Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-30402176-20170915192232/@comment-24101790-20170920211053

Capitalization: "(Sixteen)16-year-old Eli Fogherty was lying lifelessly on his new bed, failing to settle into his new house", " it. 5-6 (five-six) entries in, at long last, Eli had an answer for the author’s name, which he had mentioned in passing, when describing some of the things which annoyed him.", etc. You should always capitalize numbers at the start of a sentence. Some styles accept it when you open the sentence up with a year ("2017 was a good year for ____"), but most styles discourage starting sentences with numbers unless they're written out.

Capitalization cont.: Remember that dialogue tags shouldn't be capitalized unless it begins with a proper noun. "“Are you actually going to get down and help us?” Asked (asked) Martha". "The Ewe Vale High School Shooting (shooting) occurred" Shooting isn't a proper noun and doesn't need capitalization (See: Columbine High School massacre).

Punctuation: There are a number of times you forget to use punctuation in dialogue. "“Hold on, I’ll be down in a moment(comma missing)” he lied.", "“Just ignore him(comma missing)” puffed Sarah", etc. "His first written entry was two pages’ (apostrophe not needed) long."

Format: You shift between keeping dialogue on separate lines and having multiple conversations in the same paragraph. "“Are you actually going to get down and help us?” Asked Martha, folding her hands in her chest. Eli slowly turned around, not wanting to look directly at her. “…Do you need help with something?” Eli puffed. Martha uncrossed her hands, and responded, condescendingly: “Umm… yeah. Actually, yeah we do. I’ve been working my ass off for the past hour. Maybe you should get off your ass as well, and actually help?”" Literature typically splits up these lines to improve story flow and prevent misattribution.

Story: I won't get too much in the story as you do indicate that it is currently unfinished as there are a few directions the story can go to and I rather not jump to any conclusions. I will mention that it does seem a bit unlikely that the protagonist would find the diary of a school shooter and not be able to identify the identity of the person with a quick google search. If it happens that he's living in the house that Nat lived in before going on their spree, I feel like that would also be brought up with the new residents quite a lot. It feels kind of like living in a stigmatized house which would likely have some focus.

While you can argue his isolated nature would limit those interactions, I feel like the Facebook search might be more of a sticking point. An unfortunate Facebook search of the two Columbine shooters does turn up memorial pages, fake profiles that reference the spree shootings, and news articles. Given the event happened only two years back, it feels like this is going to need something to keep from revealing this twist too early. That's really all I have for now as there isn't much I can get into with an unfinished series without knowing the end.