We arrive at a small opening in the jungle. The plane settles down and the squads move out.
“Remember 10 days get back.” Said Ekko
The planes pick off the ground and flies away. The squads stand at on the soft grass covering the ground looking over the horizon, a small cliff lays just over some trees. A scout team put down 2 days before we found the camp we set up. One of the members approached us and said they had some important information.
“There’s a small waterfall fresh water about 10 clicks west.” Said one of the squad members.
“Understood,” I said in a soft voice.
We put up our tents. The area was pretty clean, small sticks and brush that the team moved out of the way. Soft grass covered the area, other than that a pretty decent sized open land.
“The City is about 13 miles away from her,” I said firmly.
“We move out tomorrow leave the camp here so we can have an area to return to and get some supplies. We will leave one squad here for defend. Dezbra your up on that job.” I said.
“Good luck getting there.” Said Dezbra squad leader, a small young woman about 20, with dark black hair, and a clean pale face.
“We will get there fine it's getting back and getting the mission done, that’s the challenge.”
“Makes sense.” She turned around with a sly smile and walked away.
The rest of the night was lacking in conversation. Small talk went around the camp, nothing major. A small campfire was built for the upcoming night. People told stories from before the war. Others told their life stories or war stories. We all had fun and talked not worrying too much about the mission. I sat towards the back on a log one of the members pulled in. I just sat and listened to all the glamorous stories and chuckled at the jokes. At around 10:00 or so we all went over to our tents turned on some lights and put them onto night mode. We then set them on the ground so people could see where they walk. We put out the fire and went to bed.
~~~~~~~ßà~~~~~~~
The camp woke up to a small group running and grabbing guns. We all got out and grabbed ours and went to the middle.
“What, what did you see, what’s going on.” A new rookie shouted nervously.
“It’s nothing to get your hair in a knot about. We just heard some shuffling outside in the bushes.
“I can say you gave us all a heart attack running like you guys did,” I said ready to strike.
“Well, I’m sure we can figure out what it was, no need to freak out.
“Well, we can do that as we are moving towards the city. Remember we got a mission to go into.
“Hey, Xavier if I die out there your Alpha leader on the ground. Deal.” Spoke Landon, a very skilled and trustful person.
“Yes, but I don’t think you will you have been on the field 123 deployments. 1 away from being double what I have.”
“you still have the skill, and leadership to be.”
“Okay, I won't argue.”
“You two love birds we are moving out in an hour no time for sweet talk.” Said
“Point taken.”
We then move to pack up. The ones moving out got their gear did some last minute training rookies talked nervously to each other. Some of which exited. Others terrified.
“At least we aren’t Eagle.” Said one of the rookies. “All of them have lots of missions so they are on extraction.” “I heard in tunnels like that they cut the lights off and monsters not shown on the surface or in day lurk down there. I would hate to haft to be in that hell hole.” “Also your communication coms are off so you haft to rely on each other and messenger birds. Imagine if one died and the other was lost.” “They wouldn’t be able to do anything.”
“Yeah, but I mean wouldn’t it be cool Eagle is highly respected and there faces are known all over.” Said another
“Yeah but I mean I rather keep my life than be famous.”
I turned around and started to walk towards the lineup. The rest of the squads were waiting. About 10 minutes later rookies joined up after chatting and re-briefing. The whole troop started the walk towards the city leaving one squad behind. We arrived about 2 hours later.
“Extraction team now’s your time to move in.” Said Landon. “Rest of you make a perimeter and keep a safe exit for them.” “Xavier, I expect a full team coming back.”
I could feel the hearts of the rookies pounding. So jokingly I said.
“Yeah, I will bring all seven back.”
“Seven?” “Who’s the seventh?”
I point to one of the rookies with a serious face.
“You!” I shout “Come on we need another one of you guys on this team so we can cover more ground!”
The one I point to looks around he manages to stutter,
“m-m-me?!?” “Sir I would like to stay on-“
“I know I’m just screwing around with you.”
He looks and walks slowly in terror. We open the small hatch and climb in. The tunnels are dark, we turn our flashlights on and the hatch closes behind us.
“Three knocks 2 seconds apart.” “Then we will open up.”
“Understood.”
We turn around and begin to go down the tunnel. What waits for us at the bottom, is unknown.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,804 Reviews
Hey there ItWasntMe and Happy Review Day! It's just Lizzy dropping by real quick, so without a further ado, let the reviewing begin.
The biggest thing that I noticed right off the bat, was your dialogue. Quite a bit of the text in this chapter is filled up with dialogue and since it's the main focus, you need to be really careful about. There's a lot of places where the tags don't connect like they should. But blue has already gone really in depth into that so I've got some other things to talk about.
Typos/incorrect spelling is really something that was just lurking in the background. It's influence slowly built on me until it convinced me to comment on it. It started with rather small things but there were so many of them, I had to point it out. All simple things, always simple mistakes, but perhaps some better proofreading is needed. It's a skill that takes a while to learn but the more you think about it with you get better at it.
The story is pretty easy to follow along with, the whole mission just sort of rolling by the reader like it's in real time. That aspect of the story was pretty nice and kind of what convinced me to stick around for so long. You had a rather slow start but I supposed it was connected to the previous bit that I didn't read. I will say that the one wall of text at the beginning was a bit off putting, nearly scared me away from the piece.
Now I find that it might be better to have a bit more regular text mixed in. The dialogue seems rather overpowering to the test of the text and I'd love to see some more description come up.
So that's really all I have for now. I'm gonna head and if you have any questions about this review, feel free to drop me a line.
Have a nice day.
~Lady Lizz
Hey there! Shey here for a review!
Okay, so first. I haven't read the first chapter. I did understand most of everything going on because you did a good job explaining, but, for instance, I don't know what the mission is. The reason I haven't red it is because I can't find it anywhere... I checked your portfolio for it to see if it was maybe in the wrong folder, but nope. Nothing. So it looks like you haven't published it. Shame. I want to read it.
Anywhoozers, let's jump into my review. There were quite a few grammar mistakes throughout the piece. A lot of "her" instead of "here," commas missing from phrases, etc. However, I think typos are to blame for that. My only suggestion would be to proof read everything like, five times, to catch those mistakes.
One error I would like to address is "your." This is such a common mistake and a lot of people don't even realize they're doing it, let me just clear confusion for you. "Your" is used possessively, like "your watermelon" or "your house." "You're" is a contraction of "you" and "are." This is used whenever you aren't using a possesive "your." The best way to tell if you should use "your" or "you're" in a specific place is to test it "you are" makes sense in place of it. If it does, then use "you're," and if it doesn't, use "your." Hope that helped.
Overall, great story you have here. I wish I knew more... You really should post the first chapter! Anyhow, keep up the great work and I look forward to seeing more from you!
-Shey
The first chapter is funnily in the sci-fi folder because I was stupid and only made the other folder once I wrote the book and didn't know how to switch it and thank you for the review or help thing it means a lot and I will get on that right away.
Okay, so first thing I wanted to share with you. It's a small thing, but it's really distracting when I'm reading something...dialogue formatting! Here's a handy thing from Tumblr.
In addition to these things, make sure you put each character's dialogue in its own line so as not to confuse readers. So for example, this
becomes this
Unless, of course, this dialogue is actually spoken by the same character, which it just now occurred to me could be the case. In that case, you could either combine these two lines - quotation marks only at the beginning of the first sentence and the end of the last sentence - or you could keep the quotes you currently have and insert an action between them, like this.
(I had no idea who was speaking there, sorry. Also "scratched his nose" is kind of a silly action to include in such a serious moment, but it was the first thing I thought of.)
Actually, now that I look back at all the lines where you did this, I think all of them are actually spoken by the same character each time! To clarify, you don't need to put quotation marks around each individual line a character says, just around a chunk of dialogue said by a single character. So take this instance
Instead of all those dozens of quotation marks, you just do this.
(Actually, looking at this quote again, I'm *still* not quite sure if it's the rookie speaking the entire time or if he's discussing this with the others. This is why dialogue from new characters needs to be on a separate line!)
The only times you need to use quotation marks are
- at the start and end of a section of dialogue
- each time a new character starts speaking
This helps clarify for readers a) when someone is speaking vs when it's narration and b) when a new character starts to speak.
I hope this helped clear things up for you! Sorry to focus so much on dialogue formatting instead of the actual story, but it's just a pet peeve of mine. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions or comments!
Blue