Published January 1, 2011
I'm at the beach, and a sexy waiter named Paco is serving me strawberry lemonade on a tray as I lay on a fluffy yellow beach towel on a beach chair, low, so my feet can dangle in the water. Designer glasses are perched on the bridge of my nose, and I'm wearing an expensive Ella Moss bikini. "Anything else, Miss Kaleigh?" Paco asks, and I'm about to respond, when he interrupts me, "Kaleigh? Kaleigh? Kaleigh?" He coos, and I feel myself rocking, like I'm on a boat. Then a pinch.
Swimming back into consciousness, I blink up groggily at Bailey, my twin sister. "Ungh, what do you want?" I grumble, turning back over. She sighs impatiently, "We're going to Mexico today, in case you don't recall," She reminds me, and my hands fly up to my face, searching for signs of pimples; can't have acne for any Paco waiters, can we?
"Of course I didn't forget," I snap, even though I did. "Well, you better get up, 'cause we leave at 11:30." She answers, and closes the door behind her.
Aw, crap, I forgot I have to pack; Mom's been nagging us to pack all week, but I've been putting it off. Shoving my duvet cover off my body, I swing my legs over off my bleached wooden bunk-bed, and carefully climb down the ladder, heading straight for my bathroom.
I close the door, and lock the doors on either side of the room; one leading to my room, the other leading to Bailey's; I think they're called Jack and Jill bathrooms?
Turning towards the mirror, I quickly survey my American Eagle gray tank top, emerald green plaid booty-shorts from Juicy Couture, and fluffy white bedroom slippers that I second-naturedly slipped into on my way to the bathroom. Slipping my clothes off, I pull the thick lavender towel off the rack and set it down beside the tub, along with an arrey of bath supplies: a brand new bar of Orange Citrus Dove soap, French bubble bath, that smells like vanilla, and the lavendar-scented bath salts my parents brought back from their honeymoon in Ireland.
I turn on the water, letting it heat up, and pop open the bottle of bubblebath, watching as the velvety white liquid slowly pours out of the bottle, thick and beautiful, like a waterfall. Pinching a handful of bath salts out of the jar, I drop some into the bath, and grab my razer and Dove bar, setting it down beside me, before lowering myself into the hot water, feeling heavenly.
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139,407 Literary Works • 672,554 Reviews
Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night(whichever one it is in your part of the world),
Hi! I'm here to leave a quick review!!
First Impression: Soo..this is a relaxed piece here, not much going on, but we get a decent introduction to the person that I assume is meant to be the main character and on the whole a decent if somewhat incomplete sounding start here.
Anyway let's get right to it,
OKay...interesting start there, looks to be just someone on vacation there...although not exactly sure what this opening here is trying to convey. It seems like a fairly neutral scene, but it looks like in some sense its trying to show a little something more with the description here.
OKay..well that took an expected turn there...with things turning towards them having to leave soon and this person having woken up fairly late I assume. Its settling into be a neat little introductory part to the story here.
Hmm, well this protagonist is being pretty relatable so far, having forgotten to pack until the last minute and now running around in a semi panicked state as they have to try and get ready on time.
Okay...that went into quite some detail there, which I think was surprisingly well incorporated into this piece here, you've done a pretty decent job with this introduction, and these little details are all working together to construct a nice personality for our main character here.
Aaand the ending, kinda feels incomplete to be honest, this is by no means a cliffhanger nor is it really a place where things gradually winds to an end. it just looks like it was abandoned there...soo..you may wanna add some more to it or look into making this sound more like an ending here.
Aaaaand that's it for this one.
Overall: Overall, this makes for a fairly solid piece here...although I will have to say, that the ending is not great. I did like the little bit of personality you built up for the main character and there's enough things mentioned about plot to make you want to read more here. Not a bad piece here.
As always remember to take what you think was helpful and forget the rest.
Stay Safe
Harry
This was quite short; I think you could’ve added another page or so to this introduction. It’s hard to critique something that hasn’t even had enough time to really get started.
Anyways, I like your description. You seem to describe every situation and object as your character sees it, which adds a bit of personality, I think (sexy Paco, the waterfall of bath soap). Do the same thing with describing your characters, how does she see herself and others?
There were some spelling errors in this. Not a big deal, but to clear that up it might be a good idea to copy and paste what you wrote into Microsoft Word first and wait for the red squiggles to appear.
For the most part, I enjoyed reading this. Good luck with future chapters
~blacksheep
General comments: Well presented with great description - I could really picture the story in my head. I loved it! Would definitely read on!
Hello there, elfwriter97! I hope you're having a great New Years Day! 2011 already, woo!
Nitpicks
The repetition of 'beach' slightly bothers me. Also, instead of just right-out saying that Paco is sexy, describe his looks and how he is sexy.
Alright, I end up saying this a whole lot in reviews. Instead of just writing 11:30 you should write it completely out, so: eleven thirty.
I dislike how you phrase this as a question, and besides, do we need to know they're called Jack and Jill bathrooms? No.
First of all, it's "array" not "arrey". Secondly, the coma after bath is unnecessary, so go ahead and remove it. It should be "lavender" not "lavandar".
"Razor" not "razer".
Overall
First of all, I would like to praise you on one thing you did very well: description. From the "bleached wooden bunk bed" to "velvety white liquid" descriptions and all in between, you did very well to create a picture in the reader's mind, at least in my opinion. Also, I praise you for your lack of info-dumps, which are usually slightly common in first chapters, because author's want to squeeze everything in to catch the reader up to speed.
One major issue I noticed with this story is purely the length. I am not sure if this is merely a part of the first chapter or the whole first chapter, because it's so short. I feel like you need to lengthen this, because at the moment it took me about five minutes to read, and that was spending time searching for errors, too. When Bailey comes in the room, describe her -- is she the early riser, and Kaleigh the night owl? Just add some meat to this story. You have a good start, but adding meat equals adding length.
Another issue I had is simply the ending of this story. There's no cliff-hanger to even make me interested in reading the next chapter. For all I know, this could be the whole story. You don't make me want to (metaphorically) "turn the page" and read on. I feel the ending is too dull for an otherwise very well written short story. Also, you need to run spell-check on your story. You had some simple spelling errors in there, too.
Overall, this was a good start, but you have a lot of work to do. You didn't really let us see your main character's personality, which means I didn't find a reason to identify with her as a reader. Keep working on it, though! I hope this helps you and if you have any questions/comments just PM me.
- Mizz