Dreamers And The Dead

SO. In an try to clear my writer's block, I made this. So-so. Go ahead and comment!

A girl with bright ginger-colored eyes had begun to scream as the horror of the room slowly came into focus, colors edging in shades of paint. Crimson trickles, running down like streams, painted the once-golden room. Two lifeless shells were lain down, shots and stabs marking their covered bodies of different colors, mostly jade to cream. A thorn-sharp blade had been struck into the eldest, her locks of black tainted cruel amber. Feeling as if her legs were jelly, the girl fell down, letting her fingers touch the weapons that had sucked the life out of them. "Taylor?" Someone had cracked open the door, then screamed. "Thomas. I don't know." I just. Don't.

It had been ten years since that crime. The girl had luckily been the eldest; eighteen. Her family, Vanessa and Aries, her sister and brother were amazed by the scene. "Don't worry. We'll be alright." She had met with the police the next day, trying to make it calm as possible, not releasing it into public news. "Mr. and Mrs.Rostam have been killed you say?" The man was asking, his eyes bright with fever of winter. "Yes, Sebastian." "How sad. They were a lovely couple. Only aged twenty eight and twenty five." After the crime had been found out, the eldest did her best to pick the family off their feet. Now she was visiting her home, seeing Aries painting his picture of star travel and planets. "How's the research going?" "Still haven't proven God is real yet." Her brother muttered, twirling his chair to face her. "Me and Vanessa are still writing that book about the crime." "Are you sure, Taylor? The public..." "Needs to know." Sighing, Aries shook his head, turning back to drawing space. Maybe the public shouldn't know.... Soon enough, she got tired of just standing to her brother, walking outside. Flashes of light brightened around her, the memory of her parents' death replaying in her head. Oh god... Why us?

Well, the first thing I notice is that you definitely need to change paragraphs more frequently. It gets pretty bad during the second paragraph when it's hard to work out who is saying what.

Anyway, I have no idea if this is going to be a short story, a long running thing, or if this is just one post all by itself, so it's hard to comment on things like pacing and development when I don't know how it'll be in comparison to the rest of the story.

If it is intended to be a long story, I will say that things like the entire backstory of a character and the defining event that has shaped their lives into what they are now should come second to introducing the character as they are now so the reader can sympathise and feel with the character. Death is a powerful tool when writing so it has to matter and the reader has to care, oherwise you're just opening with some people I don't know dying which has affected someone I don't know.

It's important to keep a sense of mystery and carefully develop characters. If you open completely showing off the backstory behind the characters it has to be very carefully executed.

For example, for an opening chapter, you could've shown Taylor's life just before she stumbled across her parent's body, to establish her as the protagonist, to show her life and her feelings and build her as a character so we could really feel for her when the chapter ends with her coming across her dead parents. The next chapter could skip forward ten years, but again, this example would really only apply for a longer story.

Oh, and one little niggling thing. There are three children, Vanessa, Aries and...Taylor. Did the parents have someone else picking names that day for her?