Young Writers Society

Hey there. Sorry for being so inactive but I have recently revisited this piece and I will be rewriting it with a little more length and backstory to it. My style has changed a bit and I still love the concept despite its age. So stayed tuned for the rewrite soon!

Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night(whichever one it is in your part of the world),

Hi! I'm here to leave a quick review!!

Anyway let's get right to it,

Brown eyes when you look at them look nice in the sun, but in reality it’s dangerous. They mean something worse than the fact of it looking like a normality. They just look hideous.

Genesis in my dreams has this feature. Genesis is probably considered hideous by definition. She’s like all the normal regular popular girls on campus using fancy matte lipstick and blonde haired girls screeching at the sight of cute boys. Which is a problem for the people living there. They hate normality. Genesis is probably a blonde haired girl who, like every popular girl, likes cute boys. She doesn’t look like me. I have brown hair with brown skin. I have scars on my face. I have blindness that blurs my vision. I know it was a lie. I can see completely fine. At least I could before my mom did surgery on my eye that made me bilnd by changing how my irises feel. They feel like sandpaper now. I’m surprised that she didn’t get sued for malpractice or something of the sort. But there’s no laws on medical malpractice, so it’s not an uncommon thing.

Who is this Genesis? I don’t know. Some people think she is a spirit that lives in unsuspecting women or girl’s bodies. Some people think it’s a hoax to scare off students. And some think it’s a disease that doctors can’t treat. There’s no time to think about it though. Time passes too quickly. Too quickly to think.

My legs start to throb and my neck swells up. My heart starts skipping beats and I for sure think it’s anaphylaxis. But then I feel someone pulling at my ponytail and I plummet to the floor, worried that it is a psychotic episode and that I need meds to fix it. But then it happened. My eyes shut and I stop breathing. Everything becomes silent.

I might seem dead to them. But this is my new life. I am Genesis.

Ooh, I really want to know more about this mother. Now on to the plot questions: How recent exactly was this surgery? If it was further in the past, as seems to be insinuated, the narrator must have a good recall to remember all these colours. But how would she know that the girls all wear matte lipstick and so on? One can only learn so much from the other senses. Even all five aren't enough sometimes! Is it possible to sue someone for something not covered by the law at all? That'll be something fun to find out when I have the time. It must get mighty expensive. On a side note, you mis-typed "blind."
The first paragraph feels altogether too misplaced and abstract, and the second-to-last paragraph is extremely sudden, so I would suggest you use the former to lead up to the latter. Sometimes you overuse words, reusing them too close together, such as "look" in the first paragraph and "but" in the second-to-last again. The tense also tends to switch between past and present.
Overall, I really liked this... Short story? It feels more of an introduction, and you said you have another part in the works, so let's call it that. I really liked this introduction, and I look forward to the next installment!

Hi Purple67,

Mailice here with a short review!

That was an interesting piece. I would call it a kind of prologue, because it feels like one, and also gives the necessary foreknowledge to follow the main plot from a possible chapter 1.

The text itself was great to read and you already created a good tension based on the narrator, partly even with a possible characterisation. The narrator doesn't really seem to like herself, hate is perhaps a little too exaggerated, but there is a way out, which she seems to know and wants to do. We also learn a little about what the relationship is like with the parents, or at least with the mother. I think you've already put in some good features of what you want to create here. At the moment, I just can't say whether it falls into the horror genre or somewhere else. We'll definitely have to surprise ourselves a bit more.

Your structure is very good up to a certain point and I like the fact that at some point you also come out with the language that there is a first-person narrator. Sometimes, especially after the largest section, you abruptly switch between Genesis - the narrator - and then jump back to Genesis. I think you should try to bring the structure back to some extent so that it doesn't read so forced.

Otherwise, I think you create an exciting lead-in to a story.

Other points I noticed while reading:

Brown eyes when you look at them look nice in the sun, but in reality it’s dangerous.

She’s like all the normal regular popular girls on campus using fancy matte lipstick and blonde haired girls screeching at the sight of cute boys.

At least I could before my mom did surgery on my eye that made me bilnd by changing how my irises feel. They feel like sandpaper now.