or young by pushing them out of the nest. But I wanted to make it clearer that the young were displaced before they were actually born. Nest to me implied home or house, hence the change to the place that they were actually "pushed out of".

Perhaps still not the right combination of words for readers of speculative fiction?

My thoughts were that a Cuckoo alien was implanted in the womb of a woman who was already in the early stages of pregnancy - the Cuckoo causes the miscarriage of the real fetus. The woman will miscarry but as scans will still show a live fetus - she and the doctors/midwife etc will just write it off as unexplained bleeding. The woman completes a pregnancy, however it is not the pregnancy she started. Does that makes sense?

I also originally had more of an explanation of this in the story - however I had cut a lot of it because I felt that the reader would already get sort of the gist of it because the aliens were colloquially called "Cuckoo" but perhaps I should add a bit more back in?

Thanks again for the constructive feedback everyone - it makes me think that if I'm having to explain myself in detail, as above, then I'm not making things clear enough in the actual story. And that is great to know