2009: A Great New Year

I hope no one takes offense, but I had kind of assumed grammar and spelling issues weren't a concern given the general level here. It's very common for writers to need proofreaders to correct that sort of mistakes before publishing.

I'm guessing you already know to use spellcheck since the mistakes are almost all word replacements (does->dose, our->are, etc.), but if not, Firefox, OpenOffice, and a number of other free products include a spellcheck to help a little with that.

A few other suggestions -
- Choose a tense before you start and write it down somewhere where you can look at it when you need to. It can get confusing when you switch between past tense and present tense ("Claire dropped the apple..." vs. "Her shrinking continues..."). Present tense works well for first-person perspective, where your audience is supposed to be present or watching in realtime. Past tense is better for third person perspective or first-person omniscient, where you're seeing more than a real person would see.
- Vary your sentence structure. A few places got to be litanies of "She (verb)... She (verb)..." sentences which can make a paragraph harder to read and less interesting.
- Multiple paragraph quotations don't have a closing quote until the very end, even though they have an opening quote at the beginning of each paragraph. This distinguishes them from a second person talking right after the first quote.

Would a grammar squad be of interest here? A group of us with English proficiency to send something to for proofing?