Young Writers Society

Good job

Hi there!

This was a very good read. You have potential to be a great writer. You just have to make some changes here and there.

The first thing I notice you do not have punctuations. Avoiding them isn't a good idea as they are there to help with the structure and flow of the story.

Ruby-Ella was a gilr, of 15 years of age, who was secretly a vampire. Shehad 17 brothers and sisters too except one of them died because it was a bad vampire and it was bad that it died. Then their father was really not a vampire and only their mother was and the girl called rubyella had to fight him. But rubyella couldnt cause she loved him cause she was nice vampire. And in the fight began she stepped out onto the front of her big mansion and looked at her father who was ready to attack but in order to save him she breathed in and then breathed out and closed her eyes and drew in the energy and made a move that pushed him safly into the pool because luckily he could swim too. And the. Rubyella and he best brother who wasnt her real brother he was only her brother by marriage and he had just come before and their parents had divorced because of the vampire ran away into the forest. I pushed through the Forest leaves and my step brother called Jake followed me he was very strong and had thick muscles and blond hair too with a gold colored tan. I was strong too and I would always beat him when we had practice fights but he was the second strongest. Rubyella pushed her long waist length dark soft and silky hair that felt like velvet." we should set up camp here" said Jake and he stopes running. Cause even though vampires don't get tired from running it was getting light and the Sun turning up. I curled up my long waist length silky and shiny long black locks behind my ear and looked at Jake. what do we do now" I asked him but he didnt no. And I went and collected some leaves to make a bed out of and Jake made a fire but then it was day anyway so he put it out again and then we had to hide under the leaves to pretect(protect) themselves[you mean ourselves?] from the sun. It was dangerous cause Rubyella and Jake were vampires and they had to drink blood or else they would dry up and die but since they were nice vampires they didnt want to drink the necks out of humans so Jake got up and catched a bad rabit who had bullied the other rabits and they drank all of his blood but not enough to kill the rabit and when they were done they let him go so he could get fixed.

This goes to the whole story. The grammar and punctuations need to be fixed.

And the. Rubyella and he best brother who wasnt her real brother he was only her brother by marriage

Hi there Genna and welcome to YWS!

In the interest of Review Day and getting this out of the Green Room, Nite here with a more constructive review.

So first off, a good tip for submitting stories: use shorter paragraphs. It's really difficult to read long paragraphs on a computer screen. The big chunks made it very difficult to follow what was happening in the story. Also, proofreading is a good idea if you want your work to be taken seriously.

Secondly, there's a lot of action, but very little transition between. This transition is essential so the action makes sense. I have very little grasp of why the characters are doing what they're doing. There's sentences with a lot of information, but it's largely irrelevant. That's known as info-dumping and tends to drag a story down.

Also, you don't have to inform us about basic vampire lore (roam at night, drink blood) although I have no clue how nice or bad vampires come to be that way. Or how/why a vampire would have a family of 17. It's hard to stay under the radar with that many people.

Honestly, I'm not sure what else to say, but I will say I think Ruby-Ella is a very pretty name. Just make sure you keep it hyphenated, as it's rather close to "rubella".

Overall, I hope you continue to grow as a writer. Read more to see how authors develop their plot and characters. Keep writing!

I feel my thoughts on this piece will take some time to put into writing, so I'll start from the top -- namely, the title. I really like it. When one usually reads vampire literature, one hears of vampires hunting in the night, vampires prowling in the darkness, vampires cavorting in the twilight -- but here, you go the opposite direction. The name summons the glory of the glimmering dawn, though with a twist: vampires are of course allergic to sunlight, so to them, sunrise is the anti-glory. It's a dark title, but only dark when you think about it. It is subtle yet sublime. In a typical fashion for this piece, as we'll see later, the gloom of the title is contrasted against a smiley, playfully misleading the reader into assumptions.

I liked reading your first paragraph. It does not waste time on the backstory (after all, we live in the present, not in the past), but at the same time it does not ignore it, either. We learn of Ruby-Ella's large family, giving us a reason to root for her as the heroine. Is it not in all of us to admire a protector of the innocent? The few chosen words that /are/ present are used to set up a scene of Ruby-Ella against her father, where not only her struggle, but her mercy and heroism are portrayed. Instead of killing her non-vampire father to her evil mother's wishes, she instead safely lands him in a pond. Her mother shall be pleased with the splash, thinking good thoughts of her obedient daughter's ferocity in dispatching her weakling human husband; the same one who is alive and well, thanks to Ruby-Ella's quick thinking. Literally everyone is happy. This is a rare thing to accomplish, even in writing. Quickly, backstory is summed up and (I assume you missed a paragraph break here) the actual story, signified by the transition into first person, begins.

Jake greatly intrigues me. He is a vampire, but he has a tan. This could only mean that he spends protracted periods of time in the dangerous daylight, immediately building his character as a brave hero. Perhaps a little reckless, too, as his presence in the daylight could be due to lacking foresight. Perhaps he may die early, from skin cancer, as a consequence of his spending so long in the sun, in spite of his nature as a vampire? Great character exploration potential.

Unusually, sometimes the narrative switches between first person and third person. While some may call it unorthodox, to me this technique was rather refreshing (and besides, the stagnant literary circles need the occasional whisking to preserve freshness). It gave me the mental equivalent of binaural beats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_beats), and I felt like a spirit stuck between the body which I inhabit, and my spiritual, third-person-observer self. It's a massage of my self-image, blurring the lines between the realms of existence in a comfortable haze.

I was for some time fascinated by this sentence: "I curled up my long waist length silky and shiny long black locks behind my ear and looked at jake." It reminds me of an Aubrey Beardsley drawing, The Peacock Skirt (http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustr ... sley/3.jpg). There is a startling amount of detail and information in an unexpected location, contrasted against vast swathes of conservative prose focusing mostly on the actions of the characters and the movement of the plot.

The campsite scene built some chemistry between Ruby-Ella and Jake, as well as showed off the knack for survival the characters have, and once again reinforced their merciful image. Quick and efficient. I like it.

More tightly packed images followed by understated events come soon after. Here, an additional curiosity is the length of the sentence which describes Jake and Ruby-Ella's bat forms. I had read it with bated breath, as if speaking it all at once. The pause in breathing had an effect on me as I imagined their forms: a lack of oxygen to my brain put me into a short daze, and the bats in my mind's eye became one with the night.

After their flight through the city, Jake and Ruby-Ella run into bandit-related troubles. Points of view shift in the middle of the sentence like restless continental plates, and the resulting earthquakes tremble in the crust of my brain, sometimes splitting me in half and sometimes merging me back together. Of course, nothing could have prepared me for the incredible journey, the sentence that makes up the rest of that paragraph, and the wealth of information hidden therein. Instead of being frustrating, your usage of the wall-of-text invites the opposite effect -- the scene reads smoothly, as if it were a snail sliding down a mound of wet jell-o. It compressed several hours' worth of events into itself, and then hid from the reader, appearing only as a whale-sized blip on the reader's wall-text-radar. Yet reading this section probably took me less time than any single sentence in the preceding paragraph. Subtle efficiency.

Finally, the piece offers us a cherry of sensuality as a parting gift, revealing an unexpected romance between Ruby-Ella and her (step-)brother. It was only very furtively hinted at earlier. However, it was furtive enough that I neither noticed it (before I had the gift of hindsight) nor saw it coming.

The final line of the piece struck me -- the sentence never ends, it is a cliffhanger, inciting the reader to reach for more. Not only that, it is also a callback to an earlier sentence of the second paragraph ("in the morning whch was really night because they were vampires"), providing a pleasant mental echo for me. Like a sweet recollection -- like coming back to grandma's house in the village for another summer. And since your only job is to make the reader turn the page, you succeed with flying colours.

Your bat,
cC

P. S. this is a comment rather than a review, since I consider constructive criticism a must for a review. This post lacks constructive criticism, and so -- not a review.