Jam's thoughts

Hello.

I'll be honest. I didn't get very far in this. The idea has promise, but the writing isn't really grabbing me, between dialogue punctuation issues and not really getting into the character's heads.

Your dialogue punctuation is the reverse of what it should be. Proper dialogue punctuation would look like this:

"Who are you?" he asked .<- lowercase
We all introduced ourselves,
"Uh, I'm Rose." <- period
"I'm Katilin." <- period

"Uh, it's Luke," I heard him say. <- comma instead of period

Your punctuation is correct here:

In a tiny voice, I said, "I'm Jamie."

This article goes into more depth.

Repetition is also fairly easy to fix: reread the draft over and highlight every word that's the same within a short distance (ie- your use of eyes three times in two sentences at the beginning, there), then find a way to remove it. Do not do this by grabbing your thesaurus and switching out words for fancier variations. That would turn this into what's called purple prose and people don't like purple prose because it's needlessly fancy and hard to read.

Instead, change your sentences from the ground up. Focus on new things instead of what you'd just mentioned. For example, your first sentence could read, "I pushed my wavy brown hair out of my face" instead of "out of my eyes." Changing your second sentence is harder, which leads to my next point.

Your first person is thin. The advantage of first person is you live inside your character's head. This means you see everything from the character's perspective. The prose reflects their thought patterns, you can insert their remarks on practically everything, and basically you have every single little thing the character does or thinks available to you.

Use this advantage. Don't list events, but instead give us the character's emotions, reactions, attitude of the surroundings. Keeping this in mind, I'd rewrite your second sentence to reflect this. Say Elise's name, and say Jamie's reaction to Elise being so close to her immediately upon waking up. Is it fear? Anger? A yelp? Or noncommental because she does this so often (if that is the case please mention she does this so often Jamie's used to it).

Do this throughout. Let us have Jamie's reactions and emotions so we really get to see things from her perspective. It's her head. Let us explore. This article goes into more depth.

First person narration can also carry through a beginning. A good character voice can make pretty much anything interesting to read about. The reason I bring up your beginning is you need to grab us immediately. Give us a reason to keep reading. This can be basically anything, so long as you start with something interesting. Being woken up by somebody a few inches away from your nose can be very interesting if written well, for example. It's an unusual event and it gets us asking "why is she being woken up like that?". You usually answer that question only to provide us with another, and we keep reading just to find out the answers.

Beginnings are covered more in-depth here.

Hopefully this helps. PM me if you have any questions or comments.

~Rosey