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I'm writing a story, largely based on my experiences. I'd really like some feedback. Here's an excerpt. Brooke is my main girl character, a Jewish girl. Evan is my male main character, obsessed with outer space. They're talking to one another after Brooke has just had a rant about her feelings. Evan loves Brooke. And perhaps she loves him..." FIND OUT! This is not going to be a romance story, I just need feedback on the romantic part...heh...heh...because I've never been in a relationship. Thanks!

“Your constant introspection is exhausting.” Evan murmured.
“But you’ve been listening.”
“Yes.”
“The conversation has been largely one-sided on my part, but you’ve been listening?”
“Brooke, I am probably the worst liar you will ever meet, and I’m also awful at hyperbole, so take that literally. I find your internal narrative fascinating, like a book. Your emotions are the Brooke-book, and it’s a long, very tedious book, but it’s also enjoyable. And… A-a-and when I’ve finished listening to a chapter I feel as accomplished as if I had… just read Plutarch or Livy or Tacitus or Ovid or Plato or Socrates or Machiavelli or Shakespeare or Nietzsche or Newton or Kant or Marx or Dickens or the Brontës or…”
“Evan.” Brooke’s heart was beating quickly and she loved him: she loved his complex, confusing metaphors, his mind, his hesitance, his brilliance, his awkwardness, how he was looking into her eyes, finally, with that almost inhuman gaze boring into her skull.
“Evan.” She breathed, returning his gaze.
“That’s twice now,” Evan observed, watching her microexpressions, and her dilating pupils, her slightly open mouth. She blushed at his intensity of observation as she moved closer, closer, closer still.
But Evan didn’t understand the implications of this incredible closeness Brooke had initiated. His senses were overridden with every aspect of her. His focus was shot like a… like a… Similes failed him. He began to panic as her lips got closer to his, and he broke eye contact. Brooke saw the expression in his eyes change from rapt attention to a look not unlike that of a frightened animal.
“Evan,” She whispered, carefully, asking him if he was okay with that one word.
“Thrice…” Evan murmured, rocking on his heels, one of his hands flickering up to the side of his face, nervously twitching. His eyes darted from place to place, not focused on anything in particular. His heart was beating far too quickly and an unidentified sensation stirred in his stomach. Brooke saw his distress, and decided it would be best to state her intentions.
“Evan, I’d like to kiss you, if you’ll let me.” She experimentally placed a hand on his arm and he didn’t flinch away. She could feel his pulse rushing.
Am I hyperventilating? He thought, Her hand, her hand, her hand…kiss me kiss me kiss me kiss me!
“Eh...” He stuttered, “K-k-kiss away…”
Brooke couldn’t help but laugh at his choice of words before she leaned in slowly and brushed her lips against his. He gasped and stepped back, head spinning, logic failing… Brooke reached out for him and slipped an arm around his waist. He melted in her embrace and allowed her to hold him and poke her nose into his chest. She held him tightly like his mother used to do when the world became too much for him. He felt so safe, so relaxed. He bent and kissed her on the eyelids just to be nearer. Closer, he wanted closer. He smashed his lips into hers awkwardly, never having kissed anyone before…besides his mom when he was little. But this was different. So, completely different. He felt so young with her, so slow and normal. He was so, so happily stupid. She pulled away, amazed and just hugged him tightly.
“Oh my gosh. That’s really disgusting.” Morgan.
They broke, doe and buck in semi truck headlights.

Please?

I love your writing style, you have a unique and quirky, effervescent charm to your prose, it's fantastic. You also build anticipation amazingly on paper, could not stop reading....much better than I can ever even in real life. I think Brooke and Evan come alive in that excerpt, oooh and I know I'm not gonna like Morgan! Don't stop writing, you've got serious talent.

Thanks! It's part of a 10,000 word manuscript at the moment. I want to publish it, but I'm only fifteen. So there are complications. Thanks so much for reviewing!

<< Moved from general autism discussion to arts, writing and music, by mod. OP, Hopefully you'll get more replies here. >>

Here's another bit, if you'd like.

Evan was awake, aware: That jostling of the RV. That sand-papering sound of the tires on the road. That rush-whistle of the wind. The sheeeroooom! Sheeeroooom! of cars passing. That girl who dreamt softly on his shoulder, breath tickling his arm. All of it whooshed in his ears, his face. Evan craned his neck sideways to try and catch a glimpse of the stars: his stars, his constant. He edged his shaking hand from his lap onto the window-opening crank and slowly began to twist that handle down and down and down. As he turned, cold air began to rush in, beating against the back of his seat, brushing his hair back like icy fingers, reverberating against the interior of the RV. He could barely open his eyes to the intensity of that blasting airstream. Brooke awoke slowly with a prolonged sniffle and a stretch. Evan’s head was out the window, now, she noticed. The back of his neck was pressed up against the side of the RV, and his hands touched longingly at the remaining glass of the window, his fingernails scraping a little.
“Are you okay, Evan?” She asked tentatively, brushing the back of her hand against his forearm, hard enough not to tickle, but soft enough not to alarm him.
He didn’t answer. His world of stars was where he belonged, fit in. The stars were like him: solitary, burning, set in their ways. The planets were like him: “anchored” by revoution to their stars, as he was anchored to his love of space. The constellations were like people to him: multifaceted, complicated, and made up of too many different things to be understandable! If only he could be a celestial body, converting hydrogen into helium for energy, living in relative stability until his time of death! This was the world, the dream he’d shared with his mother. As a child, and sometimes even now, he believed his home planet was up there, somewhere, revolving around a different sun, filled with people like him. NGC2420 up to Pollux, up to Castor, Gemini, Cancer. Canis Minor. Orien. The remaining visible pinpricks of light from Taurus. The quivering light from the moon reminded him of... He saw his mother’s wedding wing flash in his eyes. She was carrying three-year-old Evan from a playground, and as he burrowed his head into her chest, she’d held him to her with that ringed hand. He’d stared at the glimmers of the small diamond. Diamond… His mother’s earrings glinted at a parent-teacher conference, under the nerve-wracking fluorescent lighting in that Pepto-Bismol-pink office. Office… His mother’s own office in the psychiatry ward where he had played with a gyroscope until it had to be taken away. Away… Away! His attention was ripped from himself as he felt glass close up the space between himself and the bottom of the window. His hands had slipped as someone had begun closing the window on his neck. He gasped, a squeak deep in his throat. He felt the vibrations of that menacing hand, turning the crank of the window-opener, shutting the window tighter and tighter and tighter against him.

Sorry and thank you moderator!

I really gasped when I read these. You write so well! It reminds me of Orson Scott Card. But everything reminds me of him! Is Evan an aspie? Do I even have to ask? Brooke is cute.

My pleasure! Seriously, I enjoyed being immersed in your writing for a few minutes. Don't let your age stop you. Plenty of now famous writers had trouble publishing their novels, it's part of the biz. Get the book "the Craft of Writing" by William Sloane. I think you'll find it will be invaluable in helping you with polishing it for publishing.

There's a lot to work with here. I won't say you don't need to edit - but since I've reached the stage where I spot passages I think could use editing in even published books, that's not a putdown. (Writing is one of my earliest and most longstanding obsessions - I am hyperlexic, self published a book of poetry while still in high school in the 1970s, and define myself as a writer.) If I ignore a request like this, it may mean I haven't noticed it, or I'm too busy to respond. If I respond - at all - it always means I've noticed something worthwhile.

From reading the excerpts you've posted here, and your comments, I'm going to give you the few pieces of advice I think you need most.

1: Do not let anyone convince you to change your voice. Details, sure. Editing to fix weaknesses, sure - if you can see the weakness when it is pointed out. Changes to suit what anyone else thinks it ought to be, unless they can honestly convince you - NO.

2: Write. A lot. You're good now. So much better than most people around you, you'll probably find this hard to believe, but you will get better as you go along.

3: I understand the desire to publish. When I printed my book of poems, I literally printed it. I studied graphic arts in my obsession to learn all about publishing. Right now, I have printing presses in my basement, the kind which print from hand set type, individual lead letters. But don't be in too big a rush. I see two possible downsides to you if you rush into it. First, is what happened to me. I published that book of poetry, which everyone around me thought was great (I sold out a press run of 500, which without the Internet to give me publicity was a pretty good record for a self published kid) - and then by the time the excitement of that was over, I'd become better. I saw all the things I wished I could improve, but it was too late. This caused me to freeze up, to constantly revise my work and to hold back from letting anyone see it, because I'd seen I could improve it. Even now, all those years later, I'm still thawing out from that. Second, the way self-publishing is now, it is far too easy to get ripped off. There are the cheap solutions, and most of those are just bad for you. And there are the expensive ones, and most of them don't give you real value for your money. Take editing. If you hire a cheap editor, what you get is mostly a proofreader. If you hire an expensive editor, you still are likely to get too little out of it. You need to find an editor you can work with, one who understands your voice.

4: Harking back to the first point, as an author, the only thing you have to offer your readers that no one else can offer is you. You are unique. The way you write is unique. Don't try to change it, to become the next whoever the current big selling author is. Be you. You may or may not sell as many books (and if you self publish, selling more than a handful of copies is a real struggle, anyway) but at least you'll hang on to the one thing that might, some day, attract readers. You can only ever be a poor copy of anyone else. The only person you can fully, vividly be is yourself.

5: Even if they are "professionals", published writers or editors or anyone else, ignore anyone who pretends to have "the" secret to writing well, getting published, whatever. For every "rule", there are successful writers who have thrown it onto the floor and trampled all over it, laughing while they did so. What matters are the tricks that work for you. The ones that make your writing more what you want it to be, what you intend it to be. The ones that help you write more. - But, if you're struggling and not getting the results you want, don't ignore an idea just because you think it won't work for you. Give it a try. See how it works. Play with it, tweak it, figure out a way to make it comfortable for you.

6: I get the feeling you aren't ready for tough crits right now. That's fine. Crits are hard. They hurt, worse than having a tooth ripped out of your head. (For what it's worth, if I tore everything you've posted here apart, there'd be a lot less blood left on the floor than there would usually be. So I'm not saying anything is that bad. Just that any criticism hurts.) And yet... the only way you learn is to find out the things you could be doing better. You're good enough, you'll work it out on your own, but that process is slow. It is faster to have other people who know what they're doing point out the flaws, and the strengths. But you need critters who do know what they're doing. Even over on Forward Motion (the one writing community I recommend without reservation), not all the critters are ideal. Wrong Planet isn't even set up well for critting, and there are few if any members I'd suggest you listen to. (No, not even me. I'm too driven to be as good as I can possibly be, which makes me too harsh a critter for anyone who isn't already covered in scars. The only thing I care about is being the best writer I can, at all costs.)

7: Head on over to Forward Motion. You can learn a lot there. Just follow the TOS. They are serious about them, because the idea is to avoid the flame wars that have gutted good writers on so many other sites. (Been there, barely lived through that... ) And keep in mind, although there are those of us on the spectrum who hang out there (my user name is related to the one I have here; I won't "out" anyone else without their permission), most of the members are NTs who will not understand a good deal of your style and voice. Which is fine. A writer who everyone can understand would be pretty dull and boring, because they could never say a thing everyone didn't get. But take all the things you read with a grain of salt. Remember what I said above: use what works for you and ignore the rest.

8: When you're doubting your work (and we all do that), remember what I said about how tough I am on myself (and, inevitably, on other writers). Then remember I took the time to write out a pretty long post to try to give you the help I think you could use. That's not something I do unless I think someone definitely "has it". And read what I said a few lines above, "we" - I called you, by implication, a fellow writer. Since I don't enjoy gutting people, I ignore the wannabes and keep my mouth shut - but I do not consider them fellow writers.

TheMarchofIdeas, sounds like this is based off of an experience with a guy you've met. If so, that's cute.