AwkwardMD and Omenainen Review Thread

[CharlotteKurai]

Having read your English and your Spanish, I wonder how much better off you would be publishing in Spanish. It's clear that the translation is losing a great deal, possibly because the added difficulty of composing English text causes you to adopt a much more brief, summary-like style.

Yeah but sadly the spanish Literotica, it's dead like, probably when I finished the english version of the story. Even is an non con, my story will have like five alternatives ending, the good one and the truth ending. And the neutral and the bad and worst ending.


Desgraciadamente Literotica en español, está muerto x.x es decir, no es muy activo. Pero cuando termine la versión en inglés, lo publicaré en español pero el problema es que se tarda de subir mucho las historias.

 

[APilgrimSquare]

Not sure if there's a protocol or etiquette around requesting feedback, but I'd like to submit a recent story for review. It's a 14k word I/T story about a first time with the narrator's cousin.

Return to Dungeon Island

The early voting feedback has been underwhelming, at a 3.67 (albeit with only 9 votes), and I'm not exactly sure why. It could be that it's not raunchy enough, that it ends too abruptly, or that the writing just sucks, but it's not so different from my usual fare and it's a full point lower than my average.

I have some other pieces that scored lower than the average (that's how averages work!), but I usually understand why something doesn't land with readers. I'm surprised here, though, and curious if you two might have some feedback/criticism I can use as I develop. No holds barred, brutal honesty is welcome!

 

[AwkwardMD]

@PennyThompson
Link

Full disclosure: Before submitting this request, Penny PM’d me to ask if making another request was okay, and I said that it’d be fine but we’d probably dispense with the most of the lovebombing in favor of getting to whatever criticisms we were going to get to. And yet, I can’t not bring up how talented of a wordsmith Penny is. There are so many interesting, complex, and nuanced turns of phrase in this story that my head was spinning. Dandelion Greene is an absolute delight of a character.

The weakest tool in my authorial toolbox is my prose. My words are functional and boring. Effective, but not pretty. I always respect it when people can do things I can’t, and I was deeply impressed by the work here.

*

I have a friend who is an adult graphical artist. Most of their business, in the time we’ve been friends, is predicated on work that involves nostalgia characters. Kim Possible, Velma and Daphne from Scooby Doo, Mary Jane Watson and Gwen Stacy from Spider-Man, etc. That is what most of their patrons and commissioners want, and they’re very good at adapting characters to be identifiable in their style. In addition to being their friend, I am also a fan, and I know that this work is less fulfilling for them. They would want, under perfect circumstances, to be drawing their own characters, making up their own stories, and doing more things their way. I have tried to encourage them in this.

One of the ways I tried to encourage them was to try to get them to shortcut their normal style, which is very detail oriented, so that when they have the time to make work of their own they can crank out a lot of work. Do some pages in black and white. Do some pages with no shading. Get it in front of patrons in volumes so the patrons can see how good it is, how good the ideas are, how talented my friend is, and sell the patrons on letting them do what they want. I tried a few different tactics, and ultimately they weren’t satisfied with those so it never got off the ground.

One idea that went further than the others was to try to develop an alternate style that was a bit like Chibi. Tiny, expressive, cutesy, funny, yes, but it struggled to then make the transition to being erotic.

This is really the only place I can find to criticize this story. It’s so good. The first 80% of it is chock full of character and vibes and mood, and when it came to the sex I was kinda meh. It’s clearly trying to be hot. I don’t think you only tacked on the sex scene as an afterthought and that it wasn’t supposed to get anyone off. I just don’t think it connects to the rest of the story in a way that matters.

For one thing, I’m here for Dandelion Greene, not Margie Colton and not Ms. Only Appears At The 11th Hour. Dandelion isn’t really involved, and the sex isn’t really the culmination of any kind of arc for her. It does awaken some things, and we love that for her, but Dandelion is incidental past a certain point and that’s fundamentally unsatisfying as the apex of a story.

Now, this is the part where I need to point out that this is not normally my kind of story. Folk Tales are a lot like Noir/Pulp in this respect, where an airtight plot is less important than a plot that allows for plenty of opportunities for the main character to deliver killer lines. Zingers. Folk Tales operate on the same kind of logic.

The out-of-left-field plot turns that involve the Hidebehind and Billy Green Eyes, those are staples of this kind of Folk Tale. It isn’t what I would call good storytelling, but that’s because Folk Tales operate on different criteria (much like Noir), and that’s out of my wheelhouse. In a Folk Tale, it’s okay to have characters appear to exemplify a moral or lesson only to then get discarded, never to reappear. It’s not just acceptable, it’s expected.

I am not suggesting that comedy and sex are unmixable. I think I’ve pulled that off, so I know it’s possible. I’m suggesting that first person comedy with a wisecracking POV character is mostly incompatible with emotional vulnerability, with intimacy, and with payoff. Wisecrackers break tension like it’s a 2x4 at a karate convention. For me, good storytelling involves cultivating that tension like a flower, not trampling it underfoot if a good enough punchline presents itself. In third person, you can have a wisecracker cracking wise while the narrator is able to make the audience more aware, say, of the underlying sadness that drives this character’s desire to fill every pause and bit of silence with something pleasing and smile-inducing. In first person, all you have are the bits (read: jokes).

At the end of the day, I feel like you’ve got a great Folk Tale AND a sex scene. The choice to put it in first person contributes to this. The nature of Folk Tales contributes to this. The characters involved in the sex scene contribute to this. To circle back around, it doesn’t make the transition from sexy to erotic. Maybe that’s not what you’re going for. Maybe that’s an acceptable loss for an experiment in a new style.

I can’t make that judgement call for you, or decide how important this element should have been. I can only tell you that it doesn’t quite work.

 

[Omenainen]

@PennyThompson

I have something to add to the above. The way we work these reviews is that we have a file for each story, and jot down notes as we read as to what aspects we want to cover, to work as a starting point for us discussing what to include in the review.

This is verbatim what I wrote after first reading this:

From a deeply personal and definitely subjective perspective, I am depressed by this story. Dandelion Greene and the Witch of Watson County is a perfect short story. Perfect scope, flawless execution, spotless style, strong characterization, marvelous descriptions. The attitude towards life, universe and everything that this story encapsulates, makes me uncomfortably aware of how wounded and messed up I am as a person. This story makes me reconsider my life choices, like writing stories in English, and writing stories in general. I have nothing to say about this except I hope Penny will stop asking us for more, because I think I should be asking her for advice instead of the other way around.

 

[PennyThompson]

From a deeply personal and definitely subjective perspective, I am depressed by this story. Dandelion Greene and the Witch of Watson County is a perfect short story. Perfect scope, flawless execution, spotless style, strong characterization, marvelous descriptions. The attitude towards life, universe and everything that this story encapsulates, makes me uncomfortably aware of how wounded and messed up I am as a person. This story makes me reconsider my life choices, like writing stories in English, and writing stories in general. I have nothing to say about this except I hope Penny will stop asking us for more, because I think I should be asking her for advice instead of the other way around.

holy heck, that's a hell of a paragraph to wake up to and I have no idea what to do with my feelings about it

Tiny, expressive, cutesy, funny, yes, but it struggled to then make the transition to being erotic.

when it came to the sex I was kinda meh. It’s clearly trying to be hot. I don’t think you only tacked on the sex scene as an afterthought and that it wasn’t supposed to get anyone off. I just don’t think it connects to the rest of the story in a way that matters.

At the end of the day, I feel like you’ve got a great Folk Tale AND a sex scene. The choice to put it in first person contributes to this. The nature of Folk Tales contributes to this. The characters involved in the sex scene contribute to this. To circle back around, it doesn’t make the transition from sexy to erotic.

Thank you, this is so extremely helpful, and cuts to the core of my feelings about this story. I feel like I succeeded reasonably well at writing the Weird Americana folktale that I wanted to write, and in the process I failed at writing erotica.

I want to write more with this character and this setting, I think I've got something here... and I think that Literotica might not be the right place to do it, and that really scares me!

 

[AwkwardMD]

Thank you, this is so extremely helpful, and cuts to the core of my feelings about this story. I feel like I succeeded reasonably well at writing the Weird Americana folktale that I wanted to write, and in the process I failed at writing erotica.

I want to write more with this character and this setting, I think I've got something here... and I think that Literotica might not be the right place to do it, and that really scares me!

Nobody is clamoring for my ideal. Even for me, I read this at the time it came out and loved it. If it makes you happy, then you should explore the oddball intersections and fuck what I have to say about it.

It sounds, though, like I've hit on something you were maybe already thinking. Proceed with knowledge. If it comes out wonky and wonky was what you were going for, that's okay! If it comes out asymmetrical and asymmetrical was what you were going for, that's okay! I reject the idea that you can't use Literotica as a platform to explore whatever kind of creative writing fulfills you, even if it's inherently non-erotic.

 

[AwkwardMD]

And, importantly, if your creative ambitions are  bigger than Literotica, I support that too.

 

[Omenainen]

holy heck, that's a hell of a paragraph to wake up to and I have no idea what to do with my feelings about it

I’m usually less dramatic, at least in what ends up in the review or the thread. But there you have it, my unfiltered first impression