Only my second story here, would love constructive feedback

[TheLM]

https://literotica.com/s/jennifers-resignation

I wanted to focus on buildup and pacing, as those are things I’ve always struggled with in writing.

I know with erotica there’s a punch to get to, so I inserted a little early sexuality to help keep things moving, but in general I feel like I have a lot to learn.

 

[joy_of_cooking]

Nice story. Hot, graphic, well-paced. I'm going to focus on the negatives here because that's the sort of feedback I like to receive myself, but these are mostly minor nitpicks. Don't forget that the story was good. I liked it.

You have a good grasp of syntactic stuff like spelling, punctuation, and grammar. The few mistakes in that area are clearly mistakes, rather than misunderstandings. E.g., "Jennifer's personality had rub off on her pet," rather than "rubbed." Or, "But some things about Jennifer were abnormal," which seems duplicative of and worse placed than the later sentence "But sometimes appearances are deceiving."

There are also some minor continuity issues. E.g., "Natural G-cup breasts had always been the feature she was most proud of" but also "Jennifer's bust had been the product of 2 years worth of holiday bonuses," which implies augmentation.

Oh, and you use different quoting conventions for online comments and forum messages versus SMS messages. Seems unnecessary? I'd just do it all like regular speech.

Another proofreading pass could have caught most of this.

Stylistically, your sentences and paragraphs tended to be longer and less focused than I would have written them. E.g., you wrote

At work, her boss Jeremy tended to gravitate towards Jennifer's coworkers more than he did her. Jeremy was 45, tall and stocky, handsome. His favorite haunt was in front of Monica's desk, as he likely saw something in Monica that he didn't see in Jennifer. Both were equally competent at the (always-riveting) task of insurance sales, but Monica didn't dress how Jennifer did. Monica wore pencil skirts and low-cut blouses, and her dark hair was never styled in a way that could be described as utilitarian. Monica's visage was everything that Jennifer's was not. Monica was the office flirt, while Jennifer was a fantastic employee but otherwise a forgettable fixture in a mundane day.

I'll offer a rewrite:

Jennifer took it as a point of pride that her boss, Jeremy, lingered at Monica's desk rather than hers. The two women did the same job, and equally well, but Monica wore pencil skirts and low-cut blouses. Monica was the office flirt. Jennifer was the quietly competent employee in the background, and she liked it that way.

That's 61 words instead of 124, and the only missing content is Jeremy's physical description. (I'm happy to hear if I've substantively changed what you were trying to accomplish with that paragraph.)

Speaking of physical descriptions, I usually interpret stocky as implying short in addition to broad. Maybe "tall and broad" would have better communicated his appearance?

Moving on to higher-level stuff, you've clearly internalized the lesson of "show, don't tell." The precise timing of her daily routine, the rigid rotation of her podcasts, the messages she exchanges with these redditors (?), all paint a vivid picture of an exacting and discrete but also sexual woman. Well done.

Okay, enough nitpicking. Here's my big complaint: your characters seem inconsistent to me.

Jeremy is 45. Monica and Jeremy both tell Jennifer that they're going to talk. Jennifer thinks she can sue people for sexual harassment. All of this led me to expect mature, professional people responding rationally to incentives like labor laws and HR departments.

But then Jeremy tells Jennifer to come in a corset and no panties, and Monica answers the door in latex and heels, and Jeremy ties Jennifer up and starts cutting her clothes off. Which is...not what those people do.

It's ironic that I'm saying this to you. If you read through AwkwardMD's and Omenainen's review thread, you'll see that I was very recently advised to try writing characters. Because I wasn't, at all. So take the following with a grain of salt.

I think of characterization as world-building, but for people. And as in world-building, you can do anything as long as you don't contradict yourself and you flag the deviations from the real world. The classic example is, if you want automobiles you have to have traffic jams or a reason for not having traffic jams.

Another way to think about this is in terms of reader expectations. You're welcome to write stories about people doing things that should have gotten them fired or imprisoned long before they meet the narrator. But you have to warn your reader that's where you're going.

A microcosm of that point is your "blackmail" tag. I expect stories tagged "blackmail" to feature that as an important plot point. It's usually the prime mover of the entire plot. Here, I got a few paragraphs of someone expecting to get blackmailed before instead having (as far as I can tell) consensual sex. Surprising! And not in a good way.

To summarize: proofread more, revise more, focus on internal consistency, and manage your reader's expectations.

Believe it or not, this really was a good story.

 

[TheLM]

Thank you so much for the thoughtful response!

That is super helpful and totally actionable feedback, exactly what I was looking for.