Chroma - Chapter 1

You have the dubious honour of being my first review, so I hope you enjoy it

I'll start with the dialogue, the conversation flowed nicley, not jerky or unnaturual at all. However, I think it could be improved alot with the use of some description, It might help the characters to feel less hollow and give the conversation a little easier to follow because, at times anyway, there was no feeling behind any of those words. I didn't know if the characters were angry or said, moody or if they just had a bad sense of humor.

Your story began to creep a little bit back into life once the action started. I especially liked the paragraph after the bloodcurdling scream. But even here there is room for more description, while you don't want to choke sentences with laboured comparisons, smells and colours, it would be nice to be able to have some picture and context. A good example would be the way that the girl is dangling of a one thousand foot drop. Thats a rather large drop, popping out of nowhere. That sort of thing needs more than a passing line, its terrifyingly huge but just glanced over. If you can't picture there is no peril, no adventure.

In conclusion I think you have the great backbones of a story, it just needs all the meat building up around it. Add in some description to liven up the dialogue and help give us a better image of whats taking place, tell us where they are. Even after re-reading it a couple of times I got no real sense of what terrain they where in. Don't be discouraged, it has great potential to be the start of a story and I can't wait to see where it's going to go.

Scion

Well, I don't really know if you really want another opinion since you reviewed it yourself, but I'll give you one anyway, as long as I'm here. x)

It was difficult for me to follow who was speaking in the beginning since you had no dialogue tags. I couldn't place any of the characters. Be sure to cue us to who is speaking.

Next, you say Az punched the guy hard enough for him to wheeze... that's quite hard. Like, that really would've damaged him. You just pass over it like it's nothing.

You made two jokes within a page of each other, one of them where Az says "Fuck you." and Matei replies with "I'd rather not." and the other where Az says "Fuck this." and Matei says "I don't think I should." In my eyes, they are the same thing and it wasn't very funny to just have them repeat themselves.

To be honest, I didn't really care for the first part at all, but the second half got a lot better. We finally get an idea where these guys are and what's going on. I like the idea of the jungle and I thought the bugs and animals you created were pretty cool. There was a lot more description and I thought it worked well!

On a whole, this really story wasn't appealing to me because your characters felt really weak. To me, it almost seemed like you don't understand people at all because I can't imagine people behaving like this in real life. You could say the characters are a bit stereotypical; Az is the bully and Matei is like the defenseless nerd who puts up with it, but you take them to such extremes that it's just kind of unbelievable.

Also, the excessive swearing was annoying. I don't usually mind swearing in books, I certainly think it has its place, but here it was just not very creative or necessary. The first few sentences felt like "It's your fucking fault we're fucking lost, you fucking fuckface!" and it just continued from there. Instead of throwing the f-bomb everywhere, maybe you can create some swears or insults of your own.

Also, be sure you have a rating or warning before posting something like this.

Hope this was a little helpful, sorry it was so negative You seem like a great writer but the characters need a little work, I think! Best of luck!

Hey ShapeShifter, nice piece you got here.
It really started to get exciting at the end
Anyway, to the point.
This chapter is quite interesting. It starts off a bit plain and at first you think these guys are two friends going on a hiking adventure. Fighting over things, getting lost, angry at each other, and just not seeing eye to eye. Also, I think you overused cuss to much. The only reason I clicked this piece was because I was randomly reviewing. All of sudden, three billion cuss words come at me. Make sure when uploading work, to put a rating on it, like 18+ so on. It's actually a YWS rule.

Anywho, when they start fighting I am quite captured in the sense that these guys aren't friends, or don't want to be around each other. This is a good building block. You could rename this piece a prologue, (unless you've already written one) it juts makes more sense to me.

There were'nt any grammatical mistakes to pick up on here, and I really liked the ending and overall the whoel piece. I'm looking forward to reading more

Keep writing,
Tobes.

Can the authors leave their own reviews on their stories? Well, I guess I'll find out.

Well, me, looks like you've written a story with two stereotypical characters. You've got the typical angry, swearing character, and the funny character to balance him out. Your name choice is interesting, they're not typical "Johns and Jenny's", so you've probably got here a different setting than the normal world. But you've got the main appealing thing to teen readers: an anti-hero who may be an assassin of some sort. They may also be criminals of some sort.

It seems that your writing is somewhat weak, and not dense and serious. It could be your narrative voice, he doesn't seem the type to describe things with heavy imagery and metaphors and such, so again, this would be appealing to teen readers. They don't need to unravel sentences, this is no "The Scarlet Letter". (That, I swear, was in hieroglyphs.)

Anyway, overall, you need a second opinion, because my help would be no good, because you already know what you need to work on from my view. It just depends if you get off your butt and do it. And don't be offended by criticism. Besides, you get enough from your inner critic, so you should be toughened up by now.