AwkwardMD and Omenainen Review Thread

[AwkwardMD]

Keep The Blindfold On, by HappySpouse

Link

Sorry this took me so long to get to. I finished a work of my own, beta read for a couple people, edited two chapters for another, and did a private request that came in before yours. I know it looks like this has just been sitting here, but I promise I was doing stuff.

Okay, so. Keep the Blindfold. I agree with some of the comments it got that this is really a lesbian story. Maybe I just didn’t get far enough into the final sex scene, but I didn’t come across any part of Emma’s journey to the isle of lesbos that really dealt with any kind of loving wives angle. Not within the framework of the story. Metatextually, sure, you as the husband wrote this thing about your 'wife', so there's all kinds of personal attachment that's wrapped up in the doing of the thing, but within the context of the story the husband was mostly a non-entity. The wife had free reign to do as she pleased. There didn’t seem to be a lot of hand-wringing, or the nervous exploration of the feelings involved in extramarital sex. I assume that these are probably things you’ve covered in other stories, since it seems like your stories all exist in separate universes where each time is the first time, but it does make it so that reading this one in isolation feels off.

I see what you are going for, because the first time is generally a pretty powerful experience, but I think it loses something in the way you executed the premise.

The story really lost me (metaphorically, not literally) when it jumped to explain who had given Emma the toy. Emma spent two Lit pages looking around corners and being nervous, and you built up a lot of mystery. She’s going through the women around her looking for her potential secret admirer, but then when the story cuts to Shelby’s perspective the things Shelby relays make it absolutely ridiculous that Emma didn’t just guess her first.

There’s a disconnect there where you wanted it to be a coworker, and you wanted mystery, but then you also wanted Emma and Shelby to have this long-simmering sexual tension. It didn’t work to try and have both. Those are mutually exclusive paths. The obvious answer should have been obvious.

I can already hear the “it’s just fantasy, it doesn’t need to be realistic” but this story was largely realistic already. You just needed to square away a few motivations and details in your backstory. Instead of having no one else in Emma’s floor who would have maybe been the secret admirer (and then it’s obviously the obvious one), make it so that there are five or six women who are flirty and handsy and maybe could be the one Emma is looking for.

I thought that the opening of the story, Emma being unsure and trying to figure out her mystery with a remote control plug inside of her, was much, much stronger than the downhill “Let’s have lots of sex everywhere all the time” moments that I got to later. If the story had been a bit more focused, it could have used the best parts of what came later to make that initial sex scene take longer. You could have given Emma the blindfold as a second anonymous gift, and kept Shelby’s identity a complete secret from front to back while driving Emma absolutely crazy.

I think it’s important to point out that you were going for something with a light BDSM edge, and if you’re going to do something like that successfully then you need to maintain tension. Not every BDSM scene needs to be about orgasm denial (although that’s hot too), but you need to keep some thread of anxiety. Something that's being withheld, or controlled. Think of it like a small flame. You need to feed it just the right amount of fuel, and just the right amount of oxygen. You don’t want to burn anything down, but you also don’t want it to go out. The longer you can keep it going, the better.

I was reading an article not so long ago that I cannot for the life of me find anymore that was talking about how the brain interprets media (video/audio/literary). Since I can’t find the article anymore, take the following with a grain of salt because I can’t find the science that backs it up, but there are parts of the brain that treat what we see/read/hear/imagine as real. We get dopamine highs when old lovers reunite like we would if we met up with that one that got away. We flinch at a car crash on TV as if it might hurt us. We orgasm from sex in a dream. Our conscious mind generally doesn’t have to actively remind the body that what we’re seeing isn’t real, but there are unconscious, physical reactions to media that can happen if the imagination is engaged and you aren’t forcing the reader to actively suspend their disbelief, or to continue slogging through something while their attention is really on their phone.

(Just to be clear, any setting can be made to be believable. Fantasy and sci-fi are realms that can be easily evoked and kept realistic despite their inherent unreality. It doesn't really apply to this story, and I don't want to sidetrack into a length discussion of how you make sci fi work at this time.)

What this means is that we, as artists, authors, and content creators, are capable of fostering incredibly powerful reactions in our readers and audiences if we go about it with purpose and intent. Not every story needs to be realistic, but if you can thread the needle of presenting a complicated sexual scenario and get the reader to buy into the premise, you can deliver some absolute dynamite.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Also, DrAwkward is a palindrome, but that username was taken

Dr. Awkward, are you a professor of English or writing? I’m learning a lot, and I thank you all for teaching this old dog some new things about literature.

No. I have most of a Masters in Secondary Education, because I wanted to be a high school history teacher, but I didn't finish. No Child Left Behind (an education program in the US) fundamentally changed the landscape of education in ways that took all the joy out of what I wanted to do.

I've also been writing as a hobby since I was 16 (so, nearly 25 years now), and I spent a long time being super super harsh on myself. I never finished any of the stories I started because I'd second guess myself, or fall into infinite editing cycles until I couldn't remember what I'd been trying to do at all.

When I published my first story (in 2013), I couldn't get anyone to give me any kind of meaningful feedback on it even though I was desperate for it. After it was done, I did two things. The first was that I performed a post mortem on my story, and tried to figure out how I could write better. When I wrote my second story and I felt like it was an improvement, I kept the pattern and have been actively working on self-improvement ever since. The second thing I did was that I started giving others the feedback I couldn't get. I know how crushing it can be to labor on something for months (or longer), and then get silence back once its out in the wild, so I try to be the help I myself wanted.

EDIT: this last note, about being the help that I wanted, is a big part of why I'm blunt. I want blunt advice when I'm getting advice. It's easier for me to process something that isn't couched in elaborate, polite language. You fucked up the thing, now go unfuck it.

 

[HappySpouse]

Thank you for giving it once over. I agree with all of your comments about not holding the tension quite right and the realism being just off. Like I said in my original comment, I feel like it lost it's mojo in the edits.

Originally, I had it as very realistic (in a fiction kind of way). She decides not to wear it to work, which, in itself is more believable. She does not admit the situation to her husband. Then through some "evil genius" (as she calls the person manipulating her) moves she ends up in a middle stall in a busy staff bathroom at shift change holding a buzzing toy in a panic. The evil genius then keeps her head spinning and thwarts every opportunity for Emma to get out of the situation. There was certainly no break in the tension, however...

Writing the original version, I was only concerned with making a situation that could actually happen. Then, I was lucky enough to have a couple of beta readers. It was pointed out that it was a non-con story and one of them said that Emma was in "crisis" and they "felt sorry for her". They were right, and it continued past the hospital. She wasn't given a choice the following day when Shelby woke her up, and she didn't consent to having anyone else touch her in the blindfolded scene. I enjoyed her being a slave to her pleasure, but it was really kind of abusive.

So, I put Emma at the helm of the decision making, but reading your comment I can see that it ended up being neither this nor that. It has died somewhere between. I have ten "Emma" stories either published or partially written. "Keep the Blindfold On" was supposed to be the tent pole story surrounded by shorter ones like "A Woman Catching Bikini". It just means more to me for some reason, and I hope I can eventually find a way to save it.

 

[AwkwardMD]

I think I'm in a position to take more requests, and get to them within a week (finally).

 

[NotWise]

I think I'm in a position to take more requests, and get to them within a week (finally).

You've done my stories before, and thank you. Are you willing to take on my first non-con story?

Quarter to Midnight links to Part 1. Part 2 follows. the parts are each about 9K words.

I have a history of writing bland male characters. Aaron's not that bland, but I don't know if I did it right. It's hard to make the same character both protagonist and antagonist.

I think Renee rocks.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Absolutely

 

[Alicemoon98]

I think I'm in a position to take more requests, and get to them within a week (finally).

If you are willing to take on a short one from a relatively new author, I'd love a review of Masturbaby.

I have been deliberately trying to write short intense stories. My dream would be to become the Lydia Davis of smut.

- Alice Albert-Moon

 

[DrHappy]

AwkwardMD,

I would be grateful for your feedback for my latest story, Dreams, Drawings, and Panties in the Erotic Couplings category. I considered Horror and Novella, but I thought that this was probably the best fit. I was aiming for a Twilight Zone kind of story, and I thought that readers expecting real horror would be disappointed. I’d love to know some specifics of what worked and what didn’t. I’m sure that there are many areas where I don’t know what I don’t know. I’d like to improve on future stories.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Quarter to Midnight, by NotWise

Link

Okay, so! I agree one hundred percent with your self-assessments. The male characters of yours that I’ve read are… interchangeable. Not bad, but not super differentiated. I think that Aaron is a step forward, and yeah, I can see the struggle. I wouldn’t really call him the antagonist, though. For storytelling purposes, the gang is clearly the antagonist. The friction between Aaron and Renee is different. Interpersonal. Aaron is more anti-hero than he is villain.

(TropeTalk is a fantaaaastic channel that I peruse from time to time. They cover a lot of storytelling stuff, and I generally agree with their advice on a wide variety of topics)

***

I liked how you handled the non-con in this story. I’ve certainly gone off on this topic a time or two, and I didn’t feel like this story was trying to excuse anything. It was definitely non-consensual. It was definitely rape. I definitely understood how every character got there, and why it kept happening, and at the end of it I was rooting for them. There are plenty of ways to take behavior like this and make it work in a way that’s erotic, vicious, and still fair, and the way you did it here absolutely worked. This is the kind of non-con a woman could (and did) get into without a prerequisite non-con kink (I don’t), and without feeling like the author hates her (me). Kudos.

When I was reading this story, I felt like you succeeded in the place where 50 Shades of Gray failed most spectacularly. 50 Shades took shitty behavior, tried to gussy it up with bondage, and then pretended that everyone was into it. It used the veneer of the billionaire alpha to justify an unhealthy relationship. Here, with Quarter to Midnight, I never felt like I was being shown something healthy. These are two differently damaged characters who are maybe finding their way toward something better, and they’re doing it together. They get there with communication (mostly (more on that in a minute)), and because of the way you set up the story and their backgrounds and their motivations. You plotted this out nicely.

That’s really impressive for, what, 20k words? Maybe a little more? Kudos.

***

I liked Aaron. I liked Renee too, but I still feel like they were kind of distant from the reader. I don’t feel like we got in their heads, even though periodically the POV followed them both. Aaron was harder to penetrate, and I think you know that because you had to have Shelley come in and explic his whole deal. It would have been hard to find a way to have him tell that story on his own.

I think there are other ways you could have done it. I think you could have done something like having him visit a grave on the anniversary and Renee can’t help but google some names, or there’s a news clipping/personal item in a box/container that he treats very reverently or is placed very centrally in a room and she either knocks it over while cleaning or just gets curious. Obviously, these kinds of things can’t always be solved by just the two characters in isolation so maybe it’s cliche for Renee to Nancy Drew her way to the truth, but I wanted Renee to have some sort of drive to solve him. I wanted her to care about him and care about getting to the bottom of it and she didn’t.

Assuming these characters were real for a moment, and that this sort of thing could be sorted out, I would have said that Renee didn’t have a drive to solve Aaron because his primary purpose for her was shelter. He provided that with money, from his job, and some good old fashioned testosterone, from his balls. Yes, he was also generous and giving, but I didn’t feel like the two of them had chemistry, per se. I didn’t feel like there was a part of Aaron’s personality that turned her on. It was more that his sharp edges aligned with areas where Renee had been beaten numb by others.

That is not a judgement. A lot of people would be lucky to find a relationship that suited them that well, and maybe that’s the best that category should ever really get to. I don’t know.

I think, though, that having a full cast of characters that are lively and engaging is the next big step for you. I mean, your flapper girls are still the gold standard in this thread. They’re so much fun, and I think you have it in you to pair that kind of energy with a man worthy of their attention. Men can be interesting and lively and brawny too!

***

Especially compared to your flapper story, and especially because I brought it up there, I think it’s important to point out that the scope of this story was near perfect. You didn’t waste a word of storytelling, and you got me to buy into the action and the motivations right alongside Renee who is, for most of the story, the reader insert. We’re learning as she’s learning. I think you plotted this story out much more tightly, had a very specific goal in mind, and executed it.

The characters had arcs. There was growth. There was plot. Every scene moved at least one of those things forward, if not more than one, and that’s awesome. Super impressive progress, and at the end of the day, just really damn good storytelling. That kind of skillset enables you to tell any kind of story you want, if you set your mind to it, and it will serve you well if you keep at it.

***

On a nuts and bolts level (and this is getting really picky), I felt like the flow of the scenes was a little rambly. Sometimes you had scene breaks to differentiate a shift in time. Sometimes you just had “Two weeks later”. Sometimes it felt like time was elapsing and I was supposed to sort that out on my own. I can usually handle any one of those in a story, but I would try to keep it consistent. If you want to have one paragraph surrounded by scene breaks, that just gives a little update between two larger scenes, do it. Just like this.

***

I really liked that this story had a larger cast of characters. This is something that’s taken me a really long time to build up to. An embarrassingly large portion of my stories are just the two love interests in a vacuum, interacting just with each other and basically no one else. I’m always impressed when people do something I can’t, or that’s hard for me, and this looked seamless. Aaron’s neighbors and coworkers and exes all drifted in, served their purpose, and left without overstaying their welcome. They made the world around Aaron and Renee feel full.

 

[NotWise]

AMD, I always value your input. You've helped me be better.

If TLDR is your reaction here, then I understand completely.

[I liked how you handled the non-con in this story. I’ve certainly gone off on this topic a time or two, and I didn’t feel like this story was trying to excuse anything. It was definitely non-consensual. It was definitely rape. I definitely understood how every character got there, and why it kept happening, and at the end of it I was rooting for them. There are plenty of ways to take behavior like this and make it work in a way that’s erotic, vicious, and still fair, and the way you did it here absolutely worked. This is the kind of non-con a woman could (and did) get into without a prerequisite non-con kink (I don’t), and without feeling like the author hates her (me). Kudos.

I was writing the story concurrently with the big flare-up over non-consent stories. I read the commentary, but it didn't change what I was doing.

That’s really impressive for, what, 20k words? Maybe a little more? Kudos.

I little less than 20K. I divided it in two at an obvious demarcation. Did the division help you read the story, or hurt?

I liked Aaron. I liked Renee too, but I still feel like they were kind of distant from the reader. I don’t feel like we got in their heads, even though periodically the POV followed them both. Aaron was harder to penetrate, and I think you know that because you had to have Shelley come in and explic his whole deal. It would have been hard to find a way to have him tell that story on his own.

This is a style thing that I'll probably keep, though probably I need to get better at it. I want their thoughts and beliefs to be expressed through their words and actions. I probably need to get better at that. But really, Aaron's head would have been a messy place to go, and I kinda wanted the story to reveal Renee as she changed rather than spelling her out.

In the end, I think Renee turned out to be a bitch, but she was the bitch that Aaron needed.

I think there are other ways you could have done it. I think you could have done something like having him visit a grave on the anniversary and Renee can’t help but google some names, or there’s a news clipping/personal item in a box/container that he treats very reverently or is placed very centrally in a room and she either knocks it over while cleaning or just gets curious. Obviously, these kinds of things can’t always be solved by just the two characters in isolation so maybe it’s cliche for Renee to Nancy Drew her way to the truth, but I wanted Renee to have some sort of drive to solve him. I wanted her to care about him and care about getting to the bottom of it and she didn’t.

I hadn't considered those options. The only problem I have with them is with the break in the pace of the story that they might cause. The pace was important to me, and having Shelly describe it all kept the pace moving.

Assuming these characters were real for a moment, and that this sort of thing could be sorted out, I would have said that Renee didn’t have a drive to solve Aaron because his primary purpose for her was shelter. He provided that with money, from his job, and some good old fashioned testosterone, from his balls. Yes, he was also generous and giving, but I didn’t feel like the two of them had chemistry, per se. I didn’t feel like there was a part of Aaron’s personality that turned her on. It was more that his sharp edges aligned with areas where Renee had been beaten numb by others.

That is not a judgement. A lot of people would be lucky to find a relationship that suited them that well, and maybe that’s the best that category should ever really get to. I don’t know.

Their relationship is tough. What can you say about a relationship where violence is foreplay?

I had a hard time piecing together how they might need each other. It's definitely the most emotionally difficult relationship I've written, and maybe it could have been better.

I think, though, that having a full cast of characters that are lively and engaging is the next big step for you. I mean, your flapper girls are still the gold standard in this thread. They’re so much fun, and I think you have it in you to pair that kind of energy with a man worthy of their attention. Men can be interesting and lively and brawny too!

My male character need to be more interesting, but it's too easy for me to write the story about the woman/women, and make the man her foil. I imagine that most women would like more complex male characters.

Especially compared to your flapper story, and especially because I brought it up there, I think it’s important to point out that the scope of this story was near perfect. You didn’t waste a word of storytelling, and you got me to buy into the action and the motivations right alongside Renee who is, for most of the story, the reader insert. We’re learning as she’s learning. I think you plotted this story out much more tightly, had a very specific goal in mind, and executed it.

The characters had arcs. There was growth. There was plot. Every scene moved at least one of those things forward, if not more than one, and that’s awesome. Super impressive progress, and at the end of the day, just really damn good storytelling. That kind of skillset enables you to tell any kind of story you want, if you set your mind to it, and it will serve you well if you keep at it.

Thanks. I synopsized this story while I was struggling to finish of "A Valentine's Day Mess." Then mostly wrote the story to the synopsis. I departed from the synopsis at the end of part 1.

Originally, when Renee and Aaron faced off about his lies and she admitted to being aroused by his violence, there would have been a line where she said "You can't control yourself, can you? And you know what? If you can't control yourself, then guess who's in control."

There were originally some fetishy elements in part 2 that I deleted. They addressed issues of control; handcuffs and shackles on Aaron's bed, a dog collar and leash for Renee. I thought it was better for them to confront each other without symbols and constraints, so the maid's costume was the only fetish element that survived from the synopsis.

On a nuts and bolts level (and this is getting really picky), I felt like the flow of the scenes was a little rambly. Sometimes you had scene breaks to differentiate a shift in time. Sometimes you just had “Two weeks later”. Sometimes it felt like time was elapsing and I was supposed to sort that out on my own. I can usually handle any one of those in a story, but I would try to keep it consistent. If you want to have one paragraph surrounded by scene breaks, that just gives a little update between two larger scenes, do it. Just like this.

Thanks. It's something I need to work on. I've been working on pushing the pace of my stories, and 'flow' has been a victim.

I really liked that this story had a larger cast of characters. This is something that’s taken me a really long time to build up to. An embarrassingly large portion of my stories are just the two love interests in a vacuum, interacting just with each other and basically no one else. I’m always impressed when people do something I can’t, or that’s hard for me, and this looked seamless. Aaron’s neighbors and coworkers and exes all drifted in, served their purpose, and left without overstaying their welcome. They made the world around Aaron and Renee feel full.

I find it easier to develop characters when there are more than two people closely involved in the story. This story would be very different without Shelly, Sam and (especially) Carol.

As always before, thank you for your help.

 

[CMK877181]

I think I'm in a position to take more requests, and get to them within a week (finally).

Hey man, so I’ve taken a break from writing for going on 2 years now, but I’m slowly getting back into it, I have about 4 or so stories I’ve started working on. I’m not sure if you have any restrictions in terms of genres but this (https://classic.literotica.com/s/moms-buttons) was my most popular story before I left and I was wondering if you’d be able to give me any feedback on it. It probably isn’t my best-written story but as I said it was my most popular. I’ve always felt like I’ve had trouble writing believable dialogue, I think I’m pretty descriptive as far as actions go but conveying thoughts and emotion through dialogue has always been tough. If you have any advice that I could use now that I’m trying to get back into the swing of things, it would be greatly appreciated!

 

[irvingsmusings]

AwkwardMD,

Would you consider reviewing my latest story, Amanda, CIA Agent Ch. 03 https://www.literotica.com/s/amanda-cia-agent-ch-03 ?

While its score is not terrible, it's fallen short of what I hoped for, and I'm not sure if it's not hot, or not credible, or otherwise lacking? You've provided specific, constructive feedback to so many other writers, and undoubtedly your comments would help me improve too?

 

[AwkwardMD]

Masturbaby part 01, by Alicemoon98

Link

So, earlier in the thread I was asked to read a stroke story, and I wasn't really able to give her anything. I felt really bad about that, but the story didn't really have enough for me to get into. My primary focus, and I think the area I'm most useful with feedback, is in the structure of storytelling, and the many ways that can be accomplished. Short fiction (micro fiction?) is harder because it only hints at those things. There isn't room to get into very much, normally.

Since then, I've written some of my own short fiction. Mine are in the 3-5k word range, but it's basically just one long sex scene. I still don't think I'm very good at it, and I wouldn't say I'm comfortable enough with it to be able give a lot of advice about the subject, but I'm not completely unprepared this time.

I think the thing I had to learn, that I hadn't learned yet before when MaiaEmpire asked for feedback, was that the same basic rule applies to critiquing longer stories and shorter ones. "Does this story achieve what it set out to do?"

Emphatic yes. Masturbaby is pretty great. It's hot. At least one of my friends who regularly follows this thread thought the same thing. I touched myself. Job well done.

Beyond that, I think you were able to give the two main characters some depth in a very short period of time. I was able to take in the complexity of their relationship, and you gave them tension, and you provided some release/relief, but without really resolving the main tension. It's just going to happen again, and the stakes are only going to get higher. That's awesome storytelling.

Short fiction like this isn't my forte. I like dabbling in it from time to time, but my real passion and experience is in short stories and novellas. You're doing something different here, and you're doing it really well. I've read a handful of stories over the years where I read them and didn't have a lot to say because it was already pretty great, but I've only read one story where I sat back afterwards and thought "Wow. This person is better than I am." Now I've read two.

 

[Erodick]

AwkwardMD,
You're exactly what I am looking for. I published my first story here https://literotica.com/s/tutor-pt-01-1 and was hoping to get some feedback from my story in the comments.

A little background; the idea of the story is actually one of my own fantasies. Me being the young teacher and having an affair with a student's mother. After my own marriage and not exactly being "young" anymore, I found it very stimulating to replace me from my fantasy and add my wife into it, not exactly that I am the cuck or the teacher but as if it were an alternate reality where my wife is that student's mother. Hope that made any sense.

I am worried that since a lot of it is from my own memory I may have left out some details that might not be as obvious to the readers or not exactly written for a female audience. In the end, I would like to have produced a good story that my wife would one day enjoy as much as I do.
Thanks

 

[AwkwardMD]

Sorry it took me a while to get to this. I had to think about it all. I appreciate the thanks.

I agree with most of this, and it makes sense, but there's a couple sections I wanted to highlight.

1) Did the division help you read the story, or hurt?

2)I hadn't considered those options. The only problem I have with them is with the break in the pace of the story that they might cause. The pace was important to me, and having Shelly describe it all kept the pace moving.

1) I think it worked, but that has more to do with the way you conceptualized the tension. I think you paced it to be broken in half, so and the pacing is broken into two arcs. You could have done it as one, but it probably wouldn't have been as good. It would have felt like two stories crammed together.

2) Any idea can be adapted for pacing purposes. It's all in how you execute it.

 

[MichaelStJohn]

The Things Done To Me Ch. 02

Hello AwkwardMD,

THANK YOU for reviewing and providing feedback on our stories. This story I'm linking to hasn't gotten a lot of view/votes, so I'm curious what you think the problem with the story might be. I'm interested in any feedback you are able to provide regarding this story. Thank you!

Category: BDSM
Includes: Mind Control and Incest themes
Link: https://www.literotica.com/s/the-thi...ne-to-me-ch-02

 

[AwkwardMD]

I'm in the home stretch finishing one of mine. Expect a flurry of responses once that's done.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Dreams, Drawings, and Panties by DrHappy

Link

This story was largely okay. Well written. Solid enough grammar. It seems like you had a pretty complicated idea, and for the most part I think you executed the idea you had. That’s huge. Kudos. I think the idea itself lacks punch, or a hook. It’s one thing to say “I want to write a Twilight Zone type of story”, but what does that really mean?

The Twilight Zone created horror stories with no real underlying logic (except rarely), and no functional motivation for the antagonist (except rarely). Because of the medium, television, wherein episodes had to be structured into time slots and could only be so long, the resolution of episodes of The Twilight Zone were usually pretty truncated so they could deliver on the specific mode of terror that the episode focused on. It isn’t explained why anything really happened (except rarely), only that it did. In the medium of television… that’s… fine, but in a literary setting that’s crap.

Say what you will about Stephen King, but he delineated three different types of terror writing

The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”

It’s one thing to have mystery, and there is a type of uncertain tension that can be stoked when the villain/antagonist of the piece has unknown or unknowable motives. It’s something else to just have “a series of bad things” with little internal consistency and no discernable point.

I have a lot of questions. Things like… Who is Alex to be targeted like this? Who is Julia? Was Emma a Succubus? What was she after? It seemed like her goal was to undermine Alex’s mental health, which is… a thing? Is this a thing? It didn’t seem like souls were on the table, or that there was some kind of Terminator thing going on where Alex and Julia are destined to give birth to the once and future king who will unite Heaven and Earth and kill all the succubuses, so Emma is sent back in time to stop it?

Honestly, that Terminator thing made the most sense, given the context in the story, out of all the possible plots I could come up with, which is not great. Much, much more could be done with the building blocks you started with, but it seemed like all you wanted to do with those blocks was cram them into round holes.

Don’t lean on “It’s a Twilight Zone episode, it doesn’t have to make sense!” as a shortcut around good storytelling, and solid plotting, and making things make sense. Be purposeful. Spend some time with the different layers of your story, and get to know everyone. Emma might have been where the story started, but aside from having very vigorous sex, she’s a non-entity. You want your villain, in stories that have villains, to be so much more charming than this. Villains set the bar.

 

[DrHappy]

AwkwardMD,

Thank you for taking the time to read my story and to provide thoughtful feedback. I’m taking your advice from your original post in this thread to “sit with it for a day or two,” but I wanted to let you know that I’ve read your comments a few times and I’m still digesting them. I’ll follow up with another post soon.

So far, I’ve only gotten two comments for this story on Lit, despite getting fairly good ratings. One commenter loved the story, and the other one didn’t. I’m very grateful for any specific feedback from someone other than myself.

 

[DrHappy]

On the positive, it looks like I actually executed the story in my head reasonably well, which I’m happy about. This story grew much bigger than I expected, and it looked like it could have been improved by setting my sights even higher. This is my third story here, and I’m pleased with my progress as a writer in that regard. It was also my longest story at +35K words, which was new territory for me. It started as a fairly simple premise but grew in complexity as I fleshed out the details. It easily could have been much longer with more character development. I’ve read stories that seemed needlessly long with too many details, and maybe I erred on the side of brevity.

Other shortfalls and struggles: Based on your questions, it looks like I may have been too subtle in explaining what was happening to Alex (spoiler). Alex wasn’t being tormented for the sake of being tormented. She wasn't after his mental health. His torments were the side-effects of having his soul taken away one piece at a time. Yes, she was a succubus. I gave some clues like “empty hole in his soul that was torn out of him,” but they were metaphorical and not explicit. I also didn't dwell on the supernatural aspect. Another part of my thinking was that everyone can relate to the pain at the loss of someone dear and that the pain of the loss of a soulmate might feel like a piece of their soul was taken away. She fooled him into believing that she was his soulmate.

I worried about some of my descriptions being too tedious. I know that I tend to do this, and many of my edits were related to this. I’ve seen the advice about “show, don’t describe,” and I still suspect that I may have been guilty of describing too much.

I struggled with how to best wrap things up without it being like the cheesy ending of a Scooby-Doo episode where the initial clues were useless in helping to figure out the mystery. I wanted the reader to at least suspect that there was something bad about either Emma or Julia. I liked the building drama near the end between Alex and Julia and chose to have them become closer by figuring things out together. One potential weakness in my chosen ending was that there was never a final confrontation with Emma. I had trouble with coming up with a confrontation that didn’t seem too contrived or predictable.

Big Picture: There were LOTS of directions that I could have gone with this premise. I never intended to turn this into a terror or horror story. I'd prefer an Indiana Jones story over Steven King (except for the most recent Indiana Jone movie, which was terrible). I liked exploring the psychological suspense/thriller/mystery aspects. Here are some big picture points I’ve gotten out of your comments that I can use for future stories:

• Make sure that the functional motivation for the antagonist is clear.
• If the storyline is complicated, the story might need to be longer.

This was my first time using Grammarly (free version). Wow, I highly recommend it. It allowed me to focus more on the story line and less on the mechanics and catching typos.

Again, thank you for your time in reading my story and giving your feedback. Does it look like I misinterpreted anything from your comments?

 

[AwkwardMD]

Make sure that the functional motivation for the antagonist is clear.

The only thing I want to add to this is to reiterate that the antagonist (if the story has one, and not all do) sets the bar for the story. They set the stakes, and the stakes define the tension. If the stakes are high, and the consequences are high, that's a good opportunity for really strong resolution. If you have an antagonist who seemingly isn't after anything, then it's unclear what was at risk. Like, yes, he ended up with Julia and that's better because he doesn't wake up sad every day, but that's only a moderate resolution after 35k words.

Yes, you could have made the story longer and gotten a bit more resolution, but the other option was to make the story much shorter.

There was one other thing I wanted to mention, and that was that the dialog during sex was very stiff and direct. Extremely on the nose about everything. This is, technically, a matter of style. How you want your characters to talk is how your characters should talk, but there is something to be said for sexy time being a place where the characters let their hair down and are at their least formal. I didn't feel like the dialog was stiff anywhere else, just whenever things got a little heated.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Mom's Buttons, by CMK877181

Link

Mom’s Buttons is a perfectly acceptable vehicle to get to quick mom/son incest. It doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny, but that’s fine. It doesn’t seem like it’s going for much more than being a wank story, which is fine. The world needs wank stories...

...but...

...if you’re wondering why it’s hard to write plausible dialog for a story in which Mom and Son go from ‘Mom and Son’ to ‘Lovers’ in the course of, like, thirty minutes, with no prior lead in or setup, there’s your problem. The scenario isn’t plausible on the face of it. The dialog, then, is just ‘the things I need my characters to say to make this work’.

That’s fine for what it is, but if you want to be working on plausibility then your underlying story is where you should start. This story is right on the same level as “Step sister got stuck in the washing machine AGAIN!”

I kept this review pretty brief because I feel like I can succinctly point out the cause of the problem you yourself identified, and I focused on that. I don’t have a whole lot more to say about it. As the views, comments, and voting have signaled, it’s a solid little wank piece and that’s a thing to be proud of on its own.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Amanda, CIA Agent Ch. 03, by irvingsmusings

Link

Specific, constructive feedback.

Okay.

You wrote Amanda as an incapable field agent whose only redeeming quality is her body. You added elements to the story that serve no purpose except to highlight how bad and awkward she is, and to lower everyone’s estimation of her. Then, when she’s at her lowest and being sexually abused by two characters with systemic power over her, you had another character tell her that she’s a tease because of her shape (despite a very modest wardrobe). You made it so that Amanda deserves to be treated like garbage because she has curves.

I phrased the preceding very carefully. Usually, in my feedback, I try to treat the characters as real. I don’t talk about them as characters. I try to read them as real, and treat their choices as real, and their feelings as real, and when I engage with the author about them I do so with language and phrasings that treat the work with respect.

This story reads like a revenge fantasy. It reads like you, the author, were up for a job/promotion, and you didn’t get it. A woman got it instead, and you’re bitter. It reads like you think she only got the job/promotion because she was hot, or she’s a diversity hire. She wouldn’t have appreciated the job as much as you would have, or treated it as seriously as you would have, or been as good at it as you would have, and so Amanda suffers to soothe your bruised ego.

Admittedly, I only read chapter 3, so maybe there’s a whole section of Amanda being a badass earlier on, but there’s nothing in this story to justify Amanda being part of such an elite class as a CIA field agent. She isn’t capable. She isn’t cunning. She doesn’t problem solve. She can barely walk. She’s beaten at every game, can’t seem to handle basic conversations without turning on every guy around her, and has no plan for getting what she wants except to just give in and get fucked. At every turn, she either objectifies herself or is objectified by others, and this is treated by everyone around her, men and women, as completely normal if not something she was basically begging for.

This story reads like “I don’t hate women, but I hate it when women get things they don’t deserve just because they’re women.” If you’ve never really considered why you’re writing this story, and this character, maybe spend some time thinking about that.

NOW

If you feel like that was an unfair characterization of you, then I apologize. If those aren’t your politics, and that really isn’t how you feel, that’s good, but this is how Amanda, CIA Agent reads.

There is a phenomenon in humans where parts of our brain experience the media in front of us as if it was real. When watching a romance, our hearts swell and we get big, goofy smiles. When watching slapstick comedy, a man might sympathetically wince and place his hands over his groin when a character gets kicked in the nuts. He might even feel a physical twinge as muscles contract in an unconscious protective effort. When a character jumps out of a plane, and the camera is pointed downward, our stomachs lurch as gravity takes hold and the POV races downward. We feel what we see.

I’m fond of a Youtube series called Survive the Hunt wherein a very talkative British guy plays GTA V and drives around like a muppet for an hour trying to evade his friends, and whenever he gets into a high speed chase I sit in my chair and lean into the turns like I can somehow aid the weight mechanics of his vehicle. I press my feet against the back of the desk and brace for impact when he’s clearly about to hit a wall. I gasp when he hits a ramp and jumps.

I can’t stop these physical reactions to media, because I’m a human and that’s how we’re built. Our brains aren’t designed for things that aren’t real in front of us, so we treat them as real. There’s no “media mode” in the sympathetic nervous system, so a threat (like, say, a bear on screen that ‘sees us’) is treated as a threat and we the audience experience a rush. Our hearts start racing. This is why we consume media in the first place; we can connect with it.

I feel hated reading Amanda, CIA Agent because I’m a woman.

Now, for some women who have complicated body issues, or a complicated sexual history, or just regular old self-hatred, that might work for them. For men who have women issues, your story might work for them too. Beyond those readerships I think a lot of readers are probably clicking into your story and finding nothing to relate to, and that’s where you’re finding a disconnect between your expectations and the reader reactions. Few comments. Few votes. Lower score than you were hoping for. It doesn’t feel real; it feels like it’s based on a warped view of reality.

A lot of writers on Lit like to say things like ‘Interpretation of my work is completely out of my control. Ethics don’t factor into this. Fantasy is fantasy.”

This is untrue on the face of it. We, as authors, if we’re purposeful and intentional, are capable of crafting specific experiences in our readers. We can control the message. We can convey images and thoughts and feelings. It’s pretty rare that readers walk away from one of my stories having grossly misinterpreted it. They might not like my work, but that’s a matter of taste and rarely a matter of mixed signals.

It takes effort and practice to cultivate the skills to do this, but it’s not impossible.

If your goal was to trot out rapebait with no redeeming qualities, then well done. Amanda is a lamb for slaughter and I felt deeply uncomfortable watching it happen. If, however, you were trying to write about a character in a bad situation, who gets taken advantage of despite her best efforts, and who doesn’t deserve what happens to her, then I feel like you missed the mark.


Postscript: “Please spend some time thinking about why you wrote this story” is advice I’ve given before, and in every instance I really do hope they follow through with that. I don’t suggest people do things because what I really want is to throw shade. I want them to do the thing.

There’s a difference between non-consensual fantasies and non-consensual stories that punch down, or hate women, or are rooted in really toxic ideas. It is only when we’re purposeful, and when we’re intentional, and when we know why we’re writing the things that we’re writing, that we can do it effectively.

‘Writing effectively’ is something I wish for everyone who follows this thread, and who asks for feedback. I want us all to make the things we set out to make, and convey the things we intended to convey.

Non-con is a fraught subject. There are myriad reasons to wade into those waters, from both sides, but some of those reasons are unhealthy for everyone including the author.

 

[irvingsmusings]

Dear AwkwardMD,

Thank you for your helpful and insight-laden feedback.

It’s useful to know that Amanda comes across as incapable and incompetent. My intention was the opposite. She is meant to be intelligent, ambitious, and bent on retribution. Her failures were intended to motivate her increased effort and determination. I’ll need to rewrite that part.

It’s also helpful to know the story reads as a revenge fantasy. Yes, Amanda is extremely hot. Yes, she is repeatedly victimized and objectified. But the victimizers are intended to read as villians. Perhaps that wasn’t apparent – or maybe it’s just insufficient to save some readers from the sensation of their car hitting a wall or being eaten by the menacing bear, as you so eloquently put it. Obviously, that’s not the reader experience I was aiming for.

Amanda is not meant to be a lamb for slaughter. She doesn’t at all deserve what happens. So I have some work to do on the story – to hopefully give it some redeeming qualities - and as you suggest, some thinking to do about its objective.

Thank you for all the time and effort you’ve invested in providing such a specific, constructive, respectful critique.

 

[AwkwardMD]

It's okay to have stories where bad characters do and say bad things. Villains can be mean and hurtful, and a good storyteller can use that as motivation to push an injured protagonist further than they ever thought they could go.

The difference here is that the story reinforced that Amanda really was bad. Everyone on her team was rightly frustrated with her during that memory stick exercise. All the men did their parts, but the one woman didn't. She could have been partially successful, or done some things that really saved the day for the time while still ultimately getting tossed in the drink by Percy, but the story paints her as incompetent.

I've talked before about the concept of authorial endorsement, and it's important to note that this can be unintentional. Not everyone goes about writing non-con fantasies with the intention of alienating their female readers. Amanda, CIA Agent repeatedly puts Amanda in situations where she has little agency. When she does have agency, she doesn't seem to do very much with it.

Maybe that's all part of the plan, and it's all going to be turned around in the last act, but I personally wouldn't have stuck with it to find out.