New Story "Crazy, Dark"

Just wondered if anyone has the time would the check out my story in "Erotic Couplings" it hasn't drawn a lot of interest so far but I actually worked quite hard on it and wondered what people thought.

I also wrote a story called "The Good Girl" that is my lowest rated yet has garnered more actual positive feedback than any other story I've written. Lots of folks have e-mailed me wanting a sequel though I have not ideas for one yet.

Links may help.

https://www.literotica.com/s/crazy-dark

https://www.literotica.com/s/the-good-girl-17

I suggest you seek out an editor, and sort out your punctuation and spelling. I gave both stories a go, but clicked out quickly because of poor construction. The poor punctuation in particular meant the prose had no rhythm or flow, and then dreaded "walls of text" - break it up and use more white space. But when I scanned "DD cup" somewhere in the text, that was it; back-click, gone. Not for me.

I can see your point about the "walls of text" although every book I've ever read has walls of text at certain points, maybe that kind of thing looks worse on a website, I'l try to remember to space things in the future.

I'm not sure what you think is wrong with the spelling, I write all my stories in Microsoft Word and run them through a separate editor to check for spelling errors so if I made any I'm not sure where they would be at this point. I also check the punctuation the same way and let MS Word make the changes, it often punctuates things differently then I would but I go with it since I'm not an English major and I figure it knows better than I where the comma's and semi-colons should go. Sometimes I write in a very colloquial fashion because I think it sounds more like how real people talk even if that means the wording is not always proper to the rules of essay writing. Not sure why you were bothered by "DD cup", so much it would kill the story for you, would you have felt that much better if I had spelled it as 44DD or double "D" don't see why that is a big deal really.

It's is interesting that you didn't like the flow since the only consistent feedback I've gotten on my stories from readers is that they flow well and are easy to read.

For example: 'to' when it should be 'too', little things like that - which to me is like knowing two follows one (a fundamental thing) - its vs it's; there vs their vs they're; your vs you're; commas in dialogue.... Basic stuff, but when basic errors are repeated it just gets in the way.

It comes up here a lot, folk who rely on software for their spelling, grammar and punctuation - it shows. Word spell-check won't catch a correctly spelled word incorrectly applied. Also, grammar checkers are generally more oriented for business writing - fine if you're writing a contract or a show-cause letter, not so good for erotica.

As I say, it shows - if someone "sees" the writing and not what's being written about, then the writing is getting in the way - for me and for many others.

Walls of text - you need to remember that many readers use phones and mobile devices for reading Lit - content for use on-line needs to be broken down into smaller chunks, so there's plenty of white space. It's not the same as a printed page.

The use of cup sizes as a descriptor is also a personal preference - some people love it and it does the job for them; others think oh for godssake why? It polarises, certainly, and my gut feel from the last few years here suggests on the whole it's better not to use it as a writing ploy. For me, it evokes nothing but a very unsexy comparative table on a medical web-site. But as I say, some readers crave the numbers. It wasn't the story killer though, just the "right, that's enough" moment.

That is the problem with living in the electronic age, you get used to letting the software do the work I guess. I've been out of school for more than thirty years and haven't written anything longer than a grocery list until seven months ago. The only other thing I write are e-mails at work and where I work no one is paying attention to punctuation believe me, you would be appalled at what the e-mail traffic at my office reads like.

Anyway I do try to proof read my stuff but after re-reading the same thing for the tenth time it starts to get old and no matter how careful I miss things, I'm actually embarrassed about the "complement" thing, I know the right word I just didn't catch that MS Word had changed it.

I also tend to just let MS Word handle the punctuation and assume its right but looking at some of your examples I can see where it reads worse than my original version. I am going to go back and edit it again after the holidays and try a little harder next time.

Thanks for your honest feedback.

darkoverlord6 said:

The only other thing I write are e-mails at work and where I work no one is paying attention to punctuation believe me, you would be appalled at what the e-mail traffic at my office reads like.

Click to expand...

Lol - I've worked with graduate engineers, I know exactly what you mean.