New Stories.

[TheBard1982]

Hey everyone. I just submitted part two in my series, The Summer Job.

The series tells the story of Eric, a recent high school graduate who is looking to make some extra money for the summer. Soon after, he is referred to his next door neighbor who has some things she needs help with around her house. Needless to say, Eric ends up helping her with more than the "usual" household chores, and Part 2 introduces Eric's second customer.

Anyways, I'd appreciate anyone who wants to check them out and give me some feedback. Just be warned, you might have to suspend some disbelief on these.

Here's the link to Part 1:
The Summer Job, Pt. 01

 

[filthytrancendence]

Hello! Before I get into it, I feel it's appropriate to just disclose that this one doesn't especially appeal to me on an erotic level. While I do have thoughts about that, I think they probably delve too deep into differences in taste for it to be worth burdening you with them.

I guess before I get into the specific stuff, I think it's interesting your primary concern going in is whether readers will suspend disbelief. I think you'll find people on this site will meet you pretty damn far with disbelief suspension if you tell them a good story. I'll be honest, I didn't enjoy this one much, but the fact the scenerio is far-fetched doesn't even factor into why. For my money, if a scenerio is silly, just lean into it. Don't apologize, don't hedge your bets, just go whole hog with the silly and have fun with it. My story, Taming the Bratty Roomate, is by far my silliest story. It's also my most read. I regret adding the insecure author's note apologizing for how silly it is. People like silly sex stories--it's better to just go with it. Ovbiously I've made the same mistake I'm admonishing you for. That's the only reason I bring it up.

It is not at all my intention to be unkind, just to give you as much useful feedback as I can, one writer to another.

Technical Stuff

• You've got an odd habit of starting a sentence with a present-tense verb attached to a mostly irrelevant phrase, and burying the meaningful action in the second half of the sentence. I saw it once, I moved on. But I saw it at least a half dozen times and it really ruins the flow of your prose. It's also awkward tense-mixing. An example:

Creating a flyer, he spent the next few days posting them around the neighborhood, while his parents spread the word to some of their friends and acquaintances as well.

• • "Creating a flyer" isn't adding anything to this sentence. It's just making it awkward to read. We can infer he created a flier. You can just say:
    • He spent the next few days posting fliers around the neighborhood while his parents spread the word to their friends.
  • Every sentence I clocked that starts with a present tense verb is like this. In most cases, you lose nothing by just deleting the present-tense phrase.
  • Even if the phrase is actually necessary, it is always obscuring the real action of the sentence.
    • We don't care about him creating a flier. We do care (a little bit) about him spending days posting fliers. Make sense?
  • There's a rule against mixing tenses for a reason, and this is one of the reasons.
• Your dialogue is stilted in an odd way. I picked out this line as the prime offender:

"Fuck my hairy pussy good Eric," Joyce wailed. "Tear my snatch up."

• • My best guess as to how this sentence happened is you were trying hard to follow the punctuation rules around quotations and lost track of what was actually being said. Both of those phrases are in desperate need of exclamation marks. As written, you've made Joyce sound bored to be fucked. This is a very strange way to make her sound in this moment.
    • "Fuck my hairy pussy good, Eric!" Joyce shouted.
    • "Tear my snatch up!"
  • Not all of it is this awkward, but a lot of the dialogue is a little awkward for similar reasons.
• I feel like this might be edging toward imposing my subjective taste, so make of that what you will. It feels to me like you thesaurus'd some things for the sake of it. You use about 8 different words for penis, including penis. That's a distractingly conspicuous level of variation for a story this short. People don't talk or think like that. Men usually have one word they refer to their dick with and use that word 90+% of the time. Somebody else is talking about his dick, mix it up, sure. But don't just cycle through the dick thesaurus for the sake of it.

Structural Stuff:

• Just straight up, you have too much blow-by-blow description of irrelevant action. There should be a reason every single sentence of your story is there. They don't all have to move the plot forward, but they all need to be doing something useful. I'd venture to say about 20% of your sentences in this story can be simply deleted and the story would be improved for it. Some of the more glaring examples:
  • Most of the scene of him looking out the window.
  • All of the scene of him walking from his room to Joyce's house.
  • Most of the scene of him beginning to try to put the bed together. See how hard I had to reach to even describe the scene? That's a sign it needs the hatchet. He picks up a hammer. He finds the porno mag. Bob's your uncle.
• Now, I just want to be clear. You could write a scene of him staring out a window and make that useful. But describing events we do not understand and have no context to care about is not that. Dig into his emotions. Describe the women. Describe the neighborhood. Build the character, set the scene, entice us with evocative imagery. Don't just tell us that things happened. Nobody cares what happened until you give them a reason to care about it.
• I'm going to give you a hard time about this paragraph specifically, because it instantaneously took me out of the story, hard.

While he'd known Joyce his whole life, Eric couldn't say he found her particularly attractive, but he could definitely consider her sweet. She was in her early fifties, short and thick, but not fat, with pretty, blond hair and blue eyes. If anything, the boy was confident enough to say Joyce might have been a good-looking woman in her youth, but to him, she was just the friendly lady next door.

• There is no cue for these thoughts to be shared. He closes the door to her house and starts thinking about her not being attractive. That's a big yikes.
  • The most yikes is the phrase "short and thick, but not fat." Thick in the context of a body already excludes being fat. Going out of your way to specify 'not fat' when it's already unnecessary is big yikes.
• At minimum, these thoughts need to be shared within the immediate context of him looking at her. Not him shutting a door. People notice each other's appearance when they first see them. The audience would also like to know. Not a half dozen actions deep into their interaction apporpos of nothing. These thoughts desparately need a reason to be shared. Sharing them out of nowhere shatters the flow. Sharing them out of nowhere in a yikes way double shatters the flow.

 

[TheBard1982]

Hello! Before I get into it, I feel it's appropriate to just disclose that this one doesn't especially appeal to me on an erotic level. While I do have thoughts about that, I think they probably delve too deep into differences in taste for it to be worth burdening you with them.

I guess before I get into the specific stuff, I think it's interesting your primary concern going in is whether readers will suspend disbelief. I think you'll find people on this site will meet you pretty damn far with disbelief suspension if you tell them a good story. I'll be honest, I didn't enjoy this one much, but the fact the scenerio is far-fetched doesn't even factor into why. For my money, if a scenerio is silly, just lean into it. Don't apologize, don't hedge your bets, just go whole hog with the silly and have fun with it. My story, Taming the Bratty Roomate, is by far my silliest story. It's also my most read. I regret adding the insecure author's note apologizing for how silly it is. People like silly sex stories--it's better to just go with it. Ovbiously I've made the same mistake I'm admonishing you for. That's the only reason I bring it up.

It is not at all my intention to be unkind, just to give you as much useful feedback as I can, one writer to another.

Technical Stuff

• You've got an odd habit of starting a sentence with a present-tense verb attached to a mostly irrelevant phrase, and burying the meaningful action in the second half of the sentence. I saw it once, I moved on. But I saw it at least a half dozen times and it really ruins the flow of your prose. It's also awkward tense-mixing. An example:

• • "Creating a flyer" isn't adding anything to this sentence. It's just making it awkward to read. We can infer he created a flier. You can just say:
    • He spent the next few days posting fliers around the neighborhood while his parents spread the word to their friends.
  • Every sentence I clocked that starts with a present tense verb is like this. In most cases, you lose nothing by just deleting the present-tense phrase.
  • Even if the phrase is actually necessary, it is always obscuring the real action of the sentence.
    • We don't care about him creating a flier. We do care (a little bit) about him spending days posting fliers. Make sense?
  • There's a rule against mixing tenses for a reason, and this is one of the reasons.
• Your dialogue is stilted in an odd way. I picked out this line as the prime offender:

• • My best guess as to how this sentence happened is you were trying hard to follow the punctuation rules around quotations and lost track of what was actually being said. Both of those phrases are in desperate need of exclamation marks. As written, you've made Joyce sound bored to be fucked. This is a very strange way to make her sound in this moment.
    • "Fuck my hairy pussy good, Eric!" Joyce shouted.
    • "Tear my snatch up!"
  • Not all of it is this awkward, but a lot of the dialogue is a little awkward for similar reasons.
• I feel like this might be edging toward imposing my subjective taste, so make of that what you will. It feels to me like you thesaurus'd some things for the sake of it. You use about 8 different words for penis, including penis. That's a distractingly conspicuous level of variation for a story this short. People don't talk or think like that. Men usually have one word they refer to their dick with and use that word 90+% of the time. Somebody else is talking about his dick, mix it up, sure. But don't just cycle through the dick thesaurus for the sake of it.

Structural Stuff:

• Just straight up, you have too much blow-by-blow description of irrelevant action. There should be a reason every single sentence of your story is there. They don't all have to move the plot forward, but they all need to be doing something useful. I'd venture to say about 20% of your sentences in this story can be simply deleted and the story would be improved for it. Some of the more glaring examples:
  • Most of the scene of him looking out the window.
  • All of the scene of him walking from his room to Joyce's house.
  • Most of the scene of him beginning to try to put the bed together. See how hard I had to reach to even describe the scene? That's a sign it needs the hatchet. He picks up a hammer. He finds the porno mag. Bob's your uncle.
• Now, I just want to be clear. You could write a scene of him staring out a window and make that useful. But describing events we do not understand and have no context to care about is not that. Dig into his emotions. Describe the women. Describe the neighborhood. Build the character, set the scene, entice us with evocative imagery. Don't just tell us that things happened. Nobody cares what happened until you give them a reason to care about it.
• I'm going to give you a hard time about this paragraph specifically, because it instantaneously took me out of the story, hard.

• There is no cue for these thoughts to be shared. He closes the door to her house and starts thinking about her not being attractive. That's a big yikes.
  • The most yikes is the phrase "short and thick, but not fat." Thick in the context of a body already excludes being fat. Going out of your way to specify 'not fat' when it's already unnecessary is big yikes.
• At minimum, these thoughts need to be shared within the immediate context of him looking at her. Not him shutting a door. People notice each other's appearance when they first see them. The audience would also like to know. Not a half dozen actions deep into their interaction apporpos of nothing. These thoughts desparately need a reason to be shared. Sharing them out of nowhere shatters the flow. Sharing them out of nowhere in a yikes way double shatters the flow.

Thank you for the feedback. This story was written years ago before I had better practice. I will definitely take your info to heart. Thank you.