Hey there,! I’m glad I found this, it looks excellent.
First things first, a nitpick list.
Our tiny village layinbetweenthebarren moors andtheclusters of farmland that were almost as barren.
See what I’ve struck out? Try reading the sentence again, skipping over those parts. I’m sure it’ll sound better.
Another thing is your use of the word ‘between’. Use that only if you mean an object between two other objects. Here, you said ‘moors’ and ‘clusters’, so there are quite a few objects. Use ‘among’.
Also, I like your comparison of the farms and moors, but I think you worded it awkwardly. Try putting that bit in a completely new sentence, like this:
“Our tiny village lay among barren moors and clusters of farmland. It was hard to tell which was which.” Or, “…hard to tell the difference.” Or, “…hard to tell between the two.” Or…you get my drift.
Our homes were small, built on what flat, hard land was available, and low to the ground.
Hard? These are moors, right? There shouldn’t be any hard land. That is, unless you live on a moor and know more about it than I do.
Anything made of timber or stone that stood more than two short stories tall ended up getting battered and torn apart when the wind storms
came.
“…Short stories tall…” just sounds weird. Try to reword that phrase, I know you had some good idea behind it. Maybe:
“Any and all two-story houses ended up as piles of junk, blown to nothing by the relentless wind storms.”
Also, I doubt the building material is any bit at all relative.
The moors stretched a mile out, and marking the end of it was the dark, grey mass that we knew as the Dark Forest.
Woah, wait, a mile out? What about the width? Is this one long strip of moorish stuff? And how could a forest be at the end of anything? I think you should mention that from the perspective of someone in Moor Village, the moor seemed to stretch on for a while, and then end in the Dark Forest.
However, even with that wording you have a problem. Does the Dark Forest take up an entire horizon?
I think you should draw a map of your story place and visualize what the views would be like from the village. I’m sure you could do it!
In my worst nightmares I would hear creeks and noises around my room, and the Creatures would be standing there, tall and pale.
Ranger already got this one, but I’ll say it again: a ‘creek’ is actually a nice thing to listen to while falling asleep.
On the other side of the village where the farmlands, where we kept a few animals and grew crops.
Did you mean, “…other side of the village, where the farmlands were, we kept…”? Plus, I’m pretty sure a village would be surrounded by their farmlands, as is common with village structure. (and I should I know, I live in one)
Mostly we harvested wheat and sunflower seeds, which got taken in a huge truck from the village to the town to be traded for other things.
‘Grew’, not ‘harvested’.
Also, up to this point, I was sure the setting was medieval, or at least before the Renaissance Period. I was thrown off a little by the mention of trucks here.
Also, I’m not so sure about location either. A little clarification?
We worked as a community, and everybody looked out for each other, which meant our community was much more sturdy than our houses.
Funny, but worded awkwardly. Try:
“Everybody looked out for each other, which made for a strong community. I only wished our houses could be as sturdy.”
Daddy taught me that you should always be brave, because the more you give into fear the less able you will be to face it.
Here, you say ‘be brave’, but the next thing you say is ‘more you give in to fear’. I don’t know why, but that doesn’t work for me. Try flipping the negative and positive sides, like this:
“…because the less you give into fear the more you are able to face it.”
Spiders and small spaces were foolish things to be afraid of with one tenth of all the worlds evils sitting on your doorstep.
I laughed aloud at this one, really, I did! However ‘worlds’ needs to be possessive, with an apostrophe; “world’s”.
Also, I think you could have had ‘sits on your doorstep’ instead of ‘sitting’, because it pulls the whole sentence into present tense.
“Spiders and small spaces are foolish things to be afraid of when one tenth of all the world’s evils sits on your doorstep.”
As we stood on the outskirts of our city I looked across at the forest and felt a strange sense of nervousness make my stomach tight.
You say ‘we’ without clarifying who ‘we’ is. And then, in the next sentence, you switch right over to ‘I’. Explain that Kara is with the MC first, then go on to use ‘we’.
Also, this sentence marks the beginning of the story and the end of the long descriptive introduction. You should put a little distance between the two. Maybe a double line or a row of asterisks.
Kara was a few metres ahead of me. Her flowered dress that inflated in the wind and yellow wellies made her the brightest thing on the moors, so she wasn’t hard to lose.
I put my arms around her and held on to the strings of our new bumble-bee kite -which was when I regretted letting her leave her hair out when I tied mine up that morning.I knew she wouldn’t blow away, not in this wind, but every time a strong enough gust came along it would drag her a few steps closer. Sometimes I even tricked myself into believing that it was the Shadow Creatures manipulating the winds, pulling her towards them. We were still over half a mile away, but I couldn’t ignore it.
Okay, if someone was ‘a few metres’ ahead of you, then it would be impossible to put your arms around them. Try ‘a few feet’.
By the way, who is holding on to the kite? Here, you say Ollie is doing it, but shortly after this paragraph Kara is holding it.
Also, that bit about the hair being in or out…it confuses me. I would suggest cutting it. I am befuddled (like born2 was) by Ollie’s gender. I would consider ‘Ollie’ to be a male name as well, but the whole tying of the hair got in the way. I suppose Ollie is a girl, but you could clarify it a little more.
Another thing is the two places I have underlined. Replace the first with ‘Kara’ and the second with ‘the feeling’. The reason is that pronouns tend to get less affective the farther away they are from their appositives. ‘Kara’ is the appositive of ‘she’, you know what I mean?
‘I want to stay out here,’ Kara said. The kite jerked and snagged a few times.
“Snagged”? A kite can only snag on a tree or telephone wire. How is it ‘snagging’ on anything out there in the empty loneliness of the moor?
‘ ‘I want’s never gets. Come on, we’ve got to go home now.’
Hmm, big sis is breakin’ out with the aphorisms; watch out, Kara!
Seriously, though, you have an incorrect verb. It should be ‘get’, since the phrase, “I want’s” is singular.
“‘I want’s’ never get.” just sounds weird, though, so maybe you should say: “‘I want’s’ never get anything.” Also, the triple quotation mark is hard to work around.
‘I want the my kite!’ She whined, then started to cry.
The my?
'But it's not far, we can run in and out before the monsters even notice.'
I would expect Kara to be even more afraid of the forest than Ollie, but it’s your call.
'You were thinking it.'
Ha.
'You struggle to do your own chores.'
“You can’t even do your own chores.” Sounds better.
It meant don't go offering things you may not be able to give, because the devil will make sure they're taken from you. ‘Why can’t you grow up and stop acting so foolish!’
I think you should connect that phrase somehow, like this maybe: “It meant “Don't go offering things you may not be able to give”, because…”
Also, the dialogue here should start as a new paragraph.
I was only nine at the time, but being Kara’s older sister and constant watch (since Daddy worked most days) I often thought myself to be older.
Really? Nine? Some of her dialogue seems to come from a much older age; I was thinking Ollie was fifteen.
Also, ‘I was only nine at the time’ implies that Ollie is telling a past-tense story, but it does not flow so well with the rest of the story. I know it is all past-tense (She whined, I switched, I clipped, Daddy was sitting) but I think it is a different type of past-tense. Like, past-perfect, past-participle past-grammarmumbojumbo. Or something like that.
What I mean is this: ‘at the time’ implies that this is a ‘looking back’ kind of story. But since it will involve a lot of action (I know it will, what with the leering Dark Forest and all) you should have a tense that follows well through suspense and close ‘zoomed-in’ action.
You dig? I didn’t think so.
This time she didn’t even look at methough, and I knew the clogs in her head were turning.
Cut the ‘though’ and change ‘clogs’ to ‘cogs’
Alright, I think you did well with this first chapter, but I have one protest: the sister relationship. Ollie ‘clipped’ Kara on the ear. I’m not familiar with that particular with that noun, but I think it could be synonymous with ‘boxed’ am I correct? What my point is that Ollie seems to do a lot of hatin’ on Kara. Why the physical abuse? Is Ollie more afraid of the Dark forest than Moor Villagers generally are? Is she insecure because of this fear? That would explain why Kara was so eager to retrieve the kite.
On a final note, it took me a while to realize that 'wellies' was your name for wellington boots. Good thing I've read Paddington, or else it would have gone right over my head.
Points: 13307
Reviews: 350
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