This week I received the following two feedbacks in the same batch of e-mail.
Feedback # 1 seemed to like my story 'Once a wife, now a teenagers slut':
“A Great story I hope you continue as I always look for updates. Thanks KEV”
Feedback # 2 was a good deal less complementary about the same story:
"get real this couple is real plastic ... give the readers a break and either write about how a real couple handles punks like these two teenage skanks or put this story in the rubbish bin "
Certainly, 'different strokes for different folks' applies. I can understand that, but there is an interesting theme here I have seen before.
Most of my stories are on a D/s theme, and many include a husband who waffles indecisively about what to do about losing his wife to a dominant lover. A number of my readers, almost always anonymous (but who I suspect are uniformly male) take extreme offense at the possibility that any man would be such a wimp. Their feedback usually suggests my story should end with the cuckolded husband breaking both legs (or perhaps the skull) of his wife's lover with a baseball bat.
Actually, as an old macho jock myself, I understand that reaction. For a lot of men, including myself, John Wayne is the model of the 'real man.', and anything less is an insult to our masculinity. I remember being disgusted with Hamlet when I was exposed to him for the first time in high school: I thought, “Jesus, what a sissy! Why not just go kill the son of a bitch?" I suspect my critic who found my wimp of a husband to be "plastic" didn't think much of Shakespeare's Danish Prince either.
At the same time, my macho aside, I am a teller of tall tales. It seems to me that my critic has overlooked a couple of important points.
First, tall tales are always fantasy, all of them, including those that feature John Wayne. As a writer, I plead guilty to being an amateur hack. I will accept as true that my characters are 'plastic'. If I was any good at this, I probably would be getting paid. At the same time, however, what else should be expected of a fantasy but a caricature of real life?
Second, a tall tale is what it is..., TALL. "Once a wife..." is a story about a submissive woman who becomes the sex slave of a young neighbor who also traps the husband into a situation where both husband and wife are subject to blackmail. I suspect that doesn't happen very often in real life, if at all. I would have thought that most readers would not expect reality in such a plot, and that any who did would have abandoned the story before finishing the first page of Chapter 1. My critic must be even dumber than I am, or he wouldn't have wasted his time reading all way to chapter 3. On the other hand, if he didn't read chapters 1 and 2, perhaps that's why he thought the characters were 'plastic'.
Third, as I have mentioned earlier, the indecision (cowardice?) of my husband does not itself make him more ‘plastic’ than Hamlet, (although I will certainly agree that the great bard presented his character with more skill than I did mine.) The fault, if any, is neither in the character nor the situation, and if my husband is less ‘real’ than Hamlet, what is a reader entitled to expect for free on the Internet? Still, I plead guilty as charged. Nevertheless, if I have learned anything in my many years, it is that I am not Shakespeare or even Hemingway, but then unlike my critic, I have also begun to suspect that I am not John Wayne either. So few of us are.
What do the rest of you authors of sexual fantasies (and dirty stories) think?
Feedback # 1 seemed to like my story 'Once a wife, now a teenagers slut':
“A Great story I hope you continue as I always look for updates. Thanks KEV”
Feedback # 2 was a good deal less complementary about the same story:
"get real this couple is real plastic ... give the readers a break and either write about how a real couple handles punks like these two teenage skanks or put this story in the rubbish bin "
Certainly, 'different strokes for different folks' applies. I can understand that, but there is an interesting theme here I have seen before.
Most of my stories are on a D/s theme, and many include a husband who waffles indecisively about what to do about losing his wife to a dominant lover. A number of my readers, almost always anonymous (but who I suspect are uniformly male) take extreme offense at the possibility that any man would be such a wimp. Their feedback usually suggests my story should end with the cuckolded husband breaking both legs (or perhaps the skull) of his wife's lover with a baseball bat.
Actually, as an old macho jock myself, I understand that reaction. For a lot of men, including myself, John Wayne is the model of the 'real man.', and anything less is an insult to our masculinity. I remember being disgusted with Hamlet when I was exposed to him for the first time in high school: I thought, “Jesus, what a sissy! Why not just go kill the son of a bitch?" I suspect my critic who found my wimp of a husband to be "plastic" didn't think much of Shakespeare's Danish Prince either.
At the same time, my macho aside, I am a teller of tall tales. It seems to me that my critic has overlooked a couple of important points.
First, tall tales are always fantasy, all of them, including those that feature John Wayne. As a writer, I plead guilty to being an amateur hack. I will accept as true that my characters are 'plastic'. If I was any good at this, I probably would be getting paid. At the same time, however, what else should be expected of a fantasy but a caricature of real life?
Second, a tall tale is what it is..., TALL. "Once a wife..." is a story about a submissive woman who becomes the sex slave of a young neighbor who also traps the husband into a situation where both husband and wife are subject to blackmail. I suspect that doesn't happen very often in real life, if at all. I would have thought that most readers would not expect reality in such a plot, and that any who did would have abandoned the story before finishing the first page of Chapter 1. My critic must be even dumber than I am, or he wouldn't have wasted his time reading all way to chapter 3. On the other hand, if he didn't read chapters 1 and 2, perhaps that's why he thought the characters were 'plastic'.
Third, as I have mentioned earlier, the indecision (cowardice?) of my husband does not itself make him more ‘plastic’ than Hamlet, (although I will certainly agree that the great bard presented his character with more skill than I did mine.) The fault, if any, is neither in the character nor the situation, and if my husband is less ‘real’ than Hamlet, what is a reader entitled to expect for free on the Internet? Still, I plead guilty as charged. Nevertheless, if I have learned anything in my many years, it is that I am not Shakespeare or even Hemingway, but then unlike my critic, I have also begun to suspect that I am not John Wayne either. So few of us are.
What do the rest of you authors of sexual fantasies (and dirty stories) think?
