I hear the water drip down the stone walls. The cold chains that are wrapped around my wrists pinch my skin. I press my ear to the wall, hoping to hear something, but, as usual, there was a deafening silence, aside from the drip drip drip of the water down the walls. I continued my pacing until I heard the jingle of keys through the small hole in the iron door. I walk up to the barred hole and looked through. A guard wearing a dark jumpsuit and a tight ponytail is walking down the row of dark cells. She stops in front of mine and turns a set of jingling keys in the keyhole. I hear the lock click and stand back from the door as it opens. Something wizzes in through the door, over my head, and I instinctively crouch down, not wanting to be hit.
"Get up," says the guard. I stand up, shakily. "You get one correspondence before we lock you up for good. If the bird can take the weight, you can send one letter."
I look up to see that the thing that whizzed over my head was an emerald green hummingbird. It seems a little girly for prison, but contact with the outside world isn't something I want to give up. I take the roll of parchment that the guard held out to me and wrote:
Mother,
I know I have not been home for a long time and you probably think I'm dead but I'm not. I am in prison in the swamp of marais and have a life sentence here. I just want to tell you I am sorry for leaving and please tell Laina I miss her. Because my birthday just passed, I am now thirteen. Please forget me to not feel any pain.
Love from Your Son,
Jay Radlan
The guard takes the paper, reads it over, and rolls it up. "Kinda cheesy," She says.
"I know," My voice cracks from not talking for so long.
The guard smiles at me and I am taken aback by the kindness she suddenly shows.
"I'll be back, kid," She says and walks away, quickly.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
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125,018 Literary Works • 672,857 Reviews
Hi there! Ooh fantasy and sci fi! Kinda cool, right?!
So, I think this one is a bit too short for me to comment
on in terms of plotline, pace etc.
So, one of the places where I think you can work on is the letter. i think instead of being factual about it, you could use the words in the letter to show the emotional realtionship between the the mother and the son.
Also, I don't get why the son had to tell his mom about his birthday. I would suspect the mom would know that. It seems like you were using that to get across the age of your MC, but I think there are other ways you can get to showing the reader that.
Again, the signing off on the letter seems foced in that a son wouldn't write his full name. It would probably seem more natural to say " Love from your son, Jay" or "xx, Jay". These are little things that define the relationship.
Good luck!
"I walk up to the barred hall and look through.
A guard wearing..."
That's just a paragraphing suggestion.
They're wearing a tight ponytail? Sorry, i know that that is correct, but it sounds a bit odd to me. I think maybe saying that their hair is typed up in a tight ponytail, or something along those lines.
If there aren't multiple prisons in the swamp, i would say in *the prison in the swamp.
Sorry these suggestions are weird.
It is very good. I like your use of present tense, but i must warn you to be careful if you are not used to writing in present tense. However, you did a good job with that and i did not catch any tense errors. I really like how you've chosen to express the guard's character. Although she probably isn't that important, we get a sense of her personality, or at least the one that she shows on duty.
I think that maybe now, or a little later we should try to get a bit of a better sense of the protagonist, only because it's good to just have a bit more knowledge of the main character.
I really like this, and i strongly encourage you to continue (mainly for selfish purposes, sorry).
Hello Flutter, Wolf here for a review!
First off some nitpicks:
There should be a comma after 'but'. I also love this sentence by the way. It's very descriptive and it just fits very well.
'Says' shouldn't be capitalized in this context.
Same problem as the first nitpick.
Some other technical suggestions. First, the letter could probably be italicized, just to emphasize that it is written, and make it stand out more. Also, be careful not to just repeat 'I did this. I did that. I said this.' Try to change it up a little here and there. I only mention this because in the first paragraph, three sentences in a row were started with 'I'. Don't worry though, if all else fails, starting a sentence with a pronoun is completely fine.
Other than that, nice job! I feel you really developed the mood of this story, and I can't wait to see what happens. The interactions between the two characters that were met in this were really well written. On to the next chapter! Keep Writing,
~Wolfare