Really need feedback

[al55]

Hi everyone, I haven't gotten many responses to my first story and am starting to think it may be terrible. Would anyone be able to provide feedback?

Please see the story:

https://www.literotica.com/s/metamorphosis-33

 

[NoTalentHack]

Hi everyone, I haven't gotten many responses to my first story and am starting to think it may be terrible. Would anyone be able to provide feedback?

Please see the story:

https://www.literotica.com/s/metamorphosis-33

I’m afraid I don’t have time to read it at the moment, but I’ll note two things. The first is that it’s long, which may be a turnoff to users. The sweet spot seems to be in the 10Kish range for readers. The second is that it’s an Erotic Horror story, and that category has very low readership. It looks like it has a rating of 4+, which means it’s pretty solid, too.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

As NTH said, your story is quite long, so not many will have the patience to read it. I would also advise to divide such stories into smaller chapters - I agree that 10k words is a good value overall. Once you attract some readership and a decent amount of followers, then you can be more free with your story length, as you will be an established author by then, so readers will know what to expect from you and won't hesitate to plunge into a long story. If I get some time I will try to read it and offer some insight, even though judging by the tags, it is not my cup of tea, so...

 

[Dark_Logan_]

Given the permitted, often toxic, anonymous abuse that can constitute feedback around here be careful what you wish for.

Although if you’ve not had anyone telling you you’re pathetic waste of space and that you should never write again you might be doing something right

I’m paying serious consideration to turning comments off to stop the anonymous trolls I occasionally attract.

Recently had one charmer with the time on his hands to bomb every story I’ve written with the eloquent prose “this is horse shit”

I presume he at least cut and paste to save himself a little time

 

[wintextwriter]

Hi everyone, I haven't gotten many responses to my first story and am starting to think it may be terrible. Would anyone be able to provide feedback?

Please see the story:

https://www.literotica.com/s/metamorphosis-33

I didn’t read it all, so my input will be limited, but I wanted to try and give some feedback since I understand how you feel.

First off, I don’t think it’s terrible. I can’t speak to the plot, but your descriptions are good and well-spaced, so they do the job without feeling intrusive. So unless some extremely jarring plot mistakes happen, you should be fine

Your dialogues read well and communicate character well—however, I do think they can be a bit cookie-cutter in places. Not the worst mistake out there, since such dialogue short-hands are useful and common, but something to keep in mind.

I do agree that it’s long, but I’m not one to talk since I tend to write long build-ups and preambles myself, so I can’t fault you for wanting to take some more time with your characters and settings than erotica readers are used to. However, some advice that I do think is warranted in this avenue, is to try and make your sentences a bit more granular. Use more periods, in short.

For example:

[[ Sarah laughed too, realising that she was doing so with more abandon as time went by, the strength of the drink she was sipping being considerably more than the ones she had already consumed at the beginning of the night. ]]

Can be:

[[ Sarah laughed too, realising that she was doing so with more abandon as time went on. The strength of her current drink was considerably more than the ones she had been sipping all night. ]]

It helps with readability. Makes the prose lighter on the eye even if the action your readers are waiting for is not yet here.

Finally, do also keep in mind that the category you posted in might not have that much traffic to begin with. Even the ones with lots of traffic (like I/T) are sparse in the feedback department. So don’t fret too much.

And do take my advice with a grain of salt. I’m also pretty much a beginner. I commiserate a lot with wanting some feedback, though.

 

[Djmac1031]

Ah, Erotic Horror. Where good stories go to die lol.

As others have said: 13 pages is a huge commitment right out of the gate. And EH isn't the most popular category anyway. (Note: I have no problem with the category just stating facts.)

I breezed over the first page. You write well, no glaring spelling or grammar or punctuation errors to dissuade a reader from continuing.

I suppose you need to be a pretty good writer to crank out 47K words.

So: your technical abilities are not the problem.

It's your category and the fact your a new, unproven author.

Here's the good news: your story will find it's audience. Although it might take awhile.

Keep writing. Put some more out there. Maybe some shorter, simpler tales to get you noticed, get some name recognition.

As you draw new readers, they may look for your other stuff and be more willing to commit to a much longer story.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I don't have time for a full critique but just a few comments on the first page.

Technicals (spelling/grammar) are decent. That might seem like faint praise but I mention them when they're bad, so I might as well mention when they're not

47k words is a lot. It's not necessarily too much; I've written longer here, and most of the fiction I buy is novels around 100k words or longer. But when I'm buying a novel, I have a lot of info about the story - maybe a friend recommended it to me, maybe it's an author I already know, maybe I liked the reviews. At the very least, somebody who's in the business of selling books read the whole thing and decided this was something that might sell. So once I buy a novel, I'm probably going to see it through, or at least give it a very solid try.

With a new author on Literotica, I have none of that. Quite often I'll start a new story, decide "I don't think this one is for me", and go read something else instead. If you want to hook me as a reader, you probably want to do that within the first 1000 words or so, definitely within the first Literotica page (~3750 words). If I've made it that far and I still don't know whether I want to read all the way through, the answer's probably no.

One of the things that will influence that decision: Does the story need to be this long? Some stories really do have 13 Literotica pages of story to them, and some feel more like 3-page stories with 10 pages of padding.

(FWIW, that doesn't mean everything needs to be action. Character development, mood, scene-setting, all of those are great if done right. I've read 50k-word books that were almost entirely characterisation and not felt impatient. It's more just "do these words serve some purpose?)

First two paragraphs of your story:

At first, Sarah had been sure that she wouldn't be able to handle the heat of the Island, never mind the Mediterranean as a whole, imagining long and sleepless nights wrapped in sweat-soaked bedclothes and days of fatigue that would follow. She was used to a colder climate and the need to wrap up in warm clothes on a daily basis, but to her surprise, she found herself acclimatising within the first day aboard the ship that would carry her around the various islands on their cruise. Somehow the warmth seemed to sink into her skin, rather than fluster her, and she grew to enjoy the sensation of the sun on her bare skin more than she could have imagined.

Laura, on the other hand, was a different matter entirely. Sarah's best friend proved not only to be very susceptible to sunburn, but also irresistible to the many insects that called the islands they visited home. Where the blonde strode past such troubles like a serene siren on the way to the beach, the brunette spent most of her time batting away mosquitos or slathering her reddened skin in endless layers of sun-block in the vain hope of improving her situation. Of course, the irony was not lost on either of the friends that it had been Laura who convinced Sarah that the trip was a good idea in the first place, not knowing how things would turn out in reality.

This isn't terrible, but it could stand some pruning:

"She was used to a colder climate and the need to wrap up in warm clothes on a daily basis, but to her surprise, she found herself acclimatising within the first day aboard the ship that would carry her around the various islands on their cruise."

I don't think this loses anything if it's cut down to:

"She was used to a colder climate and the need to wrap up in warm clothes, but to her surprise, she found herself acclimatising within the first day aboard the cruise liner."

"Laura, on the other hand, was a different matter entirely" - "on the other hand" is just redundant here.

"but also irresistible to the many insects that called the islands they visited home" - I don't think this would lose anything if trimmed to "but also irresistible to insects".

"Where the blonde strode past such troubles like a serene siren on the way to the beach" - "serene" feels redundant here, since the rest of the sentence is already describing her serenity.

And these also feel redundant:

"the brunette spent most of her time batting away mosquitos or slathering her reddened skin in endless layers of sun-block in the vain hope of improving her situation. Of course, the irony was not lost on either of the friends that it had been Laura who convinced Sarah that the trip was a good idea in the first place, not knowing how things would turn out in reality."

Those extra words make your opening paragraphs almost 30% longer than they need to be, without adding much of value. It'd take a lot more reading for me to know whether the overall structure could stand the same level of pruning/ But as a reader without much information to go on, my best guess is that if it's padded at the micro level it's probably going to be padded at the structural level too. Assuming another ~30% there, this story might be 60% longer than it needs to be, and that's likely to make me feel impatient.

Another thing I want to know early on: what kind of story is this?

"Erotic Horror" covers a lot, some things I love, some things I don't want to read. From the title and the opening paragraphs I can see this is about "transformation", and it looks like it's happening on an island. But that still leaves a lot. Are we doing Shadow Over Innsmouth somewhere sunny? Island of Dr. Moreau? Futanari transformation? I don't know and the first page doesn't tell me much about it.

I started reading Literotica decades ago, back when the story tags weren't available on the front page, and I never got into the habit of checking them. That's on me, and if I had checked the tags, I'd have known a lot more about the content because you gave the story relevant tags. But I'm probably not the only one who doesn't read the tags. Even knowing it's a "big boobs" kind of transformation, I don't have much of a feel for how dark it's going to get.

Near the end of page 1 you start on a conversation between Paul and Rob, which I suspect is going to answer at least some of those questions, but unfortunately not before the page break. It is established that Paul is "a leading surgeon and a prominent researcher in the field of genetics research", which gives some hint about where this might be going, but unfortunately it also derails me into wondering why he's an expert in two vastly different fields and trying to figure out why this needs to be one character instead of just recruiting a cosmetic surgeon and a geneticist.

Without having read further, I can't say exactly what the right solution for that would be, but one thing I'd consider would be putting some of that flashback a bit earlier and using it to give some hints on what kind of tone and content I can expect. Alternately, if you can trim the first-page content down a bit so the reader gets to that scene faster, restructuring here might not be necessary.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

In reading the story, I understand why you placed it in Erotic Horror, but as others have mentioned, the length of the story within that category will dissuade a lot of readers.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with writing a story of this length. I've done so with several. The key to attracting and keeping readers though is to place them in the Novels/Novellas category with all the appropriate tags. Some believe that only non-erotic content resides in the N/N category, but they're wrong. There are stories covering all manner of kink posted there and readers in that category know going in that the stories will be longer and accept that fact willingly.