Ben_Efits and Urban Fantasies

[Ben_Efits]

Hello everyone!

It's good to see you've made your way here.

And I'd like to personally thank you for stopping by.
Truth is, I'd like to become a better artist of my craft. That is to say, I'd prefer to be a better worker of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs and literature; an Author. One day published and if my cards fall right, popular.

I've written in third-person for over a decade, and though this is the second submission I made it was the first accepted by Literotica.

It's written in first person perspective, as it is happening.

The 'Urban Fantasies' theme is such that I wish to relate an idea that stereotypical fantasies aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Anyways - Comments, Criticisms, and Praise welcome!

http://www.literotica.com/s/urban-fantasies-the-model

 

[PennLady]

Just read it and left you a comment.

 

[Ben_Efits]

Thanks!!

Yeah - Not all of my writing is for everyone, but I'm hoping that once I have enough up that some of my writing will be.
And - I'll keep that in mind for future posts. I appreciate the honesty!!

 

[CWatson]

Overall I like it. Your style is a bit choppy and telegraphic, but there's nothing wrong with that; if anything, it's better to have a style at all.

You have some problems with punctuation, particularly apostrophes; do some studying on how they are used and when they are appropriate. (Hint: ownership and contractions.) Also, you have some misspellings; an "ascent" is a climb," whereas "assent" is agreement. You'll want to get into the habit of doing a word-by-word editing pass before submitting; alternately, train yourself to catch these errors as you write.

The two real problems I had with it were the changing of tenses from present to past as you moved between segments, and the lack of any real header BETWEEN segments. I don't remember anymore if Literotica allows you to boldface things in stories, but if they do, then using that to make the "One week later" and "One month later" segments breaks stand out would just make the story easier to navigate.

Finally--and feel free to take this with a grain of salt, because I say this to everyone; but it bears repeating--I feel like I want to know more about the characters. Your story is about sex, and sex alone, and it's very well written, but eventually I want to know things like personality and motivation. What makes Sinclair's cock so irresistable to Sara? What about Sara is attractive to Sin? There are two basic angles you can use to make The Reader interested in the sex going on between your characters: one is to write smoking-hot sex, and the other is to give the characters personality. This second way is a bit more reliable, because the definition of "smoking hot sex" changes from reader to reader. Pennlady, I note, wasn't a huge fan of the name-calling and degredation, and frankly neither was I. Now, that's not to suggest that your story was bad, because it wasn't; I'm just pointing out that, on the "smoking hot sex" score, right now you're zero for two. One reader's fetish is another reader's squick, so if you play solely to the fetishes, you have less wide appeal than you could.

That's all I got. Hope it helps.

 

[lovecraft68]

Read it and liked it.

I don;t feel too qualified to pick apart grammar and technical aspects, as my own are lacking a bit. But I think Cwatson covered that well.

I think it was good, but pretty much stroke. I agree with CW that I would have liked to know more about the two of them.

Reason is that for me, and I think many others, the sex is hotter if we have some motivation and know something about the people.

Ask yourself what's better a quickie or a nice long romp with great foreplay? That's the difference between a stroker and erotica.

Knowing more about Sin&Sara would have made it deliver more punch.

Having said that, the punch was still there and there is an audience for that.

I am also mainly chiming in to let you know that I liked the degrading language. It plays to my personal tastes and you did it well.

But again knowing more about Sara could have made it hotter, I would like to know why she likes being treated that way (also takes the edge off the demeaning to readers like Pennlady, if you know why she likes it, its easier to handle)

all in all nice job.

 

[PennLady]

I decided to expand a bit. But first, to answer CWatson's question, you can use bold tags in Lit stories <b> </b>. I wouldn't use them often, but for things like section headings, they can stand out a bit more than italics.

I may have held back a bit. I know sometimes I get caught up in wishing things were in a story but then I try to step back and evaluate how a story is about what it is about (credit Roger Ebert on that). So you did write a short erotic story, which I'm sure a lot of people will like. I wasn't distracted by any major technical problems; in fact, I didn't even notice the verb tense thing, which usually do catch my eye.

But I have to agree with CWatson in that I also find myself wanting to know more about the characters. It's almost the first thing I have to say about every shorter story. I think I held back from saying that b/c I was trying not to inject too much of what I wanted in the story. But it would have helped, and mostly -- as lovecraft said -- it would have helped immensely to know why Sara wanted to be called a slut.

It seems cliche to have the hero just "know" that a woman wants to be treated that way. If she does, then fine, but how does he know? Doesn't he run at least a 50/50 chance of her smacking him? Especially since he's had limited interaction with Sara, by her own admission. Conversely, nothing's been done to establish Sinclair as a dominant alpha-type.

And I'm not saying you need tons of explanation of this, although your story is short enough that expanding on it wouldn't a) be a bad thing or b) make it overly long.

 

[Ben_Efits]

Responses

WOW!

Okay - Thank you all for your words.
First -- YES! Punctuation is my devil in writing. It seems no matter how much I research, work, and look in to it, I cannot seem to figure it out. (Note: Comma's especially) So...
I am sorry but it's just something that's going to have to go to my editor. It eludes me.
Word Choice: Yeah. 'ascent' looked off but I couldn't figure out why, and should have looked further in to it. I think some times it's also having that extra pair of eyes: I should take others up on that and not be too proud to think 'I don't need it.'

As far as the name calling... o.o Woah. I just thought it was something people did... didn't know it was MY fetish. Just... woah. o.o I'll pay some more attention to that kind of thing in the future.

Character Development: Because these are little blurbs I write to relax from a larger piece I'm working on, I hadn't thought to make the characters. You're VERY correct when you say it's a stroker piece with no life or volume to it.

Bolds and Italics: The first piece I submitted to lit demands the use of Bold/Italics for emphasis... but I'm incompetent at the HTML stuff, so it became a rejected piece. I've tried to submit things since that don't use these, so I'm no longer being rejected.
Sometimes I just wish it was a bit easier, no?

Thank you all so very much for your comments and opinions. I will keep them all in mind as I continue writing.

Namaste!!

 

[PennLady]

WOW!

Okay - Thank you all for your words.
First -- YES! Punctuation is my devil in writing. It seems no matter how much I research, work, and look in to it, I cannot seem to figure it out. (Note: Comma's especially) So...
I am sorry but it's just something that's going to have to go to my editor. It eludes me.

You'll want to work as much as you can on this, b/c not every editor is going to be willing to correct such basic things. A grammar check may help to an extent, but you should work to master some basic rules. It's a tough one for me, b/c I do know those rules and I find it frustrating when others don't, but as you point out, we don't all learn the same way so naturally it will be more difficult for some than others. But as with everything else, you'll improve with practice.

I haven't read it myself but the book Eats, Shoots and Leaves is, I think, highly recommended for punctuation guidance.

Word Choice: Yeah. 'ascent' looked off but I couldn't figure out why, and should have looked further in to it. I think some times it's also having that extra pair of eyes: I should take others up on that and not be too proud to think 'I don't need it.'

Another problem with something like "ascent" is that while it is the wrong word, it is spelled correctly, so a spell check won't pick it up. So absolutely another pair of eyes can help. If you can't, or don't want to, try some other things people have mentioned -- read your story out loud to yourself, or change the font and/or color, whatever makes it look different to you and forces you to really look at the text, not at what you think is there, or what you want to be there.

Everybody can use a second pair of eyes.

As far as the name calling... o.o Woah. I just thought it was something people did... didn't know it was MY fetish. Just... woah. o.o I'll pay some more attention to that kind of thing in the future.

LOL It's not just your fetish, trust me, but it's not everyone's fetish either. I don't have anything like that in my stories, mostly b/c it's not something I like. Just like some people don't care for bondage or whatever, not everyone cares for that kind of name-calling. Everyone likes something different, so don't worry about trying to please everyone.

Character Development: Because these are little blurbs I write to relax from a larger piece I'm working on, I hadn't thought to make the characters. You're VERY correct when you say it's a stroker piece with no life or volume to it.

I think there's a lot of debate on this. Some people like a flat stroke piece with nothing but sex, but others want a little -- not a ton -- of character development because it makes them enjoy the stroke piece more. It's not that there's no life or volume to your piece; I think it's more that there isn't enough.

Bolds and Italics: The first piece I submitted to lit demands the use of Bold/Italics for emphasis... but I'm incompetent at the HTML stuff, so it became a rejected piece. I've tried to submit things since that don't use these, so I'm no longer being rejected.
Sometimes I just wish it was a bit easier, no?

Oh, we all do. But again, it just takes some practice. Now, you can submit pieces in RTF or DOC format, with the text bolded or italicized, but it may take longer for it to post, b/c Laurel is going to have to put that code in somehow.

What I do -- and I have experience writing HTML code, albeit a long time ago -- is insert the code as I go along. So I will italicize a word, but also but the tags around it. So I'll write <i>italicized text</i> in my draft and then the tags remain when I copy and paste it into the submission box.

If you really don't want to learn that, then just leave it out. The readers will get the idea.

Good luck!