Alezrani Chapter 9

Still stuck on chapter 10, but here have chapter 9. I'm not putting summaries anymore, they're getting too long.
Edited
Right after chapter 7

The kitchen was open. It faced the living room, with only an upraised, wooden stick dividing them. The kitchen floor was made up of black and white tiles. When they were younger, Wolf and Crane used to play chess on them with their mother cooking on the gas stove.

Now, they were both sitting at the square, granite table, facing each other. Crane pushed a cup of coffee towards him " Drink."

He pushed it away " I don't want it. " She sighed and took a sip if her own drink. They were silent for a while. Crane tapped the sides of her cup as Wolf searched for something to say.

"I heard you quit your job." Wolf looked into his cup. He traced the handle with his fingers and thought of something to say.

" I couldn't work for them anymore. Not after" he took a sip.

"Mom told me you stopped visiting her. " Wolf didn't look at her. Instead he looked at the chessboard-like floor.

" I couldn't face her." he mumbled.

She sighed and played with her hair. She always did it when she was searching for something to say. " You haven't been eating well either."

" I eat enough." he studied the fine cracked surface of the cup.

"You've lost weight. You wear baggy clothes to hide it." she gestured towards his baggy clothes. He frowned and pulled at the fabric.

" I'm fine" he replied.

" Then why aren't you living?" Her tone was exasperated.

Wolf winced and looked at her. " What?"

She gestured to him, the dirty dishes in the sink, and to the messy living room. " You call this living?"

"I'm not going to go look for him." She took a breath and ran her violet-painted nails around the rim of the cup.

" You told me you wanted to go look for him." her voice was quiet and held the presence of tears.

" I do, but Hiram said not too." She glared at him and set the cup down.

" And when," she said, icily, " did you start listening to Hiram?" He took a sip, the cup cooling beneath his large fingers.

"He is the head of the Collective. It would be best to listen to him." he said it as if he had rehearsed the answer.

She slammed the cup down, lukewarm liquid splicing onto the tabletop and dripping down onto the floor. " Stop making excuses!"

“It's the truth.”

“Liar” she got up and grabbed the napkins off the counter-top. She wiped the table and then bent down to wipe the floor.

“Leave it. I'll get it.” he got up, grabbed a napkin and knelt down beside her.

She waved him away, “I got it.”

He got up from the floor and put the napkin back on the counter-top. He observed her for a few minutes, trying to place why she looked different.

“You look different.”

She blinked and started to laugh. “Wow, I must, if you noticed.”

He frowned. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“I dyed my hair.” she ran her fingers through her pink hair.

“Why, what was wrong with it?” He wondered if this had something to do with their mother's sickness.

“Nothing! I felt like a change, that's all.” She laughed, a little too high and a little too fake.

He leaned on the counter-top and watched her. She laughed nervously and righted the cup.

“You should go find Seres,” she said after a while.

“I don't want to.” he crossed his arms over his chest. She got up, put the cup in the sink and then turned back to the table.

"Are you going to finish that?” she gestured to the cooling cup of coffee on the other side of the table.

“Go ahead.” She grabbed the cup and took a sip. “You told me you wanted to!”

“That was then, this is now.”

“You told me five minutes ago!”

“I changed my mind.” She screamed and hurled the cup at his head. He ducked; the cup hit the wall behind him, the liquid staining the pale green paint.

“What was that for?” he yelled. He bent down to pick up the cup. Mom was right about these cups being tough. He swallowed hard and pressed his fingers into the cup. Thinking about mom always made his stomach twist and his throat close.

“Stop lying to me!” He could hear tears in her voice. He straightened and put the cup in the sink.

“Well?” he knew she was standing there with her hands on her hips. He turned on the faucet and rinsed the cups.

“I don't deserve to see him again,” he admitted. The sound of the water covering his voice.

“Answer me,” she ordered. Wolf grabbed the napkins and wiped the liquid off the wall.

“Tell me please? I'm your sister,” Crane begged. He shook his head and threw the napkins away. Then he turned to face her.

“I can't”

“Can't or won't?” He shifted, studying her.

“Can't,” he said at last.

“Fine then,” she said, blinking her eyes. She tugged her shirt down and smoothed her skirt. Then she ran her fingers through her hair and tucked the strands behind her ears. “Talk to me when you find Seres,” she said, briskly and stepped out of the kitchen.

He followed.“Crane, wait!”

She stopped at the front door and turned to look at him. “Once,” she said, “you decide to stop lying to me and yourself, come talk to me.” She yanked the door open and stepped out into the frigid winter. “You can keep the box,” she said as an afterthought and shut the door behind her.

“Crane!” Wolf banged a fist against the door. “Come back!”

Hey Drax!

I haven't read the rest of the novel, so I'm basing this review on the single chapter alone.

If you can't explain it simply...
You don't understand it well enough. Eventually, when your novel is finished, you're going to have to figure out a way to sum up the entire thing on one quick, snappy sentence. These one sentence summaries are not only helpful to those reading, but they're good practice for packing a lot into a short pace of writing, which is a technique that's good to get the hang of. You can start practicing by figuring out how to sum up the plot so far in one short paragraph.
THe biggest tip for this is not to explain every detail that has happened so far, that would take forever. Instead briefly mention your main characters, the overall conflict, and what theyre doing at this point in the story. For example; "Cinderella, a girl growing up in the shadow of her evil step sisters, attended the ball with the help of her fairy godmother - but now the prince, who has fallen in love, is searching the land for a princess he may never find.'

Dialogue:
This piece has soo much dialogue, it would be better suited for a script than a story. Like with the above point, when your character has so much to say, you should condense and sharpen it. Mix around and combine shorter phrases, or cut out all together the ones that aren't relevent. Shuffling round your sentence order would help too. Your paragraphs seem to constantly follow the same structure of speech, word-tag, action, speech, word-tag, action. Try having a lot of action in between clusters of speech.

Speech Tag Syndrome
'Hi!' She exclaimed. 'Hello!' he gasped. 'What are they doing over there?' Someone else asked. 'I think they're staring at us,' she mumbled.
Jazzy speech tags get tiring, and they're often unessesary. The word 'said' is a wonderful little word because like 'the' and 'a' it's used so much that it has a way of disappearing into the background. Your reader acknowledges the name of the character who made the comment, without actually reading it. For that reason you can use it almost all the time and easily get away with it. Complex speech tags are much more noticable, and your reader will stop at them to take in what it says. When they have to do this after ever other part of speech, especially in a piece with this much dialogue.

Presentation! Presentation!
Never forget it. Line breaks in between between paragraphs make the whole thing look better. Having lots of white space on the right side of the page is ugly, and tends to come with the habit of staring lots of new lines with speech. Remember that even though it's the words your writing that should be most important, your reader has still got to look at that page for as long as it takes to read it, so presentation, even at a glance, will make it easier to read, and as much as one might hate to admit, result in more reviews.

Overall:
I can't say much for the plot, because I haven't read it, but I'm tempted to. I love these characters. They're both very unique, yet in some ways mimic eachother, they make good siblings, and I assumed it's a big brother/little sister relationship. The way they interact and balance eachother is brilliant. Keep up the good work

Thank you for the review Tenyo. I posted this chapter unedited, so that's why there's so much dialouge in it. The reason it's so hard to sum up is because the storyline is non-linear. I'm glad I got the sibling relationship down, someone thought that they were married. My younger brother and I don't act like that at all. Thanks for reminding me of the line breaks, I forgot those.

Hi Fishy!

You're my 500th review! Whoo!

So, I went back to skim through chapter 7, to get the feel of a continuation.

The first thing is, since, this is on a screen, I'd prefer spacing between lines. This just looks like a lump of text.

Characters:
I love their interaction and how you portray the relation. And it's good dialogue, yes.
Nitpick:

Then she ran her fingers through her hair and tucked the strands behind her ears.

This seemed very out-of-flow. She already did that once, and it doesn't really contribute to her development.

“You look different.” She blinked and started to laugh.

The way it's formatted makes it seem Crane told this. Maybe put the 'she' in the next line.

Plot:
So, while this is a great character development scene, I would like for something to happen. There's a lot of dialogue, but not much of action. Save an unbroken teacup. Maybe you could shorten this, and show us more of what's going to happen. I understand Wolf probably doesn't want his sis to know the reasons, but maybe you can show us some more of his annoyance/worries. So that we're sort of still connected to the main plot.
On the way this chapter is paced, it began very well. But with the dialogue that ensued, it seemed like every minute was described. That becomes the minus of using a lot of dialogue. You feel like describing everything through dialogue and you can't have large skips in dialogue. As a reader, I expect some sort of development in the main plot and I want to get to know Wolf more, not just through dialogue (which you do brilliantly.)

Good luck with chapter 10!
~Lava
Comments/questions, PM me.

Thanks Lava. I definitely have to go back and edit this.

Hey Idraa! *beam*

Okay. I don't nitpick, because it gets boring for me after a while and creates tension for the writer whose piece I'm critiquing. But I will list what irked me about this piece. While your characters appear solid and your dialogue isn't half-bad, you need to add in more description to spice up the story. Over-filling a story piece with dialogue isn't a good idea - it's only good when you're writing a screenplay. I also wanted to note how awkward the formatting of the piece seemed to be - all the sentences seemed to be attached to each other, and that sometimes looks a little painful. Could you correct that? Also, instead of this:

" Sample quote. "

This is the correct format: "Sample quote." Fix that?

And...that's that, I think.

Robyn.

Hi Idraax, I liked the overall scene quite a lot. The understated emotion, the subtle language puns. She wipes liquid up, he wipes liquid up; this has a balance, though creaky, but the napkins... Too many napkins:)
I'm attaching my inch by inch editing advice, hope it clears up some confusion on technicalities which seems to be present.