I just published my first story and would love some advice.

I'd love some feedback, and to know if I'm going in the right direction. Any help would be greatly appretiated.

https://www.literotica.com/s/the-lord-of-keeley-hall

It's fairly short, and it's in the first time catergory.


F

I can feel your excitement, writing this little fantasy, your little period piece. It's light and fluffy, and there's nothing wrong with that, it'll get the boys in .

You do need to take more care with the simple things: punctuation, the dreaded apostrophe ' and when to use it properly, some spelling mistakes; all of which can be easily fixed if you slow down.

Your speech tags aren't quite right:

"Good morning, Mr Laithwaite." He said.

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should be "Good morning, Mr Laithwaite," he said.

Your style is quite staccato - short sentences, some of them not quite grammatically complete, but for me that actually didn't matter - it reflected your breathlessness, your eagerness to tell the story. Like Emily, you're excited about this little tale, and that's good. Excitement is good.

Next time, tidy up your technical writerly bits and pieces, teach yourself to edit yourself better (or find an editor). But don't loose that excitement, whatever you do, it jumps off the page. You don't need to polish your text till it's perfect, just so it's acceptable. You'll get better as you write more.

Now, I need to go put my feet up beside the fire and catch my breath. That buxom little wench, Emily, has quite exhausted me .

Thanks for the feedback, it was rushed. I'll admit that.

As for the technical stuff, you're right I do need to learn the technical side of things a bit better. I was never sure about the dialogue grammer, it was something I should have looked up.

F

Flixity said:

Thanks for the feedback, it was rushed. I'll admit that.

As for the technical stuff, you're right I do need to learn the technical side of things a bit better. I was never sure about the dialogue grammer, it was something I should have looked up.

F

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I have published 30 submissions, I still trip on that stuff.

I agree with eb66. Your style worked well for the material. But take one more close look over everything before you click submit next time.

Good start!

It was a cool story.

Flixity said:

Thanks for the feedback, it was rushed. I'll admit that.

As for the technical stuff, you're right I do need to learn the technical side of things a bit better. I was never sure about the dialogue grammer, it was something I should have looked up.

F

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If you have the patience, you can print out a hard copy and read through that after running the file through a checker. (I use the one built into Word).

Then when it's in Literotica preview mode, you can read through that and mark the printed copy with anything you find in that pass (ideally in a different color to keep track of things). I once had to print out a fresh copy because I had such a mess of edits on the first one.

Anyway, I usually read it twice in preview. And yet I still miss things.

I'd like to give a quick real time comment (I'm reading this story as it goes).

First, you did one thing quite well. You started with a nice action scene, ended it with a little unexpected twist, and then went into the info-dump, back story. A lot of first time authors don't get that part right. Long winded info dumps can be a lot to take in, but since you've drawn the readers in with a scene that is both suspenseful, unexpected, and erotic, I'm engaged enough to get through the necessary info dumps.

Here's something I'm wondering about:

"No, what curse?"

She told him what she knew, which admittedly wasn't much. He was polite and listened. Curses and folklore was not something he gave much mind too, but he listened as she talked.

"You must tell me more about it sometime." He said, as they made their way into the entrance hall. The artwork in question was a fine bronze statue of a horse.

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I'm curious why you chose to summarize talk of the curse here. I get the sense it is something that you'd like to hide from the reader. That makes sense to me. However, I'm not getting the needed emotions, or even a good teaser of what "the curse" is right now.

Now, this is a real time comment, so I might change my mind after reading it. So far so good.

Appreciate all the help everyone.

As for the curse it was something that didn't really go anywhere. I wanted her to have a fanciful idea that others would dismiss. It really didn't work as I wanted.

Thanks again for the feedback though.

I did notice that the curse thing didn't pay off. That's okay.

I think you're story still did a good job, especially since you did things out of chronological order and it still worked.

Please keep on writing!

Excellent voice! Great energy, really.

If you are fishing for critique, I can only offer some small nits that caught my eye when I read it:

- "He had found a log cutters path and had made his way inside." you could drop the past perfect and just do "He found a log cutters path..." reserving the past perfect for a phrase further back in the past like, "He had mounted his horse early that morning."

- The "she couldn't be happier" line caught me off guard as jarring against the set up of her in dire panic running from this man. Now, if it's your intent to give the reader a bit of shock here, a plot twist, you might consider separating that revelation out to a separate sentence or even paragraph, and do it more slowly, like how her smile spread slowly and then she made this switch from being desperate to accepting her fate.

- the backstory section was a little thick for me to parse (as a lazy reader). I like backstory in general, but maybe there's a way to keep it moving like the rest of your story, which reads freely.

- I really love the dialogue about being broken. Very well done, I think it's the strongest part of the story. You capture her shyness and his attempt at approaching, and even dominating. I think you can continue that even longer. I hunger for more dialogue between them as they couple together, in addition to the physical. I'm sure you have great ideas about what he would be telling her as he undresses her or whatever, with the domination attitude, and describing her reaction to those words would be hot.