Photoshop :: Creating Shiny Star Effect?

The following is a link to a tutorial creating a diamond effect on a word.
 
[URl]
 
At 4:35 into it, the author begins creating the shiny parts of the diamonds by drawing a path, copying it and then rotating the copy ninety degrees.
 
I'm having trouble just creating that first path the way it's done in the tutorial. First, it says to choose a brush of 17, make sure it's white, then switch to the pen tool and draw a straight white line. However, mine doesn't look like that, how it splays outs. I just get a straight white line. Then, when I try to tranform the copy by rotating it 90 degrees I get an error message saying "Could not rotate because the initial bounding rectangle is empty."