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125,005 Literary Works • 672,798 Reviews
Salutations, Ashley.
The beginning has been used before and honestly dull -- perhaps a good word to use here is cliche. Waking up scenes are very common and just plain old boring to use. It's difficult to turn them into something that's interesting. Even with the mysterious old lady that was mentioned, I could put down the story and never return to it. It didn't capture me, it was just familiar in a bad way.
Even with her being late, it turned out to be for naught and that killed it for me. Even if the tension wasn't as high as it could have been, but just killing it made it even worse. It's just another day for the protagonist, even with the old lady showing up. (Some kind of supernatural spirit? A mentor?) It just seems too cliche and hard to follow.
There are some minor grammar mishaps. Threw instead of through, stud isn't of stood, but those are pretty common.
One thing, thoughts may want to be in italics instead of double quotation marks. Because with quotation marks, it looks like Ivy said some aloud instead of in her head.
A better dialogue tag may want to be put here. Just picture her, roaring like a lion. Now, put that roar into words and how... silly it sounds coming from Veronica. Some synonyms for roared for boomed, thundered, crashed (hey, are we looking at dialogue tags or a thunder storm?
So, there's going to romance in this story? Or, at least skirting around Ben and awkward conversations.
Another thing I want to say is that this is a bit too long to be posted in one work. Perhaps put the two chapters in two seperate posts, so then more readers might be more inclined to review this story. Because it has potential, but it also needs critique to ever improve.
'Dad' doesn't need to be capitalized, never does 'Mom', because the word 'my' is before them. Speaking of capitalization, there are some issues with that in the second chapter.
Comma before 'sweetie'.
Woah, she's adopted. That's sorta unexpected, but a great place to end the chapter. A very evil move.
~Adrian
Kay here to review your work!
First of all, I'd suggest you break your work up into smaller pieces for posting. I made the same mistake when I first joined; you won't get many reviews when your piece takes a long time to read. Some people even split their chapters in two for posting.
Was, not is, and could, not can. Everything else is in past tense so you should keep it in past tense.
grammar error. The way you write this means your character is blinking twelve over and over again, not the alarm. So you'd say "which was blinking" to fix that.
When it noticed I wasn't there.
Tense error.
Semicolon, not comma.
These paragraphs need to be smoothed up a little. We don't really need to know your protagonist's wake-up routine, and we could use a better description of the old lady, even if the character isn't wearing her glasses. Either the lady is blurry and she doesn't know if she recognizes her or not, or she could give more detail. I'm not as worried about her knowledge that the woman's watching, because that's a sixth sense many people have.
Comma splice. Semicolon or period and capital.
Another tense error. This is the last one I'll point out, so I can focus on the rest, but there's still some in there. Pick a tense and stick with it.
had turned
Notice or realize there was
Golden isn't a proper noun so it's not capitalized in the middle of a sentence.
homely means plain to the point of being ugly. It doesn't fit here.
Comma splice, again the last I'll point out.
Stood up. Don't tell us the info about the dad, show us.
My father had started back working on his bike again soon after I walked in; he was kneeling
At the moment, what you really need to do is go through and do a through grammar check, and rearrange your paragraphs so this is more readable. Then you need to make sure you thoroughly understand every word you're using-some of them look like you were flipping through a thesaurus and thus don't fit well. If you want, when you're done fixing these errors PM me and I'll go over the plot.
It's just me here, the Chirave Canicthus, here to kick this out from the bottomless pit known as the Green Room!
Ooh-de-Lally, where do I start? Sure, this is all set-up, but there's such a thing as too much of it. Stop infodumping probably useless information. What struck me most and stuck out like a sore thumb was her father being an advisor for the mayor. Sure, that's fine. But then you have to bring the extra details in there like the politics behind the previous mayor and stuff. First question. Why would your MC care? Second, would it have any significance to the plot? Remember, if you put a gun on a wall, then it must shoot by the third act. Only add relevant things to the story and you could trim it down to a readable size.
This just seemed like endless scrolling of mundane things, and it really put me off. Nothing makes this piece shine out from any realistic fiction out here. It reminds me of why I couldn't get into Homestuck even after hours of trying.
This isn't to say that I didn't like this. I liked it for the descriptions you added in there, even if I had to skim a lot of it, due to the endless infodumping. The one that really got me was the coffee pot. In our house, we grind the whole bean with an extremely loud Magic Bullet. Loud. Trust us, we know when somebody's brewing coffee. This really made me think about how lucky you are about that.
So, just try to keep all the useless info out. (And avoid using too much product placement too. Lexus, Harley Davidson... It's like reading a commercial.)
Keep Writing!
*The Chiravian flies away*
I have no comment on the plot line at the moment, since I think it's pretty good for a first draft. What you need to work on now, I think, is splitting up those huge paragraphs. I myself struggle with this same kind of info-dump, because the world is laid out in my head. Unfortunately, the readers cannot read your mind and can get bored through those long chunks of backstory and actions. Just a thought.
-Grace
I have no comment on the plot line at the moment, since I think it's pretty good for a first draft. What you need to work on now, I think, is splitting up those huge paragraphs. I myself struggle with this same kind of info-dump, because the world is laid out in my head. Unfortunately, the readers cannot read your mind and can get bored through those long chunks of backstory and actions. Just a thought.
-Grace