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2.5/10: Hearts' Enticed

Hearts' Enticed by Nettenettenet

Seshé has had the same nightmares of her parents being murdered for years. She hates that it's one of the few memories she has of them. She's frustrated that she can't more than that. However, she begins to see new details in her dream after meeting two mysterious siblings. How will she handle her new attraction to a vampire when that was the very being that killed her only real family? And how will she deal with the new discoveries she makes about her family and herself?

COVER: The cover upon first glance is so cute. Then as I keep looking at it, I see so much that can be improved. That black strip across her lips would look better if it fully covered her lips. Personally I would make the text bigger/thicker, whichever works I guess, and the "Written by Jay R" bit would look more put together and professional-ish if it was changed to "A wattpad story written by..." or simply "a wattpad novel," or "a novel written by..." you get me? Just something with "a story" or "a novel," etc. looks so much better on a cover if it's italicized or even just regular. Either way, it's a step up from what you have there. I'm not sure how much graphic design experience you have, but the graphic itself would look so much better with a few highlights added, some crimson red overlay in the eyes and a blackish color multiplied over the iris. I can help, if you agree with my tweaks, just DM me and we'll figure it out.

GRAMMAR: So, in your description you mention working on the title. Before I start, I just want to say that maybe you should remove the ' after Hearts in your title. It implies plural possessive, but having the word Enticed doesn't make sense in that case. You are saying "the many hearts having the enticed." We can use the word excited, for example. "Hearts' Excited" is "the many hearts having the excited." If you did "Hearts Excited," it would be "the many hearts being excited," or "Hearts Enticed," "the many hearts being enticed." If you want to keep the ' in there, it would be "Hearts' Excitement," or "the many hearts having the excitement." That's technically correct but it doesn't flow well, so I would stick to removing the apostrophe instead of going through all that.

In the description, you have "She's frustrated that she can't more than that." She can't what? Remember?

Your capitalization could use some work. Not every bit of dialogue needs to end in a comma. If you aren't adding a tag about how something is being said, or if what you are adding can be read as a standalone sentence, put a period at the end of the dialogue and capitalize the next word to start a new sentence.

The sentence structure of your writing seems to be all the same. I see a bunch of "as," a bunch of "she" starting the sentences, etc.. It makes all the sentences blur together when they're all written similarly. The sentence structure is really repetitive, so mix it up here and there.

There's a few tense slips and missing commas. There are also several sentence fragments, which is no bueno. Those are the most basic things that you should tune up if you want people to take your writing seriously.

In the first chapter, when you are describing the interaction with Seshe and Mia, there are so many "her" identifiers in there that it's hard to keep up whose bag is being grabbed and whose face is smiling, etc.. That makes it confusing and really hard to read.

The capitals for emphasis are tacky, by the way. They completely downgrade the story as I read it. If you want to emphasize a word, use italics. They're about the only formatting allowed if you want to emphasize how something is said or a strongly said word. Bolds, capitals, underlines, etc. look unprofessional and as I said, tacky.

CONTENT: Right away, you start off identifying people as mother and father. It would look a lot better if you described how the characters looked, and implied that they were the little girl's parents like you did when the father said that the gift was from her mother and him. Try adding more descriptive words as well. Kids remember more sensory details than they do other things, so maybe the girl remembers her mother's dark hair or sparkling eyes or soft smile, or even her voice, so describe those. If you're going to start with a scene like this, make it rich with imagery and something that we can visualize and feel ourselves.