Wordmangler2000 wrote...
Hello, Yanagi.
I don't have time today to do a thorough analysis of your chapters, but I read them with interest and I'm pleased to offer my reactions, plus a few details here and there. I'm sorry I can't do more -- it's clear you put some effort into this work, and you deserve some real feedback.
yanagi wrote...
Twelve Days of Christmas, A collection of Stories About a Sub and His Mistress and How They Celebrate the Holiday Season
I find writing titles incredibly challenging and more than a little tedious.
The Twelve Days of Christmas is a fine start, but your subtitle is so clunky! I know you need to say something about the content so prospective readers will find your book, but there must be a smoother way to get the essentials across. What about:
The Twelve Days of Christmas: Celebrating the Season with a Sub and his Mistress
Ugh. I'm sure you can do better.
yanagi wrote...
The first day I came home and found her in her black coat.
First sentences are essential. Many of your potential readers rely upon it when deciding whether or not to read your story. You've got to polish the first sentence until it sparkles. In my opinion (and there are those who disagree), the first sentence is more important than the last. I worry that your lead doesn't do it all it could to capture the reader's attention.
You're leading with the least important element: what day it was. "The first day" doesn't arouse interest, it just establishes when the story happens. (Possibly, probably, you want to embed subheads in the story to reinforce the "twelve days" structure. Why not lead with a simple subhead:
Day One. That's your chapter title. It frees you to get to the important stuff first in the actual text of the story.) You've also got that awkward repeated "her." If you say that you "came home," readers will wonder where you were, and speculate that they should be thinking about your activities there.
Here's one way you might get into the action:
She was wearing her black coat. Indoors. With the black spikes, I noticed.
"I see you finally found your way home, dog," she said. I lowered my head. A large, elaborately wrapped gift box sat beside her on the floor, next to the stairs. I knew it was for me.
"I've decided how to make Christmas a little more fun this year," she said. "Get on your knees and beg."
I paused. I was still wearing my coat and scarf. Should I put them in the closet or -- no. When she used that tone, she expected to be obeyed. Without hesitation.
I fell to my knees...
yanagi wrote...
I fell on my knees and she straddled me. I could just see her heels on either side of me when I looked down. ... She grabbed my hair and jerked my head back and whispered in my ear. “Did I tell you to leave your pants on?” I shook my head and whined “No, mistress.” I could feel the satin of her thong on my back as she scooted back. “Here, hold this.” She put her whip between my teeth and she reached her arms around and unbuckled my pants and then pulled them slowly down, tapping each leg for me to lift it. Soon, I was on all fours in nothing but my briefs. She pulled those off last, leaving my cock free and growing.
I had a tough time envisioning this. When I read "I fell to my knees," I think of someone who is still upright, but kneeling. "I fell to all fours" or "I fell to my hands and knees" would have made the setup clearer for me.
You have an opportunity add some vividness to this paragraph, to paint the picture more clearly in the reader's mind. Instead of "I could just see her heels," why not "Her black spike heels shone on either side of me. How I had labored to bring those shoes to such gleaming perfection!" Later, you write, "I could feel the satin of her thong..." Why not: "The satin of her thong slid smoothly against my back..."?
yanagi wrote...
Mistress took her whip from my mouth dismounted with a clack of heels.
I do like this sentence, plus or minus the missing "and." "Dismounted" and "clack" are good colorful words.
yanagi wrote...
She pointed with her cat of nine tails at a gift box on the floor wrapped in red ribbon and green, shimmering paper.
You gotta hyphenate "cat-of-nine-tails" for clarity.
I worry about "on the floor." It doesn't add much to the sentence (where else would it be?) and it interrupts the description of the gift box. Cut the prepositional phrase and the sentence will be clearer and more direct.
yanagi wrote...
“There’s your present, dog, go unwrap it.”
A small point: You've spliced together two sentences. "There's your present, dog. Go unwrap it."
Why do I mention such a small thing? Because these tiny errors interrupt the trance that you're trying to cast over your reader.
A master of the writing trades once told me to envision a milk bottle with a funnel stuck in it. The reader's attention, he said, was like an ant making its way around the top rim of the funnel. Your goal is to capture the ant -- the reader's attention -- in the milk bottle.
Your title and opening sentences, if they are well written, create a gravitational force that starts to pull the ant down into the bottle. Vivid, smoothly written sentences work like grease on the inner surface of the funnel. The reader's natural interest in the subject matter pulls his attention down the smooth surface of the funnel. You're almost home!
But: When the reader encounters a typographical error, a poor word choice, a convoluted sentence, a choppy paragraph, a misplaced preposition...the tiny weakness in the story is like a little ridge on the surface of the funnel. It lets the ant gain a foothold. The ant's progress into the bottle is arrested and there is some danger that the loss of momentum will allow him to climb out entirely.
Reader attention is a fragile thing. Readers have spouses, cell phones, manga to read, jobs, children...they have a million ways to spend their time instead of reading your story. You've got to make them forget all of that. When they encounter a poorly written sentence, the trance is broken. They are shocked into the meta-awareness that they are sitting in a chair reading a story, that they are neglecting other matters that are more important. They may not finish the story.
Ultimately, your goal is to make the reader so hunger for details that he has to finish the story. You don't want any ridges on the funnel.
yanagi wrote...
I began to push myself up and felt the sting of the whip against my back.
In the spirit of giving each sentence a thorough, close reading: How does one "begin" to push oneself up? Isn't there a moment when you're not pushing yourself up, and then a moment when you are? It would be better to give the readers "I straightened my arms" or "I struggled to my feet" or some similar concrete action that they can picture. No one can picture "began to push myself up" because there's really no such thing.
yanagi wrote...
Obediently, I crawled over and took the ribbon in my teeth and began to pull.
I distrust adverbs. If your character is obedient, let his actions show it. "Obediently" doesn't really add anything to this sentence. What is the difference between crawling and crawling obediently? Can you see the difference? If so, describe it. If not...what is the word doing there?
Geeeeeez. I love this word-by-word work. If I could live my life over, I'd focus on being a copy-editor. The money's not great and there's no glory in it, but the work engages me like nothing else. I wish I had time to crawl over your story sentence by sentence. But I don't. So I've got to back up and make some general observations.
First, your "twelve days of Christmas" device is a fine way to structure the tale. You get to write a dozen vignettes, some longer and some shorter, and let the full relationship between your principals emerge from the pastiche. The title could possibly turn off some potential readers who think it's a holiday-season book that won't interest them during the summer. But maybe you'll enjoy the counter-effect of increased downloads during holidays.
The relationship is getting clearer, with more details revealed in each installment. That's just as it should be.
For this kind of tale to work, the details must be completely believable. "...on the fourth jerk I came." Really? I can imagine that, but it's the kind of claim that makes me doubt. If you're going to get a guy so excited he gets off with four jerks, you've got to shows us his excitement building, step by step, level by level, so the final release is believable.
Keep writing! Ask if you have questions! I'll try to post more later!
First, thank you for reading what you did. I did work over this story several times and I did change the language used nearly every time. I worked on the title too. The subtitle was also the result of a few edits. While it’s not very smooth, it is far better than what I had come up with before.
As for the content of the story, I worry about too much descriptive language. I know how I react when I read detailed descriptions but I also know how many people I know read, by filling in the blanks with exactly the sort of words they would use or the perfect image in their heads. I don’t want to destroy that by putting too much detail in.
Your rewrites of my work are very good, but...I wouldn’t write that and now that you’ve written them, I’m not sure I can write anything like them without feeling like I’m cheating. You also have a better grasp of grammar and overall sentence structure than I do, something I do intend to fix, though I’m not sure I wish to use exactly the right grammar when I write. I only want to fix anything that doesn’t seem right to me, or to people who don’t know the particulars of grammar and editing.
You’re right, I do need improvement. This is my first try at anything like this and I wasn’t as involved as I should have been due to losing the first draft of the first story. The last sentence will probably be changed. I was losing interest. There will be some changes made based on your criticism. It's much needed though I didn't actually mean I wanted editing and content refinement advice when I asked for a review, more an opinion on whether the story in its present form is entertaining and arousing or not.