CHAPTER 01
Happy Winters
It was 4'o clock in the morning. The Sun was not up yet. There were no birds, no sparrows or gauriyas, as we call in Hindi, on the old Neem tree in front of my balcony, chirping and waking up all who, just like me, hadn't woken up from their slumber. It was the twitter of these little birds that wake me up every morning, not my alarm app, which I have been trying to abandon for years.
Within ten minutes, I was in my study, with a cup of extra strong coffee in my favorite Harry Potter mug and a determination to finish the final draft of my novel 'Do Not Compare Me' which is a sequel of my best selling novel 'Comparison Hurts' and ' is being waited upon by readers worldwide', at least this is what the magazines say.
Today I had planned to do a lot of things. I had to make Raj and Nisha meet in a restaurant, had to visit the community park for a jog, and feed the ducks, that's my favourite pastime, after writing and music, text Mahirisha and cook something great. You know I had a lot of things to do and a lot less time.
Yes, I was in my study, slipping hot coffee and examining chapter XIV of my previous novel on the monitor, with my hand rotating the ink pen in a turbunal fashion. I still write with ink, atleast the first draft. Frankly speaking,it gives me some sought of unexplainable freedom and liberty, that being some of the abstract ideas that do not have any physical, materialistic existence and is beyond any logical conclusion.
My concentration was bugged by a sound, a sound of something chirping. It could not be the gauriyas as they were still asleep. Moreover the sound was being produced in my study. I rose up to find out what was it that was producing the clattering sound.
Today I wish I should not have risen up that day.
You know, my study is a small room, enough for only one person, that is me and sometimes Mahrisha, when she is home. It has a chair, my desk, my book shelf that was cleaned off dust ages ago with a old box kept over it.
Whatever was producing the sound was up in that box. Carefully I lifted the box and placed it on the desk. It was dusty. Very dusty.
I could feel the thing in the box.
I opened the box. Guess what? It was a rat! A Rattus rattus, black in colour and extremely large. I was about wish my tailed friend good morning but he looked a bit awkward and fled . Shy natured rat…
After my tailed friend had left, I decided to explore the dusty box. It had been lying on my bookshelf for centuries and I had never noticed it.
What was it that it enclosed? Other than my tailed friend and his by products. He had been living in the box for quite a long time.
I, covering my nose with a handkerchief, I was about to unravel the secrets the box enclosed, when my phone begun vibrating.
It was my alarm app, saying:
"Happy December Ishu!!
It's time to go for jogging"
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
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125,027 Literary Works • 672,768 Reviews
Hiya there. Pastel here for a hopefully helpful review full of rambling!
So this was pretty short and sweet, which lives up to the name of a prologue. Information about our main character, Ishu, is known by the readers such as job, hobbies and such, and not too much stuff was released for us since this is only a prologue.
But, the whole meaning of a prologue always confused me. They always seemed like an excuse to get out information that the author doesn't want to state later on, such as information about main characters, or revealing parts of the story's problem. Take the Warriors series by Erin Hunter for example. From the ones that I've read, there is usually to always a prologue that tells the prophecy, or it is in the point of view of the antagonist, making the reader wonder what the antagonist is planning. While it is a good technique to grab a reader's attention, I feel like it's a cheap trick.
The only form of criticism I can give you is that there are some run-on sentences in this, and my suggestion would be to read this out loud and catch those sentences and fix them.
Well, that's the end of my review. Cheers!
- Pastel
Hey there! This is a very interesting start to your story.
First off, I agree with Elinor that you could move the line
It would be more impactful in pulling the reading, as wake up scenes tend to be seen as a "cliche" way to start a book, and that would make yours less so.
Second, just a small note is that you titled this piece a prologue when it feels more like a first chapter. Prologues tend to be more like stuff that happened before or after the main story, or even a letter from the author. Maybe you did mean it to be the first chapter seeing as you also added the chapter 01 at the beginning.
Finally, as Elinor said a little bit of sentence structure could be worked on.
Ex.
This one sentence is super long and additionally, some of the info does seem slightly unneeded at this time, although since I don't know more about your story I could be wrong. But maybe try something like this (just a suggestion)
I really enjoyed reading this and I hope to see more. I hope that this review was helpful to you.
Sláinte -Junel
Hey there Ishan!
Ellie here to give you a review. I think you have a really good start to something here! I was certainly invested while I was reading it and intrigued to see where it was going. Your voice is really unique and I'm definitely interested to see where it goes from here.
This line especially caught my attention:
I think you could put this even earlier, in order to hook the reader's attention. You tell us this, and we start with a fairly normal scene of your protagonist waking up. Then we're on the edge of our seats wondering what's going to happen!
I think where this could use the most work is just improving the structure and flow. There are quite a few run-on sentences here. What I like to is read my work out loud, and that usually helps me catch a lot of the clunk.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions.