I enjoyed this poem. I thought it was short, evocative, and told a story which is not easy to do in so few words. Nicely done!

I found the repetition of the lines ending with "drinking" to be a little repetitive, especially since the second line of the poem already communicates that a "wild night of drinking" occurred, which makes the line about Sam Adams "starting drinking" to feel like a bit of a redundancy.

Overall, this was an entertaining read. Good work!

The detail and description in your story was excellent, creating a vivid and specific image in the reader's mind. I also thought the character development and the dialogue were realistic and engaging.

The "horror/scary" elements of this genre piece felt a little muted. For me, the genre more than anything is defined by an atmosphere of tension, dread, etc. and I didn't get as much of that as I was hoping from a story written for a Horror/Supernatural prompt where something "scary or spooky" was going on. I would have loved for those genre elements to really be exploited a little more.

Overall, this was a solid, well-written story with excellent detail description and good character work. Nice job!

I liked the worldbuilding in this story. You did a great job of packing a lot of setting and narrative into just a few hundred words. Nice job!

No specific suggestions for improvement.

Overall, this was a fun read. Nice work! Thanks for entering the contest!

I liked the action and the description in this piece. The pace moved along nicely and the characters were interesting. Well done!

While following the prompts of other contests is beyond the scope of judging criteria for "The Bradbury Contest" , I did note that the prompt for that contest was Horror/Scary and it was one of the selected three genres of the piece as well. On that front, I'm not sure it was successful; there was very little that was creepy, scary, suspenseful, or horrifying about the narrative. Supernatural, sure... but it was missing that tense, dread atmosphere that I associate with pieces in the horror/scary genre.

Overall, this was a fun read. Thank you for entering the contest!

I enjoyed the worldbuilding and the setting in this story in particular. The sci-fi elements are worked into the narrative well, without being too distracting or pulling focus from the story.

No specific suggestions for improvement.

Overall, I enjoyed the read. Well done!

I enjoyed the characterization in this story. Terry and Thunder were both fun, intriguing characters that were entertaining to follow along with throughout the narrative.

No specific suggestions for improvement.

Overall, this was a fun read. Nice work!

You did a great job developing story and keeping the pacing moving along through dialogue in this story. It was only about 800 words and it read much faster than that. Well done!

No specific suggestions for improvement.

Overall, I thought you did a good job on this piece. Nice work!

I thought you did a great job with this story, particularly the way you depicted some really sensitive topics. They were handled with a deft touch and were really compelling. Nicely done!

No specific suggestions for improvement.

Overall, this was a really good read. Nice work!

I really enjoyed this poem. I thought you did a great job with the imagery and the structure of the piece. The stanzas were short and concise and allowed the piece to be read in smaller bits and pieces that all complemented one another.

No specific suggestions for improvement.

Overall, I think you did a great job with this piece. Well done!

I love discovering new features of the site, and somehow I missed this one a couple years back. I had no idea you could create automatic responses based on submitted reviews!

No suggestions for improvement.

Overall, this is a super cool feature!

I really loved the imagery in this piece. The first stanza, in particular, was a beautiful metaphor comparing the soul to a wilted flower.

No specific suggestions for improvement.

Overall, I thought you did a good job with this piece. It was vivid, concise, and well written. Nice work!

I really enjoyed this poem. I thought the structure and the imagery were particularly well done, and I thought your use of descriptive language really made this poem stand out.

No specific suggestions for improvement.

Overall, I think you did a good job with this poem. Well done!

Nice job on this poem! I really liked the imagery and the structure of this piece, especially how the poem is a shape poem that takes the general form of a tree. Well done!

No specific suggestions for improvement.

Overall, I thought you did a great job on this piece. Keep up the good work!

I really enjoyed this poem. I thought the structure and the imagery, in particularly, were really well done and the poem left a definite impression on me.

No specific suggestions for improvement.

Overall, I think you did a great job with this piece. Well done!

I thought this was a really well-presented, informative item. I tend to agree with you that, outside of Mary, Eve is probably the most prominent mother figure in all of the Bible.

No specific suggestions for improvement.

Overall, I think you did a good job with this piece. Well done!

I think that the structure and the presentation of this piece was really strong, given that it was assembled from stream-of-consciousness source material. The imagery and metaphors were great.

There were a handful of small technical errors ("nourishment" in the first line should be plural, "Often it seems out of the parents' control", etc.) that did detract from the piece's readability a bit.

Overall, I enjoyed the read. Nice work!

I'm impressed with the way you were able to condense the narrative of Moby Dick into exactly 100 words. In exercises like this, every word counts and I think you did a great job with it.

No specific suggestions for improvement.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this piece. Nice work!

I thought you did a great job capturing the raw emotions that can come along with caring for someone. Love and relationships are complicated emotions and you managed to communicate your feelings on the matter clearly and concisely.

No specific suggestions for improvement.

Overall, I thought you did a good job with this piece. Well done!

I thought you did a great job on this piece, particularly with the imagery and the structure of the piece. It was a strong read from start to finish, and really evocative. Well done!

No specific suggestions for improvement.

Overall, I think you did a great job with this. Nice work!

I thought you did a great job with the structure and imagery in this piece. The rhyme scheme was well-suited to the subject matter, and you did a great job writing evocative stanzas. Nice work!

No specific suggestions for improvement.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this piece. Well done!

I really enjoyed the moral of the story in this tale. You did a great job of presenting a situation and resolving it with a lesson for others in a short amount of space. It was a quick, easy, and informative read. Nice work!

There were quite a few technical errors in the piece, including missed spaces, omitted quotation marks (either at the beginning or end of a piece of dialogue), and no paragraph breaks, which made the experience of reading it a little slower and more tedious than it otherwise would have been. I'd recommend a quick proofread and polish to smooth things out a bit.

Overall, this was a very enjoyable story. Well done!

The detail and description in this piece is excellent. You do a great job of establishing tone and letting the tension play out not just by telling the reader, but by showing the audience. This is a skill that even longtime screenwriters don't always do well, so the fact that you can so clearly create a visual image in the reader's mind on your first screenplay is really impressive. Nice work!

In a screenplay, you typically only describe what can be seen and heard, since the other three senses (taste, touch, smell) are not something the audience can experience. In a line like, "The heat wraps around her like a blanket, the dry scent of eucalyptus and distant petrol lingering in the air." I'd remove everything after "blanket" because the last part of that line about the eucalyptus and the petrol scents aren't information that any department of a production can convey to the audience.

I noticed a tendency to repeat the same information over and over again. As Alexis arrives at Pernilla's apartment and crosses the courtyard, she drums her fingers on the cover of her notebook and "the tapping echoes the rhythm of her wandering mind." Then, just one scene later, she's again tapping her notebook lightly against her thigh, "matching the nervous rhythm of her mind." Once you've established a character behavior, you don't need to keep over-explaining the rationale behind it. After you first explain the character motivation behind the tapping, you can then just mention that she keeps tapping something in subsequent scenes; the reader doesn't need to always be explicitly told what the motivation is time after time after time, unless it changes substantively.

While camera directions are perfectly fine, be sure that you're not taking away from the narrative quality of the storytelling. When Alexis is waiting outside the door, there were a lot of instructions for SFX, reverse shots, close-ups, etc. And that stuff is perfectly fine when used sparingly (or if you are planning on directing this yourself), it can distract from the read if your goal is to tell a compelling story that will make a producer want to buy it, or an actor want to play the role. For me personally, I'd cut down on the camera directions by about half, reserving it for only the most key moments when capturing what you're going for just cannot be accomplished narratively any other way.

The big-picture issue I had with this script is that Alexis' motivation is unclear. You do a great job of setting up the atmosphere and making it tense, uncertain, etc. as Alexis approaches Pernilla's apartment. And that makes sense, because she's apparently there to ask questions about the brutal murder of someone that Pernilla worked with. And yet, when a complete stranger (Harold) opens the door to her apartment and offers no real explanation for why he's there (which the narrative tells us Alexis finds disconcerting)... and yet Alexis just walks into the apartment and starts asking him questions? I think you need a more compelling reason for why she does something against what I think would be most people's better instincts. Does she need this story for some reason? Tell us why.

Overall, I think there's a lot of potential in your script. The technical screenwriting elements have a strong foundation and can be finessed rather easily with a quick rewrite. The actual story elements themselves need a little more thought and development in order to take them to the next level, but I do think you're off to a good start. Nice work!

I think you did a good job laying out your three points on the problems facing America. I noticed that this piece was originally written in February 2021; I'm curious as to whether your position on any of this has changed in the time since (either as the result of anything that happened in the Biden Administration, or the substantive changes being made to government in the first several weeks of the second Trump Administration).

The one area of this piece that I think could use some expansion or further explanation is the very last point about how your preference would be to restructure government where the federal level was responsible for the military and foreign relations, while everything else is left up to the individual states and how that may help heal the divisions in our country.

How do you see that playing out in practice? To me, the idea of fifty different states determining their own educational priorities, energy and transportation and immigration policies, support for veterans, etc. would make things more divided since every state you visited would have different (and in some cases drastically different) policies in place. I'm genuinely curious about how you see this playing out in your preferred system.

Overall, I thought this was a thought-provoking piece and you did a good job of articulating your three points. It's a great place to build from and expand on. Nice work!

I think you did a good job creating a comprehensive and detailed letter that tackled a lot of different activities that you're planning on participating in. On a personal level, I was also happy to hear that your experience with "Musicology Anthology"  was so positive! I hope you have the same this year with either that contest again, or with "The Bradbury" .

The back-and-forth argument with yourself was an interesting technique, and I'm all for injecting something fresh and unusual into Dear Me entries, but I'm not sure this one entirely worked. It started to feel, to me personally, a little repetitive to read toward the end, and the tone - at times - felt overly self-critical.

Overall, this was a well-written and thorough Dear Me entry. Nice work!

I think there were a lot of great elements to your letter. I particularly liked the way you turned a positive into a negative with your login streak here on Writing.com; a lot of people get really discouraged when they inevitably miss a day on a daily streak (myself included!), but I thought you did a good job maintaining a positive perspective on that.

I would have loved just a little more context on some of your goals. For example, the one with the part-time job doesn't really detail much about what you're working on or how you're hoping things will go this year beyond "making changes" and "making a difference to children's reading." Some practical insights about how you see that working out (or hope it will work out) would improve the piece.

Overall, I thought you did a good job with this Dear Me entry. Good luck with the effort to cross this one off your list; I remember when I was down to my last one (I think mine was Rhythms & Writing) and how much stress that added to the wait for the judging! Deep breaths!