Fresh Meat

[GigiBrevard]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to Literotica and would really appreciate some feedback on my first posted story, Decompressing: http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=499885

It's about a couple getting it on in a decompression chamber. If you like titty fucking, female orgasm, and/or H.P. Lovecraft, this is the story for you.

Thanks! I look forward to reading your work as well!

 

[elfin_odalisque]

Gigi, congrats on taking the plunge for your first story here and welcome.

Sorry no-one has replied before but you are welcome to my two cents, for what it's worth.

I think you write well, very good at using dialogue to develop the story which is usually difficult to learn.

As an aside, I can't quite see how this qualifies as a Halloween story but since the Management have accepted it and Scouries never actually reads stories, I wish you well.

On a literary edit basis, I have a few probs. Beyond my PADI certificate I am pretty ignorant of diving matters but I don't understand why they are in a decompression chamber if they never left the submersible. Like pressurized planes and depressurized submersibles, shouldn't they be living in sea level atmospherics?

Lovecraft is fine but a niche interest. For those readers who don't know of him your core falls a bit flat. I think you use him to create horror tension but that won't work with all your readers. You have to explain more.

In a paragraph of regurgitation you throw out all the backstory of the dive. This is too much at once and should either have been pared down or slipped in gradually throughout the story.

When you get to the 'down and dirty' you move away a bit from your great dialogue and get into narrative.

From a copy editor standpoint;

Dave had been SCUBA diving since he was thirteen, but he'd never been in a decompression chamber

You need to add "before" at the end.

"It's definitely alive," Shannon confirmed. She turned her head as if to look out a window. Dave mused to himself that she ought to have broken that habit long ago.

After the narrative paragraph it's not clear if we're at the bottom of the ocean or in the chamber. Flashbacks are difficult to come back from.

couldn't help but think that they must have been made of something other than what they were, or that somehow they had been air-brushed. Usually pale women had blemishes, freckles, scars. Shannon was completely unmarked.

Sorry, I'm sure Paco would chastize me for this, but this would make a bundle of female readers click back. I won't comment, just read it and reflect on how we think of your pricks.

Her pencil paused over the Cosmo quiz it was filling out. "Don't worry. There's no escaping it."

All style guides advise that any new dialogue must start a new paragraph. This should be,

Her pencil paused over the Cosmo quiz it was filling out.

"Don't worry. There's no escaping it."

Gigi, I really enjoyed your story and thanks for flagging it up here. I think you write really well, 'specially for a newbie. Overall, I think you try to pack too much into a short story but the clues you drop to more depth make me hope you will write some longer erotic stories.

Well done.

 

[PacoFear]

Okay, since elfin dragged me into this, my thoughts are below. Keep in mind my advice is worth what you're paying for it.

couldn't help but think that they must have been made of something other than what they were, or that somehow they had been air-brushed. Usually pale women had blemishes, freckles, scars. Shannon was completely unmarked.

Sorry, I'm sure Paco would chastize me for this, but this would make a bundle of female readers click back. I won't comment, just read it and reflect on how we think of your pricks.

Actually, I'm going to back elfin up on this one and not just because she's a girl. rose: elfin) Your story's delivery made my nose wrinkle a little too. The statement "sually pale women had blemishes, freckles, scars" strikes me as unnecessarily sexist. Much better to my eye would be: "usually pale skin shows blemishes, freckles, scars."

(Does that help you, elfin?)​

Her pencil paused over the Cosmo quiz it was filling out. "Don't worry. There's no escaping it."

All style guides advise that any new dialogue must start a new paragraph.

Here, I'm definitely parting with elfin's company. I'm a U.S. fella, so I have the luxury of pointing to a principle authority for my English: the Chicago Manual of Style. CMS 11.45 provides that a new paragraph ought to be used when a new speaker is speaking. Not just because new dialogue begins.

Putting aside resorts to CMS and just going on common sense, the sentence preceding the dialogue in this case is in fact a slick little action tag that draws the reader's attention to that character who is about to speak.

I tend to use action tags in my own stories because I tire of dialogue tags. For example: Molly rolled her lips and looked away. "I'm not sure why you need to make this so difficult." The reader infers it's Molly doing the talking.​

Can't say anything about the story as a whole, but elfin and I seem to have similar tastes so I'll give her assessment a blind endorsement.

Cheers,

-PF

 

[KillerMuffin]

I had a lot of difficult in maintaining any interest in the story as I read it. I was uninterested to the point where I spent more time telling my computer screen that why, yes, practical and romantic are mutually exclusive because, denotatively, romantic means not practical. This should not happen in what appears to be a well written story. When my interest is not piqued, I just have to sit back and wonder why.

It's not the dialogue, the usual culprit at Lit. The characters had voices that were unique enough, but not bland. The dialogue is well delineated with interest tags, the use of action over said-words, and has character to it.

It's not description, which is well enough wrought. I didn't wince over the fact that she was described and he was not because it stayed very true to the POV and her description was well within the bounds of normal rather than exaggerated gorgeousness of sexy female that pops up at Lit all the time. Her physical description was interesting and fresh. Setting could have been worked into the storyline a bit more, to give a strong sense of location and why it's meaningful, but I had enough of a mental picture to work with it.

And that's when I hit it. Meaningfulness. Why was the setting meaningful? Well, apparently, they're diving and now they need to keep from getting the bends. And that's where it all ends. Why do these people have meaning? Why should I care about them? What makes them interesting? It's basic storytelling. Tension = interest. Lack of tension = lack of interest. It's the way we're all built. Gossip is so delicious because somone's got problems. It's never about how deliriously happy someone is, but about how deliriously unhappy someone is.

I backtracked through the story and looked for conflict. I seriously couldn't find anything that was tension-producing. There was hints at tension and potential conflict. The "bloop," the fact that he works for a paper that put Johnny the Batfaced Boy on the cover every other month, the fact that they're going to an aircraft carrier (which does not, as a little FYI, have an actual role in scientific exploration, the navy has dedicated ships for that. Civilians and scientists almost never report directly to an admiral, so why the carrier?), etc. So, the interesting, friction-causing stuff is all background information. There's no friction-causing stuff in the foreground. Conflict is where stories derive meaningfulness. It's where we get a sense of why something is important, like why the setting matters, or why the characters matter, or why what they're doing matters. Yes, I know, the basic reason why they're there, they went diving to look for a bloop and must not get the bends, but that's all backgrounded, not foregrounded, and the story wouldn't have changed much if you'd swapped out any number of scenarios, for example, they must be locked in a quarantined clean room for a few hours. Absolutely no change to the basic story, just a few background details.

So, what I really wanted from the story was to be given a sense of why the immediate storyline was important. Why is the setting important to the story? Why is the sex important to the story? Why is Cthulu important to the story? At the moment, it reads like an excuse for sex, which doesn't hold my interest because there's way too much time spent on unnecessary background information and not enough time spent on sex. There should be some kind of issue, or tension, that makes all the background information vital and interesting rather than in the way, and the requisite ratcheting up of the tension and then easing of the tension to make the characters and plot both interesting and satisfying. Either stroke story or tension-driven story works well, but a hybrid of the two never seems to work out.

The Lovecraft stuff could have been interesting, but, sorry. I had trouble not skimming until they took their clothes off.

 

[elfin_odalisque]

Paco thanks Just teasing Lit's best male writer from a girly POV

On dialogue I entirely agree with you. Rushing and not reviewing left the sloppy language unspotted. The convoluted point I was failing to make was, 'Even if the speaker is the same as in the last paragraph, any new dialogue must start a new para. '