Young Writers Society

Set modern times, a girl begins to mysteriously fade into another world - one where she'll find all that she's ever looked for, but also the biggest dangers she's ever faced...

The sand tickles my bare feet, and I giggle splendidly. The sun is scorching my head, and it’s so hot that I have to put my hands protectively to my face. The smell is lavender and freshly mown grass, although there is no grass or lavender in sight. The waterfall ahead of me is splashing water on the rocks surrounding it; but the rocks don’t mind – the sun is their friend, and it takes the coldness of the water away. All around me I hear birds singing; but I cannot see them.

Maybe changing this to past tense. ie. The sand tickled my bare feet and I giggled splendidly. etc.

I woke up alarmed, trembling in my own bed. This beautiful place was more than just a dream - I could feel it in my bones. I had reason to worry: this was the third time that I had dreamt about this place, and the sixth that I had been there.

Try rewording this sentence.

My father used to tell me of a land like this: a beautiful land where fairies, princesses and dragons lived. He described the heat so vividly, I used to be able to feel it beaming down at me. He described the grass, always full of early morning dew. There was no grass where I went now, though the smell lingered in the air.
My father died when I was four.
I’d missed him at first, and I could tell that my mother still did – but little by little I began to forget him. We didn’t keep any photos. The only things that I remembered were those wonderful fairy tales, so beautiful that I drew the place multiple times, but could never get it right.

You used a lot of semicolons where there should be commas in this paragraph.

“It’s just… It’s just that I go to this place sometimes… Hie: I’ve been going there more and more… and today I found evidence that it existed.” I murmured, my confidence slowly slipping away as her face grew even more confused.
“Woah, slow down! Hie? How strange is that? And what evidence anyway?” she said, trying to sound jokey but instead sounding rather shocked. She turned to face me. I couldn’t stop now.

Okay this dialogue is sort of shaky. It doesn’t sound very realistic, especially considering the circumstances. I don’t think the narrator’s description of what has been happening to her is very good and Lola’s reaction just doesn’t make sense. Sorry if that seems sort of harsh. I still think it’s a pretty great story so far.

“Look – don’t worry about me,” I whispered.
“I’ll be okay, just don’t tell anyone else about it because they’ll think I’m a nutter!” I tried to laugh but failed.

This shouldn’t be part of a new paragraph.

I smelt the Siren smell.

*smelled

Okay, pretty good so far but still a few problems.
1) Try to work on using commas, colons, and semicolons in the right place. You have a lot of mistakes that fall into that category but I only corrected the first few.
2) This isn’t really a problem with the story itself, but I noticed that you have a couple of your little paragraph separator shapes stuck randomly in the middle of a paragraph.
3) Some of your dialogue and characters just don’t seem very realistic; mainly the parts where Lo and Hannah are talking about Hie. I don’t know why, it just doesn’t seem to make sense for some reason. Try rereading it and see what you think.

Other than that, I really like the story so far. I don’t have time to read the whole thing right now, but I’ll keep reading it and posting my comments as I go. I can’t wait to see what happens! Keep writing!