Young Writers Society

CHAPTER 2: Turing On the Flirt

Everyone was sitting around a small campfire in the area that we called the living room. It was the main part of our warehouse and, besides us using it for living, it was also our bedrooms, dining room, and meeting room. Our beds weren’t the best; they were made up of broken and old couches and chairs along with some pillows and sheets for blankets. We ate in the center of the room where we had a fire pit set up, lined with rocks, twigs and kindling in the middle. We sat on the hard ground using glass plates and silver forks and spoons as our dishes. Everyone shared a cup, which was normally water or wine.

Since wine didn’t need to be refrigerated and didn’t spoil, there was plenty of it around. Some Clans didn’t allow it at all, because of the crazy teens that had loaded guns everywhere. But whenever we found it, it was always a treat and anyone could have some, even though you were only allowed a little for various reasons. To me, wine was okay, I would prefer water to hundred-year-old grape juice, but Jesse and everyone else seemed to like it plentiful. Even Kyle had some every once in a while.

This building that we had chosen for our home was tall, depending on how you described tall, with two stories and a wrap-around porch with railing on the roof. On the bottom floor, which we were on right now, was outlined with large windows around the ceiling, a loading dock, and the main and the side doors. The upper story was our “Look-out” spot. Our building was one of the tallest in the entire city, so when I say, “Look-out”, I mean we lookout over most of the city. That’s another good thing about this place, with a tall structure, we can see where other rivalry Clans are and the most populated place with food. All in all, our home was one of the best buildings in the city and boy were we lucky to have it.

“So, you almost got creamed out there, huh?”

I heard someone say something, but it was like the sound was coming from a distant dream. I was dazed. All I could remember was Jesse helping me into the building and then setting me down somewhere, but by then I was mostly unconscious. I wasn’t asleep, but I couldn’t see anything. The same thought came into my mind again and again. ‘Those poor animals.’ I couldn’t fully remember why I was thinking that, until the pictures seeped into back into my head. ‘Those dog, those poor hungry dogs.’ I was seeing their crazy faces, their ribs, and the desire in their eyes to get to our fresh meat… to me.

Then I heard a new sound. It sounded like someone was rolling their R’s.

“Rrrrrrrrrrrr…”

No, that wasn’t it. It was a name. My name. Someone was calling my name. But who? I couldn’t remember where I was or what had happened. Was it mom and dad calling to me? No, the voice was to close and deep and real for that. That’s when I noticed that I was slumped onto the hard, cold floor, with my eyes closed.

“Rachel?”

I sat up and my lids flipped open. Suddenly everything was spinning. Nothing was clear; everything fuzzy and I couldn’t make out details. There were figures sitting Indian-style in a circle around an orange flame. Then everything got quiet and still. Two of the figures got up and came closer to me. Then I felt the warmth of other skin and blood. I didn’t realize how cold I had been. Someone took my hand and held it tight. Then another hand was placed on my forehead. Two different hands. Two different body temperatures. Two different figures.

“Are you alright?”

“Rachel, how are you feeling?”

The voices were much, much closer and louder. They made my head hurt. But before I could answer anything, a larger figure stood from the group and walked toward me. I recognized his arms. Anyone could have recognized those arms, but I couldn’t put a name to them. The large figure pulled the other two off me and then bent down to pick me up off the ground.

“Help me get her into the bed. She’s probably just freaked out by those dogs.”

When I heard that voice, my mind cleared and I could see again. Jesse. Just leave it up to him to bring anyone back to life with his voice. That voice that I had learned to respect and depend on and love like nothing before. I liked to think of it as a big black bear, husky and dangerous, but covered in honey, silky and comforting. I glanced back over Jesse’s shoulder to see that the two figures that had come over to comfort me where Mark and Jake. They kind of had a crush on me.

He carried me across the room and placed me on a creaky old bed, the only real bed that we had. As soon as he had placed my head and feet onto the bed, I sat up, quickly, a little too quickly, and objected.

“No, I’m fine. I feel fine,” that’s when the headache raged. My head hurt so bad, my arm flung up to press my head on my temples. Jesse placed a hand gently on my shoulder and pushed me back down onto the bed.

“You need your rest. Just lay down for a while and then you’ll be fine.”

I didn’t object this time, and before long I was unconscious again. But this time by sleep. No more crazed dogs threatened to enter my head, and I slept peacefully.

To be continued...

Back to review your second chapter. I'm not going to nitpick, as this is mostly grammatically sound, nor am I going to hammer home the "show, don't tell" point again, because you've had it drummed into you by now and I actually think this is an improvement, which is always nice to see. Even better in this case because, as I said before, your ideas are very good, but listing them all one after the other isn't the best way to go about expressing them.

I think the problem with this half of the chapter is mainly focus. You begin by describing wine as a staple drink in the diet of these Clans. Then you go on to describe your MC with a fuzzy head and hearing others around her slur her name. I can't work out whether she's meant to be drunk, but at no point are we told she's actually had any wine, so I assumed otherwise; it's the context of that description that makes it seem so, I think. Unfortunately, it reduces the impact of the collapse, and as with the last chapter, I'm still lost as to this great effect the dogs had on Rachel. They haven't been described to the point where I fear them or even just understand Rachel's fear of them.

You tend to lose sight of your plot in favour of describing your world. Ideally, those two aspects of the novel should work together; that's the point about showing again. You're halfway there, in starting with a description of everyone sitting around the campfire drinking wine, and then discussing the wine, but you then get sidetracked and start offloading information. It would probably benefit you to have a clear goal in mind as to what you want this chapter to achieve. Half of this excerpt is spent talking about the setting without any direction.

Character-wise, I'm not clear on Rachel's character yet. She seems to be very strong and worldly and then suddenly vulnerable. That's not a character flaw, but again, you need to make her vulnerability seem justified, as well as Jesse's strength, rather than just distributing those qualities as the plot demands it.

Still, I like your ideas, which is why I keep coming back to this. It's just overcoming this tendency to launch into long passages about the scenery that you need to work on, because eventually, the reader's going to start feeling cheated. I hope you're successful with this, though, and please keep posting your chapters.

- Jet.

I've really enjoyed reading the story so far.

Rachel, your speaker, should describe more about what is actually going on instead of just telling what she's thinking. Like what Jetpack said, it gets a little bit confusing and I had trouble trying to find out what exactly happened to Rachel. I had to assume a lot of things to create my own mental image of the scene.

I like how you managed to explain the world and its condition thoroughly, but you could edit your other chapters and spread bits of the information through several chapters or even the whole novel. Also, Rachel learned all of this information from someone or some people, right? Maybe a flashback about what people had told her about the world could be a different representation of the information. Of course, this is just a suggestion -- I don't really have a problem with how you present the information now.

As for the theme of the story, I really enjoyed the post-apocalyptic adventure goodness. It'll really make for juicy, action-packed scenes later on and I'm looking forward to those.