(By the way, if you get a sense of deja-vu, I posted this a while ago in 'other fiction', but it wasn't being rewieved and I figured it wasn't the best place for this kind of story -sorry if I'm breaking some unknown rule...) Critiques are very welcome. Thank you!
You asked for shredding. I tried. 
She moved with agility, grace and slender that no human could possibly achieve
I don't think 'slender' is a noun. Having just googled it, Merriam-Webster agrees that 'slenderness' is the noun and 'slender' the adjective; if you still want to use the word, you'll have to go with 'slenderness', which will change the flow a little bit.
Other than that, the opening isn't bad. I like the image of the trees standing still.
Her deep purple eyes Eyes are frequently described as 'deep'. If you can get around it, I would do so, and maybe replace 'purple' with a more vivid synonym that isn't violet, since that too is overused in relation to eyes. flickered back and forth - bloodshot and ready. [s]To[/s] At any slight sound they would narrow, until they were but tiny, red slits on her smooth, delicate face. Her red You've already used red, so you can replace one of them. lips, stained with old, rusting blood Nice image. Well, not nice, but you catch my drift., were occasionally licked by her thin, forked tongue – which, though pink, had random Nooo. I have a bit of an aversion to 'random' in prose. It's too often used colloquially now to be of any merit in a piece of writing, in my opinion. patches of green colour on its surface. The striking orange hair that tumbled messily down her back fell frequently over her eyes, provoking her to tear it out with sharp, slim fingers.
I don't usually quote whole paragraphs, but here my point is recurring. You don't experiment with colour synonyms: everything is "red" or "orange" or "pink". At one point you mention 'striking orange hair' - 'orange' is not a particularly striking word, but a very mundance one. At the moment, we can't just assume her hair is striking: either cut it or back it up. This happens later on too. I wouldn't dive into a thesaurus right now; that's not what I'm getting at, because basic adjectives are fine sometimes, just not all the time, and certainly not all crammed into one paragraph like this.
As a whole, this paragraph is not very interesting. You could maybe use a few more metaphors or similes to bring this vampire's image across to us. It's partly to do with the colours, but the language is also a little too simplistic. The detail of the rusting blood, I liked, and we don't often see this sort of vampire - wild - thanks to Twilight, so build on it.
I've inserted any other criticisms I have of this paragraph in bold. Sorry it seems like I'm totally homing in on such a little part of the story, but this is the description of the MC so I think it deserves attention.
So now, even though convincing herself that the wail meant nothing, her eyes were wide with fear, and the gleaming white venomous fangs continued cutting deeper into her lip.
This is a very awkward end to the sentence. You're documenting her movement rather than writing a story. You could probably cut the whole of the clause from "and the gleaming" 'til the end of the sentence.
surrounding it with her venom to ward off any other of her kind. If the monster here is of my kind, she thought.
The 'if' implies a result or something. I would change her thought into a question. Is the monster here even of my kind?
Never in her long existence had anybody been able to pass the barriers of fire that she had set up at the entrance – apart from herself, of course, for she had the ability of taming flames. A talent she had had all her life.
Your narrative is losing me again. I've read this through a couple of times already and I like your story, but you don't keep me particularly interested. The big blocky paragraphs don't help, but your writing itself is quite slow, and quite uniform. The reason I picked these sentences out is because you make taming flames sound uninteresting, unremarkable.
You can change tone every so often to avoid this: speed it up and slow it down. If you're going to describe these wails for two hundred words, to use another example, we want to hear them and then feel Petra's fear.
Imagine as the wails are beginning. Maybe they're slow to penetrate Petra's mind, which is focussed on hunting, but you can describe them, slowing down the pace to let us hear what's so terrible about them. Fear, on the other hand, is not a slow feeling. It makes you jumpy and alert, so you can shorten sentences, make your writing a bit more jagged to fit with the mood.
Obviously I don't expect you to do all of that, because I certainly don't think about my writing that carefully, but even when you're writing in third person you don't have to restrict yourself to such an impartial, distant voice. Experiment a little bit.
The paragraph in which Petra is captured is better. Her thoughts come fast and agitated, and though the writing around it is still fairly slow, the thoughts help to bring us closer to her character. I love the idea of such a wild, animalistic vampire, and I think you've thought that out well. However, you could separate it out into several paragraphs, since the whole thing is again one big block.
Why? Oh God, why?
Would she really say 'oh God'?
The description of the elderly vampire is like a repeat of Petra's description earlier, right down to the order in which you describe his features, and I have the same criticisms. Again, though, the introduction of some of Petra's thoughts is a welcome insight into her character.
The dialogue, I liked a lot. Even though it is very formal, you manage to pull off the lack of contractions well and it was believable, for me. When you told us that Petra was naked, it genuinely was a shock to us, and even as we as readers were digesting that, your character was arguing against our own opinion. This was my favourite part of the whole story.
The smugness was soon lost to fear, however, for she was pushed into the dark cave, and, ignoring her hisses of protest, pushed and tied into a chair. The human stepped to the corner of the unfurnished, damp cave, and leaned against the wall. The aged vampire, however, stepped into Petra’s view.
Cut the second 'however'.
I am really nitpicking now, since you've started to give us more to chew on and I can better appreciate Petra's character.
You lose the pacing again later, though. Petra's escape is not quite fast enough for me, and her thirst for the human woman is not described well enough for us to feel her thirst for blood. Though it's still better than the beginning, I think you might want to go through the ending and see if you can tighten the writing and let us feel Petra's strength and anger. At the moment, it's described, but I didn't feel it as much as I think I could.
So, I'm finished. To summarise:
Characters. I think I've been through them as much as I can. Certainly, at the beginning I couldn't feel Petra's character at all. She needs to be wild then too, as she is when you get into your stride as a writer, later in the piece. I love the idea of a feral vampire - you can really bring the bloodthirsty appetite home to us, though, in a way I don't think you did here.
There seems to be little opportunity to expand on the elderly vampire's character, except in the paragraph of description, which I've already said you need to look at, in my opinion. The human woman just needs a bit of fleshing out, so that we can see that she's only trying to be strong and that she is quite afraid underneath. At the moment, she randomly swings between the two.
Plot. Not my strong point. I liked the story, but that's probably all the advice I can give you. In my experience, plot is just relative to the pacing, which I think I've spoken about enough.
Grammar. I didn't remark on it too much. You were fairly free of punctuation errors, as far as I could tell, but go through with a fine-toothed comb to spot a few grammar slip ups. Mostly you just seem to use the wrong word in the wrong context.
I won't bore you by repeating myself too much. Writing-wise, I would recommend you just tighten a few bolts here and there and work on moving away from the simple style you employ. I think that's supposed to come with practice, though, so you're already on the right track. Other than that, I've made all the comments I want to.
I hope my review helps! PM me if you have any questions, and good luck with the contest.
Points: 22745
Reviews: 197
Donate