All Comments on 'Message in a 300 Page Bottle'

fantastic

Very nicely done. Bravo.

So I'm now late for work because I had to finish reading this before I got up. ******

Damn, you nailed it perfect !

You make words matter. It’s really great writing. Thanks for sharing.

Enjoyable story!

4

Great story!

5

Quite wonderful -- thank you very much for this! Well-developed characters with understandable hang-ups and motivations, and a really well done back and forth perspective.

Well, now I wish that I used 5 ratings more sparingly. I read…a lot…and this story was simply amazing. If there’s any way that this can find a wider audience than this site, I sure hope that happens. It was almost cinematic…script-like. The characters were quirky, but distinctly different…as though written by different authors (or were actually different real people). The writing reminded me of The Maid…or maybe Goodbye Vitamin…never uproariously funny, but often smile provoking. What a treat! Moreover, though different from other stories by this author, the overall quality of the work is excellent. More, please?

I started the story, curious, thinking about relationships I've had which were weirdly similar. Then as the story progressed, I was thankful none of them were that similar. Nonetheless, terrific writing, and I was sucked into MK's world, and Doug's world, and wondered just how they'd get back together, because...

Well written! 5 * of course.

The structure of the time shifting was a challenge and it took a little bit of faith, but so worth it.

Marvelous. Girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl finds boy, and they lived as close to happily ever after as they could manage. Yet another winner from RobertaBob. Thank you.

Great, I love a long story with a happy ending.

What a great Saturday afternoon read - thanks for continuing to contribute to this site, and for letting me step out of my life and into your imaginative story telling. 5 Stars

Your story has left a permanent mark on my soul. The characters are more like living, breathing, loving people than the people that I know in real life. This should become a major motion picture, but I'm afraid that they'd fuck up its purity. You have moved me greatly. Thank you for existing.

Oh my, where to start? To start with I was irritated by some of the vocab, “intuited” was the one that stuck out, but as I progressed I realised the vocab and phrasing “grew up” with the characters, I’m not sure if that was a conscious writing ploy used instead of marked date progression (which I really really wanted), but it definitely felt like it.

There is a suspicion growing in my head that I’ll have to read this again to get the best from it, after all, a convoluted story about writers ought not give up its best all in one go, it should keep a little back for a repeat reading.

Given what I’ve read and my soft spot for a HEA - or as close to it as they can manage, this is a solid 5⭐️, what I originally perceived as faults, I don’t think are, just very clever writing, which says volumes about both the Authors ability and my comprehension, the latter being far poorer than I’d thought.

Many thanks for writing and posting here on Lit, cheers Ppfzz.

Girl meets boy, girl doesn’t lose boy but abandons him, girl goes to the big city and gives herself to other men, including at least one famous musician just to publicly rub it in boy’s face, girl manipulates and fails to get at least one of her many men into impregnating her because he ‘has good genes’, boy lays his heart bare for the world to see, re-enter girl into the picture, suddenly caring *so much* about someone she hasn’t bothered to contact in 10 years because he watered her orchids… and, oh, because although he’s still clueless he’s now rich enough to meet her standards. She’s no prize and he’s still fumbling in the dark when it come to recognizing her true nature. The End

Tale is RAAC more than Romance... Author forgot to mention

A one sided love story of a naive youngman

And a clever, opportunist, celebrity writer

Writing skills won highest ranking 5*

I loved this. One of my all time favorites. The humorous but emotional writing, the easy dialogue, the lightness and the easy reading. What a delight. Wished it could have been longer.

Good story. But wow 10 lost years. She had psychological issues. The combination of the attack, her paranoia, her increased feelings for Doug, her lies about being a technical writer, and her fear of Doug reading her book and changing how he thinks about her, all conspired to make her run and then she ghosted him out of shame, regardless of what she tried to convince herself was some noble act to spare Doug her polarizing life. Yes she broke his heart. That is the point. They weren't married. Not engaged. Not pregnant. Not even exclusive or really formally going out as boyfriend and girlfriend. So if she goes somewhere else to drown her sorrows for her stabbing Doug in the back, that is her call. The point is she was a mental train wreck. She devastated Doug. He tried to find someone else and it never took flight with Claire. He went to therapy and wrote a popular open ended book about the two of them. She is sorry and he reconnected with her. They still find they complete each other. This is a reconciliation but also a romance with poor communication between the two. Indeed most people woukd have been heartbroken but moved on. He couldn't and forgave her for leaving him. It is his choice. Personally I get the therapy and maybe even the book writing, but personally he should have found someone else with all the baggage that she brought with her. The orchids story was quite wonderful.

Well written. But wow. Ghosted for 10 years due to a mental issues, anxiety and PTSD. Sucks to be Doug.

Bored after 2 pages. Didn't care for this.

Loved it 5*.

This story made me reconsider all of the other 5 stars I have given in the past. This is the new benchmark.

Intriguing after the first four or five lit pages, but when I finally started to make connections between the handful of characters and discovered that there were really supposed to be connections and interactions between then, the message finally started to leak out to me, so I finished the entire 7 pages and discovered a very clever novelette.

"time was more precious than long hair that I wore up most of the time anyway, and I cut it short." Like house cleaning. It's just going to get dusty and disorganized again. As long as I kill all the mice and flies, or even just keep them out, it's good enough.

I loved the story. Very romantic. Reminds me of the girl I left behind on my way to Vietnam. Barbara let me share her apartment for several months while we went skiing together on a few weekends and made a few other friends, mostly her friends with whom I became acquainted, while she enjoyed looking at houses with me occasionally, but I was too focused on planning how to enhance my career in uniform by flying to foreign missions, to acknowledge that she would have married me in a heartbeat. If I had asked. She planned to visit with my on my R&R in Hawaii, but I went to Hong Kong instead because I had already been to Hawaii. I sent her a pearl necklace from Hong Kong, but apparently the message is more important than the gift, and the message wasn't included. When I returned to Denver three months later, she greeted me wearing an engagement ring gifted by another with a stronger message.

My most memorable songs now are "Leaving on a Jet Plane", "Left my Heart in San Francisco," and "Got To Get Outta This Place."

Really good story. Emotionally intense.

Lovely story. One of the best on this site!