Young Writers Society

thanks for the review excalibur. I did notice however that you told me allot of things that were bad, but you never gave any ideas on how to fix them. if you have any id be glad to hear them.

EDIT: I went over it and removed some things, smoothed it out a little, added a couple of things. Im not sure if you will like it better, but whatever. I also decided that the main character would not now what happened to him until much later.

This is actually worse then the old one. A lot just seems to be copy and pasted without attention to the points made in the reviews. On to the paragraph by paragraph review.

DEATH AND ALL HIS FRIENDS

I had been in the small town for less than a minute and I could tell it was dead. It was a ghost town. It was a nowhere. A nowhere I didn’t belong in. The buildings were dilapidated and broken, empty husks leaning over a snowed in street.

(Repeated 'nowhere' and it really doesn't set a setting.)

At this conscious thought of the word snow I realized how cold I really was. A shiver ran through my thinly clothed body. I looked up and down the streets but I had no recollection of where I was. This is not right. Something is wrong.

(Describe clothes/appearance.)

I started to walk. I did not know where I was going. I just wandered. Thinking about whether this was heaven or hell and if it was the latter what I deserved to be there. I couldn’t remember anything.

(I rep.)

I wandered in a daze for at most twenty minutes before I saw him. He was dressed in a long brown coat and his face was hidden behind the brim of a limp leather hat. As soon as I rounded the corner and saw him he turned to look at me. His face was shadowed by the hat, but I could clearly see his eyes. They were blood red. They stared at me for a split second and then they were gone.

He appeared next to me in an instant. Then his arm came across my neck and I lost consciousness.

(Still all telling...)

-----

I woke to the sound of an argument. I was leaning up against a wall not far from where I had fallen. The snow was pressed up against me as if I had been there for a while. I was cold.

The first man I had seen was tying up a horse to part of a fallen down building nest to two other horses. Off to his right were two other men sitting around a fire. They were the ones arguing. I couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying, but I managed to pick out ‘kill’, ‘liability’ and ‘don’t’. Are they arguing over whether or not to kill something? Is it me?

(More descriptions.)

As soon as I opened my eyes and looked at the men they turned to stare at me. One stood up and started walking towards me. The one who had been with the horses took his seat.

Despite the fact that I was still groggy from waking up I noticed how fluidly the man moved. He looked more like a cat than a man. When he reached me he dropped smoothly into a crouch and pushed a bowl into my hands.

(Fluidly? Doesn't work, and no descriptions don't help me much for this odd word choice.)

The bow contained a thick soup that looked to contain a couple of times of vegetable and some meat. I went to eat it and realized that I didn’t have a spoon. As soon as I thought about it one appeared in my vision. I took it and began to eat the soup. I ate the first bight slowly, savoring the warmth as it slid down my throat and into my stomach. The heat seemed to radiate throughout my body and I was much more comfortable.

(I think you meant 'bowl' and 'bite'.)

When I looked up to thank the man he was gone, sitting on the far side of the fire with has back to a building. When he had given me the soup I had not seen his face because I had been preoccupied. When I had seen the first man he had been wearing a hat and I had not seen his face. Now I saw it.

(Telling.)

His eyes were the same blood red, and the face that framed them was as white as a dead body. The contrast between the red and the white, as well as the smoke rising from the fire made him look like a ghost. It was uncomfortable. My face must have showed what I felt because he looked away and started talking to the other men.

I finished my soup quietly, and again as soon as I was finished the man who had given me the bowl was back to take it away.

(Telling again.

When he had the bowl he just stood there, examining me, like I was a puzzle they had to solve. I looked at his eyes to try to find some clues as to what he was thinking, but they were stone cold. His face was just as hard.

(Describe prior.)

“Can you stand?”

I was startled when he spoke. His voice flowed like molten amber from his mouth. It was not a human voice.

“Umm… yeah, I think I can.” I managed to respond.

I tried to stand but fell back to the wall. He offered his hand and pulled me up without any apparent effort. We walked back to the fire and sat against the wall. I felt awkward walking next to him. It made me feel like a toddler walking with my parent.

(Lacking descriptions only kill you here as well.)

When we were closer I could see that the man from the street had taken off his hat. He and the third man each had the same pale skin and red eyes. They were also very gaunt and looked undernourished.

(Use up top.)

When we sat at the fire I was eternally grateful. My clothes were soaked from the snow and my body was starting to spasm from the cold. One of the men saw my jerks and handed me a heavy jacket. It helped a little.

(Setting wasn't really established... why now?)

The man sitting next to me looked at me, “Why are you out here?”

I thought about the question for a moment, “I have no idea…”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I don’t remember. I don’t know how I got here.”

Until this time only the man who had given me soup had spoken, but another addressed my questioner, “Steven, I’m not joking, this is weird, let’s just kill the kid and go home.”

Steven’s face, which had previously showed no emotion, now flared up in anger, but it disappeared so fast that I thought I imagined it. “No. it may be strange, but he is a civilian. We keep him alive and we bring him back to the elders. I’m not arguing this Alex.”

(This situation is weird.)

So Alex must be the one who wants to kill me and Steven is the one who is protecting me and I still don’t know the name of the third guy, I thought; surprisingly enough the knowledge that someone wanted to kill me did not bother me, I was still too preoccupied with figuring out how, and why I was here. I was still drawing a blank.

“So you know nothing?”

“Yeah...”

When we had sat at the fire the sun had been just setting over the buildings. When Steven finished questioning me the sun was still setting. I simply had no information to give him. Did I have a name? Not that I know. Where was I from? I don’t know.

(Weird still.)

By the end of the interrogation I was just nodding.. I was slowly coming upon the realization that I did not know who I was. I had no history. No basis for personality. I did not have any friends. I didn’t even know if I had any family.

(Cliche.)

We sat around the fire in silence for several more hours, until Steven decided that I needed sleep. I was about to argue, but the look on his face stopped me dead in my tracks.

He cleared the ground at the base of a building of snow and laid a blanket over the ground. He handed me a few more coats to use as blankets. When I laid down I felt all of the aches the cold had left in my body. Despite the pain I was asleep before I had completed a single breath.

(Seems unrealistic to fall asleep like that.)

-----

When I woke the sun was directly above me but it was colder than it had been yesterday. I had been able to bear the chill, but now it was unbearable and I began to shiver immediately, even under three coats. The three horses were eating grass that was growing from the base of one of the buildings. I rose, and as before one of the men was already with me, Alex this time.

“Good. You’re up. Winter is coming quickly. We need to get back to the city before the snows come and we are stuck out here,” he seemed to notice that I was cold, “If you move around you will get warm. Don’t go too far though. You wouldn’t want us to leave you.”

I was starting to dislike Alex. Steven seemed to be welcoming, though he still seemed very reserved and guarded around me. The third man still hadn’t spoken.

I got up and began to pace along the row of buildings but before long Steven came up. “Do you know how to ride a horse?”

“I don’t know,” I told him again.

He paused for a second, “Well, you will be riding with me. Take your pants off and put these on,” he handed me a pair of wool lined leather pants, “they are warmer and your legs won’t be as sore from the ride.”

I changed and we left immediately. Since I had had never ridden a horse before and by the end of the day my legs were cramped and sore from holding on. By the fourth night I had gotten more used to it though.

“The snows will be coming fast,” Steven said, “We will have to ride hard for five days to make it to the city in time.”

I nodded. I didn’t feel like talking. During the ride I figured out that the last man’s name was Matt.
During the next four days that we rode I didn’t think or talk much. I just ate and observed. As soon as we left the ghost town we became enclosed in a forest. The trees were very large. They stretched up and up until their tips were lost in the winter clouds. The limbs were each thick enough to walk on and they intertwined with each other, forming a mat that afforded only rare glimpses of the sky. There had been no trees in the village, that’s why there had been snow. Here, the branches stopped all the snow before it reached the ground.

(Better part then the rest.)

The first three nights we had not made fires, but had all eaten cold leftovers of the soup and then we had rolled up in blankets and instantly fallen asleep. On the fourth day however, we were out of leftover soup and I understood why we had not made a fire before. The trees were so large that no branches fell through that could be burned. It took us over an hour to find enough twigs that we could start a fire and then even longer to find wood big enough to keep it going while we cooked.
After we had eaten we all sat and stared at the fire. After so long without one it seemed like a gift from god. I stared in the flame for hours. That was when I started to notice the figure dancing about in the flames.

(You know I still think they are hobos with horses.)

I watched the flames dance in the circle of stones. The writhed and jumped and then returned to their places, flickering in the shadow of the descending night. All other thought had fled from my mind. I did not think about why I was here or what was happening. I thought solely of the fire. It was beautiful in a way. It had a perfectly chaotic shape that could only be marveled at. As I watched the flames seemed to take a shape. They danced with more regularity and pattern until it looked as if it were a figure dancing in the flames. Soon that figure could be seen. It whirled in the fire and soon other figures joined it. There were six now.

One by one the figures jumped and disappeared out of the fire. When only one remained he began to dance more fiercely than ever, turning circuits around the rim of the fire in seconds. As it danced it grew till it was the size of a man, then until it was larger. When it was ten feet tall it stopped dancing and looked at me. It looked down at my kneeling form and smiled. Still smiling it reached out its hand to me. Without thinking I did the same, and when our hands touched there was pain. The pain covered my body and overwhelmed my senses.


(This was just... rushed and awkward.)

-----

Their faces. Alex, Matt, Steven. Those sickly, pale faces. Revolving together, blending into one. My face. But not. It has the same tousled brown hair, but it is not mine. The skin is pale, not tan; and even more shocking, the eyes emit a dull red color.

-----

The pain covered my body. It flowed through my veins and spared no part of my body from its onslaught. The pain reached a peak and I could feel my body torque as if it was trying to keep itself together. I wished for death at that moment. The suddenly the pain was gone, and in the silence I remembered who I was.

-----

I was eighteen years old. I was a student attending Appalachian State University in northern North Carolina. It was summer vacation and I had traveled south to visit my parents. The cab had dropped me off and while I was crossing the street it hit me. It being a car driven at sixty miles an hour by a man talking on his cell phone and yelling at his child in the back seat at the same time.
In the silence I realized what had happened to me. I had died.


(No. Just no. This late in it just isn't acceptable to me. )
-----

Through the flashback the pain had remained almost unbearable. I continued to wish for death until that heavenly moment when the pain stopped. I lay perfectly still, believing that if I moved then that pain would return. Anything would be better than pain. After what I estimated was twelve minutes I opened one eye and shut it quickly. Everything was clear. I could see the dust particles in the air. I could see all of the nooks and crannies in the tree bark hundreds of feet above my head.

I must have inhaled some smoke or something. This cant be natural, I thought.

I closed my eyes again, hoping that everything would return to normal.
When I opened my eyes again I saw with the same clarity. The only thing that was different was the fact that Steven was leaning over me with the first trace of actual emotion showing on his face. I closed my eyes again.

Two hands grabbed my shoulders and shook me until I opened my eyes again.

“Kid! Open your eyes and get up! You have about two hours before it comes back and we have to get you out of here.”

I groaned. I could never imagine going through that much pain again. I stood up and wobbled on my feet. I would have fallen but Steven still had my shoulders and was supporting me.

“Ride with Matt, he is the fastest.”

The urgency in his voice convinced me more than anything. I looked over at the horses and was once again astounded by the clarity of my vision. I could see their individual hairs. Matt was already mounted and was beckoning for me. He looked worried too. I took his hand and he swung me effortlessly into the saddle. Before I could ready myself we were gone, galloping down the trail.

Before we were far I said, “I know why I’m here. I died. This is my afterlife.”

(This just went bad real quick. The memories come back and everything is well! It kills the flow and changes the story in a bad way. Either he keeps his memories or he loses them for a long time. I'd say keep.)

A lot of errors, a lot of flow issues and lacking descriptions. I was lost in this piece for the first half and the last didn't do much to save it either. Whole issues with the memories, overused and weak, you can do better and you know it.