Feedback Request: Memory Lane

[LightningSeed]

Memory Lane is a story about a husband and wife’s vacation at a Mexican resort, which is complicated by two single guys who mistakenly booked themselves into the wrong place.
The early comments on the story have been widely divergent. Would love any input anyone would like to give. Thanks for reading this far

https://www.literotica.com/s/memory-lane-7

 

[hadruprider]

Well, it's a controversial subject, so inevitably you will get these divergent opinions.
As you are fairly new here, you may not be aware that there are some pathetic anonymous trolls who write very similar comments on most stories, regardless of content. This is particularly a problem with the LW category. You can delete some of those dumb comments.

I thought the story was OK, fairly well written and well paced, not too many typos (forgetting a space after " marks came up a few times). The plot wasn't that interesting. A holiday resort meetup is a very common setting. As soon as drugs were mentioned it was predictable how the story was going to play out. The sex scenes were also in the 6 or 7 out of 10 category to me. The drugs seem to have little effect on her - the sex is no wilder after that than it was before.

 

[LightningSeed]

Thanks for taking the time out to read and review

Well, it's a controversial subject, so inevitably you will get these divergent opinions.
As you are fairly new here, you may not be aware that there are some pathetic anonymous trolls who write very similar comments on most stories, regardless of content. This is particularly a problem with the LW category. You can delete some of those dumb comments.

I thought the story was OK, fairly well written and well paced, not too many typos (forgetting a space after " marks came up a few times). The plot wasn't that interesting. A holiday resort meetup is a very common setting. As soon as drugs were mentioned it was predictable how the story was going to play out. The sex scenes were also in the 6 or 7 out of 10 category to me. The drugs seem to have little effect on her - the sex is no wilder after that than it was before.

 

[8letters]

LW is not my category so I only read a little bit. I thought your beginning was unusual - sort of talking directly to the reader and sort of not.

 

[LightningSeed]

I thought your beginning was unusual - sort of talking directly to the reader and sort of not.

Thanks. I felt like a non-traditional open might be fun.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Adultery and drug use are elements that tend to draw... strong reactions... from a certain percentage of the audience. Put them together, and you can count on some ragewanking in the comments

I thought it was well written. A couple of minor typos, but nothing too intrusive, and you developed the characters well. This line stood out to me:

Her leg, the top of her right thigh, has a scrape on it and tiny droplets of blood are pooling along the line of the scrape, red quivering circles waiting to be either jostled and run or stay in place and firm up.

It felt like foreshadowing the main storyline - will they stay inside their comfort zone, or won't they?

 

[LightningSeed]

Thanks for taking a look! Appreciate the feedback, and for pointing out your favorite line. That was actually in many ways the impetus for the story.

Adultery and drug use are elements that tend to draw... strong reactions... from a certain percentage of the audience. Put them together, and you can count on some ragewanking in the comments

I thought it was well written. A couple of minor typos, but nothing too intrusive, and you developed the characters well. This line stood out to me:



It felt like foreshadowing the main storyline - will they stay inside their comfort zone, or won't they?

 

[hpycpl]

Pm

I left you a PM instead of commenting here as I think I would spoil the story for anyone who hasn't read it yet.

 

[Valint]

The story didn't work for me.

So, for stories on this site, I'm looking for it to either work as porn or non-porn. For porn, it obviously has to hit the right kink, and this doesn't. It came across to me as a basic NTR story, which I'd consider worse than a cuckold story. At least a cuckold story has the husband getting something out of the situation; a NTR story is just about the "taking away", how a weak and pathetic man has the woman he cares about taken away from him.

I'm sure there are readers who are into emotional sadomasochism that this really worked for, so I won't judge (okay, I'm lying: NTR is a trash fetish), but that's not my kink, so it didn't work for me on a porn level.

On a non-porn level, I need something to care about in the story, and I just didn't.

The husband didn't seem to care about his wife or marriage. He folded to something on the level of junior high school peer pressure, and the story was clear at pointing out that this wasn't a "What happens in Vegas" situation with no lasting repercussions: No condoms or other protection used during the wife's gangbang, and the drug dealers were from the couple's home city (and almost certainly got enough information from the wife that they could track her down later).

If the husband didn't care, it's hard for me to, and the husband was too weak and pathetic for me to care about him, so the story was basically just a couple of people destroying their marriage and life over a holiday, but who I really didn't give a rat's ass about, so there was no impact.

To me, the issue with the story is lampshaded by something you said in the comments, "I see Rebecca as very much a loving wife. She and George may have some issues but they do love each other."

I don't see that. At all. To me, almost all cuckold (and most swapping/swinging/watching) stories are great examples of unreliable narrators. The author tells us in narration that the wife truly and deeply loves the husband, and then shows us a wife who has no respect for her husband and, at best, appears mildly fond of him, on the level of a pet dog that you've had long enough to grow on you.

It's kind of like the stories in which you have a mentally-disabled kid who tells the reader about his bestest friends... and as he describes them, you realize that they're not his friends at all, but bullies who are tormenting him. That's most cuckold stories, but with a passive and pathetic husband instead of a mentally-disabled child.

To work as a story, I think this needs to be the first chapter of something larger. Without a next chapter, the implicit assumption for the reader is that whatever bad stuff the author set up in the first chapter isn't going to change, so the husband will always be a wimp, the wife will continue her downward slide, and the drug dealers are going to be a part of their lives. There's an implicit next chapter in which the only question is the precise mechanism by which the couple's lives are destroyed, whether it's being coerced into being drug mules, the wife becoming a coke whore, or simply that the wife's affair with the drug dealers keeps going on back home.

So, if this were the first part of the story arc, and it's just about the couple descending into degradation or losing (or almost losing) everything... and then the husband finds his balls, or the wife finds a better man who will protect her, or the kids find someone in their lives to protect them against what their pathetic parents have brought into their lives... then, okay, we can evaluate that entire story arc as a whole.

But, on its own, this story is just about two very stupid people doing very stupid things, without anyone worth rooting for.

 

[8letters]

Thinking some more on the story, I feel you should have named where the couple was from. I'm guessing that you wanted to make the story general. However, not naming where they were from led to lots of awkward workarounds such as talking about the team on the narrtor's hat without mentioning anything about the team.

 

[LightningSeed]

The story didn't work for me.

Thanks for taking the time out to write a well-thought out review. I definitely am learning that the genre isn’t for everyone.
In terms of the writing - as opposed to thematic - observations I did find many of them to be interesting and helpful. Appreciate you reading and responding very much!

 

[gunhilltrain]

This may be my thing rather than yours, but I'd like to know a bit more about the characters beyond them just being Americans in Mexico. You mention how they find out that they're all from the same area. Well, the country hasn't been completely homogenized yet; where is it?

The narrator says his job is almost too dull to describe, and I'd guess he thinks the same way about his hometown. I can see how it makes sense to not specify either the job or the city since he doesn't seem to have strong feelings about them. So there is a case to be made for going the generic route.

 

[LightningSeed]

This may be my thing rather than yours, but I'd like to know a bit more about the characters beyond them just being Americans in Mexico. You mention how they find out that they're all from the same area. Well, the country hasn't been completely homogenized yet; where is it?

The narrator says his job is almost too dull to describe, and I'd guess he thinks the same way about his hometown. I can see how it makes sense to not specify either the job or the city since he doesn't seem to have strong feelings about them. So there is a case to be made for going the generic route.

You make good points. I really had to make a decision as to whether this was going to be 60k words or just a short story. Had I gone the novel/novella route I could have fleshed out everyone in greater detail, but ultimately I felt like part of what made the last sex scene as erotic as it was was the shock and immediacy, and a longer piece would have telegraphed that for quite awhile.
Thanks so much for reading it and taking the time to weigh in!