Published April 20, 2010
When the smallest beam of light peeked through the slits of her blinds Nora's eyes pushed open quickly followed by a sigh. After blinking the sleep from her eyes she leaned forward to peer down at the foot of her bed to check on her brown and black calico Murfey. Without so much as disturbing the sleeping feline she got out of bed.
"Nothing but a can of tuna or a cold bucket of water could wake that cat when he was asleep," Nora pondered to herself. Nora shook her head trailed by light brown curls before she continued quietly to her half empty closet.When she opened the door she revealed how barren it really was.After sifting through them she decided on a faded blue oldnavy shirt and an old pair of blue jean shorts.
The heavenly aroma of breakfast lead her downstairs to find Jason one of her housemates slaving over a fiery stove, his silver blond hair hiding his green eyes that concentraited on every flick of his wrist to the crazed dance he made around the kitchen.
"Smells great," Nora offered in her bell-like voice. Jason looked up and smiled making her lips part to reveal pearly white teeth.
"It'll be done in a minute," Jason said with another quick upward movement of his wrist.
"You seem too cheerful this morning,even for you." Nora accused.
"You noticed," he paused to grin at her before continuing, "Laycey's going to be here in a few minutes." Nora rolled her eyes.
"We'll be long gone," Nora assured him. Jason began laughing... Nora coughed to get her friend's attention as a blond haired barbie entered through the front door.
"I'll see you later," Nora offered, but was stopped before she could retreat up the staricase...
"No,no, there's no need I'll only be here for a minute," Laycey said making the grin to slid off his face.
"I'm going to go upstairs and wake Lori," Nora responded not wanting to see the hurt and confusion in her friend's eyes. Without waiting for either of them to say anything Nora bounded up the stairs and burst into her younger sister's room only to find the twig-like girl waiting for her. Murfey squeezed between her legs to jump on the bed beside Lori and gave her a look that said 'I dare you to kick me off the bed'
"Rude little thing aren't you?" Lori challenged. Murfey meowed innocently
Points:
Time spent:
IP address:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
140,552 Literary Works • 673,425 Reviews
First off I'd like to thank you both for the comments/suggestions. As to your question prepareyourself2 as to why Nora thought to her sister " You think you're funny don't you" is because her sister knew she liked Russ and her leaning forward was her silent way of picking on her about it... And I'll definitely try to put more description in there but I don't think I can bear to rid of all my dialouge, but I'll do my best.
Hi!
) so it'll be confusing as hell, but try. Focus only on the characters, on their appearance, reaction. Keep the dialogue empty. And when you've done that, add the dialogue.
Show us how all those characters function in your imagination, because the reader only knows and sees what the writer will write.
Welcome to YWS
Alright, a lot of this is made up of dialogue. That means (and even if there were less, too!) proper dialogue punctuation is a must. Tossing grammar aside, it'll look better - and visuals and first impressions are very very miportant. Demeter wrote an article about it, will probably help: topic44898.html
So, dialogue. Dialogue is the core here, dialogue is the most important, dialogue is in the spotlight. But dialogue also makes up most of the chapter, and here I'd like to say I want you to build around. See, at the very beginning, there were two fully-fledged paragraphs - terrific. And after that, it was dialogue dialogue tag, ev. a sentence after that dialogue. And that pattern kept repeating itself.
The unneeded dialogue, I'd cut (for example the time incident - it could be mentioned, doesn't have to necessarily be passed on through dialogue). See, so many people appearing and talking, there's so much of that talking. At some point in the middle, I started to not care who's saying what and why they're saying it.
We know what they say and sometimes how they say it. But it's abrupt, choppy. We go from flower to flower, from one person to another, and move on, move on, because they say sthing new. In my opinion there's simply too many people this early on... I hadn't had enough time to learn to care for them. My advice would be to introduce those characters gradually. Who's truly important to Ch1 and who can come later?
So having deleted unnecessary dialogue and characters (for now), expand what's left. Give depth to Nora, focus on characterization more. Flesh it all out. Now they're speaking, yeah, looking sthing, but that's all. I forget when I stop reading.
Show people, not only from dialogue's perspective. Hmm. Perhaps try cutting out all that dialogue, all, but still remembering who says what - and try to convey those feelings, emotion, without any spoken words at all. Of course, "why" won't be asnwered (dialogue
Emotion. It's an emotional paragraph, judging from the dialogue. But that dialogue and choppy, hastily written tags are the only indication. I mean, drama. Drama! More drama. Right now it's two Englishmen talking about weather on a hijacked plane.
Things are definitely happening, there's a plot, there are characters. Groundwork is done, and it's good. Now work with what you already have to make it better
Esme
This is pretty good. I like the characterization you used here, and how you make Nora's personality distinct. However, I can't help but feel that you're introducing too many characters here. Maybe it would be better to start establishing the relationship between a few of the characters in detail, and then introducing new ones as the story goes on?
Also, there are a few small nitpicks here:
I think you're missing a couple of commas in this section, and the bolded part really caught my attention. It first looked like a mistake with tenses, but after looking closer, it'd be better for you to replace the 'and' with a 'she'.
This is a run-on sentence. I think you'd better split it up into shorter ones, and try to keep it to one idea per sentence.
I think it should be, "And miss your birthday?" He continued, "Never."
This whole scene seems a bit flat to me. It appears that you could use some more descriptive language and add some build up and a fuller resolution. Right now, it just seems like Laycey goes up, yells for a bit and then starts crying, letting Nora comfort her and then returning to Jason. It's a bit dull, to be honest.
This comment seems a bit out of place. I'm not exactly sure what made Nora say that.
Their introductions seem a bit abrupt, like they're not supposed to be here. Maybe you could save this for a later chapter, since there are already quite a lot of characters to digest.
There are a couple of small typos and such, but they don't distract me as much from the story. But anyway, it's pretty good, but though I said that Nora's personality was distinct, maybe you could add a little more depth to her. One thing that I'd probably warn you to watch is the flow of the chapter, since it's not very smooth at the moment. But otherwise, it was pretty good. Keep up the great writing.