AwkwardMD and Omenainen Review Thread

[gunhilltrain]

Okay, I'll bite.

I think some of my earlier stories haven't held up that well. I decided to recently revise these two in regards to some background details. When I reread them, they seemed to have been better than expected even before the revisions.

Although they are written in the third person, they are from the point-of-view of a young woman - probably the only times I've tried that. The events are only a few weeks apart. If it seems to be a bit disjointed, it's because they were supposed to be part of a larger work I never did. Eventually, I will write a series about Judy and Michelle that takes them to the end of 1975.

https://www.literotica.com/s/a-hot-day-in-december

https://www.literotica.com/s/west-side-gun-moll

If anybody else wants to chime in on this, feel free.

 

[ElectricBlue]

If anybody else wants to chime in on this, feel free.

If you want others to comment on your stories, gunhill, it's better start your own thread. This one is for MD's reviews and discussion arising from those reviews - so your request here should be for a visit from the doctor, but not the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker .

 

[gunhilltrain]

If you want others to comment on your stories, gunhill, it's better start your own thread. This one is for MD's reviews and discussion arising from those reviews - so your request here should be for a visit from the doctor, but not the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker .

Okay, I will. AwkwardMD has a lot to handle anyway. Amazing that she volunteered for this.

 

[avery617]

That's quite a bit of effort for a gotcha. Hope it was worth it.

It is if at least some people more carefully examine what you say.

 

[AwkwardMD]

It is if at least some people more carefully examine what you say.

Are you lost? That is literally the point of this thread.

 

[AwkwardMD]

TeroWright combined feedback

Part 1
Part 2
Closing Time

I’m gonna review all three together here, since they are so similar.

The Cindy and Christie chapters are solid. There’s introductions and progression. I felt like I understood these characters, and their hesitations, and the nervous energy of exploring something new/exploring something with someone new.

I had difficulty understanding how they were sitting in a movie theater with feet in the places being described. That defied my understanding of who was where, like an impossible game of Twister. Eventually I had to give up trying to imagine how the bodies were oriented and just focus on which feet were where, as that seemed to be the only important part. That was kind of a give-up moment for me. From that moment on the only thing that mattered was the kink, and it’s not one I share.

I had less trouble following what was going on in the second chapter. It was short and almost entirely kink, so there wasn’t a lot to get into. He went to their apartment. They stepped on him. Everyone liked it.

Fine. No judgement. There wasn’t much to it, but it wasn’t long so that checks out. You’ve got comments from other foot fetish writers, and they seem pretty pleased with your content. You’ve got 13 out of 27 stories at a 4.5 rating or higher (although some of them have too few votes to qualify for an H), and that’s pretty solid.

In the Fetish category, where so many different fetishes are lumped together, the readership is hard to please. The ones you’re getting through to, however, seem to like what you’re doing, and I’m not in a position to comment on how you might improve that.

That being said, I didn’t like Closing Time. Closing Time was 100% kink from front to back. There was nothing in this that holds up outside of foot fetish writing. To an outsider, this is a less capable story with little redeeming value. The flirting feels forced. The jokes don’t land. Characters are laughing at things I’m unphased by. It’s referencing past events from other stories that, looking at your catalog, are impossible to sort out a chronological order for.

It almost feels like you’ve lost sight of trying to write a story, per se, and are just grasping for any slice of life event or location that where you haven’t already had someone stand on someone else. Did I do it in a grocery store yet? Nope? There’s a new chapter. I have a Fourth of July chapter, but what about Labor day? No? There’s a chapter. I had someone break into Christie’s apartment, so maybe I could now have Christie break into someone else’s apartment!

The further you fall into this kind of hyper-focused fetish writing, the smaller your audience gets. That’s not inherently a bad thing. If you have 300 dedicated readers who fucking love you, and you’re content to crank out work that pleases them, that’s awesome.

Outside of that fandom, though, I think that most readers are mostly going to have questions about a story where the height of sexual stimulation comes from a woman standing on a man’s throat until he passes out, and this story is not here to answer questions. It’s not here to explain.

The choice of what you want to make is really up to you. If you want more interaction from your readers, ask for it. Ask for comments, votes, or private feedback. Get them to tell you what they want. I want more story, but that’s just me.

 

[AwkwardMD]

The Hive Ch. 1, by NoJo

Link

Really good. Well written. Intrigue and mystery. I like it. Also, more than a little bit anti-semitic? What’s going on there?

I’ve spent a long time here, after reading The Hive Ch 1, scratching my head. I don’t know how I feel about Rich. I don’t know how I feel about Lee. As characters in a story, they’re powerful on the page and consistent. The whole thing reminds me very much of the fourth season of the American TV show Angel.

I’m not a fan of hyperbole, so making Rich so sex obsessed falls flat where as something more reasonable would still be equally destructive to his personal life. Likewise, I didn’t like Lee being magic. A good hypnotherapist, or a good psychologist, is a perfect predator if their motives are unwholesome, and that’s way more interesting to me than “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”

When I was a little girl, I had bad asthma (that I have since, mostly, outgrown). I was regularly hospitalized for asthma attacks. To me, breathing clear felt like a completely sacred thing. Necessary, but also beautiful and incredibly, impossibly, fragile. At many points in my life, I might have died because my lungs would get so inflamed that breathing was impossible.

And then I would see people smoking, and I wanted to do violence upon them. Taking their breath for granted. Killing themselves, albeit slowly, because it looked cool, while I was practically drowning in air

They were taking something for granted because they had never had to consider the possibility that it might be taken away. It came easy, and therefore it meant nothing. Wifi access, air conditioning — heck, chairs — these are things we come to expect to have at a meal, not as comforts that improve the experience but as baseline standard. Each of those is a crazy little miracle of inventiveness.

When a character can do something extraordinary because they are magic, that undermines the consequences of it. It undermines the effort involved. The thing is worth nothing because it cost nothing. Lee got a doctorate in hypnotherapy and psychology, which is fucking amazing, but she was magic long before and that’s where her real power resides afterwards anyway. Who cares that she has academic rigor? She can bat her eyelashes, and everyone falls in line. No one is going to say no to that (unless they are magically immune), which makes the tension of mind control pretty bland and/or predictable.

If you get past these two and their needlessly over-the-top motivations, then the rest of it is really damn good. The initial conversation between Rich and Lee, and the follow up one when he fakes accidentally running into her on the street, are strong examples of powerful, persuasive dialog. You could have just written Lee convincing Rich with just her words. She didn’t need to be magic. You’re a good enough writer to have pulled this off.

I wrote a story that plays with themes very close to this. The antagonist, an older woman, has decided that she knows what’s best and enforces her will on a few subjects in a controlled environment. Instead of bees it takes the form of pony play. Instead of magical pheromones, the antagonist preys on needs and trauma, using drugs, bondage, a comprehensive and subtle camera layout, and insightful rewards to inculcate loyalty in her kidnapped victims. She does it with just her brains, and I would rather read about someone who was clever over someone who was magic ten times out of ten.

I liked the structure of The Hive, and the authorial skill involved to craft it, but I’m immune to the pheromones. It didn’t hook me.

P.S. What’s with the anti-semitism here? Why can't the story go more than half a page without someone pointing out how Jewish Rich is? By my count, he was fetishized, dismissed, prejudiced against, and objectified, and in every instance he seemed to respond as if that was something he deserved, or was asking for.

 

[TeroWright]

In my defense, these stories were written with a 'foot forum' in mind, more or less. It doesn't surprise me at all that they didn't land with you personally. In all fairness, I wasn't expecting them to.

In other stories, it is mentioned that women like my characters are rare, and even they (my characters) are aware that what they like and what they do aren't appreciated by many. It's why the group gets along so well. There's more of a story there than what you have picked up on.

As far as chronological order goes, if you sort the stories by Date, everything from Christie and Cindy's Intro to Cindy's Recourse is in order - over the course of ten years. The Shoe Salesman and Closing Time start to fill in the gaps after Kacie's Service Tech and refer to those first few stories accordingly.

Thank you for your time. This was a much different response than I was expecting, but appreciated nonetheless.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

The End Of The Affair
Interstate Love Song

These were both very strong examples of compact storytelling. There’s a lot going on in both of these, and I love efficient storytelling like this. You are layering in details for what’s coming alongside what came before while what’s happening now unfolds, and that is amazing. The ability to make your scenes dense and meaningful is a super useful tool.

It’s not a silver bullet to apply to every scene, as some scenes (particularly sex scenes) are often at their most powerful when they’re about only that moment.

Learn when and where to use scenes like these to fill in huge story gaps without resorting to exposition. These tiny stories told me so much more about the lives of these 6 characters than a similar amount of exposition would have done, and you did it organically. It just felt like I was catching them at the right moment to catch the right details and put 2 and 2 together all on my own.

That takes a little bit of forethought and a lot of talent. This skill will serve you well now that you’ve mastered it.

Hi - thank you. I'm not sure how I missed this response when you posted it.

The thing I liked about the super short stories is the challenge of conveying enough to give a whole picture, and a sense of the characters while leaving out every thing that is extraneous.

 

[AwkwardMD]

I'd like to take my place in line with my rewrite of "Jennifer" which has gone live within the past several hours. It's now about 15k words and includes a few more "meaningful interactions" as well as a second explicit sex scene.
You've already seen a sample of this and responded favorably, so I'm fairly confident this will be well received. Perhaps the "music appreciation" scene is a bit self-indulgent, but self-indulgence was the motivation for writing this in the first place so I'm not going to worry about it.
As always, your brutal candor is appreciated.

https://literotica.com/beta/s/jennifer-25

I finally got to meet Jennifer, and it was good. Heck, I want to date her now.

I don't have a whole lot to add here because it seems like you took a lot of what I said to heart, and the end result is something I think really stands on its own. Also, I think that in Jennifer being so much more of a presence, your protagonist also comes off a lot stronger and has more of an identity. The scenes with them smoking and listening to music were a really cool addition.

Really solid. Excellent banter.

I think the next step for you is to take your work out of the vacuum. Jennifer is two people interacting only with each other as if the rest of the world doesn't exist. Put your next set of characters in a slightly bigger world, with friends and coworkers and bosses. Obligations other than to each other or their own desires. Something a little bigger and broader in scope.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Hi - thank you. I'm not sure how I missed this response when you posted it.

The thing I liked about the super short stories is the challenge of conveying enough to give a whole picture, and a sense of the characters while leaving out every thing that is extraneous.

You're welcome! Thank you for sharing! Those two stories were a delight!

EDIT: They absolutely were a challenge, but you rose to it admirably. Keep challenging yourself! Good things come out of that!

 

[AwkwardMD]

Gunhilltrain combined feedback

A Hot Day in December
West Side Gun Moll

I am going to theorize that you love New York in the 70’s more than you love any of your characters. If this were non-erotic writing, that would be fine because the writing does a good job of transporting us and making us feel like we’re there, but in erotic writing it means that your protagonists and love interests are secondary characters.

There is an abundance of telling, about back story and location and thought processes, and not a lot of showing. I know that, in both instances, these are stories that take place in the characters heads, but there are ways around that.

Even though they’re secondary characters, I really like both Judy and Michelle. I liked Judy’s bisexual confusion and her shifting fantasies. I like Michelle’s confidence. They’re both very well rounded characters. I like the way they interact, but I didn’t get nearly enough of it. The story was too busy telling me things to let the characters simply be around each other, doing things and sharing their experiences.

Unfortunately, the story of these two takes place in (at least) three stories I wouldn’t normally find. They don’t look related in the format that Literotica stories normally do. I would love to see where this goes, and I think you’d get a better reader reaction if the story were self contained.

You have a talent for writing the period, and I feel like with a little bit of tweaking to the formula of your stories, you could be executing some really interesting characters with interesting stories. You clearly have some scope for these, knowing where it’s going and where it starts, but the needless story breakups (3 stories instead of 1) add an additional difficulty for readers trying to get the full experience and the excessive descriptiveness is watering down interesting character arcs.

The end result is that the interesting bits are very far apart, and it takes a lot of patience to string them together.

 

[AwkwardMD]

I powered through a few feedbacks today because I am, of late, inundated with inspiration. For the next little while, anyone that asks for feedback is probably going to have to wait a little bit. I don't know how long of a wait that's going to be, but I promise I'll get to anyone who asks eventually.

I've got a fever, and the only prescription is Gideon.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I've got a fever, and the only prescription is Gideon.

*evil cackle*

 

[AwkwardMD]

In my defense, these stories were written with a 'foot forum' in mind, more or less. It doesn't surprise me at all that they didn't land with you personally. In all fairness, I wasn't expecting them to.

In other stories, it is mentioned that women like my characters are rare, and even they (my characters) are aware that what they like and what they do aren't appreciated by many. It's why the group gets along so well. There's more of a story there than what you have picked up on.

As far as chronological order goes, if you sort the stories by Date, everything from Christie and Cindy's Intro to Cindy's Recourse is in order - over the course of ten years. The Shoe Salesman and Closing Time start to fill in the gaps after Kacie's Service Tech and refer to those first few stories accordingly.

Thank you for your time. This was a much different response than I was expecting, but appreciated nonetheless.

What I should have said is that "Closing Time felt like I was in a room with 4 people who were talking about an inside joke amonst themselves. I didn't get it, and they weren’t going out of their way to help me understand."

Your readers, no doubt, get the joke. It seemed like competent niche writing, but its not my niche and I'm not a good judge of that.

I will say, though, that breath play with feet seems extremely dangerous. Even people who are very dexterous with their feet are only capable of a fraction of the fine motor control we have with our hands, and breath play goes wrong with hands still goes wrong sometimes. From the outside that seems like a stunt destined to kill someone, and it's only because Brian is wearing plot armor that he gets away with it.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Thank you for your comments. As I mentioned in the other post, I started in 2018 with a half-completed novella - probably it was beyond me to finish it then - and I wound up scattering pieces of it on Literotica almost randomly. They weren't even published in chronological order. Thus these two stories were written a year apart although they cover events only separated by a few weeks. The results are thus rather disjointed.

I may try to do a series about Judy and Michelle written in chronological order that doesn't duplicate what is already published. I've found out from another series, the first one true one I've attempted, that writing a longer story is pretty challenging.

Actually, New York in the 1970s was not that lovable. The high crime rate, coallapse of public services, racial tensions, and other issues made it a stressful place to live. My ex-wife and I did move to the New Jersey suburbs in the 1980s but we had once planned to go further afield than that, like maybe Wisconsin or California.

Probably what really intrigues me about it was my own youth, when anything seemed possible.

 

[WoodmanStark]

I don't have a whole lot to add here because it seems like you took a lot of what I said to heart, and the end result is something I think really stands on its own. Also, I think that in Jennifer being so much more of a presence, your protagonist also comes off a lot stronger and has more of an identity. The scenes with them smoking and listening to music were a really cool addition.

My personal favorite scene, probably where I went full Pygmalion for Jennifer, is the one where she takes him out for picnic and stargazing for the first time.
I thought the music appreciation scene was pretty masturbatory... I'm basically just nerding about Wendy Carlos, classical music, and avant garde prog rock. I'm gratified that you found it worthy of inclusion.

Really solid. Excellent banter.

That seems to me my strong suit; I'm weak in plotting. There's really no conflict or drama in "Jennifer," the closest is when she has a near freak out while high and he talks her back down.
I think my ideal situation would be to collab with someone who's a weak writer but a strong plotter, and they could outline a story for me to flesh out.

I think the next step for you is to take your work out of the vacuum. Jennifer is two people interacting only with each other as if the rest of the world doesn't exist. Put your next set of characters in a slightly bigger world, with friends and coworkers and bosses. Obligations other than to each other or their own desires. Something a little bigger and broader in scope.

I like these characters now that I've given them life, and I'd like to have them in a real story. I've a notion to put them in an alternate, materialist world that doesn't have magical sex goddesses and the like, which would leave me with the challenge of finding another catalyst to push them off the fence and recognize their true feelings for each other. Such a story would also expand their world, showing his friends Paul and Mark as well as her as-yet-unnamed girlfriends, maybe their work as well.
But again, plot situations don't come easy to me. The muse doesn't stroke my fancy very often; these stories are the first fiction I've written in over two decades. I guess time will tell where I go with this.
Thanks again for indulging me. If you would do me one more: what did you think of the resolution of the Jennifer arc in the Sex Goddess epilogue?

 

[AwkwardMD]

Nothing has changed. Still backed up beyond reason with my own projects, but wanted to share this interesting video on writing dialog.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ncK6QKpn-k

I disagree with the underlying premise here that it doesn't matter if characters don't talk like people talk, but the rest of it was interesting to ponder. Turns out I have a Naturalist style, myself. Go me!

 

[NotWise]

Nothing has changed. Still backed up beyond reason with my own projects, but wanted to share this interesting video on writing dialog.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ncK6QKpn-k

I disagree with the underlying premise here that it doesn't matter if characters don't talk like people talk, but the rest of it was interesting to ponder. Turns out I have a Naturalist style, myself. Go me!

For starters, the video is about movie dialogue, not about dialogue in text. Movies have directors telling actors how to deliver lines, and actors doing it convincingly. None of that applies to what I do. And then there's the fact that the actor and directors aren't working from a static text. The dialogue is written and rewritten to fit the directors and the actors.

My readers don't get an actor or a director delivering my dialogue. They only get my lines. The way they read my lines depends on how they perceive my characters, and on nuances of how the dialogue is written -- how are tags arranged, how are actions mixed with dialogue. Different readers will perceive them differently.

I don't think my characters should talk like people talk. In real life, people speak in sentence fragments, they speak in incomplete thoughts, they may communicate with body language as much as they do with words. That's easy for actors -- it's what they do -- but I have to depend on the readers' perception.

When readers read my written dialogue, they need to progress through it without directors or actors, and without having to stop, trip over broken lines, or reread things to understand them. They don't have actors delivering the product.

I like the dialogue to be informal, and the voices to be unique to the characters. It should feel natural to the reader even if it doesn't resemble actual speech.

 

[AwkwardMD]

I don't know if I've ever shared this here, so apologies if I'm repeating myself.

I am not well read in the traditional sense. The stories I give feedback on represent the largest body of literary writing I've consumed. A lot of my writer friends bring up other books in conversation (Oh, have you ever read…) and I have often not heard of those books and almost invariably haven't read them. The only two book series I've ever read and really processed as literary works are The Wheel of Time and The Locked Tomb.

I had bad asthma growing up. I spent 90 minutes every day hooked up to a nebulizer trying to train my lungs to stand up to everyday allergens. I read too much to keep up with library rentals, so I started reading Time. Newsweek. National Geographic. Local paper and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Then, when I got to college, I was a history major. I wrote 10 page papers (if not longer) weekly for each class (so, sometimes, a few a week). I tend to write persuasively and densely, and as a result, my prose is abominable. By far, my weakest area.

I take all of my cues for how to write dialog from TV and film. There is tons of applicability. There are certainly some differences between the visual and literary mediums, but the overlapping areas are vast.

As a writer, you are the screenwriter, actor, AND director. And producer. And lighting tech. And boom grip. And foley designer. And best boy. All of those roles are in your hand, and your effectiveness grows the more you realize your own potential; the more you realize not just that you can affect your reader, but on how many levels you can affect your reader.

You can control the readers interpretations (to a point). You can lead them to a conclusion, and to pretend like you can't is giving up.

 

[yowser]

As a writer, you are the screenwriter, actor, AND director. And producer. And lighting tech. And boom grip. And foley designer. And best boy. All of those roles are in your hand, and your effectiveness grows the more you realize your own potential; the more you realize not just that you can affect your reader, but on how many levels you can affect your reader.

As a writer you are God.

For a page at least, maybe ten or twenty. The responsibility is awesome, and addictively satisfying when your world, your characters, your explorations and revealing are done well and reach a responsive readership.

Like everything else, it feels incumbent to extend your strengths and minimise weaknesses, even the best writers ever are not good at everything, and you can always find ways to improve.

But you can be God over and over, a different God, but always one dealing with elemental forces.

 

[AwkwardMD]

The most tragic thing I've ever heard (grading on a curve) is a baseball story someone once told me. I don’t know baseball, so bear with me.

There was this guy who was a great hitter. Legendary. (Ty Cobb? Dimaggio? I'm grasping, and I wouldn’t even know how to google for 'tragic baseball story'). Rewrote a chunk of the records for baseballing. After his playing career, he went on to have one of the most infamously bad coaching careers of all time. The way it was explained to me, this guy could swing a bat and catch a ball with generational talent, but he couldn't explain what he did, or how he did it, to anyone else. He couldn't teach what he did because he was largely ignorant of his own talent. He'd never spent time reflecting on how he did what he did, and so that skill and knowledge was ultimately lost.

Proportionately speaking, that is depressing af. It's like trying to imagine the knowledge lost in the burning of the library of Alexandria, but on a teeny tiny scale and (the way I heard it) it was his own pride that got in the way.

Be purposeful. Explore your own faculties. Know why and how you do what you do. Every story on this site could be said to contain the mission statement "I'm going to convince you to have an orgasm'. What else could you convince them to do (or think) if you dared to try?

 

[AwkwardMD]

As a writer you are God.

For a page at least, maybe ten or twenty. The responsibility is awesome, and addictively satisfying when your world, your characters, your explorations and revealing are done well and reach a responsive readership.

Like everything else, it feels incumbent to extend your strengths and minimise weaknesses, even the best writers ever are not good at everything, and you can always find ways to improve.

But you can be God over and over, a different God, but always one dealing with elemental forces.

While this is true, I think it's harder to conceptualize yourself as God for the purposes of teaching. If I say "All of the responsibilities are yours", that all becomes pretty loaded. What does all encompass? It's nebulous and vast.

If I say "You have 10 jobs to do as a writer" to a new writer, and they understand those ten responsibilities, that creates a framework for understanding. It's a shell that we can add on to. "You have all the jobs" is an infinite statement. It's daunting and harder to grapple with.

 

[AlexBailey]

As a writer, you are the screenwriter, actor, AND director. And producer. And lighting tech. And boom grip. And foley designer. And best boy. All of those roles are in your hand, and your effectiveness grows the more you realize your own potential; the more you realize not just that you can affect your reader, but on how many levels you can affect your reader.

I've come to realize this. It is very humbling to learn new skills, then look back over previous work. All of those various disciplines take time and experience. New perspective can be harsh on confidence. Lol. Fall down, get back up, keep going. What is my destination anyway?

 

[avery617]

I don't know if I've ever shared this here, so apologies if I'm repeating myself.

I am not well read in the traditional sense. The stories I give feedback on represent the largest body of literary writing I've consumed. A lot of my writer friends bring up other books in conversation (Oh, have you ever read…) and I have often not heard of those books and almost invariably haven't read them. The only two book series I've ever read and really processed as literary works are The Wheel of Time and The Locked Tomb.

I had bad asthma growing up. I spent 90 minutes every day hooked up to a nebulizer trying to train my lungs to stand up to everyday allergens. I read too much to keep up with library rentals, so I started reading Time. Newsweek. National Geographic. Local paper and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Then, when I got to college, I was a history major. I wrote 10 page papers (if not longer) weekly for each class (so, sometimes, a few a week). I tend to write persuasively and densely, and as a result, my prose is abominable. By far, my weakest area.

I take all of my cues for how to write dialog from TV and film. There is tons of applicability. There are certainly some differences between the visual and literary mediums, but the overlapping areas are vast.

As a writer, you are the screenwriter, actor, AND director. And producer. And lighting tech. And boom grip. And foley designer. And best boy. All of those roles are in your hand, and your effectiveness grows the more you realize your own potential; the more you realize not just that you can affect your reader, but on how many levels you can affect your reader.

You can control the readers interpretations (to a point). You can lead them to a conclusion, and to pretend like you can't is giving up.

Thank you for posting this. It does help to explain why you appear to some to be full of crap.