Halloween Stories

[Jennylo]

I'm one of those that infrequently posts under anonymous. I'm shy, so I don't join boards. But then I read the Halloween stories... The quality of these stories, the entertainment that I have gained through the generosity and imagination of the authors, gave me the push to sign on just to say "thank you."

I don't know which story will be the winner because so many of them are outstanding. Kudos to whoever is the winner, and a pat on the back to the rest of the authors for a job well done.

Thank you for these stories.

Jennylo

 

[dreamwriter1234]

ty for your post.... I'm sure my lowley submission will not win... but it is nice to feel appreciated..... now about those votes and comments....lol

 

[Jennylo]

ty for your post.... I'm sure my lowley submission will not win... but it is nice to feel appreciated..... now about those votes and comments....lol

I do vote, I just don't comment. It's scary out there...

 

[Penelope Street]

I'm one of those that infrequently posts under anonymous. I'm shy, so I don't join boards...

Thank you for overcoming that shy streak long enough to start a thread!

 

[christabelll]

Thank you Jenny Lo... And Welcome to Lick...er... Clits... Ack... LITEROTICA

Its kind of crazy down here with the other birds, but glad you could join the scratchin and pecking mob that we are

Glad you enjoyed the reading... and yeah DO leave comments! We live and breath votes and comments during a contest...
the rest of the time we choke on them heheheh

WELCOME
ENJOY
And Dont forget to breathe!

 

[rachlou]

Welcome Jenny!

Lit isn't such a scary place, so stick around and have your say from time to time. Thanks for reading and voting on the stories - it makes all the writing worthwhile.

We do like comments though...

 

[elfin_odalisque]

Welcome Jenny

Great kudos to you for 'coming out'and joining. Don't be scared to put your two cents in whenever you feel like it. Few people bite round here. Some harrumph a bit from time time but only to hide their soft centers.

You certainly know to stroke delicate egos. I can just picture a bunch of Halloween writers preening their peacock feathers after your very kind compliments.

Elle

 

[cloudy]

Welcome Jenny

Great kudos to you for 'coming out'and joining. Don't be scared to put your two cents in whenever you feel like it. Few people bite round here. Some harrumph a bit from time time but only to hide their soft centers.

You certainly know to stroke delicate egos. I can just picture a bunch of Halloween writers preening their peacock feathers after your very kind compliments.

Elle

Soft center? What soft center?

 

[elfin_odalisque]

Soft center? What soft center?

A shy girl like you wouldn't know.

It's where the soft molten core of volcanic lava blends with liquid sulfurous acid and rattlesnake venom - so Jenny J explained to me!

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

A shy girl like you wouldn't know.

It's where the soft molten core of volcanic lava blends with liquid sulfurous acid and rattlesnake venom - so Jenny J explained to me!

yep yep yep. That's exactly what it is.


So you see, Jennylo. We don't bite...
















Much.

 

[petemgurk]

they're my feathers and I'll preen if I want to

Welcome Jenny

Great kudos to you for 'coming out'and joining. Don't be scared to put your two cents in whenever you feel like it. Few people bite round here. Some harrumph a bit from time time but only to hide their soft centers.

You certainly know to stroke delicate egos. I can just picture a bunch of Halloween writers preening their peacock feathers after your very kind compliments.

Elle

:reening peacock feathers, humming a little tune:: Hmm, hmm, hm hm hm...

Oh! Hello everybody! As the writer of one of those Halloween stories, I would like to emphatically state that I have had more than 2,000 hits on my story, but only 18 votes, AND NO PUBLIC COMMENTS! Arrrggghhh....dies horribly, stains peacock feathers with own blood.

No, only keeding! Please, anybody, everybody, don't be afraid to comment - but if you don't like it, I hope you'll tell me why. I'm not afraid of constructive negative criticism - I'm sure many people have already said it before me: "You suck" does not qualify as constructive criticism.

Natch, if you do like it, I hope you'll also tell me why. I'm pretty proud of it, and I wrote it specifically for the contest. (My blood, my sweat, my tears, my masculine essence....begins to sing Swedish Sauna Song, gives it up because can't pronounce the vowels.)

Thanks and best of luck to all the rest of you in the contest (and me, too, of course, I didn't get into the contest because I want to lose, f'chrissake).

- Pete M'Gurk, author of "The Cat and the Collar"

 

[sr71plt]

:reening peacock feathers, humming a little tune:: Hmm, hmm, hm hm hm...

Oh! Hello everybody! As the writer of one of those Halloween stories, I would like to emphatically state that I have had more than 2,000 hits on my story, but only 18 votes, AND NO PUBLIC COMMENTS! Arrrggghhh....dies horribly, stains peacock feathers with own blood.

No, only keeding! Please, anybody, everybody, don't be afraid to comment - but if you don't like it, I hope you'll tell me why. I'm not afraid of constructive negative criticism - I'm sure many people have already said it before me: "You suck" does not qualify as constructive criticism.

Natch, if you do like it, I hope you'll also tell me why. I'm pretty proud of it, and I wrote it specifically for the contest. (My blood, my sweat, my tears, my masculine essence....begins to sing Swedish Sauna Song, gives it up because can't pronounce the vowels.)

Thanks and best of luck to all the rest of you in the contest (and me, too, of course, I didn't get into the contest because I want to lose, f'chrissake).

- Pete M'Gurk, author of "The Cat and the Collar"

I'll give a few comments on "The Cat and the Collar" here rather than on the story itself. These, of course, are just my views and aren't any more valid than anyone else's. First, I think you do pretty well at storytelling--certainly have an ability worthy of development--and I like the way you couch the story in an evening of yarn spinning at the bar (although how the storyteller can be just as lucid after the fifth drink as before the first is beyond me and is something that might have been developed in a story presented this way). Although there was a bit of a storyline in there, delivering an extended wet dream--and not on the highest level of sophistication--seemed more of interest than delivering a story. That's only a problem for me in that this was submitted to a story contest rather than a wet dream contest, so I can't give it full credit on what it purports to be--a story.

It doesn't completely make it as a story for me, because there are too many extraneous or loose threads waving around here. The only purpose of the wife seems to be to have a sex scene and then fall on her knife a year later. A better story would make more use of her and weave her back somewhere near the end--the reader wants to think she's returned as the cat, and I think a better story would have worked with a misdirection element with that. There's no particular reason provided that the protagonist is out there in his jeans and sweatshirt just watching the orgy in the first scene. The sex scenes just seem dropped in (although they seem to be what's the most important to you) without being melded to the story all that well. (Sorry, but I get the feeling of a high school boy writing these scenes.) There are lots of witchy elements introduced--really too many to develop any one or two very well. The "traveller" element wasn't developed or used as well as it could have been, I think. The importance of either the existence of or the disappearance of the cat collar escapes me, although it should have a lot of importance, as it's mentioned in the story title. The dispatch of the woman the protagonist thinks he's having sex with is just sort of tacked on as a throwaway afterthought. The dispatch of the cat woman isn't all that elegant either.

The first scene had potential of arousing me, but the rest of the sex scenes didn't give me any arousing imagery. So, as an extended wet dream, it was a little less than average for me--in terms of what I'll keep reading to the end. And I only kept reading this one, because you said you wanted feedback and hadn't received any--or enough votes to qualify for the contest.

The sex words are elementary and pretty straightforward (and sometimes jarring in their crudity in a type of story that usually is lush in its word use), so the opportunity to use them and the images they could evoke in a atmospheric piece as this should be weren't developed well, in my opinion. Not much in the way of constructing atmospherics otherwise, either. The best attempt was the first ceremony scene, I thought--followed by his later sucking dry in nightly bouts by the cat woman, which left more to the reader to figure out than I thought best.

It would have been presented better with an edit. Some of the punctuation and capitalization is off, but not enough to intrude into the read. I thought the spelling and grammar were quite good, actually. More intrusive are the formatting of italics like this was a primitive-system e-mail message and the lack of quotes for dialog.

If I voted anything below a 4, I'd have given this one a 3--mostly because I liked the couching of the story in a bar room story weaving and because I think that, on the whole, you tell a story pretty well--just not notably well--in spite of all of the other, I think, half-baked threads and ideas and incomplete/spare images floating around this one.

 

[elfin_odalisque]

petemgurk, welcome.

I have read,voted and commented twice because my first was anonymous. (I've got a bad cold).

I agree prettymuch with sr but I'll put my 2 cents in any way

Proofreading:

- Dialogue MUST be enclosed in double quotaion marks. The dash is simply wrong.

- The title looks weird. Why didn't you go for 'The cat and the collar'? (Though I have no idea what the relevance of the collar is.)

- Your paragraphs are quite often too long for an internet page. It is a trick you'll get used to as you write more.

Editing:

First, a couple of errors, cow's milk is harmful for cats because the lactose does something to their insides (don't know about a succubus) and Samhain wasn't Harvest, it was New Year. The joining of spirits and mortals as the old year dies.

In my opinion, 'impaling on' is not erotic, just medieval torture where enemy heads were impaled on stakes.

To repeat sr a bit, for a short story you introduce too many storylines and then can't develop them. You don't need all those women! The tension would be a lot higher if you downgraded (or cut out) Maeve and Prudence. A battle between spirit Lyra and Jessica over the husband might have been more gripping.

I don't mind the sex, but, several times, it does seem to be dropped in rather than led in to erotically. And the trick of being in a bar telling a tale, "My glass is empty, thank you," whilst quite clever and original, in fact takes us, the readers, away from the action. We need to be thrust into being there, not listening to a storyteller.

Despite all that, I think you are a pretty promising storyteller. My comments are meant to help not criticize.

General:

I understand your frustration at not being noticed. It's bad enough at normal times but crazy in a contest. I think it' the same for others, but I sart with reading writers I know and like then try and get to some others. What you need is publicity!

See what's happened already by posting on this thread.

My strong suggestion is to start a new thread here, give an URL link (it's easy, I can do it) to your stories and ask for comments. It's the best way to getnoticed. Even quite established writers here have story thread - and don't they whore for votes at contest time.

Hope this is some help. I reckon you can get a whole lot better.

Elle

 

[petemgurk]

wow, wow, wow

sr71plt, and elfin odalesque: Thanks! There's a lot I have to learn, obviously, and your comments and critique are mighty thoughtful, and couched in such a way that I can learn from them and not be offended in the slightest.

My "complaining" about not receiving votes or feedback was mostly my attempt to be humorous, because that's generally my nature. But how could you know that?

I did the dash instead of double quotes for effect, due to the story's being one that was told by one person. Didn't work? Guess not.

I used the _underscore_ thing due to my lack of knowledge of html, but now that I've read Christabelll's "13 Hours to Midnight", I think I can figure out how to use the italics thing, hehehe.

Admittedly, there are a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of extra things thrown in, and an editor would have been useful, in that I showed it to absolutely nobody before posting it. I will do that for future submissions.

As for the sex scenes...well, the terminology is what one finds quite a bit around here, innit? Some that is not quite to one's taste may be quite tittilating to another's, so that can't be helped.

Once again, I thank you both for your insight. If you two are possibly offering your editing assistance, I will be happy to show you any new submissions prior to my loading them here. This does not apply, unfortunately, to the six stories I have in the "pending" queue, but newer ones will be available if you desire.

Best wishes and great appreciation,
Pete M'Gurk

 

[petemgurk]

one more thing

I realize my error in titling my story that way...I wanted it to be posted in the "Cs" instead of the "Ts", thinking that the higher up the alphabet it was, the more viewers would see it. If you go to the "Ts", you'll see many, many, many (many) stories starting with the word "The". I wished to avoid that, but really, it does look dumb in type, doesn't it?

PM'G

 

[cloudy]

Samhain wasn't Harvest, it was New Year. The joining of spirits and mortals as the old year dies.

One small quibble:

The Festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture.

In Scotland, at least, New Year was Hogmanay, and was held about the time of our own modern New Year.

 

[elfin_odalisque]

One small quibble:

The Festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture.

In Scotland, at least, New Year was Hogmanay, and was held about the time of our own modern New Year.

For my 2000th post I'll risk differing with the Great One.!

Samhain is Gaelic and does mean New Year. It was a 3-day festival. All house fires had to be extinguished and relit from fire brought from the mythical center of Ireland, Usinoch.

Yes, Samhain is the end of the Harvest season, but also all things living. The period between October and Yule was the period when the earth died. Leaves fell and darkness invaded the land . It was only with Yule, the oak log burning in the hearth and the beginning of lighter days and rebirth that the future could be contemplated.

 

[MarshAlien]

I do vote, I just don't comment. It's scary out there...

Thank you, then, for screwing your courage to the sticking-place. Your two comments on my Halloween stories were delightfully welcome. Exactly the right tone for us author folks who like to have our egos inflated periodically.

As for the exciting upcoming fight between the cloud and the elf about the precise dating of Gaelic festivals, zzzz[size=-1]zzzz[/size][size=-2]zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz[/size]

I'm sorry. Is it over? Who won?