Hey there! Happy holidays! You asked for help with the draft in your sandbox, Giant Carnivorous Arachnid. I'm going to do what I can to write out good crit for it now, without being able to talk to you, but from Christmas onward I'll be available through wikidot PM or on the IRC chat to talk to you about this piece and help you figure out a story and shape for it. I'm committing here to help you get this draft to a site-worthy state..
I don't know if you've ever seen crit on this site before, or if you read the guidelines, but the standard operating procedure is to be harsh, have high standards, and encourage everyone to do their best and continue improving. I won't be a dick, but I won't shy away from talking about issues in this draft. None of it is at all personal, so please don't take any criticisms too hard.
I'm gonna move ahead to crit, so check out the next tab.
Again, Happy holidays. Enjoy!
- Secret Santa
There are a lot of basic issues in this draft - bad spelling, use of non-metric units etc, which is totally fine, but also stuff like nonsensical use of redaction and too much focus on the monster's appearance, which take more time to explain. Instead of doing a line-by-line crit, which is boring for both you and me, I've done a rewrite, keeping the structure of the article in place while improving on some of those issues. Check that out in the "Rewrite" tab. As a heads up, I'm European, so I use European spellings. This is your piece, so feel free to change those to suit your region. If you've got any questions about why I've changed things or chosen specific wordings, feel free to ask!
The choice to give this creature an origin in Białowieża Forest is super-cool. There's loads of interesting history to work with there, to the degree that the wikipedia page has a whole section dedicated to named trees in the forest. You should utilise that more than as a throwaway line, because giving this creature a background and grounding outside of "it came from somewhere and it's scary" is the most simple and effective stepping stone toward giving your article real character. For instance, there's a village of people who live in the forest - to what degree might they have known about the creature, or be in some way related to its existence? How does it play into their culture and mythology?
Something I touched on in that first paragraph - you put a lot of focus here on how the creature appears and not nearly as much on its background, how it behaves, etc, which is a lot of where you inject the character of the beast. You touch on it recognising individuals, and in an older draft I see you mention it having a particular doctor it likes - that's a good touch of flavour, though the name "Dr. ███████" and the lack of context or elaboration take away from it. Do you know why it liked this one doctor? Did it actually like the doctor, or was it pretending for some reason? What's this doctor's background and history with the foundation? It's always a good idea to question all the aspects of something you're writing, figure out the logic behind it even if the readers never see that side of it. Readers can always sense the difference between an article with internal logic they don't understand and internal logic the author doesn't understand, and it often means the difference between success and deletion.
This is also crucial when redacting and expunging - you need a clear idea of what is going on that's being redacted, and you also need to know why it's being redacted. Take your sentence "The specimen is a 9-foot-tall arachnid when it is standing on all eight legs and is [DATA EXPUNGED] feet long" - why is its length being redacted? Who needs to suppress the spread of information about this object's length, and why? I suspect it was a very arbitrary decision. It's a fairly common mistake made by new writers, so don't sweat it, but make sure you consider it in the future. The way I avoid it is to always write the full first draft without any redaction, and then add some in later if I feel it's necessary, or would add to the piece.
The creature's appearance is a total hodgepodge of disparate bits - mantis head, wings, stinger, three eyes, a bulletproof exoskeleton - and normally I'd suggest you cut down on it, but you might be able to actually make it work if you lean into that schlocky B-movie aesthetic and make it your own. Try to figure out a reason it's like this - I put a couple possible threads into the basic rewrite on the next tab, pointing to it possibly being artificially created with "SCP-XXXX's body is notably asymmetric and does not seem organic" and a more abstract thing where the creature is actually the incarnation of all the eyewitness reports of it, slowly becoming what it is believed to be. This is very much me spitballing, though, throwing out ideas - nothing is concrete.
A last little bit of advice - a big part of the writing process for improving this draft was just looking things up! I ended up researching arachnids, insects, the Białowieża Forest and village, UNESCO, Polish and Bearusian culture, mantids, mantis eyes (which are really cool!), insect wing taxonomy, vivariums, ways to handle unwanted beehives, joss sticks and probably a bunch of other stuff I've forgotten. That was just to clean up the original draft, not to expand on it, though the research I did ended up giving me lots of different ideas that I would have tried to expand upon if this was my own draft. Lots of good reading leads to lots of good writing! Plus, it's a great way to get some momentum if you're stuck on where to go with a draft - just look up random elements until you hit on something interesting you can expand upon.
Object Class: Euclid
Special Containment Procedures: The SCP is kept in a forest like containment cell that is 208.75 sq miles in length and 4 stories high. It is to be given living meat as it prefers to kill its prey instead of eating already dead prey and it needs five 100 lbs of meat a day.
If it breaches its containment or gets out of its cell during a containment breech use a smoke bomb as smoke knocks it out or lure it back with food. Do not try to shoot at it for it will try to attack you with its spearing raptorial appendage it might also try to bite and inject you with it's venom as well. Bullets do not penetrate its exoskeleton. The creature is kept in Site- [DATA EXPUNGED]
Description: The specimen is a 9-foot-tall arachnid when it is standing on all eight legs and is [DATA EXPUNGED] feet long, it is a light green color and has three eyes with one of them being on its forehead. It has a long and lumpy body with a scorpion tail and wings. It is unable to crawl on walls or ceilings but it can fly. When it is hungry it emits a sweet and pleasant smell from its body to lure prey. It's head has the same shape as a prey mantis.
The organism was found in the Białowieża Forest in Poland after there were [DATA EXPUNGED] missing person reports near the forest. It has rather sharp teeth in it’s mouth. It is normally rather docile except for when it is hungry or it feels threatened. The venom in its tail would not do that much harm if it was a normal scorpion but because of it’s size the venom is a lot more deadly and serious. It's head is shaped like a prey mantis's and it's eyes resemble that of and insect's eyes.
The organism is not as dumb as you think for it is somehow able to rember what certain uniforms mean when it has seen enough people in those doing their job. It is also able to recognize faces and it doesn't seem to like the field agents or most of the doctors assigned to it.
Object #: SCP-XXXX
Object Class: Euclid
Special Containment Procedures: SCP-XXXX is kept in Mega-Vivarium 3 of Site 12. The vivarium has an area of 200 m2 and a height of 12 m. The object's feeding schedule is to be decided at the discretion of the resident parazoologist, with a minimum of 200 kg of meat introduced to the terrarium daily in the form of living organisms.
In the event of a containment breach, staff are to be armed with smoke bombs and large joss sticks in order to incapacitate SCP-XXXX. A large quantity of reserve food should be maintained and introduced to SCP-XXXX's vivarium to lure it back.
Description: SCP-XXXX is an overlarge organism of unknown species, tentatively classed an arachnid1. The object is 3 metres tall when standing. SCP-XXXX's body is notably asymmetric and does not seem organic. It features a 2.5 m long segmented tail with a venomous stinger2and a pair of stunted forewings, with which it is capable of limited flight. The rudiments of hindwings are present about 20cm behind the base of the forewings. A head resembling that of a mantis extends from the front of the object's cephalothorax, featuring a single bulging eye in the middle of the head in place of the common compound eyes of a mantis. When hungry, SCP-XXXX emits pheremones matching those of its prey3.
Following a sharp increase in missing persons reports in Białowieża Forest in 2011, agents embedded in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha National Park informed the Foundation of rumours of a monstrous creature on the grounds. While the rumours were initially ignored due to lack of coherency between descriptions, a company of MTF-ν-7("Hammer Down") was activated on 13/1/2012 following confirmed sighting of the creature with accompanying video footage. ν-7 was successfully captured and brought in SCP-XXXX on 11/2/2012, with cooperation from UNESCO and the people of Białowieża village.
SCP-XXXX has shown greater than expected cognitive ability, particularly in regards to pattern and facial recognition. The object shows preference for certain staff members4, acting with hostility toward others. No firm link has yet been found between these individuals.
Hopefully the crit I gave is a helpful start, and maybe the rewrite gave you some ideas for where to go with your draft, but as I said at the start, the real point of this gift will come across the next couple weeks. I won't be available for a couple of days after Christmas, but once I am, I'll be doing my best to work with you and help you form this into something you can be proud of when you publish it on the site.
Contacting me: The best way to contact me is through the SCP IRC chat. I'm online there most of the time I'm awake and have an internet connection. I'm at GMT, so that means I'm usually online 11AM-2AM GMT, roughly. If I'm not, you can easily leave me a message there that I'll see when I log on. You can ask the other chat members about that if it's necessary - they're all really friendly and will be happy to help you out.
If you don't want to use IRC chat, you can also contact me through wikidot PM, though it'll be much slower by nature. Maybe get in contact sometime before New Year's so we can figure out a schedule, talk about how you want to do things? If I haven't got a message from you by then I'll try messaging you myself.
Looking forward to working with you!
- Secret Santa
PS: Obviously this is a little tricky since you don't know who I am, but I'm pretty sure you get to say later on. Otherwise, I'll PM you later.