I was woken by a call from somewhere above my chest. I sat up and the songbird flitted off with a defiant cheep. The noise was ear-splitting. Cicadas, birds and squirrels added to the din. I rubbed my sleep-blurred eyes and disentangled myself from the warm nest, where Lucy, Wayne and Amy were still sleeping. Shafts of sunlight beamed down through the canopy. Moss and toadstools flourished underfoot, while a breeze stirred the treetops. A brook bubbled beyond the path.
“Hey, guys!” I called. “Wake up! Come look! Isn’t it beautiful?”
A chorus of moans emanated from the undergrowth. Amy crawled out, hair snarled over her face.
“Why did you wake us up? I was sleeping so b-b-beautifully,” she shuddered.
“Oh, come on! This place has to be heaven!”
“Can’t be—I’m stiff as hell,” grumbled Lucy as she limped out, aiming a kick at Wayne.
“Huh? Where am I?” He peered around. “Oh. What was that for?”
“Being an ass. Get up.”
Caked mud dissolved as I tentatively stepped into the clear stream.
“You’re fouling our drinking water!” snapped Lucy, but I didn’t take any notice. I splashed further down until I found a pond and submerged myself. Amy plunged her head into the water beside me. I grabbed and pulled. She somersaulted effortlessly into the pool beside me, coming up spluttering and cursing. Lucy giggled. Wayne sat down and dangled his bare feet in the stream, enjoying the spectacle of Amy dunking me. With a scream of delight, Lucy pushed Wayne in and jumped into the water fight. Amy, with her javelin-thrower’s strength, was more than a match for both of us as we struggled to sink her. Wayne pushed his way into the fray with a wild battle cry and attacked Lucy. After an infinity of screaming and splashing, we collapsed on the bank, tasting the forest air.
“Let’s go look for food,” said Wayne. “I can’t last any longer without a sandwich.”
“Boys are always hungry,” said Amy dismissively.
“Aren’t you?” asked Lucy. “I’m starved! And we could have a long walk ahead.”
“Oh yes, I remember! Esme dropped us in the middle of the empty moorland!” said Amy.
With much leg-pulling and hunger cramps, we continued deeper into the forest, where exhaustion and an increasingly oppressive atmosphere soon stifled our jokes and laughter. Solitary pricks of sunlight failed to illuminate the path. The streams stopped singing and started clacking. The peat was bland and cold.
A rustling jerked me from my reverie. After the silence of the forest, the noise was deafening. We backed away, Wayne unconsciously raising his fists. And a man appeared. My knees buckled.
“Who may you be, wandering in my woods?” said the figure, startled.
We stared. A drop of water trickled down my leg and buried itself in the peat.
Amy broke the silence with her natural forwardness.
“We apologize for the intrusion,” she said in a cultured British accent. Wayne turned and gave her an incredulous stare.
“We got lost,” she continued, but even she was helpless before this apparition. Lucy, who was standing next to the river, rustled gently.
Before we could do as much as blink, she collapsed into the water.
End of chapter
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140,799 Literary Works • 673,688 Reviews
Okay, I've gotta give my team a few points here so this review is going to be minimal size. >> I've already covered pretty much everything there is to cover in previous reviews I've given you!
Okay, again I'll stress that this chapter is very small, and now that I look at it, the writing is REALLY small and hard to read. Just a quick note. I'd advise you to not try to combine your chapters if you do decide to ever try to work The Decoder into a cohesive whole. Try to flesh out what you already have. Try to put more detail in. More twists and turns in the plot. More talking. Thinking.
It will help you with the size and it'll support your characters. It'll help to develop them. The best ways to develop characters is to put them in a hard position and then help them work their way through it. It'll show a lot about the character and help your reader to emphasize with them more!
Also, you suddenly pull this poor guy into the story, and I think it would be VERY, VERY appropriate to describe what he looks like. At least what he's wearing. You give us NOTHING about him . . . and that doesn't really work.
Okay, another thing here. You're cutting this chapter off at an inappropriate spot. Yeah, I know, these abrupt, hold-up endings are fun, but if you do them again and again and again then they really get old. Reader's can't really stand too many of them. They simply become really old. Again, try to give this chapter a new twist!
Okay, so I warned you this'd be quick. I feel that it's a totally useless review as well, because I've already covered pretty much all of your work's problems already! I can't do anything if you're not on top of things! So, good job (this was a decent chapter - if a bit small and abrupt, and a bit unrealistic)! Keep writing - You will improve! I guarantee it!
~Black~
Hello.
I haven't read the other segments of this, but I figured I'd give you what thoughts I could on this piece.
My first thought was how they seemed to be both experienced and not experienced in nature survival. The point about fouling drinking water is valid, because you can't survive that long without water (you survive less long with no water than no food). Yet, nobody tries to drag her out of there or mention that you can use water from above the stream (running water will take impurities away from where you went in). There's also the fact there's a pond near by, which would smell if it had gone stagnant too long. Ponds are not exactly a pristine mountain lake.
There's also the fact that they don't think to go for food, which tends to be important action for wilderness survival number two. Instead, they go for a calorie-burning water fight. Which will only make them hungrier in the end.
It'd be nice to get a clearer idea of what this setting looks like in this chapter. It seems like there's a place to jump into that pond, yet I thought that the MC had swum down a stream to get there. This lack of clarity made me look at the chapter funny as I tried to figure out a mental landscape.
I also agree with Kyll that this chapter seems a bit fluffy. It's reading more like a transition you wanted to expand on just because you wanted to expand on it than any sort of good, meaty interaction. Each scene should do something to moving plot or character relations forward, and this chapter is a very long way of getting to a single plot event.
Hope this helps. PM me if you have any questions.
~Rosey
Hello there, this fine Review Day! I'm busy tackling various works without any reviews, and so there's a disproportionate amount of unreviewed later chapters of novels floating around, which is sad. Very sad. And so, while I haven't read previous chapters, hopefully I'll point out some helpful things in this review. Hopefully.
First things first, the text is really tiny, serif, and crammed all together. It really isn't on-screen-reading-friendly. I'd recommend in the future that, before posting, you change the formatting so that the text size is larger, the font is sans serif, and there's some space in between paragraphs. It'll make your chapters more inviting to read.
With that said, the character interactions were fun to read, but this chapter was pretty much only character interactions, so it felt a bit fluffy. The only thing of note that happens plot-wise is that they run into the man and Lucy falls into the water. It's a bit sparse, and so this chapter feels incredibly short and a bit un-chapter-like. It also makes the cliffhanger ending a rather obvious ploy to keep reading, which makes it more annoying than anything because it comes across as a cheap trick.
I think this is one of those chapters that would benefit from being merged into another chapter, either the one before or the one after, since it really doesn't have enough substance to stand on its own. From the pacing of this chapter, I'd say merge it with the next chapter in the sequence, so that the cheap cliffhanger is no longer a cheap cliffhanger, and the readers can get caught up in the flurry of action in reaction to Lucy's falling into the river, which will be more substantial and satisfying for your readers to read.
As it stands, this chapter was a bit unsatisfying as a chapter, despite the cute character interactions (or perhaps because of them). I find that it's generally a good idea to progress and/or set up/introduce at least three elements of the plot per chapter, so that things keep feeling like they're progressing rather than being at a complete standstill. This chapter, since it only has two elements of plot that are really clear, coupled with how short it was, feels a bit empty, plot-wise.