My Twin Loves~Feb. 2, 2002

[Mickie]

The story for this week is

My Twin Loves
by Christo

It can be found in the romance category.

The link -- http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=34765

 

[christo]

Well, now the shoe is on the other foot, and I get to see what its like to suffer the slings and arrows.

Be forewarned-- the story is long. About 16000 words long, so make sure you're sitting in a comfy chair before you start. I hope you'll find it's a quick read. This was the 27th story I posted, and it's a bit more ambitious than the other stuff I've written. There's not that much sex, either, thought I should raise that flag as well. It's more a romance, a confessional. I hope you'll enjoy it nonetheless.

This is of course a work of fiction, but the twins are based on two sisters I knew a few years ago. They were both very pretty, very very nice, and extremely identical. I've never seen twins who looked more alike. I worked with the one twin, but when we would go out to happy hour her sister would tag along. They were inseparable.

They also never had boyfriends. The girl I worked with was asked out by every guy in the company, and no one ever got past the first date. I should know, I was one of them. Asked her to lunch, just friends, sure. Had a nice time. Asked her to dinner, no. Asked her again a month later, no. Very nice, very polite about it, but no. Maybe none of us were good enough for them. They were both really lovely. Sigh.

Go read the story. Hope you like it.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

Christo,

Maybe I need a double shot of scotch, or milk of magnesia, or (God help me) both. You're an experienced writer with some good stuff here. Unfortunately, the things I didn't think were good, began to bug me. That's why I'm calling it quits for the night w/o finishing your story. Until my dyspepsia passes and my task is resumed, here's a few parting shots.

IMHO, you use "I" way too often. It's a curse for writers in the first person, but can be limited.

IMHO, you also used "She" at the beginning of a lot of sentences and once ended two straight sentences with "me." Some of that may be by choice, some by chance.

One last IMHO, some of your sentences felt awkward and may need to be re-phrased or re-organized.

Sorry about being a quitter and a negative one at that. But like old Doug MacArthur and a bad taco, I'll return. Until then, if you haven't done so already, take a shot at my stuff "Dis-Orderly Conduct Ch. 1-2" in the EC section and under the "Looking for Bouquets and Brickbats" thread on the story forum. RF

--

I'm sorry, I'm being selfish. I'm not looking for sympathy, really. I see lonely
people and my heart aches, because I know what they're missing. I know how
wonderful it is to love someone and have that love returned. I couldn't be more
deeply in love than I am right now. I'm hopeless. The fact that this love is
based on lies, deception, and my willingness to ignore reality doesn't change a
thing. I'm in love. ("I'm" APPEARS 3 TIMES IN THE FIRST 6 WORDS. ALSO, EVERY SENTENCE BUT ONE BEGINS WITH "I" OR "I'm".)

I'm in love, and for a few weeks more everything will be OK, before the truth
comes out and my life changes forever. I wish by closing my eyes I could shut
out the world. But now it's too late. (THIS IS A SUBJECTIVE, STYLE ISSUE YOU MIGHT CONSIDER PLACING "everything will be OK...," AT THE END OF THE SENTENCE.)

I should explain.

A Friday night in April, and spending it bar-hopping didn't appeal to me. I
wanted quiet, (WHY?) and that's what I got, a good book in a comfortable chair and no
one to bother me. (TWO STRAIGHT SENTENCES ENDING WITH "me") But around nine o'clock I got a rather pointed craving for
mint chocolate chip ice cream. I couldn't shake it, I just HAD to have some.

So ten minutes later there I was in the supermarket, stomping down the frozen food aisle. The glass door to the freezer was open, another snacker rooting around for a quart of creamy goodness. The glass so fogged I couldn't see who it was, and I tapped my foot, waiting patiently for my turn. (FOOT TAPPING IS USUALLY A CUE FOR READERS THAT A CHARACTER IS IMPATIENT AND/OR HAS RHYTHM.)

(FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH, I DIDN'T LIKE THE LAST PARAGRAPH, ESPECIALLY THE SECOND SENTENCE. HERE'S A POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE WHICH ALSO ELIMINATES TWO "I") "Another snacker already had their head stuck inside the freezer's open glass door, rooting around for a quart…." (BY THE WAY, HOW DOES THE NARRATOR KNOW THE OTHER SNACKER IS LOOKING FOR A QT.?)

The door slowly swung shut, and it was like the curtain lifting as the actors
take the stage. She looked up, saw me staring, and she smiled at me, a sweet,
serene smile, and all thoughts of ice cream fled my mind. It was love at first
sight. I mean LOVE, not lust, not some chemical imbalance polluting my brain. (NICE LINE)
This was an arrow from Cupid straight (IN)to my heart.

She was wearing old jeans and a gray sweatshirt and her dark blonde hair was
pulled back in a bushy ponytail. She was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen.
She was tall and very thin, and her skin was flawless as porcelain. Her eyes
were the dark, swirling blue of the deep ocean. She looked like a china doll. But
she looked me straight in the eye and her frank smile told me that she was no
doll. She was definitely all girl. (EVERY SENTENCE BEGINS WITH "She" EXCEPT FOR A "But she" AND THE ONE THAT STARTS WITH "Her")

"I guess I'm not the only one with a sweet-tooth," she said in a flute-like voice,
(WHILE) holding up two pints of butter pecan. (OKAY, SO SHE WAS LOOKING FOR A QUART)

 

[karmadog]

great story

This is a terrific story. I don't think you're going to do well with it on this site, though. The average wanker won't wade through so many words to get to the sex.

Their loss.

If I were you, I would clean up some of the errors (I won't go into a line by line analysis, it looks like RF is going to do that), and more importantly, I would lose the cliches, then submit for pay.

Skin that is "flawless as porcelain"
She looks like a "china doll"
Her blue eyes "shone like stars"
Skin "pure as milk"

There are more, but these are the worst offenders. In an original story like this, they glare.

There is also a section where Mike describes the difficulty in remembering the face of someone you meet. He says the lines are "fuzzy". I might consider "blurry" or maybe "smeared". "Fuzzy" makes it sound like she has a facial hair problem.

I think the part where he considers murdering Amy is out of place and unnecessary. It throws a red herring at the reader. I understand that he is concerned that he is slipping into madness, but that just seems a little extreme. We're really only talking about paranoia.

I was also curious why Michael never mentioned the soul when wondering how he could be in love with two women who seem so identical. We speak of the one we love as being a soul-mate. Shouldn't he wonder how he could be in love with two different souls in identical bodies?

I didn't care for the Darth Vader bit. It made him seem like a bit of a geek, but then again, he may be a geek since no woman has ever swallowed with him. Plus it seems like a cop-out, you should explain how he feels rather than use shorthand.

Later, when Lynn is about to blow him for the first time, she says, "You're so big." then "You're so hard." Reasonable things to say in real life, but in a story they are repetitive.

You used the lines "My girlfriend was Lynn. Her sister was Amy." Then "My fiancee was Lynn. Her sister was Amy." I liked that, but I think it would have been good to echo that again at the end of the story. "My wife was Lynn and my wife was Amy." Something like that.

I also felt that the description of love at first sight as "Cupid's arrow straight to my heart" or something like that, was a little weak. When it happened to me it was like a lightning bolt (also stale, but I'm not going to give up MY good stuff). It felt like electricity flooded my entire body. It was sexual, but only partly. It was a shift in world view. Cupid's arrow to the heart does not do the sensation justice.

All in all, this was an excellent story. Mike changes believably and inevitably throughout the story. Very impressive.

 

[KillerMuffin]

Double post: Here and in the Clawed Feedback thread

Pretty good, as usual. Your main character was perfectly human and someone I could identify with. The twins were a little less "touchable," but that's a difficulty to overcome with first person perspective. The trick is to show the audience what they're really like despite the frequently wrong editorializations from the main character. You didn't have a whole lot of that, though by necessity there was some.

For instance, take the part where he drops Lynn off from the first date. Then he hears "Do you like him, too?" That didn't even blip on my radar. He had to explain to me why it blipped on his radar. That should have sent warning signals to me that something was less than kosher without a blueprint. That's pretty much the norm. When he suspects something that the twins are up to, it's normally something he has to point out to me. The spot with the marker wasn't too bad, though. It made me suspect things weren't okay in twin-land.

The reason this is a problem is the reader doesn't feel the same thing the main character feels. He doesn't trust the twins and he thinks they're lying to him. Cognatively, so did I after he explained a few things. Emotionally, I missed why it was such a big deal. I didn't feel the trickery.

That leads to a breakdown in plot development itself. I had some trouble with the plot. Mainly because I went through the story wondering what the real problem was. Plot = conflict. The conflict in this story is what, exactly? Is it the conflict in the man himself? Is it the conflict between the man and the lie the twins are perpetrating? Is the conflict between the twins trying to keep it a secret? You have a few conflicts going on, but there isn't a primary conflict to be resolved. There was resolution in the end, I felt the story was finished, but I didn't have any idea what had been resolved, exactly.

Plot and character development can be terribly interlinked, and when one breaks down, so does the other. I have the feeling that you gave a great deal of thought to your characters and how you wanted them to behave to create the effect that you wanted. I also have the feeling that when you gave thought to the plot that it was only developed as a series of activities that the characters went through to highlight things like the "I's" discomfort and the twins' duplicity. There wasn't much thought put into conflict and resolution, the id of most storytelling.

Of course, I've been wrong before.

 

[christo]

Thanks to those who commented on the story. I hope it was the length and not the quality that kept folks from posting. It is a bit of load.

Now, to rebut, refute, retaliate against those who dare criticize ME! Just kidding. Let me reply one by one. RF, I hope you managed to finished the story. I probably did use that one pronoun too much early in the story, more than I realized. Its always good to get a second opinion to make sure any blind spots are covered. I don't think it's especially important whether Lynn is getting a pint or a quart or a gallon of ice cream. That's just the narrator idly speculating, no big deal.

K-dog, yeah, I should have worked a bit harder on describing them other than "china dolls". The thing is, they girls I modeled the twins are DID look like dolls, and a friend of mine described them like that once and it stuck in my head. Should have dislodged it.

The question of their souls is one I really didn't consider, at least not in the spiritual way I think you mean. I meant that to be a main problem of the story, that Mike has met his soul mate and it turns out there are two of them. And what does that mean? Can you love two people at the same time, if they're perfectly identical? And what if they aren't identical? Can you be in love with two people?

I don't think the Darth Vader comment makes him a geek! I liked that line, dammit. Hey, it's only the most popular movie of all time, lots of non-geeks liked it. Including buff mega-studs like yours truly.

KM, you raise a point that was mentioned in lots of the feedback I got. Namely, what's he complaining about? I got a lot of feedback from guys saying, "Wow, twins, lucky bastard!" Which wasn't quite the point I was trying to make.

When you say that you were wondering what the problem was I was a bit surprised, I thought I went a bit overboard saying exactly what was wrong. The plot is, as you say, the narrator illustrating all his worries and suspicions.

Finishing this story was like giving birth. I wrote the first big chunk in about a week and then it took me three months to finish it and clean it up. Now I've read your comments and I have a red pen in my hand and I want to start pruning and polishing again. No. I'm going to let it sit for awhile and then go back through your comments and maybe do some fine-tuning then. I'm pooped.

Thanks again!

 

[KillerMuffin]

Well, there is one reason that I can think of right off the top of my head to this little dilemma of yours. Why do your emails say "Wow twins! Lucky dog!" and I think "What's the problem?" Your character tells us it's a problem. He doesn't really show us that it's a problem. There's no horns of a dilemma for him beyond a drunk bar scene at the very end when it's too late. He goes through these elaborate activities to discover the truth but there's no real reason why he's bothering that I can see. He says it's a problem. The problem? He's saying it and I'm not believing it. He's not showing the problem enough. The guy should be torn, I would think.

 

[VeraGem]

I saw the dilemma, and a lot of other readers might have sensed a larger conflict far sooner, I think, had the male/female roles been reversed. Picture two twin guys, possibly 'frat-boys', playing this game on a woman. Oh! Suddenly the main character is being used! I saw that as a huge conflict for any guy worthy of the name.

I liked the subtlety of his problem too - how could he show that he knew anything at all? With no proof he would simply look like a paranoid freak. I only started to believe him by small degrees because the reactions of the twins to seemingly harmless incidents went way over the edge for someone without something to hide. I like that everything wasn't right in my face. I liked having to figure it out on my own.

An inability to see what the twins were really like fits the story well. They weren't really like anything. They were hiding behind a persona of their own creation - an amalgam of both. I was wondering if they even knew their own identities after a while. I wish you would have expanded a bit more with respect to their lack of identity.

The ending though - I didn't see it as a happy one until I got there. Maybe it's just me, but I was hoping for some kind of psychotic break on someone's part - or at least for something bigger, more over the edge. The end just made me say: "Oh no, not happily ever after!"

Well written, by the way. Only a few mistakes in all those pages. Most clearly in my mind is the use of 'them' instead of 'then' and one other typo I can't recall. The story sucked me in and held me in front of the screen from start to finish. Five minutes late for work, damn it!

Good job - but a little more polish would make it shine.

 

[karmadog]

I'm with Vera

mostly, but at first I believed him. I believed that the twins were switching off. Probably because of where it's posted, but then I started to think that he was just paranoid, then back to the switch. I like a story that I can't figure out right away.

Also, I thought the conflict seemed clear, but then I'm a one woman kind of guy.

 

[christo]

The ending was the hardest part, because, uh, I didn't have one. I really don't mean for it to be a "happy" ending. He loves both girls, he can't bear to lose either, but he knows big trouble looms. I meant for him to feel that it's inevitable, he doesn't have to strength to fight them both.

I didn't think, after all that had happened, that Mike would run away. I thought about ending it that way, but it was a cop-out. Likewise, him going ballistic wouldn't have worked, after all that had happened that also would have been cheap. I thought the ending should be quiet, but the deception for once and for all totally exposed. And that's what I came up with.