Winter's Breeze, Summer's Bite: Chapter 3

tigershark: Thanks for the feedback!
ultraviolet: Forgive you? No, you helped me! I should be thanking you!

Hey there!

I don't normally quote the whole work to make comments, but seeing as this is fairly short and there are some grammar issues I want to take care of, I hope you'll forgive me.

As I woke up, I remember the argument between me and Mom. I sighed. I walked downstairs towards the kitchen. It smelled of recently brewed coffee, toast, and strawberry jam. I was alone in my house, since Mom usually goes to Aunt Maria's house for her usual brunch. I quickly ate my breakfast, changed, grabbed my camera, and dashed outside. Perfect, there are little children building a snowman outside! I took a few shots before the parents could catch me. I check my watch, - this needs to be either a semicolon (;), colon ), or hyphen (-), since the time isn't technically a part of the sentence; it's conjoined. 8:15. Oh my gosh! I'm late! I'm late! I'm late! The three "I'm late!"s are a bit of an overkill. I'd take it down to one. I quickly grab my bag and stuff my camera in it before running towards Wendershaw High School. I met Diana at the bike rack.

"Thought you were late again, huh?" She asked. This should be lowercased, a concept in dialogue punctuation I think you grasp fairly well; I'm guessing your reasoning is that it should be capitalized because the dialogue ends in a question mark, not a comma, but it's still combined to the sentence and so should be lowercase.

"Y-yeah," I said, panting.

"You were taking pictures, weren't you?" she asked again.

"Problem?" I reply.

"No, not really," she said, shaking her head frantically.

"Look at this flyer I found," she said, pulling a piece of paper out of her bag. She showed it to me; it was a music flyer.

Wendershaw's Music Academy For The Gifted, it said.

"Music Academy? Really?" I ask.

"What's wrong with that?" Diana asks, worried. She twirls her blonde hair.

"Nothing, it's just... Why are you showing me this?" I ask.

"Well, I think you just need something to take your mind off of photography, so you're not causing any problems in your family," she answers.

"You think I'm causing problems in my family?" I ask, with a bit of a tone in my voice.

"N-no! Not like that!" She sighs. She shoves the piece of paper in my hand.

"Just think about it; it might be another way of killing time other than photography," she said before leaving.

This is all a big chunk of one-liners. I'd love it if you filled this in more; gave descriptions of the characters, the settings, the MC's emotions; varied the dialogue tags a bit; showed us the characters doing actions, anything from facial expressions changing to large gestures or even just them walking down a street. It'd really add to this whole part.

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Hunter Dean (December 16)

Well, we caught 5 fishes and 3 foxes. It's winter, and it's kind of harder to catch fish when the lake was frozen. Julieanne looked disappointed.

"We tried, but if we did ice fishing, you wouldn't have wanted to anyway," I said, to lift her spirits up. - I don't really see how this is particularly uplifting.

"I thought we could actually get some fish," she said. You said you got five; that's not good, but it's not particularly bad either. I don't see why she's so upset. I checked my watch.

"Hey, I'm going to be late for school. When are you going to enroll?" I ask.

"Um, I didn't really talked about it with my dad," she said. Her green eyes look guilty.

"Whatever, I have to leave for school. Bye," I say.

I ran towards my house, dropping the gun and grabbing my bag. I drive all the way to Wendershaw High. The quad was empty, which definitely meant that I was late. I ran towards Mrs.-Space here-Lamenta's class and burst in. The whole class turns towards the door.

"Late again, Mr.-Space here-Dean," Mrs. Lamenta said without turning around from the board. I walked towards my seat.

"As I was saying, the variable in..." she droned on.

I look around the room to find a distraction and set my eyes on a blonde girl. She had green eyes, just like Julieanne, but her's looked more innocent. Her blonde hair framed her heart-shaped face and her mouth was a carefully shaped crescent. I don't know why I hadn't noticed her before, but she was beautiful. I don't see why it's such a big deal for him to not have noticed a girl before. Or why, when he sees a pretty girl, he goes half-ballistic on himself. Wait, what? Beautiful? Really? Hunter, way to be a man! Get a grip, you're a hunter, not a lover! And what's the problem with calling a girl beautiful as opposed to, say, hot or something? And it's not like he's said it out loud and his friends are mocking him.

"Excuse me, Mr.-Space here-Dean," Mrs.-Space here-Lamenta said.

I turn towards the board. "Yes, Mrs. Lamenta?" I ask.

"Could you please tell me-"

The bell rang. Everyone started to shuffle out of the class, including the girl.

"Tomorrow, Mr.Dean, tomorrow," Mrs.-Space here-Lamenta said before leaving the class.

I hurried out to keep track of that girl, but all I saw was bunches of students clumped together. I kept looking until I saw her long, flowing blonde hair, she was with some other guy. I sighed, I knew she probably wasn't single. I turned around and started walking away until I hear her say, "Stop it! Stop it, Drew!" I instantly turned around and started walking towards where she was.

This seems like it's all dialogue. Try to add some more detail about what's really going on too. You have good sentence fluency and word skills, so great job on that! One thing though: don't put brackets after every piece of dialogue. Trust me, the reader will get very annoyed at this. However, that being said, your dialogue is realistic and seems very real, and that can be hard to do sometimes, so good job with that too. I haven't read chapter one or two, but I think I will. This seems to be very interesting. Anyway, good job, great so far!

TS