You’re not taking advice, you’re just throwing down story after story. Why are you here if not for feedback?

This story suffers from the same problems as the previous one – the only improvement is that there is less room for purple prose. The space not occupied by overly florid description, though, suffers from awkward grammar, poor pacing and a general lack of attention to sentence structure. Also, the vocabulary is entirely unremarkable. This story is in turns entirely vanilla and jarringly awkward.

Your dialogue is pretty unremarkable: Poorly paced, uncreative and not at all compelling. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, it’s just boring. If this were a full novel and not micro-fiction it might not even merit comment.

As it is, you seem to totally misunderstand the format based on your descriptive work. If it’s not too florid, it’s too long, and if it’s not too long it’s too cumbersome. I’m sure you have a story to tell, but you need to take the absolute essence of it and tell only that. Everything superfluous needs to go, and right now all your writing is superfluous.

Also, your character is by turns uninspired and confusing: there’s no indication at all that there’s first-person narration in your previous “chapter”, and now he seems like a generic badass without any creativity behind him. Think, why do you want it to be from this character’s perspective? What does he have to tell that your reader wants to hear? Also, nobody “inwardly smiles and nods”. It’s just terrible interior emoting.

Please, please, please address the quality of your reading. This entry does a lot to confirm my suspicion that you’re on a steady diet of trash young-adult fantasy.

Plenty of competent writers got their start with this sort of thing, but plenty of terrible writers have wasted way too much time stuck in it.

I would strongly recommend laying this project aside in order to focus on writing exercises.

The recent dead dog trend is a start. It’s an easy start on evocative writing, which you need to work on. You could also write out memories with a focus on conveying emotion. You want your audience to feel roughly how you felt at the time.

You could also write a few character pieces. Write a story where the entire point is to convey a single character. Focus on implication over description.

Read better and focus on exercises, and your writing will improve a great deal.

While I appreciate the advice (J.M.V.), you have no knowledge of what I have read. It is nice to be equated with young adult fiction when all I read nowadays couldn’t even be rated PG13 in film circles. Furthermore, much of my writing isn’t fiction; my website is proof of that. Transitioning from writing show notes to fiction isn’t easy. Sure, I’m out of practice to a degree, and I’m more comfortable writing longer pieces; however, I consider this a step to improve the longer works. Here, I can jot the ideas down in short form and expand upon them later when I so choose.