First fiction since the Johnson Administration--please help!

[RamosWashington]

Believe it or not, these two stories are the first fiction I’ve attempted since the Johnson Administration:

https://www.literotica.com/s/sinfonia-concertante

https://www.literotica.com/s/boot-camp-for-boyfriends

Initial response has been favorable, but I need some more pointed criticism. I obviously do not often think of plots and characters worthy of turning into a story. When I do, I tend to unload my entire accumulated store of wit, wisdom and wisecracks. I can't bring myself to save anything for the next story, because I never think there will be one. A bad excuse for irrelevancies and digressions, but they are the result less of incompetence than moral weakness.

If my attempts at humor seem forced, please remember this is my literary adolescence. My actual adolescence centered on the best way to impress girls. The best verdict I could hope for was, "I know he's a jerk, but he makes me laugh."

So please, give it to me straight, Doc. I can handle it.

 

[AwkwardMD]

I'm not a real doctor, I just play one on the internet

I read Bootcamp for Boyfriends because it was shorter.

Curiously enough, I followed the technical bits at the beginning. I work with porous PTFE hollow fiber membranes. And while following the opening discussion was a bizarre case of worlds colliding, it still shouldn't be there.

The two most important rules you can learn are Chekhov's Gun and Show Don't Tell.

***

Chekhov's Gun is a rule for short stories only. It says that if you describe a gun on the mantle in chapter one, the gun must be fired by chapter three. In this situation that would mean that you should have either crafted a situation where membrane filters played into the sex, or ditch almost your entire opening.

Short stories are all about efficiency. A tight focus on the things that matter. Novels are a more forgiving medium for tangents that aren't necessary.

When you introduce people and concepts in a short story, readers do their best to retain that information in case it's important later. Bill Wilkerson was not important. New York was not important. Minnesota was not important. Being a vegetarian was not important. Hell, Donna was only barely important enough to justify inclusion.

***

Bootcamp for Boyfriends is the purest form of Tell Don't Show. That's a bad thing. This was the erotica equivalent of reading an abstract. We got some of the highlights, but none of the grit.

This story read like you were sitting in front of us telling us about this one time, at band camp, when you had fun sexy times. We're very removed from the action, and even when the action is happening (and while i'm not necessarily talking about the sex, I'm definitely including the sex), it's EXTREMELY brief.

Good storytelling sets a mood. It invites the reader in and makes them comfortable. It gives them familiar skin to wear and walks them through a handcrafted series of set-piece events that evoke specific emotions and reactions.

***

When writing dialogue, only include one speaker per paragraph. When another speaker starts talking, put a carriage return between them for readability. Otherwise it reads like one person talking to themselves.

***

When writing dialogue, especially lengthy exposition, break it up with action. Human beings move while they talk. They fidget, and they gesticulate, and they shift their weight. They do all manner of things that often say as much about the tone and the message as the words themselves

***

You write VERY intelligently. It's impressive. There are techniques you will learn to employ for storytelling in a short story format, and once you have a few tricks up your sleeve you are going to be dynamite.

***

Read. Read other authors. Read critically. See what they're doing right and wrong. Steal shamelessly. Pay attention to things like the cadence of conversation. Is there rhythm? Does it feel authentic? Could you imagine having the same conversation in real life? Could you even say the lines out loud without laughing, or all in one breath? Do the characters motivations make sense?

Whatever you do, keep writing.

 

[RamosWashington]

The surgeon's knife

Thank you, AwkwardMD, for your comments. Although I appreciate the positive reviews I've gotten so far, they only encourage me to repeat yet again my previous offenses. I particularly take to heart your points about dialogue. As for the rest, I am for better or worse a raconteur rather than crafter of fine plots. Were I to discard all the irrelevancies I might have a more compelling story, but for me it wouldn't be much fun.

 

[LeandraNyx]

Deleted

 

[AwkwardMD]

There are a lot of different skillsets that an author needs to employ to craft a good story. Writing and storytelling are the big two. Writing is largely srlf-explanatory, but storytelling breaks down to a lot of different subsets.

Lets take plot for example. "I want a story where an awkward yankee city boy goes south and meets a real belle. She teaches him how to be a man." Fantastic plot. Nothing wrong with that, but that's just at the strategic level.

On a tactical level, it's more like this.

City boy goes south for a conference (good). Lengthy scenes at the conference (bad). Boy meets girl at dinner afterwards (good). Party moves to a bar (superfluous). Smaller subset of party moves to another bar (good). Girls sister leaves so that boy and girl can be alone (good). Exposition where characters sort out their needs and wants, and boy and girl decide to make a pre-arranged short term go of it (good). Weekend of sex and aforementioned bootcamp (good). Epilogue (good).

You can see how, at a distance, your plot is largely fine. You don't need to make major changes. Where it falls apart is in the execution. The extended telling of those pieces loses focus.

Try to think of short stories like an amusement park haunted house ride on rails. The car passes through a short hallway into a room, and you put something bright and shiny at the far end. Something to draw the eye. Then, while everyone's attention is over there, you surprise them with something coming down from above that they never saw coming.

***

For the most part, the power of a first person narrative is in the present tense. It allows the reader to feel like they are present as events are unfolding around them. First person is best employed with a plot that has a visceral quality. It should give the feeling that something magical is right around the corner.

For the most part, third person is the go to narrative style for past tense stories. It better handles some distance between the reader and the story.

Obviously there are exceptions to both, and I would not be surprised at all to see you take some of those roads less traveled and do really wonderful things with them. The brst thing about expectations is subverting them. Zigging when everyone thought you were going to zag.

 

[RamosWashington]

Thank you for the specific examples. I was afraid my story would shrink to perhaps a dozen paragraphs. I've been shackled by the otherwise very helpful fact of this story being true. No, not the sex part--I chickened out of being alone with the older sister, worrying that a jealous boyfriend might indeed keep up certain fine old Southern traditions. I'll consider carefully how much exposition is necessary to establish uneasiness about being a Jew in the Deep South. In real life the sisters were disgusting racists, telling jokes which started, "Two good old boys were in a pickup truck fixing to shoot some niggers", and managed to go even further downhill. They cheerfully explained that Jew-hatred made no sense to them, being only a pointless diversion from hating blacks.

The bit about the speaker from the DOE is true, and it will hurt me to give up bragging about it, but one must put art above ego.

I of course have long been familiar with the Chekhov gun rule. When you brought it up, the first example to come to mind was the Sherlock Holmes stories. Dr. Watson is always packing his service revolver, but its only notable use is to kill the Hound of the Baskervilles.

 

[AwkwardMD]

I have one more comment to make. It's not a criticism, but it is something to think about.

The early interactions with Mellie did a really nice job of endearing her to the reader. She's charming, and you did nice job with her...

...but...

When you establish within your story that the love interest cannot be a long term prospect, the reader will begin to distance themselves from her just as Jack did. They won't empathize with her because she's just a stand-in for the girl that will come next.

As a beginner, aim to have readers connect with your characters. Make that a goal for yourself to learn how to get readers to live and die with the tension of "are these crazy kids going to make it?!" Once you master that you can play with readers expectations more manipulatively, but likeable characters is a cornerstone of erotica.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Within the context of Sherlock Holmes, Watson carrying a gun serves a purpose. It paints him with an air of menace and action that is often lacking from Holmes himself. It is less functional and more symbolic, but still useful (somewhat) as a descriptive affectation for the good doctor.

 

[RamosWashington]

It would be defy credibility to hold out the hope of a permanent relationship between Mellie and Jack. Love cannot be expected to conquer both distance and religion. Mellie's affair with Jack is unusual in being didactic and friendly, rather than romantic or purely physical. Now that you mention it, the chief dramatic interest is whether Jack will get himself beaten up before he has a chance to get in bed with her. That's why I will keep the bits about the Jewboy drinking Irish whiskey and Bill Wilkerson and the scene at the honky-tonk, although I'll certainly try to trim them down.

I take it that you and Chekhov would have no problem with a gun appearing only once on the mantle in Act I, if it establishes an air of menace and action.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Now that you mention it, the chief dramatic interest is whether Jack will get himself beaten up before he has a chance to get in bed with her. That's why I will keep the bits about the Jewboy drinking Irish whiskey and Bill Wilkerson and the scene at the honky-tonk, although I'll certainly try to trim them down.

Kinky Friedman would be so proud.

Yes. That would be amazing tension, but you killed it as soon as it appeared when Mellie explained that Daddy kicked Bill Wilkerson's ass and he's not a threat. You removed your own tension by solving it. It's ok to leave some plot threads untied because that information will linger and nag in the readers mind.

Play that up by having Mellie take him to unfamiliar places. He's looking around, and no matter how often she says "It'll be fine," he doesn't believe it. Is that the same blue pickup again?

I take it that you and Chekhov would have no problem with a gun appearing only once on the mantle in Act I, if it establishes an air of menace and action.

Yes. Things need to serve a purpose, even if the functional purpose is different than the expected or stated purpose.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Set aside, for a moment, that this is a (largely) true story.

The only reason that religion is getting in the way between Jack and Mellie is because you put it there. Jack doesn't need to be Jewish. It's your story. You are God for these characters, and their lives are clay in your hands. Tellibg me they can't be together because of religion is like telling me that they can't have sex because Jack's penis is triangle shaped.

You control the shape of Jack's penis. You control the backstory of these characters. You are not slaved to them. They are slaved to you.

Make them your bitch.

 

[AwkwardMD]

This is an excerpt from a piece I literally just wrote which satirizes writing erotica. Apologies for the dwarf with the thick accent.

So what did you think?" Ivy whispered, hoarsely, as they crept through the underbrush.

"I' was alrigh'," Mathilda said, keeping her eyes forward. "Ah mean, the sex was pretty hot but ye kinda glossed over the bit where yer girl gets taken. Ye didn' establish much b'fore ye went an' started havin' the crew tryin' ta get their dicks wet. An' the Hellish Barnacle? Wha' kinda twat names their ship the Hellish Barnacle?"

"Captain Longcock didn't name it. He took over the ship with that name."

"An' 'Captain Longcock'?! That's no' any be'er!"

"Longcock is his patriarchal surname," Ivy said, nodding confidently. "I imagined that that was how his society handled naming, so he took his name from his father. He didn't pick that either."

Ivy, the Bard in this adventuring party, is oblivious to her own ability to control the different facets of the story she's writing, and simply writes as she's inspired. The end result is more comedic than erotic.

 

[RamosWashington]

>Things need to serve a purpose, even if the functional purpose is different than the expected or stated purpose.

Then why does Chekhov specify the gun must actually be fired in the next act? We don't need him to tell us that Emma shouldn't prepare for the picnic at Box Hill by packing heat.

A friend has just told me he's willing to take a look at my stories. I'm interested to see if his PhD in Comp. Lit. from Columbia is of more use to me than it's been to him.

 

[AwkwardMD]

It isn't a rule about the inclusion of guns. It's a rule about the inclusion of exteaneous, superfluous information. If you simply pistol whip someone with the gun in chapter 2, does that not satisfy the purpose? Merely brandishing the gun to ward off a would-be attacker? Having the gun, tucked in a back pocket, sets off a metal detector, and the cavity search turns into more?

There are different ways that stories can use the props we place in them, limited only by our imagination, but the basic rule of "use all your props" is still a good one.

 

[CyranoJ]

A friend has just told me he's willing to take a look at my stories. I'm interested to see if his PhD in Comp. Lit. from Columbia is of more use to me than it's been to him.

A friend with a PhD in Comp. Lit. will be invaluable for helping you to write carefully-calibrated, nuanced stories that incorporate the insights of the latest literary theory, play with the conventions of form in ways that would make Kathy Acker proud, challenge and interrogate the norms of narrative perspective and their implications in contemporary structures of power-knowledge.

As someone who did two tours in literary academia myself, I don't know that it has all that much to say about the basics of writing good smut. Or even good romance, if one thinks of these as distinct categories. It often pays to go deeper into the basics before exposing yourself to PhD-level critique.

Any-hoo, I took a run at Sinfonia Concertante and I do have a few thoughts for you.

1. I thought the prose was well-crafted and generally fun to read, it's clear that you know what you're doing. That said, your chosen viewpoint character and narrator is a CPA who for the most part writes with the affectation of a literary scholar specialised in 19th century literature. Moreover she does so after having made a point of being from a caste of Southron gentry defined by practical-mindedness and "making things work."

This makes a lot of the high-mannered "Dear Reader" and "Gentle Reader" interjections feel off. They might work for a different character but they don't feel authentic to this one, IMO. (I dunno, maybe CPAs from the South just roll like this? I don't feel sold on that premise.)

2. The other thing that feels off, in the opposite direction, is this same weirdly-mannered character employing vulgarities like "cock" and "beating off." Of course characters can be vulgar in one breath and mannered in another, but to me that's more a signature of late Victorian erotica; it's not something that would usually suggest itself to someone writing in a more contemporary era... unless they were a literary scholar or educated like one, or someone similar using the tactic as deliberate dry humour. See problem 1.

Moreover you may find that some Romance readers just take umbrage with "vulgarity." We recently had someone start a thread in the Author's Hangout who was so tentative about naughty words that I'm pretty sure they used the circumlocution "ch*t word" because they couldn't utter "pussy."

3. I like that you have a sense of humour about things, but it's possible to take lampshading too far. God knows I can understand it being hard to keep sex scenes feeling fresh, but if you reach a point where you literally have your narrator doing this:

It ended up narcotic rather than erotic, resembling a treatise on hydraulic engineering. I will therefore present the historical record in summary form, and then try writing something worth reading:

1. A. sucks G. to orgasm.

2. G. licks and fingers A. to orgasm.

3. In male superior position, G. enters A. Both orgasm.

4. INTERMISSION

5. G. licks and fingers R. to orgasm.

6. With R. on hands and knees, G. enters from behind. Both orgasm.

7. CURTAIN

IMO your energy is better invested in actually writing a sex scene that's worth reading. I'm pretty sure both you and your narrator have it in you to do better than "a treatise on hydraulic engineering" in writing about the sex act. You're publishing this on Literotica, for crying out loud.

4. The first part of the story is kind of hard going. I'm not as resolutely opposed to the use of flashbacks as the estimable @AwkwardMD, but for my money flashbacks are much more effective when tied to or illustrating something in the story's "present," which is different from just straight up dumping of exposition. I wonder if a lot of this information couldn't have been brought across more subtly and more organically in the course of "present-day" interactions.

Overall, I enjoy the rich, affected style and I like that you make caste and religion an overt part of the proceedings. I think maybe some of what I'm finding off is easily fixed enough with a slight tweak to the narrator's profession; why not just make them a literary scholar, for instance? (If such is a fit with other elements of her background?) Pretty much everything about them, including the thoughtfulness about caste and status, would fit then in a way it doesn't quite for a CPA.

 

[8letters]

I enjoyed the "Boot Camp for Boyfriends" story. Yes, it was rambling affair with lots of extraneous details and wasn't very erotic. But it was still a fun story, refreshingly different from almost everything else on LitE. I don't think I could have handled that style for a prolonged reading but for two pages, it was a hoot. I once was on a project with an old-timer and when we had a long day where everyone was exhausted and frazzled, he'd tell us stories of what it was like when the company was much smaller and much wilder. Your story had that kind of feeling to it. That fact that it was rambling told us far more about the main character than any description would have.

But because it's so different from what I write, it's tough for me to make much in the way of suggestions. The only thing that comes to mind is I that I got confused by the switch from Mary Ellen to Mellie. I wasn't reading the story closely and the "My friends all call me Mellie" was in the middle of a paragraph well after we meet Mary Ellen. I think it would have been better to either have her be Mellie all the way through or to break out the switch into its own paragraph so it couldn't be missed.

 

[RamosWashington]

CyranoJ, thank you for your thoughts and suggestions. I made the protagonist a CPA because I happen to know a few in our community. They are all exceedingly intelligent and well-educated people who work as auditors for complex businesses such as those on Wall Street. Here in New York a CPA is considered to be a professional on the same level as a lawyer (perhaps a bit higher, these days). She does speak of people underestimating her intelligence on account of her Southern education and accent, so I'm fine with some of my readers doing the same on account of the CPA. The asides to Gentle Reader are lifted from Byron, who has long held an unhealthy influence over my prose style. When I had chapter divisions, I started off one with "Hail Muse! etc." That was best left out.

I don't particularly like using profanity, except for occasional sharp emphasis ("you idiot, get back here and fuck me") or satire ("I have not yet begun to fuck"). I made a point of Ruth endlessly discussing sex with her high-school sweetheart "using language shockingly devoid of euphemism" which led to a vital aspect of their relationship, namely masturbation. Ruth does use "club the clam" on one occasion, immediately lamenting the poverty of slang expressions for distaff self-abuse. For the record, out of 18,500 words there are four "fucks" and zero "shits". The seven "cocks" and one "dick" I regard as defensible given the subject matter. Allie called Gus "the pussy-eating champion of Greater New York", and Ruth made a point of repeating it to him, for calculated shock value.

I did write out the threesome scene in considerable detail and found it tiresome. Perhaps its very length (per the outline) made it difficult for me to sustain. There's enough explicit sex for my taste, and too much for many of my friends, and way too much for my neighbors.

AwkwardMD strikes me as a trifle dogmatic about purity of plot and really shot himself in the foot with Chekhov's gun. Sinfonia Concertante has a strong plot, I think, and I'll look carefully at the flashbacks to see if anything can be trimmed.

I make no apologies for being a raconteur rather than a disciplined craftsman. I worked for 35 years as a computer programmer on Wall Street, where everything I carefully wrote had to very carefully scrutinized by others. I'm not sure I want to do the same with my fiction, now that I'm retired. It seems too much like work.

 

[RamosWashington]

8Letters, thank you for pointing out confusion regarding "Mary Ellen" being replaced by "Mellie". The character does explain the abbreviation, but I should repeat "Mary Ellen" explicitly at that point to help out the reader.

 

[AwkwardMD]

For me, a good plot ranks just below good characters in the heirarchy of importance. You already had very well developed characters.

That being said, yes. I do tend to adhere to the rules I set for myself pretty rigidly, to the extent that some of my stories lack physical character descriptions because the POV characters have no reason to make physical assessments of each other. Some find that very frustrating, and that's totally fair.

I myself have a recent thread asking for feedback, and I would encoyrage you to contribute. Your narrative style and prose are fantastic, and I always appreciate different viewpoints (even if I argue against them).

 

[RamosWashington]

AwkwardMD, thank your for your gracious response. Your pseudonym does you an injustice.

I hadn't realized it myself until you pointed it out, but the most interesting part of my "Boot Camp" story is the character of Mellie. She grew up in circumstances which should have made her passive, but ended up very much a molder of destiny. I'll be submitting a revision where at the end, she writes a final letter saying she fell in love with a man her father can't stand, eloped and was cut off without a cent. It would be nice to show she can take charge of her own life as well as Jack's.

My "Sinfonia Concertante" ended up a bit long, but it does have a substantial plot. If you have time, I'd be interested in your comments on it. I'm sure you'll agree with my Lit. Crit. friend on where it should have ended. I've actually been able to come up with a third piece called "The Wrong Right Guy" in the First Times category. It's only a bit longer than "Boot Camp" but might suit you better in terms of tightness of plot.

I'll take a look at your own thread to see if I have anything intelligent to add.

 

[AwkwardMD]

I prefer to use the sobriquet DrAwkward, which is a palindrome. The palindrome is the point. However, that username was already taken, so i went and made an oblique alternate version of an obscure literary curiousity.

 

[8letters]

8Letters, thank you for pointing out confusion regarding "Mary Ellen" being replaced by "Mellie". The character does explain the abbreviation, but I should repeat "Mary Ellen" explicitly at that point to help out the reader.

Thinking more on this, I'd think it best if you had mentioned Mellie right away. Simply change your opening to "I met Mellie when I was in Lafayette for a conference." I'm a big believer that you need to provide the reader breadcrumbs that help them process your story. You want me rooting early and often for the narrator and Mellie to have sex. If I know that the sex in this story is between the narrator and Mellie who he meets at a conference, then I know I can toss out a bunch of the details as I read them. I know Donna is unimportant and I can toss details about her as soon as I read them. When Mellie does appear, I know to look for charming things about her.

 

[8letters]

CyranoJ, thank you for your thoughts and suggestions. I made the protagonist a CPA because I happen to know a few in our community. They are all exceedingly intelligent and well-educated people who work as auditors for complex businesses such as those on Wall Street. Here in New York a CPA is considered to be a professional on the same level as a lawyer (perhaps a bit higher, these days). She does speak of people underestimating her intelligence on account of her Southern education and accent, so I'm fine with some of my readers doing the same on account of the CPA. The asides to Gentle Reader are lifted from Byron, who has long held an unhealthy influence over my prose style. When I had chapter divisions, I started off one with "Hail Muse! etc." That was best left out.

I don't particularly like using profanity, except for occasional sharp emphasis ("you idiot, get back here and fuck me") or satire ("I have not yet begun to fuck"). I made a point of Ruth endlessly discussing sex with her high-school sweetheart "using language shockingly devoid of euphemism" which led to a vital aspect of their relationship, namely masturbation. Ruth does use "club the clam" on one occasion, immediately lamenting the poverty of slang expressions for distaff self-abuse. For the record, out of 18,500 words there are four "fucks" and zero "shits". The seven "cocks" and one "dick" I regard as defensible given the subject matter. Allie called Gus "the pussy-eating champion of Greater New York", and Ruth made a point of repeating it to him, for calculated shock value.

I did write out the threesome scene in considerable detail and found it tiresome. Perhaps its very length (per the outline) made it difficult for me to sustain. There's enough explicit sex for my taste, and too much for many of my friends, and way too much for my neighbors.

AwkwardMD strikes me as a trifle dogmatic about purity of plot and really shot himself in the foot with Chekhov's gun. Sinfonia Concertante has a strong plot, I think, and I'll look carefully at the flashbacks to see if anything can be trimmed.

I make no apologies for being a raconteur rather than a disciplined craftsman. I worked for 35 years as a computer programmer on Wall Street, where everything I carefully wrote had to very carefully scrutinized by others. I'm not sure I want to do the same with my fiction, now that I'm retired. It seems too much like work.

The most important thing is to write what you want. Nobody gets paid here. If writing a certain way isn't enjoyable for you, don't do it. I think every writer should be striving for a better rating, more reads, move votes and more comments. But that striving has to be balanced with writing the type of story you enjoy writing.

I don't think you have to have a detailed sex scene for a story to do well. The premise and the characters are more important. Readers do like the story to have a sex scene that is long enough and detailed enough to get off, but they can be entertained without one.

 

[RamosWashington]

Mellie does tell us explicitly that "Mary Ellen" has too many syllables and led to her nickname. I'll take the matter up with my editorial board.

I have a pending story in the First Times section which I think is much more tightly constructed than my others. Here the narrator would be very unlikely to give us details about the climactic sex scene, and I thought it would interrupt to flow. I ended up having her say, "I won't go over them in any detail, for if you're old enough to read this you almost certainly have done them all yourself. Your imagination is probably better than my memory." Apologies to those who read with one hand. I shall have to try some day to write a really juicy sex scene, not the usual "again and again he thrust his mighty redwood into her continental divide."

 

[CyranoJ]

A lot of my advice is more conditional. So I'll start out of order with the point on which my opinion is strongest and likeliest to offend, so we can just get that out of the way.

I did write out the threesome scene in considerable detail and found it tiresome.

This is the one point where I'll just straight up tell you I still think you should just suck it up, rewrite it and make it work. Not for me, not for the reader, not for some nebulous standard of "literature," but for you.

You can start it on a sex scene and have your narrator draw a curtain coyly across it at a certain point. You can write a sex scene shorter or longer. You can focus on things other than the sex even during the sex -- one of the best ways to vary sex scenes is to augment them with journeys into the characters' emotional and mental states, which inclusion can often actually make the sex hotter and which can combine with physical acts in near-infinite variety.

What you cannot do is have your narrator tell your reader on your behalf "I just don't have the jam to make this sex scene in my erotic story work." Sure, an actual romance publisher would send that back to you and say "fix it;" but more importantly you're just robbing yourself of a chance to grow as a writer and savour the satisfaction of overcoming a problem like this one (a problem you'll confront again and again as long as you continue to write erotic fiction).

I shall even go so far as to challenge you. Nonono... better yet, I'll have my Close Personal Friend The Beef come in to challenge you.

https://media.giphy.com/media/BHKpXZnLkYFYk/giphy.gif

The Beef demands satisfaction! Defy him at your peril!

In a related point:

I make no apologies for being a raconteur rather than a disciplined craftsman.

When you come to a fiction site and ask fellow writers for feedback, you'll basically get a bunch of people telling you how to be a more disciplined craftsman. See, for those of us who pay attention to Feedback forums and contribute to them, that's what we're all trying to do. Don't know what else to tell you about that. Pick up the advice that works for you, ignore the stuff that doesn't and keep on keeping on.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming:

I made the protagonist a CPA because I happen to know a few in our community. They are all exceedingly intelligent and well-educated people who work as auditors for complex businesses such as those on Wall Street. . . She does speak of people underestimating her intelligence on account of her Southern education and accent, so I'm fine with some of my readers doing the same on account of the CPA.

I can appreciate that (I know a few CPAs myself and they're all top-flight people who are great at parties... well, maybe not that last bit, but they're top-flight people ), but that's not really my point. Having intelligence that deals effectively with accounting questions is different from having the kind of intelligence that cribs literary style from Lord Byron or thinks deeply about the subtleties of caste. It's not a matter of underestimating intelligence; if your reader knows more than a few of the kinds of personality a field tends to attract then they won't find it believable. It's why I didn't.

Of course tends to attract allows some wriggle-room. I don't know many computer programmers familiar enough with 19th century literature to produce your style either, and the Humanities likewise attract more analytical personalities than they're often given credit for.

But the tendencies are enough to produce an expectation. Having some way to signal that a person is unusual in their profession can help. An engineer who's genuinely interested in 19th century literature will often find himself in conversations with colleagues who are baffled and even offended by this worthless pursuit. A scientifically-minded Humanities scholar might likewise find themselves at dinner parties where bizarrely unscientific views are put forth as fact.

There are ways to set it up and give it greater force of plausibility, in other words. Whether you want to do that I leave to you.

The asides to Gentle Reader are lifted from Byron, who has long held an unhealthy influence over my prose style. When I had chapter divisions, I started off one with "Hail Muse! etc." That was best left out.

Excellent call.

I don't dislike the reader asides in themselves.

I don't particularly like using profanity, except for occasional sharp emphasis

And in fairness, it is a very rare context in which you will ever hear me "complain" about profanity, trust me on this. But then I write smut, not romance, and your character voice and genre is such that even what you have may not be strictly necessary.

You could even just get away with Ye Olde Fiction Circumlocutions like "he cursed" or "she cursed" or "I told him to get on the job in terms that may or may not deeply shock you, Dear Reader, and that I shall not reproduce here." (I'm not really suggesting those particular things but you get the idea.) You're already most of the way toward having excised profanity from the style, as you point out, and your viewpoint character is clearly linguistically nimble enough to come up with creative alternatives. It may be part of why its few occurrences are jarring.

Of course it goes without saying that I wouldn't be writing at you this much if your work wasn't already genuinely interesting. Keep up the great work and I'll be keeping an eye out for more from you.