Edit Me Harder!

It was around five in the evening when she posted the awful travesty, and she waited patiently, not responding to any of the SBL commentary, until a quarter to one Monday morning, refreshing the screen every five minutes or so while in another window she paged through some of the other editing threads on the board with arousal and voyeuristic elan.

When she saw a Theodoric message pop up with three lines in it, she nearly collapsed in despair, her libido dragged below sea level with chains of disappointment.

It wasn't until she read it...

This is slightly worse than the earlier version posted, so I am reverting back to that one in hopes of helping you out more. Check my website for the complete edit.

...that she knew she had won.

* * *

Ted "Theodoric" Szmerkofsky did not live in his parents' basement, exactly. Technically he lived upstairs in the same bedroom he'd occupied since the sixth grade, when his older brother had left for college and bequeathed him a room unburdened by older sisters.

He did, however, spend the majority of his time in the basement, which is where his system was set up. He oscillated between web-surfing, posting to message boards, and playing first person shooters, but mostly he viewed pornography. Very little of his time was truly spent on proofreading the work of authors he liked; if Ted had a gift it was a mild synesthesia which made minor textual or contextual discrepancies leap out at him as if they were printed in bright orange ink. It was distracting in most cases, but it had proven useful in the recent past. Mostly.

"Teddy!"

"Yeah, Mom?"

"You've got mail!"

"Okay, Mom!"

Despite stereotypes, Ted was not overweight. In fact, his scrawny ass could stand to put on a few pounds. He climbed the staircase two steps at a time and grabbed a fistful of blueberries from the bowl on the kitchen table before making his way to the foyer table. The mail typically piled up there until his father grabbed the bills, his mother the catalogs, and Ted the "other". The package was oblong and soft, and from... Cedar Rapids, Iowa? Who the hell was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa? He tore open the package and peeked inside. His jaw dropped for a moment, then the better part of valor asserted itself and he crumpled the package under his arm and slipped back down to his sanctum sanctorum.

Ted slid into the beaten-up-to-the-point-of-comfort old chair, and dumped the package into his lap. Atop the minor stack was the latest issue of Women's Literary Fiction Monthly, a Post-it marking the page of a short story by Valerie Chandra entitled, "Wrong As Rain". The text looked decidedly familiar, and he chuckled. There was no bright orange anywhere.

His reaction to the second item was less humorous: a large Ziploc bag containing something filmy and lacy. It was evident from the third item-- a paper bag containing five glossy 8x10s-- that the lacy somethings were intended to be the same panties and stockings worn in the photos. It was further evident from the scent wafting out of the opened Ziploc that the activities portrayed in the photos were not simulated: the removed articles of clothing had actually been rubbed in the cunt of the aroused and naked girl.

He wasn't about to question it too deeply, as the hard-on in his pants and the grin on his face attested, but how the hell had she gotten his home address?

The answer didn't come to him until after he'd masturbated his tensions into the toilet of the basement bathroom while looking at the photos and inhaling the aroma within the bag. Which-- unsurprisingly, when you thought about it-- didn't take very long. When the haze from his brain had cleared and the Ziploc had been resealed to preserve freshness, he swore softly to himself and checked out his domain name setup. Huh.

Damn. He was usually more careful than that, but he'd forgotten to change the account settings and registrant name to point at a different address than his own. Oops. He'd rectify that later today, but in the meantime...

He still couldn't quite believe it had worked, but the "How to Enslave Friends and Hypnotize People" book he'd ordered as a joke had been adaptable into something which would run on a website. Who would have thought that a P.O. Box wedged in between X-ray Specs and fake doggie-doo could be legit? The comic book had been from the 70s, too; Ted supposed the fact that it was still a valid address thirty years later should have told him something.

He'd never been sure throughout the whole debacle that Valerie had been serious; surely, he'd pushed the envelope enough to see if she would cry "uncle", and she never had. But there had been alternative explanations for her eventual compliance. After all, his editing was very good.

He glanced at the empty envelope lying on his keyboard and shook his head. It wasn't that good.

No, he'd have to go for the crazier explanation. He wondered how far he could take this, and the ideas he came up with had him back in the bathroom again, Ziploc aromatic and photos arrayed across the back of the commode.

He didn't spend too much time on self-gratification, though. He wanted to get back to SBL.

There was lots of editing to do.