forum Anyone willing to critique this first part of this thing I'm writing?

Started April 19, 2018 by @calellory

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“Captain Flintlock Ulysses Calvert Keating, please report to the boarding area for ESS Wells. Captain Keating to the Wells, please.”

Axelrod’s ears perked up when he heard ESS Wells, and he started gathering his things before hearing that they only wanted Captain Keating. He groaned, and slumped back in the uncomfortable waiting room chair. It felt like he had been waiting for hours. His own fault, really, for getting up early and arriving to the THINGY three hours before he had to be there. He couldn’t help it, though. It was his first mission as first mate and he was almost out of his mind with excitement. The last captain had retired, so Flintlock had been promoted to Captain, and Axe had been promoted to Mate, much to the chagrin of the Wells’ navigator. 

Marion Huckleberry was older and had more experience, and it was traditional for the navigator to be the mate before the engineer, (which was Axel’s previous job) but there had been some tiny error in her application, and the company owners were notoriously sexist in a quiet way, so Axe was the mate and they had to hire a new engineer. He wondered who it would be. He knew most of the engineers in the area from various training seminars, and for the most part got along with all of them. He just hoped it wouldn’t be Cooper Johnson. He couldn’t stand Cooper Johnson.

“Marion Huckleberry, please report to the boarding area for the ESS Wells. Huckleberry to the Wells.”

He started up again, then fell back into his seat. Still not his turn. He should have expected this. The mate was usually the last one to board. And Axe was extremely bored. You can only people-watch for so long before getting tired of it. He closed his eyes for a minute, let his head hang over the back of the chair and sighed again, trying to maybe fall asleep or something, anything to pass the time. Someone poked his shoulder.

“Oh my god. Axe? Axelrod?” The voice and the Australian accent sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it. “Axelrod Hemmingsworth?”

He stood up abruptly and almost knocked heads with a short, dark haired woman around his age.

“Oh my god, it is you! Hi!”

He stared for a second before recognizing her.

“Chessy? Oh my god, it’s Chessy Cheshire! I haven’t seen you since graduation!” He hugged her, picking her up and swinging her around in a circle before setting her on his chair. “How have you been, man?”

“Oh my god, Axe. You’re just the same as ever, obviously.” she grinned and patted him on the head. “Still tall, still ‘not a ginger’”.

“Hold up, what are you doing here? I thought you went back to Canberra?”

“I’m going to space, dude! You’re talking to the new engineer for the–”

She was cut off by the clear, robotic voice of the intercom.

“Elodie Cheshire, please report to the boarding area for the ESS Wells. Cheshire to the Wells, please.”

Chessy hopped off the chair and hugged him again, then started walking away.

“Sorry, Axe, duty calls. I gotta go. Wish me luck!” she turned around to salute him with a grin. “It was nice knowing you!”

Axe grinned back and waved a little overenthusiastically. “See you in like an hour probably!” he called after her. She didn’t hear. He had forgotten that she couldn’t hear very well when she was looking somewhere else.

I like it! I don't have much time to write a super detailed critique, but I'll give you what I thought of in the moment.

There were just a few sentence structure problems that made it a little hard for me to tell who was who (I had to reread the second paragraph several times), and they say "oh my god" too many times. XD I'm also not sure about him swinging her around when meeting her again after so long..? But I don't really know his relationship to her, so I don't know. Overall, I enjoyed it. Still a little too short to really get a solid voice from your writing, but I could get some hints of it.

thank you!! And yeah they were best friends for like six years and then Axe got a job on the Wells and Chessy moved back home so they kinda lost contact for a while. It's hard to get personal messages back from space lol

So I think that this was really a compelling read. I think there are a few grammatical errors, but nothing that interfered with my understanding of the story. Overall, the story was great! I think that in that one bit of dialogue that there was a bit too much of "oh my god", so I'd replace that with another expletive in order to avoid the repetition. Again, I really liked it. Once you write more, I'd love to read it!

It was good! Something I didn't cringe while reading (which is a good thing). Some suggestions/gripes though; some of them are personal pet peeves, some of them are things that are good writing practices.

• and it was traditional for the navigator to be the mate before the engineer, (which was Axel’s previous job)

You want to put the comma at the end of the parentheses; you're using them as an afterthought here, and commas are normally used to separate thoughts. The same notion is used for periods.

• “Oh my god, Axe. You’re just the same as ever, obviously.” she grinned and patted him on the head. “Still tall, still ‘not a ginger’”.

• “Hold up, what are you doing here? I thought you went back to Canberra?”

• “I’m going to space, dude! You’re talking to the new engineer for the–”

This is two pet peeves rolled into one; I know the general notion is that new paragraph = dialogue for a new person, but I normally do a new paragraph no matter what (So "Still tall, still 'not a ginger'" would be a new paragraph to me). The other pet peeve is the lack of description between pieces of dialogue. Your descriptive writing is overall smooth and flows nicely; lacking the same sort of introspective description here makes the writing feel stuttered and suddenly sped up, which as a reader sort of halts my comprehension a bit. For example, mentioning why Axelrod thought Elodie was going to be back in Canberra in the form of introspection will slow the entire scene down a bit.

My last gripe is going to be your paragraphs in general - lots of short paragraphs give off the same sort of atmosphere that I mentioned earlier. Shorter paragraphs heavily disrupt the initial flow you instigated in the first couple of paragraphs.

I do like your dialogue, though. I get a bit of a feeling for the personalities of the characters in the dialogue, and your word choice isn't horribly generic; there's some character to it.