Young Writers Society

This needs work too. Oh well, It's good to keep learning! I'm never giving up. :^)

I cut this in half so it would be easier to read. Please review! Thanks. I appreciate any feedback whatsoever. :^)

Hey, SH, just a few quick things:

The stars [s]beaming[/s] across the wide window of her spacecraft resurrected her memories of the accident.

Reads better without that. Or if you'd like to keep it, I suggest changing 'beaming' to 'beamed' and 'resurrected' to 'resurrecting' -- but I think it works better without.

“Silly. We’re probably stranded here to die if our escape pod doesn’t work” Rune gazed

missing period.

Rune trembled.
No. He can’t be dead.
“Dmitri, please wake up! You can’t leave me alone here, you hear! Wake up!”

I had a lot of trouble connecting with Rune. A lot of the actions are disconnected and short, and while technically sound its not only boring to read such uniformity of sentence structure, it also has the effect of distancing the reader from what's occuring as every action seems separate. You need to make this messier, mix it up a whole lot more.

I suggest in the above instance you should delete 'No. He can't be dead' - its just a cliche thought. Sounds wrong, I know, but just about every character in these situations has that thought apparently and I mean, the dialogue actively shows us in a more emphatically emotional way what that dull thought told us. It's more effective without it.

Her fingers fumbled to unlock herself. The safety clasp refused to budge. It was broken. Fear choked her. She grabbed tightly unto Dmitri’s black jacket.
“Please,” Rune whispered. “Please wake up. Please, wake up now.”

Here's an example of those short sentences, mixing these up into slighter longer sentences would work better in my opinion. There's just one too many and while it can be effective in short doses, its too choppy here.

“I can’t believe you’re crying like that for me. I wasn’t sure you liked me that much,” Dmitri’s voice said.
Rune’s head turned to his direction.
“Dmitri! You’re alive? Don’t scare me like that!”

'Rune's head turned to his direction' - clunky and unnecessary. It's an example of overwriting simple action. 'She turned' would have sufficed. In this case, I think the dialogue is enough though and the action is unnecessary.

Her face began perspiring at the prospects of dying by either starvation or lack of air. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears.

Hm. Was it you who lectured me on words such as began? XD. Again with the overwriting here; simply say 'She was sweating'. Don't overdo it.

Really? Maybe that won’t be so bad. I’ve always wanted a cyborg’s leg. Might
make me more popular with the girls.”

unintentional line break.

Rune promised herself a long time ago that she would never let anyone close to her get hurt or die.

That's a ridiculous promise/idea. It's almost silly enough to warrant deleting. Think on that. She comes off as naive and stupid.

*

I'm going to leave it there. Generally, this was very well written. It was easy to read but I as I said before, I had a problem connecting with the piece. Given the short, choppy sentences it was hard to get a real feel for the character beyond what you told us in the info-dumps. I think, on that note, that for a sci fi you kept that under a good degree of control but when it did come out in came in chunks, just after the last quote I indicated above. I didn't really think it was necessary - this isn't a sci-fi, nor was it in the last one you wrote, a world so unique we need great blocks of back-information. It's one of those worlds and settings that's fairly common to the genre, so we infer a lot from that.

That's perfectly fine, so long as the actual story rises above the setting. In this case, I didn't really think it did. Girl's home gets destroyed so she decides in a fit of rage to join the armed forces for revenge - eh. It's a boring and very cliche plot-line for both sci-fi and fantasy stories.

The ending didn't do much for me either, I pretty much expected it. Don't get me wrong, this was a really well executed piece but nothing new was covered in it, if you know what I mean? No new ground, or new ideas were portrayed. And the ending was a little less suspenseful/dramatic because really, there was no guaranteed escape. A lowly escape pod isn't going to stand up to some warships after all. In any case, it was still a good read! Sometimes its just a relief to be able to get through something that doesn't have a tonne of errors, you know? Kudos on that.

Cheers

Thanks Jigs! I'm grateful for your comments. They're just what I needed! This an old piece that I wrote before I learned about not using "to be" and words like "began." I have a past editor to thank for that. ^_^