User blog comment:Delicioust/ok so/@comment-24101790-20181025001920

Your story was deleted because it failed to meet our quality standards. There were a massive amount of basic capitalization, punctuation, wording, and story issues for being less than 30 sentences long.

You don't get a pass if your story is riddled with capitalization (Failing to capitalize sentences and dialogue properly: "it (It) gave me shivers that me and my family could be the fifth victims.", "we (We) both just stared at each other, empathizing with each other", "m-my (M-my) parents.. they're completely p-pale, and their eyes a-are deep and d-d-dark.", etc.)

Punctuation: Not using punctuation when introducing dialogue as well "I simply replied(,/:) "Sure, I'd love to!"", ""I sputtered out(,/:) "well (Well), I did notice that the first two had newborns". You also fail to properly use punctuation when asking questions: "I was wondering if you'd like to come over after school tomorrow.(?)"

Awkward wording and dialogue: "we both just stared at each other, empathizing with each other (redundant).", "I sputtered out "well, I did notice that the first two had newborns, the third was the home of two toddlers and the fourth was a family of a mother and a fourth grader. Interesting.", etc.

Story issues: The plot's incredibly rushed and fails to really drive home the story due to you trying to condense everything into four paragraphs with very little efficacy in advancing the plot. "Later in the month her parents went missing and she had to live with us. We still to this day don't know what happened to them." It's incredibly anti-climactic and when coupled with bland descriptions ("Her eyes looked dry, and looked like they had no life in them."), it really detracts from the story.

As for leaving your story up because it's your first and you want critiques, that's what we have the writer's workshop for. We're not going to leave something up on the site with this many issues when we have plenty of authors who spend time planning, writing, and revising their stories. Here's a copy of your story.