Feedback requested for a new story in Erotic Couplings

[gunhilltrain]

I haven't requested feedback on this forum in a while (a couple of years I think) but I would like to get some on a story I posted yesterday.

Mandy's Cemetery Adventure

Thanks!

 

[yowser]

That was a sweet tale, a reminiscence almost wistful, but carefully controlled. I liked your characters, how you played out the scene.

A major strength of your writing to me (and not just because I am familiar with the region) is how you use location, with specific details, to ground your story. Way too many Lit offerings are vague and generic to the point of annoyance (where are you, anyway?) and I appreciate the small observations that ground the characters and make them come alive.

Overall, no real complaints about the bricks and mortar of the tale (I'll put a couple nit-picks at the end), as you write clearly and with far better command of the language than most of the offerings here.

A couple structural things that I think you could have done a little better:

Since it is a musing back in time, I think you could have heightened the tension (perhaps the poignancy) with just a couple more reflections. Could the MC dredge up some reactions to the garter belt thing? Ever seen one before? How nervous was he entering the mausoleum? Just a couple of reactions would advance the tale. The MC seems a bit detached sometimes.

Clarity: a little stumbling with the meeting M with your car. A sentence saying she got into it would avoid the readers' momentary confusion (are they driving to the cemetery? Getting out to walk there?) Even noting how M got into the car would have done it (did she look excited? cheshire cat smile?)

If I had been writing, I would have ratcheted up the sexual tension a bit by noting the absence of people in the cemetery (surely the characters would have been looking around for others?) Maybe throw in one or two folks, who managed to disappear after a brief spell, anything to increase the anxiety about being spotted.

Second erection comes awfully fast. Just a comment or two on how that happened would help (even twenty year old penises don't respond instantly, and this part felt unrealistically quick, at least without some insight from the MC.)

Nitpicks:

"Four years ago, when my Uncle Jeff was buried here, my family drove around afterwards. We were sort of sightseeing if looking at mausoleums could be considered sights to be seen."

comma after 'sightseeing'

it seemed unlikely there would be any passerby back there. (reads awkwardly, could probably rephrase.)

After that it was mostly, "Fuck me, fuck me harder," or whatever chicks say when they're getting nailed.
(Yes, I know, supposed to read retro, but still jarring and a bit obnoxious.)

Overall, a wonderful little mini-story, alive with memories, well-paced and not overwritten. Lovely.

 

[gunhilltrain]

That was a sweet tale, a reminiscence almost wistful, but carefully controlled. I liked your characters, how you played out the scene.

A major strength of your writing to me (and not just because I am familiar with the region) is how you use location, with specific details, to ground your story. Way too many Lit offerings are vague and generic to the point of annoyance (where are you, anyway?) and I appreciate the small observations that ground the characters and make them come alive.

Overall, no real complaints about the bricks and mortar of the tale (I'll put a couple nit-picks at the end), as you write clearly and with far better command of the language than most of the offerings here.

A couple structural things that I think you could have done a little better:

Since it is a musing back in time, I think you could have heightened the tension (perhaps the poignancy) with just a couple more reflections. Could the MC dredge up some reactions to the garter belt thing? Ever seen one before? How nervous was he entering the mausoleum? Just a couple of reactions would advance the tale. The MC seems a bit detached sometimes.

Clarity: a little stumbling with the meeting M with your car. A sentence saying she got into it would avoid the readers' momentary confusion (are they driving to the cemetery? Getting out to walk there?) Even noting how M got into the car would have done it (did she look excited? cheshire cat smile?)

If I had been writing, I would have ratcheted up the sexual tension a bit by noting the absence of people in the cemetery (surely the characters would have been looking around for others?) Maybe throw in one or two folks, who managed to disappear after a brief spell, anything to increase the anxiety about being spotted.

Second erection comes awfully fast. Just a comment or two on how that happened would help (even twenty year old penises don't respond instantly, and this part felt unrealistically quick, at least without some insight from the MC.)

Nitpicks:

"Four years ago, when my Uncle Jeff was buried here, my family drove around afterwards. We were sort of sightseeing if looking at mausoleums could be considered sights to be seen."

comma after 'sightseeing'

it seemed unlikely there would be any passerby back there. (reads awkwardly, could probably rephrase.)

After that it was mostly, "Fuck me, fuck me harder," or whatever chicks say when they're getting nailed.
(Yes, I know, supposed to read retro, but still jarring and a bit obnoxious.)

Overall, a wonderful little mini-story, alive with memories, well-paced and not overwritten. Lovely.

Thank you for your insightful comments. It just seemed strange that it only has about 324 views now. I guess the one vote is yours?

I’ve done this before: taken something from elsewhere and put it on Lit, or even go in the opposite direction and redo a story originally from Lit. I may want to rework something old or I just get a fresh audience.

In this case, the series is from nearly two years ago. I looked at the ten existing chapters, and some of them seemed too weak to repeat here. There are maybe four of the ten that I would consider putting on here eventually. But the problem is that some details about the characters – like how they met– is lost and the background you may want about them isn’t there.

I also tend to write short chapters (this is less than 5,000 words), so that makes it even less detailed by itself.

There is actually another story about Miranda and her female roommate/lover (same time frame) but I doubt I’ll do that again.

The funny thing about that comma is that it was there in the original – I kept the Grammarly output for that – but it wasn’t there for the second go-round. Yet Grammarly didn’t catch its absence.

So I might do the other three chapters relatively soon and see how those go. Thanks again.

 

[gunhilltrain]

One thing about visitors: they almost all drive in, or maybe take a cab. I did walk into there years ago - in the 1960s - when my family didn't have a car. But both my mother and grandfather were very fond of walking. For most people, it's far too large to walk into. A few do visit the gravesites of famous people like Melville, Duke Ellington, and probably Jay Gould. I've never seen the latter's mausoleum myself.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Read this last night and Yowser has covered similiar ground to what I was thinking in the meantime. So I'll mainly cover a couple of issues I had with it instead.

1) There's something a bit unnerving about the title. I was quite relieved when I started reading and realized she was bringing her partner with her...

2) It did feel like an episode from a longer series. The characters' relationship seems well-established and not under any threat, so it feels more like an interlude and I didn't get much of a feeling for who the characters were (especially 'I'). So, dramatically there wasn't much in the way of 'stakes', especially as Yowser notes, they didn't seem in much danger of gettign caught. Similarly, certain details, like how smart she was or the cars they drive, felt more important for a longer story, but probably wouldn't have needed to be emphasised so much for a 'one-shot' story.

3) There's one sentence about security being a lot laxer in 1977 - this is a bit jarring because the story hasn't really established a 'present-day' narrator in this extracted section - maybe it did in the original longer story, but it reads a bit like you're worried that readers will object to this point and are trying to explain that 'no, it's historically correct'.

4) As a British reader, I felt at times a bit excluded from the story. It started when I had to look up the word 'zaftig' (Seems like it would be useful in Scrabble, so that's a net win). But it continued because I didn't know who Jay Gould was. (I kept thinking about Stephen Jay Gould and imagined them evolving into something else during their love-making) That's fine, but there was a sense in which some of your language and description seemed like they would be useful to someone who was familiar with the cemetry, but not so much people who weren't. Similarly, I have no idea about 'The Wabash Cannonball' so that part fell a bit flat. Some of the dialogue in this section was a bit too much of a history dump - for example, she remembers exactly that Gould died in 1892 - I suppose that's okay if she's been upto the mausoleum recently on a scouting mission. Ultimately you can't write for everyone and I've certaintly included British cultural references because they fit into thte story without care for losing readers from other places - it just affected my own personal reaction to it.

5) Some of the structure could be tweaked. For example, the references to the cars and Roxy Music could be put earlier in the story to give a stronger feel of it being set in the 1970's. Her walk down Broadway seems like it would be better at the start to help establish her character.

6) The story is quite short and, it seems to me, maybe you could have included the part two encounter in the woods in it, because as it is the latter section is just a drive to somewhere and then a sudden stop. Again, fine in an on-going story, but a bit jarring here.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Read this last night and Yowser has covered similiar ground to what I was thinking in the meantime. So I'll mainly cover a couple of issues I had with it instead.

1) There's something a bit unnerving about the title. I was quite relieved when I started reading and realized she was bringing her partner with her...

2) It did feel like an episode from a longer series. The characters' relationship seems well-established and not under any threat, so it feels more like an interlude and I didn't get much of a feeling for who the characters were (especially 'I'). So, dramatically there wasn't much in the way of 'stakes', especially as Yowser notes, they didn't seem in much danger of gettign caught. Similarly, certain details, like how smart she was or the cars they drive, felt more important for a longer story, but probably wouldn't have needed to be emphasised so much for a 'one-shot' story.

3) There's one sentence about security being a lot laxer in 1977 - this is a bit jarring because the story hasn't really established a 'present-day' narrator in this extracted section - maybe it did in the original longer story, but it reads a bit like you're worried that readers will object to this point and are trying to explain that 'no, it's historically correct'.

4) As a British reader, I felt at times a bit excluded from the story. It started when I had to look up the word 'zaftig' (Seems like it would be useful in Scrabble, so that's a net win). But it continued because I didn't know who Jay Gould was. (I kept thinking about Stephen Jay Gould and imagined them evolving into something else during their love-making) That's fine, but there was a sense in which some of your language and description seemed like they would be useful to someone who was familiar with the cemetry, but not so much people who weren't. Similarly, I have no idea about 'The Wabash Cannonball' so that part fell a bit flat. Some of the dialogue in this section was a bit too much of a history dump - for example, she remembers exactly that Gould died in 1892 - I suppose that's okay if she's been upto the mausoleum recently on a scouting mission. Ultimately you can't write for everyone and I've certaintly included British cultural references because they fit into thte story without care for losing readers from other places - it just affected my own personal reaction to it.

5) Some of the structure could be tweaked. For example, the references to the cars and Roxy Music could be put earlier in the story to give a stronger feel of it being set in the 1970's. Her walk down Broadway seems like it would be better at the start to help establish her character.

6) The story is quite short and, it seems to me, maybe you could have included the part two encounter in the woods in it, because as it is the latter section is just a drive to somewhere and then a sudden stop. Again, fine in an on-going story, but a bit jarring here.

Yeah, that is something I've never tried before - to take a single chapter from a series and try to make a stand-alone story out of it. I may do it with two more chapters anyway. But I see what gets lost when trying that, like how the time period felt and how the characters met.

It's probably too much to expect readers to Google any references for a mere online story of such short length (the Wabash Cannonball, Jay Gould). I've done it for novels in print, like some of the denser references that John Updike makes. I even once drove to Reading, PA to see what it looks like because it was his hometown and his fictional city of Brewer in many of his books is so much like the real city. But that is highly unusual.

About security: I guess I assumed that New Yorkers (and Americans in general) would get that because it has become so much tighter with first crime, and then the 9/11 attacks. It used to be that you could just walk into any building without any guard checking you. Many times the doors weren't locked. But one would have to remember over fifty years of history for that, and that may be too much to assume from most readers.

The odd thing is that I considered posting the story about her walk first, but I decided against it. (That can be followed on Google maps, but yeah, but I don't expect that to happen!) I guess I didn't include the scene in the woods because it would seem repetitive, and later she comes up with completely different ideas.

I must have assumed that most people would know Johnny Cash, but then I don't know much about hip-hop. Anyway, thank you for your comments, I appreciate them.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Yeah, that is something I've never tried before - to take a single chapter from a series and try to make a stand-alone story out of it. I may do it with two more chapters anyway. But I see what gets lost when trying that, like how the time period felt and how the characters met.

It's probably too much to expect readers to Google any references for a mere online story of such short length (the Wabash Cannonball, Jay Gould). I've done it for novels in print, like some of the denser references that John Updike makes. I even once drove to Reading, PA to see what it looks like because it was his hometown and his fictional city of Brewer in many of his books is so much like the real city. But that is highly unusual.

For Jay Gould it was fine because enough explanation was given in the story. The Wabash Cannonball seemed to be an aside so I skipped over it. We get a lot of American media in Britain and we follow most of it fine - this one just seemed to have a lot of references I just didn't get. People know of Johnny Cash here, but don't necessarily know many of his actual songs.

About security: I guess I assumed that New Yorkers (and Americans in general) would get that because it has become so much tighter with first crime, and then the 9/11 attacks. It used to be that you could just walk into any building without any guard checking you. Many times the doors weren't locked. But one would have to remember over fifty years of history for that, and that may be too much to assume from most readers.

It was more that the story didn't establish that the narrator was narrating a past event from the present. If the story had started with something like 'Let me tell you about how girls in the 1970s were different, then you can compare 2020s security and 1970s security - but there was only one instance of this time-switch so it was a bit jarring.

 

[gunhilltrain]

That's something I often don't think about - what time is the narrator looking back from? In a third-person told story it often doesn't matter much. Then sometimes, I'll slip up like here. He must be narrating from the 21st Century but I probably assumed that readers would get that (if I thought about it at all). Yet a phrase like "back then" is just not enough.

There are many references that I don't get when someone else writes them on Lit. I used to follow American sports, but now I couldn't tell you who won the World Series in recent decades. Anything to do with soccer (football to you?) - I never know who is in the World Cup, for example. I have heard of Manchester United!

I usually don't get many pop cultural references from the last couple of decades. Someone mentioned Pete Davidson as if he is a household name. He is, if one watches Saturday Night Live. I haven't seen the show since the 1990s.

P.S.: Johnny Cash didn't write the song. It's based on an old folk song, so nobody is sure who created it. That I had to look up. And I didn't know that British football had leagues. The Premier League - that was news to me.

 

[gunhilltrain]

By the way, Mark Knopfler (who is he?) used a lot of references in his songs, but he usually doesn't explain what they are. When I first heard this, I didn't know what they were or even what the song is about. TheRedChamber: you are British, you might be able to get it. I'll cheat and give the lyrics first, then the video which merely shows a lot of buildings, probably from a train.

Silvertown Blues Lyrics

So what is the song about?

 

[TheRedChamber]

This link probably explains it better than I could.

 

[gunhilltrain]

This link probably explains it better than I could.

Yes, you nailed it. I bet most Americans couldn't do that well, based on just the song alone.