Young Writers Society

"....War is coming...."

"....We are all that's left...."

"....We need to find a new home...."

3 April 2171 - This is the personal log of of Navigation Officer Karl Williams aboard the HSS Starscreen.We need to find a new home, on this ship those are words to live by,human life has now become precious...and rare. We have been travelling through the blackness of space for decades now, with no end in sight.

15 September 2171 - Conditions of the ship have improved slightly, we passed a small moon two days ago, got enough food a water that will last us a few more weeks. I've picked up readings of a possible new home, but I can't tell for sure yet. Morale is steady amongst the crew, but its getting worse with the passengers. There are more than three thousand people on this ship, it could get ugly soon.

21 September 2171 - The hopeful readings were a bust, not even worth mentioning on this log. This means, according to our maps we won't see another planet or moon or whatever for another month, huh. what are we even doing?

26 December 2171 - Christmas was yesterday... just passed by everyone. No one got any presents since we got nothing to give each other, and no decorations were put up since it would've been too depressing. We just went on about our duties like it was just another day... another Christmas...another year gone by with nothing but ourselves and the stars we can always see but never reach.

9 March 2271 - Conditions are getting worse by the day. Food supplies are dwindling and water is soon to follow, morale is shot to hell and I'm amazed that the engines haven't given out yet. When I was a kid and dreamed of going into space I thought I might get lucky and be the first to find proof of alien life...but now that I've been out here all this time, I see now that there's just us and the rocks. Nothing more.

14 March 2271 - Fights between the crew and the passengers have started, last night in the Mess Hall the fight lasted a full twenty-three minutes before the captain finally got off his ass to stop it. No one was killed but many had serious injuries. I thought about lying to them, telling them I found another possible or maybe leave out the 'possible', but decided not to. We are all trying to occupy ourselves with tasks to keep the fear at bay, every few days I find something new to do to occupy my time, and every few days the fear breaks down that wall and comes creeping back. I don't think i can take much more of this.

2 April 2271 - Moments in time are blurring together. No one seems to take notice of each other anymore, they just follow the motions without looking or talking to anyone else. To conserve power we have had to evacuate and shut down several areas of the ship, which just made matters worse for everyone. But that won't be for long, soon nothing will matter. For the past several days I've been stealing weapons and explosives from the armoury and hiding them in my quarters, they are searching for them but they won't find them. not in time anyway. I will end my struggle and pain as well as everyone else's. But I won't do it yet, I've found a planet with a breathable atmosphere and we're going to check it out. I'll wait till tomorrow.

Hi!

To me, it seems like this story could be so much more then what it's at right now. You start off with an interesting premise, but you don't go into too much detail about any of events-everything just sort of moves along briskly without the reader fully getting a true sense that something's wrong. You never explain much regarding the ship's origins, either.

Before I talk about that, I just want to mention something about the format in which this story is presented. 'Logs' and 'Diaries' are two different words. A log would not be a personal one. Here's the definition of 'Ship Log' from Wikipedia.

Today's ship's log has grown to contain many other types of information, and is a record of operational data relating to a ship or submarine, such as weather conditions, times of routine events and significant incidents, crew complement or what ports were docked at and when. It is essential to traditional navigation, and must be filled in at least daily.

Note the highlighted portion. You jump around a lot, and I think the shortest gap between logs was six days. You could argue that all information filled out in said log is not important to the story, but still. Also, this kind of information would be kept by the captain, not a navigational officer. One would also start to keep record of a log as soon as the ship set sail, not a few decades later. Depending on the exact amount of time that the ship has been out, maybe the previous person keeping the log has died or passed away and has passed the duties onto your MC.

Now, about the plot. You start us off by saying this:

3 April 2171 - This is the personal log of of Navigation Officer Karl Williams aboard the HSS Starscreen.We need to find a new home, on this ship those are words to live by,human life has now become precious...and rare. We have been travelling through the blackness of space for decades now, with no end in sight.

Opening a lot of room for potential. Right now, the reader's just kind of scratching their heads because what you've got in these couple of sentences could serve as an entire short story! Tell us more about how the earth came to an end. Give us an exact time as to how long this ship has been travelling space. Tell us how they got people onto the ship to escape and why it was specifically that ship. If your MC wasn't around, maybe he could talk about wondering what it would have been like.

Also, I feel like the events like the riot were touched upon a bit too briefly. If the ship has been sailing for a long time like you say, this can't have been the first riot that has happened. What makes this one so special, so dangerous? Were there people killed? Maybe you can have a few passenger characters that you can use to show build-up and their motivations, as well as a few individual scenarios so that we see how hard it really is for them.

There's not really much you have in terms of your characters. Your MC is the only real character in your story, but I still don't know anything about him except his name. How old is he? How exactly did he come to be navigation officer? Does he have any family, or a girlfriend? How exactly does he feel about the riots? How does he get along with the rest of the crew?

If you have one character in your story, that's fine. However, you should have them warrant the time we're going to spend with them. Right now I feel like Karl is a robot who just supposed to narrate everything that's going on. If you give him some characteristics so that we can relate to him and really see how much of a dire situation that this.

Right now, I think that what you've got is an outline; a summary that you can dive into so much more detail with. Show us more about the characters and how both the crew and the passengers feel about the situation. Things like what you've described don't happen over night; it has to go with slow build-up. Give this ship a past and show how it came to be. By the way, going to detail would fix your problem earlier about the log entries being gapped out. Good luck with this, and PM me if you have questions.

-Elinor xo

Hey Rygel, .

Firstly, I really like the way this post was in the form of a Log entry. I liked your characters voice, and the story sucked you in. Kind of like you were in the story.

Secondly,I didn't really like how short the Log entries were- but that's just me. I would have liked for there to be better descriptions of the spaceship. In the 15 September 2171 entry you said something about a small moon...isn't there just one moon? Are you talking about the moon or is this a different moon.



Keep Writing.