I can't get away from it...

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

Maybe they aren't taking time to understand someone who isn't like themselves. Maybe my writing style is confusing when you don't pay attention.

I'm going to boldly claim that the majority of readers don't visit a site like Literotica to find social criticism or debates about sexual norms. Nor are they here to have their horizon broadened. It can happen, sure, but I don't think it goes beyond discovering new kinks.

 

[madelinemasoch]

Okay, I've quickly skimmed Dark Love.

First of all, I've to ask, why don't you just camp out at Interracial? There seems to be a strong White Woman - Black Man theme running through practically everything you write and, while scores aren't necessarily sky high in IR, you don't attract the same levels of vitriol and may have people reading who are in on your basic starting premise.

This is because I feel that nothing I've written corresponds directly with interracial as its central theme. It's only one aspect of my work, and it's not the main one in anything I've done so far. The stories I've written are usually more about femdom than interracial.

I know you don't want to spoil the story, but, just for the purposes of discussion, what are the major themes and plot outline of your story. If I had to get the crib notes version for my Literotica exams, what would it say?

I don't know how to give you enough to go off of without telling you what happens in the story.

 

[madelinemasoch]

I'm going to boldly claim that the majority of readers don't visit a site like Literotica to find social criticism or debates about sexual norms. Nor are they here to have their horizon broadened. It can happen, sure, but I don't think it goes beyond discovering new kinks.

It's not social criticism directly. It's like theory-fiction but the theory is about sex and eroticism.

 

[gunhilltrain]

1. I don't want to post in EC because it gets low views and it's a character piece, not a couple piece. It feels wrong.
2. If we want the misogynist BTB brigade everyone loves complaining about to leave LW, we have to start writing different stories. Whackdoodle didn't even comment on my Dark Love piece. That's a W in my book.
3. LW is loving wives–the story is literally about a wife. One with extramarital activities, no less. (whisper) that's what the category description says...
4. All the sad pieces I've read here have been in LW, not Erotic Couplings.

Well, you can't complain about the low character of LW readers and then say that your story belongs there. If you chose to, you can just not write such stories, but it seems unfortunate to be bullied by such people. Personally, I don't see why an EC story can't be a character piece or be sad, but maybe that's just me. And yes, you will get more attention and views in LW than almost any other category, but you will have to pay the price of some (not all) negative comments. It's a take it or leave it situation that is not under your control.

It's like saying, "The New York subway is too noisy, and I can't afford Uber or taxis. They should just get quieter trains." But it's been noisy since 1904 and everybody accepts that it will never get any better.

P.S.: Had I known better, I would have gotten ear plugs in 1969 and preserved some of my hearing.

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

I'm afraid people will take something from passage one to try to fabricate the claim that passage two doesn't make sense.

Sure, let me go ahead and do that right now.

The biggest problem I have with your persistent claims that the feminized men and cucks in your stories enjoy what is done to them? Their penises are almost always described as "shriveled". If they enjoy what is done, and they get excited from it... how are their dicks shriveled? Are ALL your male characters on hormone therapy? Have they ALL been castrated? Are they ALL on blood pressure or diabetes medication that gave them EDs?

In short, claiming that the moan in part one is one of lust or pleasure doesn't work, because you're too focused on portraying them as pathetic in every way imaginable. But, hey, part two reads as if your MMC tried to delete himself, which would be perfectly in line with my earlier assumption. So, it's absolutely consistent!

 

[madelinemasoch]

Sure, let me go ahead and do that right now.

The biggest problem I have with your persistent claims that the feminized men and cucks in your stories enjoy what is done to them? Their penises are almost always described as "shriveled". If they enjoy what is done, and they get excited from it... how are their dicks shriveled? Are ALL your male characters on hormone therapy? Have they ALL been castrated? Are they ALL on blood pressure or diabetes medication that gave them EDs?

In short, claiming that the moan in part one is one of lust or pleasure doesn't work, because you're too focused on portraying them as pathetic in every way imaginable. But, hey, part two reads as if your MMC tried to delete himself, which would be perfectly in line with my earlier assumption. So, it's absolutely consistent!

Okay... Unsolicited asshole comment, but I digress. I considered leaving this one in the trash where it belongs, but here we go.

I don't know about you, whether or not you have a penis, but being aroused does not necessarily mean that you have a hard dick. Most of the time (unless you're a pubescent boy) you actually have to touch it to get it erect. An erection is an indicator of arousal but is by no means necessary for arousal to occur, even without any forms of castration or what have you.

Not only that, but it literally says she can tell she's aroused in the passage I sent. These characters at the point of this story are married. I'm pretty sure they don't need any assistance when it comes to being able to tell whether the other is aroused.

As for the last thing, the fact that they're portrayed as pathetic is the hot part(!) and her wife is literally touching her dick. Of course the moan is one of pleasure.

Your very last sentence tells me you were fooled by the story, without it even being complete, which means the sadness in Part II will make a lot of sense to you.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Does it make sense? Is it consistent? I'm afraid people will take something from passage one to try to fabricate the claim that passage two doesn't make sense.

Setting aside the subject matter, following the "she's" and "her's" (who was doing what to who, in other words) got tricky, even in those two short excerpts. It's not easy to navigate same gender couplings, but if the whole story needs every sentence read twice just to be sure, I'd be gone fairly early.

 

[TheRedChamber]

The fundamental problem, I think, is that you've just got so much going on in your stories...

1) Cross-dressing
2) Husbands and Wives
3) Power-play
4) Interracial elements (in other stories if not this one).

You could place the stories in a number of different categories, but those who like (1) might not like (3) and so on. Fetish might be your best bet as the most 'out there' of the categories.

One thing to think of is that every fetish you add to your stories narrows the potential audience down - for example, if you start with cuckolding, add obese women, add smoking, add Victorian era clothing, add watersports, add rubbing red hot chilli's into the subs eyes... you eventually end up with a potential audience of just yourself.

You may want to explore just one or two of the fantasies in one story.

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

Not only that, but it literally says she can tell she's aroused in the passage I sent.

Please tell me where it "literally" says that. I read it twice now... still can't find it. The only thing coming even close to this is the part where the wife (the dominant one) reaches for the other one's dress and can tell that "it's okay" to do so.

I think we should just agree to disagree here. I still have no idea what it is you're trying to teach the world, but I'm kinda getting the feeling that's your goal.

 

[burgwad]

@madelinemasoch Madeline. Maddy. Hey. Please listen. Go back to that first reply by Erozetta. Forget alllll the rest that came after it. That message really is all, and only all, you need.

Granted, you also want valid, meaty, good-feeling feedback. You want a response that isn't just another Well What Most Readers Want cudgel to your innermost sensibilities. You want unabashed intellectualism to prevail in a place called "Author's Hangout." Unfortunately, this is Literotica. This place will let you down.

Maybe you also want advice? Easy! Sniff out and connect with the few forum-dwellers who don't utterly sap you. Abandon these forums altogether. You will grow so much more easily engaging with people you know you already like, and who ideally also think highly of you.

That said, maybe you're in a place artistically where the pain of being here is a kind of personal penance. If that's case, I will not yuk your yum. God knows why I'm here, after all. Peace to you, and good luck.

 

[Gamblnluck]

This is because I feel that nothing I've written corresponds directly with interracial as its central theme. It's only one aspect of my work, and it's not the main one in anything I've done so far. The stories I've written are usually more about femdom than interracial.

When your subservient male characters are all "small-dicked whiteboys" who are 'not men, but worthless creatures' and the 'studs' are all large black men, that is directly interracial. Just because the femdoms are all or mostly subservient and doting on those on those studly black men does not make it femdom.

 

[StillStunned]

I don't know about you, whether or not you have a penis, but being aroused does not necessarily mean that you have a hard dick. Most of the time (unless you're a pubescent boy) you actually have to touch it to get it erect.

As a middle-aged man, and hardly the most virile, I have to disagree with this. Absolutely no touching necessary.

 

[XerXesXu]

I don't know about you, whether or not you have a penis, but being aroused does not necessarily mean that you have a hard dick. Most of the time (unless you're a pubescent boy) you actually have to touch it to get it erect. An erection is an indicator of arousal but is by no means necessary for arousal to occur, even without any forms of castration or what have you.

I have a penis, and there are lots of emotional states I can be experience without being tumescent. I can be in love, be infatuated, have a burning desire for a particular woman, but I can't think of a situation where I would describe myself as aroused unless it was accompanied by the conventional physiological and physical indices of 'arousal', which include tumescence.

I've never experienced either a desire to surrender nor a feeling of sadness, as you describe them, so I have zero insight into that experience. I don't know that I ever could, but it seems to me that you give too little description of how those feelings might arise for someone like me to have a chance of empathising with that experience.

 

[djrip]

As a middle-aged man, and hardly the most virile, I have to disagree with this. Absolutely no touching necessary.

This was the part of the thread that made me stop and go, "no, wrong, I've got to correct that," too.

 

[FeralSmile]

Setting aside the subject matter, following the "she's" and "her's" (who was doing what to who, in other words) got tricky, even in those two short excerpts. It's not easy to navigate same gender couplings, but if the whole story needs every sentence read twice just to be sure, I'd be gone fairly early.

Seconded. Those passages were clear to me only with effort. Many, perhaps most readers would decide not to bother trying to untangle who was feeling tension and who could see something in the other's eyes. Yes, you often clarified subject vs object later in the sentence, but the work would flow much better if it were more clear the whole time who's doing what.

As a middle-aged man, and hardly the most virile, I have to disagree with this. Absolutely no touching necessary.

Absolutely seconded. Erections (edited to add: mostly) arise from mental stimuli, not physical stimuli. Men (not just boys) can and do become erect without physical contact. Men can and do have orgasms without being touched, for that matter (nocturnal emissions are all in one's head, after all).

Also, for the vast majority of men, sexual arousal involves some level of tumescence. We can be aroused in many non-sexual ways, to be sure (e.g. fear, disgust), but if your goal is to write about male sexual arousal, there should generally be some blood flowing to the penis, even it it's not achieving a full erection. It might be arousing to you to think of a tiny shriveled penis, and I'm not judging that at all. But the character with the tiny shriveled penis doesn't read to me as being sexually aroused.

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

I honestly have to say that I've been unable to get the implications of OP's statement out of my mind since I read it yesterday. I mean... This might be totally over the top, but it's how my brain is trained to work.

When I speak with a rapist, I do get to hear that old cliché line about "Well, she was wet, so she obviously liked it!". But, at the same time, I get to hear "Well, he was hard, so he must have liked it". But that's just not how the male body works.
We can have psychogenic or reflexogenic erections. Psychogenic is what we know as the result of being aroused. Unless you're on medication or have cardiovascular / blood pressure problems, this is true for all men. Reflexogenic erections are simply the result of the nerve endings sending stress-induced signals. It's a process that's completely detached from the brain or mind.

So, here I am, reading a story by an author who likes to write about torturing and raping men, consistently claiming they all enjoy and get aroused by it while admitting that they can not get psychogenic erections, and therefore admitting that they are NOT getting aroused by it.

Shit like that makes me think.

 

[AmberSolis]

I've been working on a long LW piece. As I write, I cannot get the nagging thought out of my mind that "they will not understand this one, either." I know my storytelling style, I can read my own work and have it make sense in more ways than one, I can connect the threads and it's a coherent narrative to me... but when I publish here it feels like those same things I'm literally writing out are rendered invisible. Either no one cares to pay attention or they just can't fathom it. I have a problem.

Does anyone here experience anything similar? Does anyone have any relevant advice?

Oldest pitfall in the book: the writer "knows" all the backstory, the reader does not. When editing, try and forget everything you, as the writer, "know" about this. Then figure out how to explain it to someone you just met, who knows nothing about you. Even that is not fool-proof, but you'll catch 95% of the errors ("error" = something you wrote, and understand, but that a reader would read, and not understand. That's our definition of error, here. (See what I just did?))

Sometimes, when writing a particularly tough bit, I'll even grab a pen and paper and manually write out:

what do I need to say here? Answer that.

What are my characters going to do about this? Answer that.

How does this situation resolve itself? Solve tension? Create more tension? Answer that.

And you'll find you've pretty well got your paragraph mapped out.

 

[AmberSolis]

I honestly have to say that I've been unable to get the implications of OP's statement out of my mind since I read it yesterday. I mean... This might be totally over the top, but it's how my brain is trained to work.

When I speak with a rapist, I do get to hear that old cliché line about "Well, she was wet, so she obviously liked it!". But, at the same time, I get to hear "Well, he was hard, so he must have liked it". But that's just not how the male body works.
We can have psychogenic or reflexogenic erections. Psychogenic is what we know as the result of being aroused. Unless you're on medication or have cardiovascular / blood pressure problems, this is true for all men. Reflexogenic erections are simply the result of the nerve endings sending stress-induced signals. It's a process that's completely detached from the brain or mind.

So, here I am, reading a story by an author who likes to write about torturing and raping men, consistently claiming they all enjoy and get aroused by it while admitting that they can not get psychogenic erections, and therefore admitting that they are NOT getting aroused by it.

Shit like that makes me think.

Clearly, a rapist would fall into the category of "unreliable narrator."

 

[EmilyMiller]

Let me rephrase: I've never seen a guy on the internet admit to a woman on the internet that he was wrong and she was right. If that's your goal, odds are not in your favor going in and you should approach with that knowledge and accept that your goal, no matter how well laid out, is unlikely to happen. If it happens even once from someone reading your story, you will have achieved your goal and that's something to be proud of regardless of any other reception.

It’s rare, I agree. But I have experienced just that.

Em