750 worder

[LaRascasse]

I submitted this for Lit's 750 word story contest (750 words being the lower limit for a Lit submission). What do you think of this?

https://www.literotica.com/s/cold-grey

 

[Blind_Justice]

I liked it. Given the constraints, you wrapped a lot of narrative into a tight package and the twist was excellent. Extra points for a clean edit.

Thumbs up!

 

[thewinedarksea]

Well it's obviously excellent. Perfect little idea well executed. If I had to criticize it, I might have preferred this line was intimated or omitted, as I thought that you cleverly led us to this conclusion without needing to say it: "So, my dear lady, he does fuck you. Through me. I am the means. The conduit."

But that's all I got. I straight up loved the rest. Nice work.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Yes, a tightly written little thing. Like .

 

[LaRascasse]

Thanks. I had initially envisioned it as a longer story, but when the contest came up, decided to use it any way. The idea was to keep it minimalist, give as few details as possible and let the reader imagine the rest. The protagonist doesn't even have a name.

What would you (readers) have liked to have seen in this if this was a longer story?

 

[Bill_Cosplay]

It was interesting, but something about the Oh yeah! Give it to me line almost made me stop reading it. I don't know why. It seemed like eye-rolling dialogue. Maybe it was the exclamation point, but it didn't fit the feel of the first two paragraphs to me. It jumped out at me, maybe a little too sarcastically enthusiastic for the character's monotone state of mind.

What I would like to see as a reader?

The character needs pills to get out of bed, so by now their life is at that tipping point of losing options in their life. They also need this guy to fund them, I inferred that maybe the drug habit and the need to sleep with him means they burned a lot of bridges. So...

• How drug use effects their life.
• The clumsy or not so clumsy come on by the investor.
• How uncomfortable the come on makes the MC feel and at what moment they decided, "Fine, I'll have sex with him."
• I'd also like to see the MC's fake sex feel more subtle, subtle enough that anyone watching could tell she wasn't into it, but the guy banging her couldn't because he thinks that she's actually attracted to him on some level. He doesn't know that he's being used (so maybe he's not the bad guy). Maybe she is, maybe she initiated the sex.
• The lady/lady relationship: are they friends, more than friends, do the drugs the MC takes allow her to just use people and maybe, as a hint toward some perverse form of guilt, does her sleeping with the wife make her feel like she's atoning for using the husband and ruining her marriage, or ....
• Does the MC care about the wife, but the drug use and the need to be a Professional Chef come first, while hoping to one day be with the wife comes second.

There are many scenarios that you've let the reader's imagination go in from this spec that my mind will be able to wander the what ifs for a while. I liked it, I gave you a Five Star Vote.

 

[NotWise]

I have time on my hands.

You succeeded in writing a dark little vignette. It seems like an exercise in character construction. You combine contrasts with location and action and build a complex character, but to me it doesn't really tell a story.

There are two contrasts in the story that I felt contributed greatly to building a character that was as dark as the setting.

First, your unnamed character is a restaurateur, and I would normally expect that to be an outgoing, people-oriented character. That expectation contrasts so sharply with the bare and shabby apartment that it seems to me like there is something disturbed about the character.

Second, sex is the only action in the work, but it is sex without eroticism. It is a strong element that raises both conflict and questions. She has a financial motivation for sex with the man, but he is vile to her. Is she somehow trapped into that funding option? We have to speculate about her motivation for sex with the woman. Is it control? Is it dominance?

The sex also seems to lead nowhere, and that's why I think this is character construction, not a story.

You work the digression to her family in very smoothly, and that gives some insight into her character. There must be something really wrong in her relationship with her mother if the fear of "growing up to become my mother" is her underlying motivation.

It's tightly written and probably does what you want. Was it an enjoyable read? As such a short piece, it was too dark for me to enjoy.

 

[LaRascasse]

Thanks for the inputs. I intended to be more cynical than dark with the story while leaving a hook for future possibilities. The key story revolving around her having affairs with both spouses and neither being aware of the other. That and some implied unpleasantness in her past which lead to her dependency on anti-depressants. Given the low word count I had to work with, the main goal was to give a glimpse and let each reader fill the gaps with their own unique thoughts. That way, everyone is happy.