Scarlet

This is the first part of five. I will be posting each new section in this thread, and I will edit the title with updated dates. Thank you for reading!

A/N: This MC is a semi-retarded teenager. Any help with making him seem like one would be much appreciated.

-

026: Round

The ball started it all.

I was just bouncing it. Really, that’s all I was doing. No magic tricks. No optical illusions. Just bouncing the ball. There’s nothing wrong in doing that, is there?

The ball was scarlet. I’d picked it up from the rain gutter and wiped off the mud that clung to it. It was a bouncy ball: the kind that you chuck at the ground and have contests to see who can shoot it up into the air the highest. I always won. Jessica was stupid and tossed it like a girl. She didn’t know how to do it right.

It was raining outside, but I didn’t care. I was wearing my windbreaker with my hood up. Jessica was pansying around, shivering and cold. She was glaring at me, but I tried to ignore her.

“Beat this!” I cried and chucked the rubber ball on the ground. A grin slid across my face as I watched the scarlet ball soar into the cloudy sky. “Did you see that, Jessie?”

“Mmhm,” she says. She didn’t see it though. I was watching her eyes the whole time. They were staring at her feet, and her feet were dipping into a muddy puddle. Girls were stupid that way.

The ball came back down and I chased it into the street. Jessica eyed me warily as I returned with a goofy smile on my face.

“Can we go in? Please?” she begged.

I threw the ball at the ground again, and it bounced into the air. This time I didn’t throw it with enough force, so the ball didn’t go very high. I caught it and threw it again.

“Eddy, please? Can we go inside? It’s so cold out here!” I pretended not to hear her. I threw the ball into the driveway of my house again, and it bounced back quickly. I jumped up into the air to catch it—

It slipped through my fingers and went into the street. I chased it like a dog would fetch a bone, except not on my hands and knees, because then I would look dumb. The ball kept bouncing and bouncing until it ended up in someone’s yard. And, even then, it kept bouncing and bouncing and bouncing.

“Eddy! Eddy, look out! Eddy!” Jessica shrieked, and I turned around. There was a car heading down the road. I froze like a deer in headlights. The car wasn’t slowing down.

“EDDY!” Jessica roared and bounded into the street. I was still frozen. The car wasn’t, though.

“EDDY, MOVE!”

I quickly jumped to one side, and the car missed me by not even an inch. I felt the side view mirrors brush my skin, and I flinched, hopping backwards. I tripped on my leg, and tumbled to the ground in a big, twisted mess.

“Eddy! Oh, my—” Jessica cried as she flung herself over me. “Are you okay? Where did you get hurt?”

“Why are you crying?” I asked, scrunching up my face. “All I wanted to do was get my ball.” Jessica wiped her face and moaned.

“I’m supposed to be baby-sitting you! Edward Phillips, you are a twelve year old boy! Act like one!” She slapped my cheek, and I became frozen again. Pain echoed throughout my jaw, and my smile quickly faded into a disappointed frown. "Don't ever do that again! You hear?"

“I’m sorry, Jessica. All I wanted was my ball…” Jessica sighed and got off me.

“I know. I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have slapped you.”

“Can I go get my ball?”

“Yeah,” Jessica said, and pulled me up onto my feet. “Come on. Where did you see it last?” I pointed over to a neighbor’s yard, and said I had seen it last there. We quietly walked over to the green yard, hand in hand.

“Where is it?” Jessica asked, and I shrugged.

“I don’t know. Maybe it fell into one of the window wells?" I pointed my finger to one, and we walked over there. I was suddenly puzzled, and Jessica pulled her hand away from mine. We walked a bit closer to the window well and looked down. There was glass shattered everywhere, but that wasn’t what made me gasp.

We were looking into another world. It was just beyond the window. I could see my scarlet bouncy ball on the other side. It was sitting nicely in a tree’s shade and blades of grass.

“What in the world…?” Jessica whispered. We bent down to gaze into the shattered window.

Like I said, the ball started it all.

Hey BBB, 'sup.

I think you've got quite the interesting premise here, not an uncommon one, but with a somewhat different bent on the idea.

Edward Phillips, you are a sixteen years old boy!

If you want to keep this sentence as it is, you need to get rid of the 's' on 'year'. However, I think its too formal a sentence to come from a young girl - settle for 'You're sixteen years old!'

Okay, so prior to that sentence, Edward seemed to be around 12, tops. His attitude about girls for instance, isn't really one a sixteen year old guy is going to have. Furthermore, not only is the style reminiscent of children fiction, but I mean, this guy is bouncing a shiny red ball? I mean, seriously? This is not an activity of someone that age nor is the style of writing suitable for an older kid...

So basically, it doesn't really fit well. You need to make him younger - that's my main problem with this. Aside from that and some minor typos you'll find, such as missing speech marks.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see where this goes.

Kudos and good luck,
Cheers

A/N: This MC is a semi-retarded teenager. Any help with making him seem like one would be much appreciated.

Did you happen not to notice that?

Thank you for the critique!

-Jared

Ahaha, no I did not actually.

And it didn't really come across that way, I didn't think of him as "special" - only young, so that needs some work, methinks.

Cheers.

Ooh, very interesting.

This was a great beginning. Not much happens, but the voice was so intriguing to me that I just had to keep reading. The red "scarlet"s were pretty cool too. Nice little touch that adds a lot.

Have you read "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time"? It's about a 15 year-old boy with autism and told in first person. It's really a great book, though I'd probably rate it PG-13 for some elements such as language and some other stuff (just warnin' ya). But it's a great insight to the mind of an autistic person, and so it might be a great read for you to look at and see how to write that kind of voice. Plus it's just a good read. Who knows? It might help.

Very nice. It's an interesting premise of a story and one that hasn't been exploited much. I want to see what happens next! Would you please PM when you post the next part? *puppy eyes*

*thumbs up* Magnificent as always, 3B.

~GryphonFledgling

Ooo this sounds interesting. I hope you're going to keept writing on this one =) I really want to know what happened, er, happens. you also put a lot of good detail into the story, which I really like and wish more people would do lol. Keep it up!

Thanks for requesting a critique!
Comments in red.


---------

026: Round

The ball started it all. What does this mean?

I was just bouncing it. Really, that’s all I was doing. Oh, okay. I get it. On first read, the opener sounded like you meant to write "The ball started to roll" or something like that. I would suggest the traditional "The ball started it." That'll hit home more, and draw the reader in more quickly. No magic tricks. No optical illusions. Just bouncing the ball. There’s nothing wrong in doing that, is there?

The ball was scarlet. I’d picked it up from the rain gutter and wiped off the mud that clung to it. It was a bouncy ball: the kind that you chuck at the ground and have contests to see who can shoot it up into the air the highest. A "rubber ball". I always won. Jessica was stupid and tossed it like a girl. She didn’t know how to do it right. Don't italicize "girl"--it reads a lot better with out it.

It was raining outside, but I didn’t care. I was wearing my windbreaker with my hood up. Jessica was pansying around, shivering and cold. She was glaring at me, but I tried to ignore her. Good description and character development.

“Beat this!” I cried and chucked the rubber ball on the ground. A grin slid across my face as I watched the scarlet ball soar into the cloudy sky. “Did you see that, Jessie?”

“Mmhm,” she says. She didn’t see it though. I was watching her eyes the whole time. They were staring at her feet, and her feet were dipping into a muddy puddle. Girls were stupid that way.

The ball came back down and I chased it into the street. Jessica eyed me warily as I returned with a goofy smile on my face.

“Can we go in? Please?” she begged.

I threw the ball at the ground again, and it bounced into the air. This time I didn’t throw it with enough force, so the ball didn’t go very high. I caught it and threw it again.

“Eddy, please? Can we go inside? It’s so cold out here!” The nickname for "Edward" is spelled "Eddie". Otherwise it is a noun that means stream or small river. I pretended not to hear her. I threw the ball into the driveway of my house again, and it bounced back quickly. I jumped up into the air to catch it—

It slipped through my fingers and went into the street. I chased it like a dog would fetch a bone, except not on my hands and knees, because then I would look dumb. Good description. The ball kept bouncing and bouncing until it ended up in someone’s yard. And, even then, it kept bouncing and bouncing and bouncing. Bouncing on grass?

“Eddy! Eddy, look out! Eddy!” Jessica shrieked, and I turned around. There was a car heading down the road. I froze like a deer in headlights Very tired phrase. Leave it at "I froze" or come up with a different simile.. The car wasn’t slowing down.

“EDDY!” Jessica roared and bounded into the street. I was still frozen. The car wasn’t, though.

“EDDY, MOVE!”

I quickly jumped to one side, and the car missed me by not even an inch. Either "by an inch" or "by less than an inch" or "by little more than an inch". It is a writer's job to create what is there, so tell readers what exists rather than what doesn't. I felt the side view mirrors They're called "wing mirrors" brush my skin, and I flinched, hopping backwards You need a snappier word to end the line: "hopping back" or "hopping away".. I tripped on my leg, and tumbled to the ground in a big, twisted mess. I don't think that I would go far. The most twisted he could be would be the toe of his shoe caught behind an ankle. Far from a mess.

“Eddy! Oh, my—” Jessica cried as she flung herself over me. “Are you okay? Where did you get hurt?”

“Why are you crying?” I asked, scrunching up my face. “All I wanted to do was get my ball.” Jessica wiped her face and moaned.

“I’m supposed to be baby-sitting you! Edward Phillips, you are a twelve year old boy! Act like one!” She slapped my cheek, and I became frozen again. Pain echoed throughout my jaw Pain is not sound and cannot echo. Choose a different verb., and my smile quickly faded into a disappointed frown. "Don't ever do that again! Jessica yelled. You hear?"

“I’m sorry, Jessica. All I wanted was my ball…” New paragraph. Jessica sighed and got off me.

“I know. I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have slapped you.”

“Can I go get my ball?”

“Yeah,” Jessica said, and pulled me up onto my feet. “Come on. Where did you see it last?” I pointed over to a neighbor’s yard, and said I had seen it last there. We quietly walked over to the green yard, hand in hand.

“Where is it?” Jessica asked, and I shrugged.

“I don’t know. Maybe it fell into one of the window wells?" I pointed my finger to one, and we walked over there. I was suddenly puzzled, and Jessica pulled her hand away from mine. We walked a bit closer to the window well and looked down. There was glass shattered everywhere, but that wasn’t what made me gasp.

We were looking into another world. It was just beyond the window. I could see my scarlet bouncy ball on the other side. It was sitting nicely in a tree’s shade and blades of grass.

“What in the world…?” Jessica whispered. We bent down to gaze into the shattered window.

Like I said, the ball started it all. The revelation is well done, but this last line is weak and loses the drive. Again I suggest ending it with "it" as in "Like I said, the ball started it", but that's kind of an easy out. I would personally try to find different closer.

----------


I'll be straight with you. The colored text thing every time you say "scarlet"? It's kitschy. Get rid of it.

Not a bad start. Kind of Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass, but I'll be interested to see what you do with it.

I note that you intend Eddie to be mentally handicapped, but it doesn't read like that at all. He just seems like a young kid--maybe six or seven. You never mention how old he is, and it would be much easier for readers to sense/accept the character if we got some feedback from him. Have him describe himself and mention what his mother says about him. Is Jessica older or younger? If she's younger, have him mention that she is, but that she watches over him because "Mama says I can't watch myself". If she's older, have him say "Jessica isn't much older than me, and not any bigger at all, but she watches me anyway. She worries about me..." etc, etc. You've got a pretty good handle on the voices of your characters, but I'm just not sure that they're the right voices. What I mean by this is that the dialog from one character all sounds like it would be said by the same person. Whether or not that person is the one you're envisioning is a whole different story. Do some research on mentally handicapped teens. I think that you'll turn up some good foundations for Eddie's character.

Let me know when you post the rest!

Avens

The big thing that is keeping you from making this story truly enjoyable is the fact that you want to make your character semi-retarded. I mean, otherwise it's catchy and good, but that one little fact blows it all to pieces. I realize that you're trying to make the letters scarlet to emphasize this fact, but it really doesn't work and it looks horribly stupid. Consider changing your character to somebody younger, just so you don't have to lower yourself with such pathetic color tricks. Somebody younger would be able to think as quickly as your character and act as quickly and precisely as your character.

If you have to have a semi-retarded character for some major plot thing that we are as of yet unaware of, then you got to write it differently. I had the same trouble for FREAK. That is, the freak was supposed to have an element of mental retardation, yet she didn't. So what I did was I changed the perspective from first, which I was more comfortable with, to third, which I sucked at. And then, to emphasis the fact that she was slightly retarded, I made her notice some things that were not immediately obvious and forget some things which were gimmes.

That might have not made any sense. Er... a sample!

She paused as she neared the opened gate. She wasn’t worried about anyone coming inside; nobody would come into a place with so many freaks. But freaks were never allowed to go anywhere beyond the orphanage. She looked through the chain link fence and shivered.

No one was there.

But nobody was ever there. Only trash walked the streets. As she watched, an old newspaper rustled as it charged down. The freak stared at it for a moment before squinting at the apartments across from her. They were ugly buildings with peeling white paint, crammed so close together that she wondered if the people there leapt through each others’ windows, just to say hello. She turned back to the newspaper.

It landed in the gutter.

So you see that she thinks that trash "walks" and people "leap through windows" yet she seems to be unaware of the fact that trash is not sentient and leaping through a window hurts. That sort of stuff.

Obviously, you don't want to do the same sort of thing for your character, if he is semi-retarded, but the fun part about writing those characters is having them aware of different things. It gives us room for experimentation and makes writing fun... well, if you think experimentation and constant failure is fun anyway.

So yeah. The only other thing I would caution you on is the babysitter. That babysitter is TERRIBLE and I don't see how she could have ever gotten the job. She seems to lose her anger far too easily, and she doesn't have control of the situation. But the rest looks all right. The length is fine, short enough to be ... well, short, yet long enough that it doesn't fail to satisfy. Just work on your characters a little more. They don't seem right at the moment.

I'm sorry, I know I'm late. XD

Um... well, I'm not sure if I can be any help on this story, because I don't honestly know what that heck I'm talking about. But... I agree with the people above me that your character doesn't really seem mentally disabled, just... young. I... kind of hesitate to say this, because I really don't know anything about mental retardation or how it would cause a person to act or think, and I don't want to say anything offensive or biased. But it just doesn't seem like you've got quite what your aiming for here. I suggest maybe a little research...? It seemed to me like your MC uses pretty big words in the narration ("optical illusions") and has really direct and clear speech and general logic, and... etc. I guess. He just sounds like a little kid. If you hadn't noted it in the beginning, I never would have guessed what you were going for. But that's just me, and like I said, I'm not entirely certain of what I'm talking about.

By the way, I also thought it was a little odd that, considering that it's raining and it would be hard for a car to stop on time, and your MC is mentally disabled, and he's playing with a ball that could bounce away, his baby-sitter would be letting him play with it in the street. Wouldn't she be a little more careful...? Of course, where I live, kids play in the middle of the street all the time, but that's just because there's gravel, cacti, and pricker bushes instead of grass and trees; nobody's got a proper front yard. ...Once again, I probably don't know what I'm talking about.

Anyway. I actually didn't mind the random color-changing word, I thought it was kind of creative and neat... but then I thought about it, and I honestly can't see a reason for it, except to draw attention to itself. So you might not want to keep it, if you don't have a good story reason. It's kinda... gimmicky.

However, the good news is, I really liked the general story concept. It sounds like an interesting idea. I really want to read the next chapter, and I'm interested in seeing your characters get developed more. I just think a little research would benefit you, in the long run.

Once again, I'm really, really sorry if anything I said was incorrect/rude/stupid, and I'm really, really sorry for sounding harsh. I'll say it again, I'm really unsure of what I'm saying here, which was why it took me so long to get this review out in the first place. I don't know what I'm talking about. Please don't get upset! *hides*

It's a good story, but you really need to describe the people into big detail. How old r they? Where is the story taking place? How old is Jessica? What are they wearing? Get my point? Other than that it's a great story? But, in the beginning....what do you mean by: She threw it like girl? She IS a girl, isn't she? Good luck with the book

i really liked this,love the first sentance. But i would agree with some of the others about the font of scarlet, it's a good start though.

this is more of question, erm im new and i was wondering where you can enter in compitions, or find out about them.

keep writing.