This article was an interesting take on the concept of "flow," pioneered by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi. It was really interesting to hear your experience of flow and how you've used it in your life. That said, I do think that your definition of "flow" is a little unclear since you use it to describe a number of different experiences. For example, you talk about flow in terms of its ability to tap into a form of energy when you're reading and writing (i.e., being active), but that you can also use it to improve your sleep (i.e., being sedentary). It would be great to have some additional context about how you define this particular phenomena and how it applies to those vastly different kinds of activities.

I like this story's take on the familiar "alien tests" trope. I also thought that you managed to include a lot of narrative information in a brief flash fiction tale; the backstory about the plague and Professor Blainesworth and his relationship to the students was conveyed really well in a limited amount of space. It gives the impression of a larger universe than just what this story portrays, which is very difficult to do with flash fiction. Nicely done!

In the first sentence, there's a gender pronoun conflict. The story opens with "Kylan shook her head" and then goes on to say "trying to clear the fog from his mind." Based on the pronoun usage for the rest of the story, I'm assuming Kylan is male and the first part of the first sentence is a typo?

In the fourth paragraph, it should be "Kylan stared" rather than "Kylan starred".

I think the story is missing a bit of information. With the ship's comms not working and such, it's initially implied that they've crash landed or otherwise met with technical difficulties... but later in the story, Blainesworth confirms that he's also stuck on Sanctar 3, but because the trilobites won't let him leave (or won't give him the technology he needs unless he stays for the time being). It would be great to have a little more clarity on what happened, exactly, i.e. whether the trilobites caused the technical difficulties, or if they boys just happened to have the same misfortune as Blainesworth.

I thought this was a fun take on the prompt. Daily Flash Fiction Challenge stories are always difficult to write well given the word limitation, and I think you've done a great job. You have the foundations of a really great flash fiction story here. Great job!

Premise

I loved the premise of this story. As someone who's lost a parent at this point, I definitely identified with Sully's circumstances and all of the emotions that were going through his mind in this story. It's a touching story of loss, and also of the experience of getting to know our parents as people a little more than we thought we did.

Although the story was very well written, I found the scene on the train to be a little long. Especially for a story that's summarized in the intro as being about a character and his father connecting at a funeral (although I loved that you didn't specify whose funeral it was in the intro!), it took almost half the story to get to the actual funeral itself. If the story hadn't been advertised as taking place at a funeral, it's possible that this note would be a moot point, but when the story advertises a premise that isn't introduced until halfway through the story, it does tend to make the opening of the story drag a little bit.

All of the characters in the story are unique and interesting; Sully and Alice were standouts for me, with Charlie acting as a good foil for Sully. Miranda and her kids on the train were equally well developed, although I wonder if all of that development was necessary in a scene that felt like it went on a little too long.

The backstory for the characters was nicely worked into the story in a natural and compelling way, and the details that you chose to included did give us a well-defined picture of both Sully and his father, and their relationship.

The dialogue in this story was excellent. It really moved the story along nicely at the right times, and felt authentic for each of the characters. It's easy for dialogue to feel stilted or inauthentic, especially in highly emotional stories like this one, but you handled all of the dialogue masterfully.

As mentioned above, I would have personally liked for the actual funeral to start earlier than halfway through the story because it caused the opening scene on the train to drag a little, but otherwise I thought the narrative was well-constructed and moved along at a brisk pace. I also really liked the note you ended the story on; it was emotional, compelling, and felt authentic for the characters and the journey they're on.

No technical errors that I could find. The story was nicely laid out with a variety of paragraph and sentence structure, which kept the reading experience feel fresh and engaging.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story. It was extremely well-written, the characters were nuanced and believable, and the dialogue was nicely honed and kept the narrative moving along. It's a great story about loss and learning to see one's parents in a new light, and it works really well. Nicely done!

There were some really great lines in this piece. The "failure not being an option" is a common sentiment that works really well here, but you also have some great additional commentary like, "failure is not the end, it is acceptance of the end" which I think is really insightful and well said.

Some of the elements of the piece could use a little more explanation, I think. In particular "failure extends an olive branch to achievement, a sacred covenant disguised as compromise" is a little unclear in its meaning, so it would be great to have some additional context about how you see that relationship between these two inherently oppositional results working.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this item and think it has a lot of potential. Failure is an experience we all have sooner or later, and you were able to successfully capture a lot of the experience of dealing with failure and provided some thoughtful advice about productive ways to think about it. Nice work!

I can definitely relate to the sentiments in this poem, particularly the sentiments about sitting and wondering what to write, and having experienced the ups and downs of life. I really connected with those elements.

One of the things I noticed, not just about this item but several items in your port as I was looking for one to review, was that you definitely seem to like rhyming couplets as your poetry form of choice. There were so many items using this exact same form in your port, I'd actually be really curious to see you approach different concepts and sentiments with different poetic forms for effect. That's a personal choice, of course, but in my own poetry writing I've found it really challenging (and quite liberating when it's successful!) to attempt to express things in poetic forms of different types... short, long, highly structured, loosely structured, etc. This particular premise seems like it would lend itself well to exploring in a few different forms to find the best possible execution for it.

Overall, I think you did a good job with this piece. It was evocative and really resonated with me personally. Nice work!

Overall, I enjoyed this piece and all the memories that it evoked. We all have those formative memories which are unique to us and that inform who we are as people. Some of the events you mentioned I remember myself, and others spurred a memory of my own equivalent of those events. In that respect, you did a great job creating an essay called "Remembering History" which encourages the reader to do just that.

Where I struggled with this piece is that it felt like it was trying to accomplish a couple different things. On the one hand, it seemed to be a recitation of the history and accomplishments that are important to you. On the other hand, it seemed to be an argument that "history" can be anything, large or small. There's a fair amount of disparity between those two concepts; listing personal accomplishments that are significant to you personally (but less so for the world at large) and are a part of your personal history is a very different premise than where someone was when "world news" happened that affected huge swaths of the population.

In a piece this short, I'd recommend focusing on one approach or other. Since there are so few words in a piece of this length, it's often more impactful to focus each and every word on one central thesis and backing it up. Or you can expand the piece into a more comprehensive look at history and memory, in which case you could cover both elements but then would probably want to more thoroughly explore each of them.

I thought you did a great job explaining the journey to getting your first entry for "The Soundtrack of Your Life"  posted. With such a lengthy activity where you're going to be blogging about multiple songs over the course of a month, entries can have a habit of becoming repetitive if you don't find ways to make them unique and interesting, so I think this was a great way to start the challenge, with something fresh and unique.

As great as this particular entry was, it was a one-off in terms of concept; in a month-long activity about the music you've listened to over the past year, an entry about how difficult it was to link the song and find the right version of it only really works the first time you use it.

Overall, I thought this was an excellent first entry into the "The Soundtrack of Your Life"  challenge. As I mentioned above, it's a marathon activity not a sprint, so finding unique ways to talk about the songs you choose is going to be really important as you go. This was a fun first entry to read, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with for your other entries. I'm excited to see what music you've listened to over the past year and what you think of it!

I really like the premise of this story. The "what goes on behind closed doors" concept is always an interesting one, and I always love a good story of a couple where one person has ulterior and/or motives against the other. Nice work!

With such a short piece, I think the story had a few too many elements to it. The key elements definitely needed to be the relationship between Jill and Ted, and Ted's plan to get rid of Jill. The part that I'm not sure is necessary is the element where they move to a new location. That felt like it could have been pared back to streamline the narrative a bit and focus on the details of the relationship and Ted's plot.

Ted and Jill were both good characters, but I would have loved a little more detail about their relationship. There was only a bit of backstory added to the story early on that tells the reader about the broad strokes of their relationship (the accident, it was his fault, she uses it as leverage), but I would have loved to see this dynamic play out a little more between the characters, to the point where the reader is really in the middle of this dynamic and experiencing it in real time, before moving into the part of the story where Ted plans to do something about it.

The dialogue worked, although it felt a bit unevenly applied throughout the story, with heavier bits of dialogue and interaction in the first half, then very little interaction toward the end of the story. I'd recommend weaving in some more dialogue and conversational pieces throughout the story to give it a little more balance.

Except for the dialogue balance issue mentioned above, and the story element of moving houses that I think detracted from the narrative, I think the story overall was concise and well paced. You managed to tell a complex story in comparatively few words, which is not easy to do!

Technical

There were quite a few issues with punctuation that made readability a bit of a challenge. For example, some sentences - especially when it comes to dialogue - are missing punctuation at the end of the sentence, or the punctuation is in the wrong place. I'd definitely recommend a good proofreading to catch all of the little typos and errors in order to increase the polish and readability of this story.

Overall, I think you have a lot of great elements here, and the foundation for a really compelling story. The existing execution needs a little work in order for everything to really come together and live up to its full potential, but you have the start of a really great short story here. Nice work!

I really liked the premise of this story, where a character is trying to come to terms with the death of a loved one. Grief is a complex, complicated emotion and I always admire stories that try to capture the essence of what it means to grieve. I think there's a lot of potential in stories like this.

The biggest unanswered question in this story is the "why" of it all. Patient care directives are fairly well established and there are enormous consequences for medical professionals who ignore the care directives of their patients; yet multiple medical professionals in this story just straight-up ignore the wishes of their patient (thereby exposing themselves to massive liability). Why would they do that? Was there something about Laura's situation that makes her unique? Is this a medical facility that has a habit of violating patient directives? Throughout the story Joseph and Carol have this almost clinical conversation about something that, if it were to happen, would likely be one of the largest single-patient medical malpractice suits in modern history... so I'm really interested to know more about the circumstances of how that came to pass!

The story started with a recitation of details about Joseph's demeanor and background that felt a little too expository. In a piece of this length, while some character development must be done in the form of "telling" the audience, I'd recommend finding at least a few details that you can "show" the audience instead, and convey those elements to the reader through character choices and action rather than simply stating a fact. For example, sentiments like, "Today he is grieving" and "Joseph is a remarkable man" and "Her tragic passing left Joseph devastated and struggling" are all the kinds of things that you can communicate with active moments in the story, which will make those emotions all the more vivid for your reader as well.

The dialogue in this story has a tendency to be a bit overly formal, and to state information that two characters with that level of familiarity with one another wouldn't necessarily need to state. For example, it's stated earlier in the story that "Laura's old friend Carol is a legal advocate for a large right-to-die organization and became involved with getting Laura's final wishes accepted by the health industry" so the later dialogue where Joseph asks her to bring him up to speed doesn't require Carol to go into the whole thing again, reiterating that she's an end-of-life advocate and that she was engaged to work for Laura. Dialogue is at its most effective when it's moving the story forward or communicating information that the reader doesn't already have; it's at its least effective when it repeats something that the reader already knows.

As mentioned above, there's a fair amount of "telling" in this story (that is, just presenting information in a straightforward manner without letting the reader discover it for themselves), and I think the narrative would be a bit more compelling if there were some variety added in to that process. Having two characters discuss something that already happened and relaying information to one another is an inherently difficult setup to make more compelling and dynamic, but you can sometimes use techniques like intercutting the conversations with flashbacks, or using a more strategic method of laying out critical information to keep the reader engaged and guessing about what will happen next.

No specific typos or technical errors that I could find. Other than the issue of the medical practitioners violating a clear patient care directive for unclear reasons, the rest of the medical information presented in the story felt sufficiently detailed and nuanced. It added a layer of authenticity to the story as it was laid out.

Overall, I really like the premise and the potential in this story. There's a good foundation here to build upon, but the actual execution needs work, especially in the areas of story structure, character development, and dialogue. But the bones of a really compelling story are there for sure. Nice work!