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

 

[Omenainen]

@Rambling_Chantrix
Butterfly Weed

First things first: well done. This was a very skillfully crafted story. Everything fits, everything has its place, it is beautiful. It is painful, but the pain is exposed in carefully measured portions in a way that makes it palatable, yet thought-evoking, yet believable. There’s just enough and not a bit more. Of everything, there’s just enough and not a bit more. And the prose is exquisite.

Contains spoilers.

The story is structured as four parts. I’d like to say for equal parts, but I’m not sure that’s true. All four parts are what this story consists of, but they’re not all the same. Usually, I’d advise against publishing chapters this short as separate things, but in this case it makes kind of sense, though I’m not sure if the reception on the site would’ve been very different if you had published it as one story. I’ll leave site mechanics out of this. What’s done is done, it’s published in separate chapters, and here we are on the other side with the whole of the work in our hands.

The parts are from the point of view of different characters each:

1. It Ain’t Much, but It’s Honest Work / Portia
2. The Food Court / Nouglas
3. Insistence / Frankie
4. Untitled Polyptych / Abi

I’m usually not one for forewords, but in this case I think it was justified. There was a lot of ground to cover as is, without including the details about sex work in this world of yours. This is one of the rare cases where I think doing it exactly like this was the best option.

The most pain, the closest to the crux of the things, are Portia and Frankie. Portia whose pain it is and Frankie whose relationship is affected. The way you start with Portia and then move away from her, inferring her struggles but from a distance, lessens the impact. I have no doubt that this is intentional. This is a fantasy, a what if all went well, and while there surely is pain, getting too close to it would be… well, painful, for a lack of a better word. I do understand this.

You open so strong. The first chapter was heartbreaking, impactful, confusing-but-it-all-made-sense-in-the-end, genuine, just… this is it. I was spellbound. Everything about it was good, and the last sentence was perfect.

The second chapter is a step away from the eye of the storm. The action is where half of the pain is, but it’s narrated from Nouglas and not Frankie. I have no doubt that this is intentional. It lessens the impact and lets us see it from the outside, and I loved how you incorporated Nouglas’s own struggles with his art and how you included his creativity into the mix. It felt justified, and it felt like he’s a character in his own right and not just a prop to display Frankie’s pain.

The third part, we get back closer to the thick of it, from Frankie’s POV. Having given us a breather with chapter 2, we get to plunge back in now. And it hurts, for sure, in a very relatable and understandable way. I love what you did with the bolded out sections. I love what you did with Frankie pondering about their sex life. I love how you let Frankie have the self awareness to get to the hurt behind the hurt and to the real issues. It might be too good to be happening in real life, but oh how I’d want it to be possible, so I’m right there with you. It wasn’t a coincidence that these two chose each other in the first place, and that is the thing, isn’t it.

It was exactly the thing to have Portia try to solve the issue like she did. It was exactly the thing to have Frankie flee and try to wait it out. I feel these people, viscerally, which is impressive, because you’ve given me precious few words to see them through. It’s all very lightly colored, with a very light touch, but it’s all there.

The least painful and the least load bearing is the last chapter, the wistful epilogue, the “after the dust settles everyone can breathe again.” It’s the one you could almost have left out, though it does tie a cute little bow on top of it all (and neatly sidesteps the most laborious parts of the story). It was the weakest of the chapters, and I have to say that while I loved how you explored Nouglas’s creativity in chapter two, having Abi “see it” in chapter four was a leetle bit too much. It was a bit too on the nose, a bit too “I’ll tie this thing up too.” Also having them meet by chance at the art exhibition was a bit too chance-y. The chapter is there to round things up, to show us the conclusion, and as such it has its place.

Now, what could have been better?

For this story, covered like it was, nothing. I think you knew what you were doing and you succeeded in exactly that. Changing the point of view character and distance from ground zero lets us see the whole picture, the shape of everything, and tell the whole story. It prevents readers from attaching too strongly to anyone’s perspective and picking sides. It’s a story about this incident, the whole of it, and as such, it is perfect.

Personally, I’m here for the pain. My art comes from pain, and pain is what I love most in others’ work. I don’t think it was an accident that you started from the most painful part, and then never got back to it, but I would’ve wanted to get back to it. I wanted the gut-wrenching grief, and doubt, and desperate certainty. I wanted to stay with Portia through it. I wanted to stay with Frankie through it. I wanted a longer story, with more depth, around these themes, but that is not a fault in this story because it is not what this story set out to do.

(If you write it one day, let me know.)

 

[Rambling_Chantrix]

@Rambling_Chantrix
Butterfly Weed

First things first: well done. This was a very skillfully crafted story. Everything fits, everything has its place, it is beautiful. It is painful, but the pain is exposed in carefully measured portions in a way that makes it palatable, yet thought-evoking, yet believable. There’s just enough and not a bit more. Of everything, there’s just enough and not a bit more. And the prose is exquisite.

Contains spoilers.

The story is structured as four parts. I’d like to say for equal parts, but I’m not sure that’s true. All four parts are what this story consists of, but they’re not all the same. Usually, I’d advise against publishing chapters this short as separate things, but in this case it makes kind of sense, though I’m not sure if the reception on the site would’ve been very different if you had published it as one story. I’ll leave site mechanics out of this. What’s done is done, it’s published in separate chapters, and here we are on the other side with the whole of the work in our hands.

The parts are from the point of view of different characters each:

1. It Ain’t Much, but It’s Honest Work / Portia
2. The Food Court / Nouglas
3. Insistence / Frankie
4. Untitled Polyptych / Abi

I’m usually not one for forewords, but in this case I think it was justified. There was a lot of ground to cover as is, without including the details about sex work in this world of yours. This is one of the rare cases where I think doing it exactly like this was the best option.

The most pain, the closest to the crux of the things, are Portia and Frankie. Portia whose pain it is and Frankie whose relationship is affected. The way you start with Portia and then move away from her, inferring her struggles but from a distance, lessens the impact. I have no doubt that this is intentional. This is a fantasy, a what if all went well, and while there surely is pain, getting too close to it would be… well, painful, for a lack of a better word. I do understand this.

You open so strong. The first chapter was heartbreaking, impactful, confusing-but-it-all-made-sense-in-the-end, genuine, just… this is it. I was spellbound. Everything about it was good, and the last sentence was perfect.

The second chapter is a step away from the eye of the storm. The action is where half of the pain is, but it’s narrated from Nouglas and not Frankie. I have no doubt that this is intentional. It lessens the impact and lets us see it from the outside, and I loved how you incorporated Nouglas’s own struggles with his art and how you included his creativity into the mix. It felt justified, and it felt like he’s a character in his own right and not just a prop to display Frankie’s pain.

The third part, we get back closer to the thick of it, from Frankie’s POV. Having given us a breather with chapter 2, we get to plunge back in now. And it hurts, for sure, in a very relatable and understandable way. I love what you did with the bolded out sections. I love what you did with Frankie pondering about their sex life. I love how you let Frankie have the self awareness to get to the hurt behind the hurt and to the real issues. It might be too good to be happening in real life, but oh how I’d want it to be possible, so I’m right there with you. It wasn’t a coincidence that these two chose each other in the first place, and that is the thing, isn’t it.

It was exactly the thing to have Portia try to solve the issue like she did. It was exactly the thing to have Frankie flee and try to wait it out. I feel these people, viscerally, which is impressive, because you’ve given me precious few words to see them through. It’s all very lightly colored, with a very light touch, but it’s all there.

The least painful and the least load bearing is the last chapter, the wistful epilogue, the “after the dust settles everyone can breathe again.” It’s the one you could almost have left out, though it does tie a cute little bow on top of it all (and neatly sidesteps the most laborious parts of the story). It was the weakest of the chapters, and I have to say that while I loved how you explored Nouglas’s creativity in chapter two, having Abi “see it” in chapter four was a leetle bit too much. It was a bit too on the nose, a bit too “I’ll tie this thing up too.” Also having them meet by chance at the art exhibition was a bit too chance-y. The chapter is there to round things up, to show us the conclusion, and as such it has its place.

Now, what could have been better?

For this story, covered like it was, nothing. I think you knew what you were doing and you succeeded in exactly that. Changing the point of view character and distance from ground zero lets us see the whole picture, the shape of everything, and tell the whole story. It prevents readers from attaching too strongly to anyone’s perspective and picking sides. It’s a story about this incident, the whole of it, and as such, it is perfect.

Personally, I’m here for the pain. My art comes from pain, and pain is what I love most in others’ work. I don’t think it was an accident that you started from the most painful part, and then never got back to it, but I would’ve wanted to get back to it. I wanted the gut-wrenching grief, and doubt, and desperate certainty. I wanted to stay with Portia through it. I wanted to stay with Frankie through it. I wanted a longer story, with more depth, around these themes, but that is not a fault in this story because it is not what this story set out to do.

(If you write it one day, let me know.)

Wow, thank you for this.

I suppose the adage applies that we are our own worst critics, because I found myself expecting considerable criticism of some of the choices I made.

I really appreciate you pointing out the weaknesses you did. I think you're right, that there's a longer story here, and that that's not what I was trying to do, but it would maybe be better if it were. Someday I will overcome my fear of commitment and try to write a novel again You may be right that Abi's perspective is the least crucial—in part, I think, because limiting myself to 3000-5000 words in the interests of maintaining 'parity' with the other parts hindered her POV. I wanted to tell a story about the healing nature of time and uncertainty, and doing that in such a short space meant that the reunion was—as you noted—contrived. In retrospect I should at least have made the reunion happen at the opening of the exhibit, when family and friends are most likely to be there.

There was, I admit, a 'completeness' I couldn't resist—that if it weren't for Abi leaving to care for her mother in the first place, Noug's career might not have taken off on the same timeline. Your feedback is a good lesson in resisting the allure of my own cleverness.

I'll be carrying your words with me for a long time. Thank you again.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Wow, thank you for this.

I suppose the adage applies that we are our own worst critics, because I found myself expecting considerable criticism of some of the choices I made.

The most common reason we criticize narrative or character choices in a story is if they don't make sense or if, even inadvertently, they endorse something harmful or hateful. Those we tend to push back on. Choices that are just different, we're ambivalent toward. What you made is what you made, and there's a lot of room for you to do your thing alongside other authors making different choices and doing their thing.

It is a CONSTANT battle for us not to impose our wants on stories, and in these reviews. I had some things I wanted different about this story for sure, but we try to keep each other in check. What you've made here is beautiful.

 

[MediocreAuthor]

we have had users abuse their alts to make multiple requests back to back in the past, and its left a sour taste.

I said I was sorry! I wasn't trying to trick you, I just value your opinions!

Lol

 

[MediocreAuthor]

Hello

𝙶𝚒𝚛𝚕: 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚕𝚘𝚐𝚞𝚎

This my prologue of my first story, I am still doing the first chapter is an slow burn of a eighteen years old, girl she going into enjo kosai, compensated dating. And how she getting much deeper on this sadly situation.

Okay, so I gave this a read, and I'll give you a brief overview of my thoughts.

For starters, it's clear to me that you have a passion for this story, if for no other reason than the fact that you decided to try to translate it into English just to get it to a wider audience. I respect that motivation regardless of the quality of the final product.

Also, I don't want you to take any of my thoughts or comments as disparaging or meanspirited. I try to encourage other authors, and I think that everyone (including myself) has room for growth.

So please don't let any of these critiques discourage you from continuing to create. Hopefully my advice will be useful to you as you continue to write.

---

Alright, so let me address the first glaring issue.

Since this story was translated from another language, I have no idea how good the prose was originally. English is my first and essentially only language so I understand that the story was probably much better in Spanish.

[For the record, I wasn't sure if by "translator" you meant a translation program or another person translating for you.]

But I will be honest and say that in English, the prose does come across as rather choppy and rough. This is likely an issue with the translation.

Just the same, I was impressed with how well it did read. I had no difficulty understanding what was going on.

That said, I do want to point out that the average reader will probably be less patient with obviously translated texts than I am.

---

Next, one of the biggest problems I saw was an issue of Tense.

The story occasionally flips back and forth between present tense:

"Aaliyah is trying to relax."

And past tense:

"Everyone went inside"

For most stories, it's best to tell them in past tense:

"Aaliyah was trying to relax / Everyone went inside".

Maintaining a consistent tense will instantly elevate your writing. Also, if you choose to write in past tense, it will be much easier to maintain consistency as well.

---

The only other issue I'd like to point is your choice of category.

Your story featured one glimpse of sex, which disgusted your female character (understandably).

The Non-consent/Reluctance category is mostly (although not entirely) made up of stories which in some way romanticize acts of sexual aggression in some form of another.

That is to say, stories which feature rape but do not glamorize it do not necessarily belong in that category.

The NC/R description reads "Fantasies of Control". If your story features rough, one sided sex, but present that sex in a negative light, then the people who frequent that category may dislike it, no matter how good it is.

---

All of these critiques aside, I want to applaud you for writing and putting yourself out there to be seen. Also, your decision to ask for advice in improving was a great choice too. Hopefully we can help you grow as an author.

Best of luck!

 

[Omenainen]

@CharlotteKurai
Link

Hello and welcome to Lit!

I’m sorry to hear there’s not a lot of audience for Spanish writers. I’m a little surprised, I’d thought Spanish would be big enough for that to be otherwise. Maybe you should dig a little deeper, see where they all are, like maybe on another site, because I find it hard to believe there is no smut in Spanish or no places to publish it online.

I know your struggle intimately, because like you, English is not my first language. I’m Finnish, and it’s such a puny language that I’ve never really contemplated trying to find a place for my smut in my own language. I recently learned it would be possible to publish here, on Lit, in Finnish, but the one person I’ve seen doing it has view counts that are so diminutive that it’s not a lucrative option.

Unfortunately, for publishing in English, I don’t really see options beside writing in English. To translate between two languages you’d need a skill level in both languages that is at least equal to writing in the target language in the first place, plus knowledge of cultural aspects so that you’d find the right idioms and adverbs. Translating text is much more than translating the individual words. Personally, I feel writing in Finnish and then translating it to English would be much more difficult than simply writing in English in the first place. Other people might feel differently, but whichever you personally prefer, it doesn’t change the fact that to do it yourself, you need a certain level of language skills for your target language and that just cannot be sidestepped. Lit is a forgiving platform and the level of English doesn’t need to be high to get started. Just go for it, like you’ve done, and learn as you go.

To get better at writing in English, I recommend writing in English. It would be helpful to have a native editor, or a beta reader, someone better at English who’d help, but there is no way around the learning and you should do all you can to reach that goal. Read a lot, write a lot, think in English, write in English. You will get better. Personally, I think that time used in futzing in machine translations or, god forbid, AI translations, is time wasted compared to just focusing on your own skills.

Good luck and happy writing!

 

[AwkwardMD]

@APilgrimSquare
Link

It’s a good story. The writing does not suck. It should have performed better. It deserved to perform better. I’ve never seen an I/T story with so few views.

What makes the most sense to me, and this is pure speculation, is that this story went up on a day when there was a minor glitch (Lit has been experiencing a lot of those, in a lot of different capacities) that prevented your story from being viewed normally. Maybe it was new, and published, but it didn’t appear on the New list. Maybe it was on the list, but a glitch also caused there to be 40 other new I/T stories published that day and yours just happened to be at the bottom of the pile.

The score being low seems a consequence of low views and is more likely due to how volatile all scores are on Lit below 80 votes. The fewer votes, the more that 1 person who just doesn’t like your work can have an outsized effect on the score. It takes a crowd to drown out one disgruntled or intentionally disruptive reader, and there are both out there. They will find your story and they will ruin your day if they can because that makes them feel better.

Given time, a story like this will even out. The score will come up. Views will come up. It will find its niche. Unfortunately, this particular story will take a little longer to get there and there’s not much you can do except to promote it everywhere you can find. There are various threads around the forum for advertising a new work (some pinned here in the Story Feedback forum). You could make a post about it in the Author’s Hangout (just be prepared for some pushback). There’s no reason you shouldn’t be proud of this, or feel like you can’t/couldn’t/shouldn’t promote it.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the story that would trigger low views in I/T, or low scores from its readers. You even ticked off the box of announcing the coupling in the blurb, which is one key to success in I/T. They love that shit.

***

That being said, “how to get good scores” isn’t really what we do, so take the above with a grain of salt. What we do is sound writing and good storytelling, and these are not necessarily the keys that will unlock Literotica Success™. We give more generalized advice that applies equally to erotic and non-erotic writing.

On the one hand, once this story gets to the sex, it’s pretty good. The descriptions are, as you put it, fairly vanilla, and that’s okay. Not every story needs to go hard when it comes to the action. This one was a bit more tender, and the ending was, as advertised, a little bittersweet. I particularly enjoyed the “we were both projecting our needs and insecurities onto each other” angle, because that’s so relatable. It retroactively recast a lot of their actions, and I thought that was wonderful.

However, that’s just “once the story gets to the sex.” Everything leading up to it was fairly contrived. It didn’t feel organic. The characters didn’t feel real. They didn’t talk like real people. They weren’t doing real things. Their reactions to things were just a little bit off, a little bit this is what I need them to say to let the next part happen, and it didn’t need to be like that.

Again, as I mentioned up top, it’s not like inorganic or stiff are usually problems for the I/T readership. They’re pretty dependable in terms of their willingness to devour whatever you put in front of them as long as it contains a blood relative. You could continue to write stories that are exactly this well justified, exactly this well rooted in anything real, and do bonkers numbers. Have ten times as many followers as I do given a few years.

(having a high follower count is not the end all-be all of authorship around here, but it is for some people and that’s a perfectly noble pursuit if that’s what you’re looking for)

For example, the entire plot is driven by these two taking a vacation together to a lake house their dead grandmother owned.

If, instead of it being a vacation, they were there to clean the house out and pack up some boxes to get it ready for sale and it just so happens that everyone else cancels so that it’s just the two of them that makes much more sense. You can have everything else happen exactly the same, follow mostly the same set of actions, but having these things happen for reasons that are less obviously “this is how we get to the porn” goes a really long way toward grounding them and their actions.

These things have a knock-on effect. When the basis for them going there in the first place is paper thin, that colors the way we interpret the cousin flashing the gas station attendant, or getting dressed in front of the window. She’s not wearing pants because of course she isn’t. We know why this is happening, don’t we? We all know why we’re here. The motivations don’t matter. Get to the cousin sex. I had actually stopped reading this story after page 3 because I felt pretty comfortable knowing exactly how the rest of it would go, and it’s only because you spoilered your own ending by calling it bittersweet that I felt compelled to see that through to the end and understand what you meant.

And it was. I liked the slow fadeout, and their never having reconnected the same way. I liked the justification you gave them at the end even if I didn’t love the way it started. I liked the way they saw each other and the way they saw themselves, even though it took some time to drill down through the porny framing that was allowing any of this to happen. I think the way you started the story does a disservice to the ending I think you were always planning.

And this is where we tie it into the large narrative of things we talk about in this thread, because I want to believe that the ending was the thing you were always working toward, and that the beginning was a shortcut through the woods to get there. We talk a lot about intention and purposefulness. I think the lack of it in the beginning undercuts what you were trying to be purposeful about in the end (though, importantly, not in a way that hurt its views/likes/voting/comments, that seems like an unrelated and unfortunate glitch). I think this needed a little bit more time to bake, in your head, before you started putting words on the page.

This is all assuming that you plot, and it should be mentioned that plotting is not the only way to make art. One of my best friends is a pantser, so I’m obviously not racist toward them; I’m just less well equipped to tell you how to pull off a well grounded story while pantsing the whole thing. Making it up as you go can produce some weird and wonderful, though not always even, results.

It can be hard to create in a vacuum. It can be hard to have an idea and be sensible about it. I know I’ve fallen way too much in love with some of my own creations to the point that I wasn’t able to see that it didn’t really make sense. I have a few creators (writers and otherwise) whom I share with, talk with, collaborate with, and engage with. I talk to them about my ideas, and they talk to me about theirs. I sometimes come to them like ‘This idea is weird but hear me out, I’m going somewhere with it,’ and if I can sell them on a premise that starts off a little unhinged but uses that effectively, then I’ve got something. If I feel embarrassed to share an idea, because it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, that’s a sign.

And even then, despite everything, it’s perfectly fine to just write a horny story sometimes. To just have the cousin be down to fuck, and get to it, and if you want to put a left turn at the end then do that. If you want to write horny, do that, but do that with knowledge and purpose, with your head held high. Put it out there with your whole chest.

***

I do want to pick on one more thing. There’s some lines at the beginning of the story, and at a spot or two in the middle, where it reads like the narrator is retelling this story out loud to someone. That’s called a framing device, and I think in this case it isn’t giving you anything. It doesn’t really serve a purpose. Yes, lots of stories do it, and I’d argue that almost all of them don’t really know what they’re including it for. I have the same feelings about flashbacks. Overutilized, poorly understood, out of place most of the time.

Placing your story inside of a framing device makes the events of the story one degree further away from the reader. You didn’t need that. It would have been perfectly fine for the story to zoom out at the end, expanding to cover the rest of their lives in a handful of paragraphs, without establishing the fact that you were going to do so at the beginning. “Lemme tell ya about the time I fucked my cousin” might be a hell of a starting line, and for some stories (or some kinds of storytellers (raconteurs, specifically)), that’s an asset they can use. I don’t think that’s your skillset, or at least, it isn’t what you demonstrated elsewhere.

I think that for you, keeping it simple and straight forward, even if it’s being told in the past tense, will go a long way toward removing the clutter. Purposefulness is a straight arrow.

***

Good luck out there. It’s a weird time to be submitting.

 

[APilgrimSquare]

@APilgrimSquare
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Thank you so much for the detailed response! I am humbled and grateful. You make very good points about how "on the rails" it all feels. Part of that is because of the story's origin as a caption story that I wrote, where I added a storyline to an existing gallery, and so the exercise was to fit a story to the image beats I had to work with. Obviously I could have abandoned that in the new format, and you make compelling arguments as to where that would have been a good idea (e.g. everyone else abandoning the clean-up is a much more interesting set-up than "let's randomly go to the cabin (and fuck)."

Lots to think about here. Thank you again!