My first story is up!

[nice90sguy]

Hi writers and readers.

Part one of my two-part femdom-tinged illustrated story "Training" is finally posted after a looong wait (over two months)!

I'd love some constrictive criticism on it.

I'm neither much of a writer nor an artist, but i just love writing and making illustrations (using a CG program because I'm so crap at freehand drawing).
The story is here:
https://www.literotica.com/s/training-16

P.S I posted a YouTube "promo video" for the story here:

 

[AwkwardlySet]

A very interesting premise, and I am looking forward to reading more of your story.
I would like to offer some criticism as well. Your protagonist, Waldo, doesn't really make much sense. He goes from tears and sadness to joy and arousal in a matter of seconds. He is also going from being a complete asshole to being sensitive and thoughtful in a blink of an eye. Too much extremes in his personality and not much nuances. I'd advise you to make him more relatable and more genuine. It is funny that among them two, he is the one who seems less human.

 

[nice90sguy]

I would like to offer some criticism as well...

Thank you for taking the time to read it -- yes, in hindsight, Waldo's characterization is confused, and he comes out as not believable.

In part two which I will submit in the next couple of weeks, I do go a little more into Waldo's back-story, where he reveals that he sufferred from Depersonalization Disorder in his youth.

"When did your father die? I mean how old were you when he died?" asked Libby.

"I was sixteen. He was out riding up in the Redwoods when his hog smashed into a truck. Out on 101."

"His hog smashed into a truck??" said Libby, puzzled.

"His motor-sickle. His Harley, dammit."

"Oh, his motor bike. I guess you called it a hog because its engine sounded like one, right?" asked Libby, expecting praise for her astute deduction. Waldo didn't respond but continued with his story:

"After the funeral my mom was too fucked up with grief to do much, so I started sorting through the crap in his office. There was a ton of stuff, most of which never got published. I found one paper in a box file. I remember the box file was labeled 'Turing Test'. I immediately noticed the date when he wrote that paper. He'd scrawled on the cover, in this bright blue ink, which is the color he always used: 'June 1, 1985'. The day I was born. He'd been tap, tap, tapping out this manuscript on his Adler, possibly at the very moment my mother was lying in the hospital giving birth to me and screaming for Pethidine.

"I read the paper, like it was some secret message from the grave from him to me, because of the auspicious date. It was really technical, full of formulas, weird diagrams and symbols which I didn't understand then. But I use them every day now. The weird diagrams are called Kahn Intention Diagrams, he invented them around that time, they're sorta Feynman Diagrams for the brain. They allow you to map out how a brain works, how people think.

"As I said, I didn't understand most of it at the time, but there was a summary at the end of the paper, which was in normal English, without any diagrams or formulas. In that summary, he made a prediction that by the end of the twenty-first century robots would become indistinguishable from human beings in their behavior. They would pass the "Unbounded Turing Test", which basically means that they would be indistinguishable from humans -- indistinguishable to humans, anyway, not to each other: You see, he'd proved in the paper something profound: That the robots themselves would always be able to tell they weren't human. Basically Dad predicted that robots would soon become smart enough to fool all of the people all of the time, but he also proved, using all those formulas, that they'd never become smart enough to fool themselves. It was kinda like Gödel's proof.

Libby set herself a new intention to find out about Gödel's proof. She thought about her own brain, imagining the trillions of electrical signals flying around. Then she stopped doing that; it felt bad for her, like it could literally blow her mind if she did it.

"So I went to sleep that night, my mind frazzled by the math, my emotions stirred up. When I woke up next morning, I was no longer a human; I'd turned into a robot. I was a machine."

"I don't understand," said Libby, who was having a really hard time following him, and was starting to feel dumb. But once again, Waldo ignored her and went on with his story.

"I was terrified, but at the same time, I knew that my terror was kinda just… just terror chemicals running around this machine that I'd turned into. That realization, that it was just some biochemical reactions happening, didn't exactly stop me feeling terrified, but it helped. My 'Spock brain', my prefrontal cortex," - He tapped his forehead and looked at Libby sharply - "It kind of took over and gained control of my body. It was like my body was acting under remote-control, and I was sitting somewhere else driving that body. I marched my body to the public library and discovered that what happened to me was actually a well-known phenomenon in medical circles, which had a name: Depersonalization Disorder, or DPD for short. Nobody knows exactly what goes on in the brain of a DPD sufferer or what exactly causes it. But in my case the trigger was obvious: It was reading that damn article, coupled with the trauma of my Dad getting killed.

 

[Parhelical]

There is instability in the narrative voice. You want to set a solid narrative voice and stick to it.

This is the story of Waldo and his girlfriend, who started out life as a dumb machine, and ended up becoming - well, someone else.

The "dumb machine" was in fact a highly sophisticated piece of technology, a state-of-the art prototype of the next generation of "Real Girlfriend" animatrons, which is a fancy way of saying that she was a fuck-doll. The doll was, as I said, a prototype - the only one of her kind. She was designed and built by the animatronics company Humanex. She was codenamed "Corky", which was a weak pun on the fact that she was a Caucasian model.

The conversational tone here isn't sustained and we slip into a more standard omniscient third without a character. And then is omniscient third with head-hopping between the two what we want? Or should we just stick to a close third or first of Waldo?

Dorothy looks a little like me. She's the protagonist in this story. She's upset because her aunt wants to take away her dog, Toto.

Now she's singing, and music is playing. The key is G major. She's sad because she's unable to leave her home. She wants to leave quickly, like a bluebird. There is no happiness, no color where Dorothy lives; rainbows are a symbol of happiness, and they're also colorful.

There: Now the colors have appeared! That increases happiness.

The Munchkins are pleased because the Witch of the East is dead. The witch was a cause of unhappiness, and her death therefore decreases unhappiness.

This is extremely strong. It's strong because you've committed to narrative voice. Love the choice of first person present tense for an awakening AI, the way you're communicating a non-human thought process is super interesting.

This is a close study of two characters. Drop the omniscient narration, kill the 'character' of the narrator and bolt him into Waldo. The AI's sections work brilliantly. There are a few parts where you weave lines of italicised AI voice into the narrative, that could be a way to bleed the AI's narrative voice into the narrative regularly if you feel that their thought processes overlapping is important.

 

[nice90sguy]

Thanks for your comment, Parhelical. I guess "I" should have stepped back from the narrative more, and let the characters do the talking more.