Young Writers Society

The falling snow was beautiful, crystallized white. It came down quite peaceful, blanketing the metal rooftops of the city skyscrapers. Any other Christmas, this would have been beautiful. But the fact that the city was deserted when people realized what was going on, left a mark.

There had once been a day when the virus wasn’t a problem. That day was about two years ago, but to Cara Thompson; it seemed light years in the past.

The city – which was once called New York – was one of the last victims of the Virus, one of the last cities to be destroyed.

Nobody knew why it happened – New York had been immune to the virus for quite some time. That was the reason that Cara was looking to come here – she wanted to be safe, after her town was affected. She originally lived in Rosewood, a small town in California, where the virus originated.

Cara had the opportunity of being taken in by a wonderful family, who activity participated in trying to find cure for the virus. Sadly, six weeks after Cara came, the thing happened that everyone dreaded. The Virus began to spread through New York City. She and her adoptive family were planning on escaping the city, as many others were doing. But soon, her adoptive mother, father and brother ended up dead.

Cara didn’t understand why she wasn’t affected. Perhaps she was immune, but why was she immune, when everyone else wasn’t? Cara didn’t like to think about it – it never turned out well when she did.

As soon as the members of her family died, Cara got a backpack, and filled it with a bottle of water, three large Hershey bars, a loaf of bread, sleeping bag, and her favorite novel, Tarzan of the Apes, which had belonged to her biological parents. She opened it up quickly, where she saw an inscription.

To Cara, on her thirteenth birthday
Congratulations to our little teenager!
We love you, and we hope you enjoy this book.

Love,
Mom and Dad

Cara smiled weakly. Reading it made her remember what her life was like back then. She remembered the book being wrapped in red package tied with green bow. She remembered ripping the package open, and crying with delight, as she had always wanted to book. She had hugged her Mom. Cara sighed, wiping away a tear. She missed her family.
If there had been people who escaped the city, they must have set up a sort of encampment. Cara needed to find them, if she was going to hope to survive, because the city was too dangerous. It would soon be a smoking ruin.

Cara had no maps. She had no idea where she was going. Maybe, hopefully, she would be lucky and find survivors. Or, they would come find her. When Cara was younger, she was a girl scout – so she had some basic knowledge of survival tactics. Boil contaminated water. She figured that that one was going to turn out to be extremely useful.

As Cara said a last goodbye to the small apartment which she had known for a very short time – the sleek, wooden bar, the glass refrigerator, the red carpet, and the LCD TV and long, brown couch, she flung open the door. She was in a long, gray room of doors with silver plaques indicating apartment number. Cara’s had been 302. Cara knew that all of the rooms were either abandoned, or their owners were dead, so there was no use trying to get help.

She was nineteen, but she had not gone to school since junior year, when she lived in Rosewood. The Virus had that spring, and by July everyone in Rosewood was dead. After that, she camped out in the forest for a very long time, hoping that she would be safe. She learned about New York . . . and how it was safe. Making it her goal to travel there, she stayed in towns and cities all across the US for periods of time, as they slowly became infected, she made her way eastward. This was December . . . If the Virus had not occurred; Cara would be a freshman in college. Cara had always hoped to study Drama.

Everything in the apartment still worked – she made her way down to elevator area. It wasn’t much, but it did have a long, glass coffee table with a few magazines, and a pale green love seat. Cara sat down – she couldn’t bring herself to look at any of the Magazines. Doing so would be too odd. She pushed the down button on the elevator – her thin, pale hand almost slammed it. Cara zipped up her metallic brown coat and put her hood up; because she had a feeling it was going to be cold outside.

She knew she probably wouldn’t get far today, because she was still in a sort of trauma about what was actually happening. Cara sort of felt like Robert Neville, Will Smith’s character from the film I am Legend. Even though he did have a companion, he had an underlying faith that there were other people out there. Cara did too, and she was going to keep it, no matter what happened.

Cara got into the elevator, which had a metal floor and dull brown walls. There were a few buttons – 1, 2, open, close. Cara pushed 1, and waited for the elevator to bring her down. She made a mental note for herself, a goal that she would make camp in safe place where it was not too cold and she could read Tarzan of the Apes.

The elevator used the digital counter to show that they were on level one, so the doors came open, revealing a rather luxurious lobby. There was a long wall of metal lock boxes – where apartment residents had once gotten their mail. Beyond that, there was a lounge with glass walls, revealing the amount of snow outside. There was a long, wooden coffee table with a lot of magazines, two beige chairs and a long, beige couch. There were large, potted plants making the scene seem exotic. To the left of that, three brown marble stairs led to the doors.

Cara sighed. She was beginning to like her home. But like all the others, it had to get destroyed.

She slowly descended the stairs. She began to think about the consequences of what she was doing – how was she going to escape the city? How was she going to the find the people who she was sure existed?

One week later, Cara awoke slowly. From the salmon-pink colors in the sky, she could see that it was early morning. Cara knew that she would had would have to eat her breakfast – which was a thinly sliced piece of bread broken in half, and a swig of water - and get going. She was running low on food.

However, she didn’t feel like getting up. After all, every day that she walked, it didn’t seem like she was getting any closer to the Brooklyn Bridge, her ticket out of Manhattan. In addition, Cara was oddly warm inside her sleeping bag – she had camped out on the doorstep of an Old Italian restaurant. – And with each day, the weather was getting excessively colder.

And, she was tired. Since she didn’t go to school, she wasn’t used to getting up early. Cara closed her eyes and opened them again. She got out of her sleeping bag, a wave of coldness swirling around her body. She got a piece of chocolate out of her knapsack, which she decided to eat instead of bread. Taking a drink of water, she looked at the sky again, realizing that it was probably only around five or six and it probably wouldn’t hurt if she spent an hour or so reading Tarzan of the Apes.

In the end, that’s what Cara decided to do. However, it didn’t last long, as she soon found herself drifting back into her pillow.

Hi ThornedRose. I'm Conrad Rice, and I'll be your reviewer for today.

All right. I have to say that you do have a very interesting premise here, one that has a lot of potential if done properly.

You need to fix your opening sentence, your hook, first. Hooks need to be plot relevant. I would suggest adding something about how the city is completely devoid of life there in that first sentence, instead of some pretty words about the snow. It's like you're fishing for the shark from Jaws only you've got a hook with a worm on it, when what you really need is a very big spear gun.

The city – which was once called New York – was one of the last victims of the Virus, one of the last cities to be destroyed.

Just say that the city is called New York. Yes, everyone is gone and things have changed, but no one has come along, claimed the city, and changed its name. You would only say the whole "once called New York" bit if someone strolled in with an established government and said, "This is now Davetown."

I'm going to start talking about an overall thing here, namely the fact that you seem to think its possible for a seventeen year old girl to make her way across the country from California to New York, all while the world falls apart behind her I might add. I have an idea of the survival techniques that the Girl Scouts teach, because it's pretty much the same thing that the Boy Scouts teach. Boy Scout survival technique will help you survive a week or so in the wilderness, long enough to be found. That's the entire thought process behind it. It will not help you make your way across the continental US. You've got the Rockies if you want to go north, which means bitterly cold conditions and fairly hostile wildlife such as wolves, bears, and cougars. If you decide to take the southern route, that's crossing several different deserts, all with extremely hot temperatures and no water. And it you just wanted to go straight up the middle, you would get a bit of both. Boy Scouts could give you some pointers, but you would need to have additional courses in order to do something like hike across America. And, since the Girl Scouts learn the same stuff as the Boy Scouts, this applies to your protagonist as well. Cara will have better luck standing by the side of the road with her thumb out and hoping that it's not a dirty old man that stops to help her.

And even if that's what she does, hitchhikes to various cities and towns, what does she do when she gets there? Small towns are not very accepting of bums, which is what Cara is while she travels, seeing as how she has no job skills and no money. For all they know, she's just a stupid runaway, and they're probably going to call the police and say she was nosing around. She's not going to find people with hearts of gold, she's going to find practical people who don't see the use in feeding someone without seeing a return for their efforts. And they aren't going to see a return because you haven't even established if this girl has any skills besides being really good at causing people to drop over dead from horrible illnesses.

And if she hits a big city, where there are things like shelters and soup kitchens, that still brings a whole new set of problems with it. Ever seen the homeless population of a major city? They aren't too kind, and will probably be less kind to a teenage girl all alone. In fact, since she's all alone, that will make her a prime target for people of corrupt moral caliber. She'll be lucky to get out of her second big city without someone having at least groped her or something, if she's without money and has no job skills.

And another thing. If she's going across the country, leaving behind cities and towns when they start to become infected, then where are the repercussions of the infection? As more and more places fall to the virus, the government is going to start cracking down on travel and things. Large areas will probably become quarantined, with no one going in or out. Sooner or later, your protagonist will get caught in one of these quarantined areas, and in all probability it will be before she reaches New York City. The government is not always slow and lethargic when it comes to responding to a crisis. If the entire western half of the nation has been engulfed by an epidemic, you can bet they will throw up barriers to prevent it from being spread any further, and they will do it sooner than you think.

I'm almost done here. Your protagonist is really looking like a Mary Sue, I'm sorry to say. She's just so good at getting across the entire country intact, and she's just so good at not letting the deaths of millions of people around her affect her at all, and she's just so good at survival that she can sit and read a book while the world falls apart around her. You need to have her get really scared at the prospect of living in a world where she might be the only human being still alive, and you need to have her quit reading and actually fight to survive. Who she is is not very believable nor is it very relatable.

Oh, and even in a horribly torn up Manhattan Island, it would not take a person a week to reach a bridge, unless they got hopelessly lost in the maze of buildings. That is plausible, and I would have called you on it if she'd reached the bridge in just one day even, but you need to mention that Cara keeps getting lost, if that's indeed what keeps happening.

There, that's the end. You've got quite a bit to work on. I would suggest doing large amounts of research all over the internet, not just glancing at Wikipedia for a few minutes. That way you can tighten up your facts and make this story a lot more solid..

Good luck.

-Conrad Rice

While I was reading this I noticed you're having a little trouble using your punctuation correctly. For example: when you use semicolons, you use them like a comma.

Elinor Brynn wrote: That day was about two years ago, but to Cara Thompson; it seemed light years in the past.

The place where you should have put the semicolon is here:

Elinor Brynn wrote:Nobody knew why it happened – New York had been immune to the virus for quite some time.

Right after 'happened', where you put the dash/hyphen instead. A semicolon is used in place of a period to separate two sentences where the conjunction has been left out. The correct version of that sentence would have been as follows:

Nobody knew why it happened; New York had been immune to the virus for quite some time.

There are also a bunch of other places where your punctuation isn't used correctly, but I'm going to leave you to try and find them by yourself. You won't learn how to use your punctuation correctly if I tell you where all your mistakes are. Good luck, and keep working hard on the story!

Hey there!
Not much to say, as the mistakes are already corrected.
I really like it! so nice job, I enjoyed it!
Best of luck!

I really do agree with nearly all the points Conrad made, it's very unbelievable that this seventeen year old is hiking across countries etc etc.

However, I think you could get away with it if you let us know just how frightened she is. I mean, it could be a lot more relatable. Personally, I would be terrified all on my own in this maze of New York.

Another thing, I think you should go more into detail about the lack of life. There would be overgrown plants, broken buildings, animals roaming free etc.

It's a bit bland, if i'm honest, it sounds like it's supposed to be this epic. It doesn't appear like that in the whole plot.
Oh, and give her some hope. Put something in there that's concrete, like a radio she carries or a phone - just in case.
A book is good, but it doesn't give her contact with anyone.

I also like the reference to I Am Legend, although that was a zombie film (i haven't read the book yet) and yours is just a virus :S

I suppose there is potential, you're writing is good - maybe clean up your plotline a bit.

Lorril.

Hi, Elinor Brynn. So you're ThornedRose? Did I get that right? If so, nice to talk to you again!

As to your story, I see that it's been covered quite thouroughly, but there was something not pointed out and I decided to do the honors. And that is... your beginning.

You've been given pointers on the details of your plot, how to do this, why this doesn't make sense, but no one seems to be actually talking about the writing! Your narrative, your description, your development. It needs work, as well. Now, I don't want to beat you up and get you discouraged; this DOES have potential. It IS a good start. You just need to work on it some.

Now, your hook. It's not very interesting. I felt like I was reading a textbook or sitting in a history lesson. You don't want to TELL us what has happened. You want to SHOW us, right? So start with that. Describe the empty city. Express the isolation your MC is feeling. Use the five senses: Sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste.

I like the small detail about the note your MC has. The one her parents wrote her on her thirteenth birthday? It just made the loss feel so much more real. And you have nice details here and there, as well.

I did have more to say, but turns out I'm out of time Sorry about that. Well, hope this little bit helps, and I wish you the best of luck on your editing.

Your friend,

KJ

I really really REALLY like it. It was really good and interesting.

Will Smith's Character in I am Legend

I really liked how you compared it. It put a smile on my face. Keep on writing!

Hello there, I'll just be adding on a little bit. I kind of agree with Conrad Rice, but just want to say that by adding little details about how she did make it across the country you could make it believable. It wouldn't be that hard, talking about getting rides or maybe even a private flight somehow. If this family she had lived with was rich, she'd still have some money. I did enjoy it, and it sounds like it'd be a nice book, just a little polishing. But don't worry, we all have some polishing to do on our works, and yours wouldn't be that hard with some effort

Hey, this was good, very good. It did remind me of I am Legend, but from a girl's point of view.
But, what I want to know, is Cara the reason for the virus to just suddenly start? Is she the virus?
Don't tell me of course, just post another part, please. I'm looking forward to find out the cause of the virus.

Hey Elinor, you have a very intriguing premise here, however your story suffers from what I call a "narrator's voice" or "narrator's presence" that gives the feeling as if I'm floating right above Cara instead of being in her skin. I feel very disconnected to her as if I'm being told about her instead of following her in her story, sadness and confusion. You can get past the narrator presence by letting us feel what Cara feels through all the fives sense and writing the story through her POV. Anyway, this is just my opinion, but I still think you're story is cool, you just need to zero in on Cara so it feels to the readers that they are living the story along with her. Hope this helps!

Suzu

You probably are dying from the critiques. After all, this is a bit of an old story! However, I wanted to point out two things:

1) Saying, "This story is sort of like this story!" is always a bad sign. You should make it your own.

2) Light years is a distance, not a measurement of time. Actually, that was the most annoying thing about the whole thing... and no, I am not a science geek!

Anyway, you have improved, and I'm glad for that! So cheers!

I can see others point of view about the hook thing, but i am leaning towards that the idea of Cara being a carrier of the virus is the hook. Which intrigues me as these kind of stories are always filled with moral battles.

This may be a small piece but i am left a little empty, as though nothing happened since we found out about the virus. Of course, nothing is supposed to happen in the sense i mean so i suggest that as others have said, describe Cara's emotions and the environment more to fill this gap.

I like it but so far it gives me a deja vu feeling, as though I've read it before (However i read a ridiculous, insanely over-the-top, amount of books so it may just be crazy readers like me who feel this way). Keep adding to it. Show us her emotions, show us the city, and this piece will improve allot.

Really cool idea, and sort of reminds me of I Am Legend but from a female perspective. I like it

Cant wait for number 2.

Very nice but here are some things I felt cold have been improved.

The city. Although you say everything was abandoned I didn’t really get a large feeling of it; usually I get a feeling of isolation when I read things like this so just try working on that a bit. Talk about how things had changed For example the lobby.

"It was hard to believe not so long ago this room would be filled with people all content and smiling, but now the only thing filling the room was silence, and the only smiles came from the feeling of isolation."

Secondly the virus itself. I felt a little more information was needed. For example did it have a name? What were there and symptoms? And what happened to someone who was infected? Did something specific happen or something that only happened to select people? (E.G. in the game Left 4 Dead some infected humans mutate into boss infected.)

Hope you found this helpful.

All the best.