The Reoccurring Sin

I think this story's worst crime isn't that it's bad so much as that it lacks anything good. There's a whole lot of telling the reader to feel bad without much context given to encourage the reader to actually feel that way on their own. The prose reflects this in its own way; solid enough to earn a passing grade in a beginning college English class but nothing so outstanding as to attract the professor's attention.

I'd recommend studying how characters interact with their setting and a bit of thought on character perspective. For example:

A general, a noble, and an architect visit a castle. The general notices the battlements and thinks about the best way to reinforce them. The architect glances at the castle's style and structure, noting each brattice and meutriere, pondering the era from which it was built. The noble ignores these things, instead appraising it for its value and the respective wealth it represents to its lord.

When you write a character into a story, what your story describes should match what the character would likely pay attention to. It'd hardly do for you to write about architecture when you're writing from the perspective of a peasant visiting his lord, now would it? How could he possibly understand such things when he doesn't even know how to read?

I feel that you ran into much of the same problem with this story. All I could gather of your character out of this was that he's an angry, entitled individual that's upset that a girl broke up with him. Nothing new or original there. Nowhere in this story did his upset state effect his perception of his surroundings or his actions beyond throwing a phone at the wall.

In summary: Needs work.

Reviews [The Refugees]

The Refugees

This is certainly the most relevant story I've read so far. It's a fairly obvious parallel to the Syrian issue going on in the West right now, but it presents itself in a pleasant way. The prose is very solid. Nothing awe inspiring, but it flows well and helped draw me into the narrative.

The ideas were good as well. The parallel to modern events was brutally obvious, but that didn't matter. Masking the situation in a sci-fi veneer was a nice touch, and I felt the writing itself could easily find its way into the pages of a paying literary magazine without much effort. There really isn't much more for me to say about it than that.

In Summary: Recommended.

Reviews [[Like] The World Is Ending]

[Like] The World Is Ending

Formatting brilliance aside, this was a funny read. Even when faced with the end of the world, the social media express still manages to miss the forest for the trees, focusing more on their social status and the like than the real issues at hand. This was a witty commentary on our modern society, and I loved every moment of it.

There were a few noticeable issues in it, most notably the mistaken use of its and it's. Some of the lines felt a little bit awkward, though that's fairly much a given when reading through media posts by a variety of people.

Candy Schmidt's line at the end was by far the strongest. The world's ending, everyone has skewed priorities, and someone gets the brilliant idea of advertising sex pills. After all, what better time is there to buy Viagra than right before the world ends? A good read overall and worth your time.

In Summary: Recommended.