Young Writers Society

Hi, Ubera! I saw you had some chapters in the green room and thought it best if I started reading from the beginning.

I really enjoyed this introduction's theme. It has a strong The Thing field, which I'm sure you've seen before. It's a great psychological horror/thriller movie with the alien assimilating the characters one by one. And I'm guessing something like that is happening here, so I'm really excited to continue reading. Judging by the chapter titles, you'll have several characters as well, which can be difficult to juggle and keep track of, but they all tend to be necessary in stories like this.

I also appreciated the insight you give the reader already by mentioning the Penisular Station and the supposedly extinct Czirnick. This already invites the reader into a new world with a thoroughly developed history and diverse cultures. Also caught some name drops which I imagine will come into play later, like Lt. Commander Cassie and, of course, Vikram and Manoj Shakra. In fact, I really love all your names in general. They look and sound so unique which continues to help worldbuild for the reader.

The fact that Darryl is so terrified that he's crying already shows his humanity. It's so easy to have a character not express realistic emotions in these circumstances as it's easier to just write in a hero that saves the day, but I can tell you're not afraid to torture your characters. Darryl is clearly terrified -- he's new and ill-prepared for this mission that probably turned out to be far more terrible than anyone originally thought, or they wouldn't have sent him.

The pacing felt a bit jointed for me, but this may be a style choice. Especially for an introduction, it's probably only meant to give a glimpse without revealing too much before the story actually starts. That said, it still feels very much like you're telling the reader a story via email rather than showing me a story through language. I don't have a movie playing in my head, I'm reading a movie script straight from the page itself instead. Still, I'd rather keep reading to see how this fits in with the existing chapters before I dive into it any further. I want a better understanding of the style you're trying to capture.

The gun scene confused me a bit. I think it was pronoun overload or something 'cause I didn't know who had a gun and who shot who. In general, I didn't know who said a lot of the dialogue in this introduction which after the third read-through, I decided some of those were generic voices in the distance. Don't be afraid of tags, or at least set the dialogue up beforehand so that the reader knows where that voice is coming from. In my first read-through, Darryl said everything and I when I caught my mistake, I'd have to go back and reread in a different character voice.

I do want to say how I love the transitioning between Darryl and the assimilation. Normally, the story might have ended when Darryl's human conscious was taken over, but you lead us through the entire process and introduce us to the new alien Darryl. It's really neat and the voices of each Darryl are clearly different.

I'm excited to see what this new Darryl is going to do, and I look forward to learning more about not only the alien but the entire mission itself and the characters involved. There's a lot of story here to dive into, so it should be a lot of fun exploring all aspects -- but of course, I hope it freaks me out. I don't usually watch thrillers, but I've watched a few, and I have certainly watched The Thing (some family members LOVE that movie), so I'm not unfamiliar with the genre.

Look forward to reading more! Keep writing!!

Jabber, the One and Only!

Hello, some creativity you've got here. I like your story line, aliens and humans, but i think you were a little brief with the scenes. In this chapter you've introduced the work of one alien, the Czirnick which apparently has the ability to absorb people with all their knowledge and stuff but we don't know how it looks like. It spent some moments chating with it's cowardy victim so there's definately got to be a description of it, i imagined something with jelly-like properties...
That aside, i like this and am looking forward to reading the rest of the story, especially about Manoj Shakra

Hello there, Darth!

Hope you're doing well. I'm here to drop off a review for you. Let's get right into it, without further ado. Alright.

We have something very interesting here. Aliens! I'm always up to reading anything about aliens. They're so cool. And we have different species of aliens too. Cool!

Just a couple of critiques now. I suggest you don't give every sentence it's own paragraph. A paragraph is a bunch of sentence in one line, like this one is, and it goes under the same topic. This is Merriam Webster's definition of paragraph:

a subdivision of a written composition that consists of one or more sentences, deals with one point or gives the words of one speaker, and begins on a new usually indented line.