Editor's Notes: Changes

Flagged: Is the double negative intended?

If this was outside dialogue, I'd consider it an error and just edit it to "...is going to keep you any safer". But in the dialogue of somebody who's struggling to express herself, it's possible that the authors put a mistake in on purpose to signal that struggle.

* * * * *

[on a mention that Lyric's hustle is "handjobs, mostly"]

This has me thinking: it's not clear to me whether Lyric's clients know she's trans. The fact that she keeps it to handjobs seems to suggest she's keeping that from them, perhaps for safety reasons, but either way it might be worth exploring that further?

One of those things where readers might get hung up on wondering about something that probably shouldn't be a secret to them.

* * * * *

A blonde in an immaculate suit walked through the front door just after one in the morning, while Lyric was cleaning behind the counter. She smiled, and said, "Hello! Welcome to Downtown Grind. What can I get for you?"

Here I changed "she" to "Lyric". I made similar edits in other places; ambiguous pronouns are an occupational hazard of writing a story with lots of female or lots of male characters.

* * * * *

"I don't know," she said, irritatedly. "I sleep here some nights? There some nights? A week at a time? I don't know. I don't know!"

Flagged: This passage might be stronger if, instead of leaning on the adverb to convey Maddy's mood, it told us how Lyric *perceives* Maddy's irritation. Is it a particular tone of voice, or a sigh? Could the irritation be conveyed in her dialogue instead, e.g. something grouchy like "What do you want me to say?"

I am not a huge kill-your-adverbs person, but when it comes to dialogue tags I do stare suspiciously at them. Adverbs often end up doing work that would be better done by the dialogue itself. When I'm talking to somebody in real life, I don't have the benefit of a neon sign over their head saying "irritated"; I have to figure it out from what they say and how they say it. If I'm reading this scene, seeing and interpreting the same cues that Lyric is interpreting, that pulls me closer to her thoughts than just telling me Maddy is irritated.

Several more that hopefully speak for themselves:

* * * * *

There was more snark in the tank. Lyric could feel the bile. If she could just unleash a bit more, she probably could get Maddy to give up.

Comment on the last sentence:

This is quite effective. I'd have to reread to be certain, but I think generally when you've mentioned Lyric's self-doubt/self-sabotaging tendencies, it's been her observing those feelings from the outside, which distances them from the reader.

Here, it's presented directly as part of her POV without that step of separation, which makes it more uncomfortable reading. You might consider whether this is something you could do more often in this story?

* * * * *

She only opened it a crack, because she needed a physical barrier between them to feel safe.

Comment:

I'd be tempted to delete "physical" and let the double-layered meaning sit there.

* * * * *

She couldn't remember the last time she'd gotten that angry in a fight, even if only briefly. It weighed on her. Her gut instinct was to be annoyed with herself, that getting mad wasn't something she did, but why not? Why was anger so off limits? Why had it felt so alien, and yet so right?

Comment:

TBH, Maddy's anger didn't come across strongly in the previous scene. She has one line that's firm but not angry as such, and then another line where she does get angry briefly but then immediately switches back to conciliatory "I don't want to give up on you". If this is important for Maddy's arc, you might want to give her some more teeth in that argument.

* * * * *

"Doesn't matter," Lyric said. "This'd be for strangers. I'm okay with that. I... I kind of... fuck I get so turned on by the idea." She gave herself a good shake. "Okay. Last question for now. Out here or in there."

Maddy turned, looking through the wall to the bedroom. "In there."

Lyric ran around the room and grabbed Maddy's laptop and the little tray table she'd found for it. "Your phone or mine?"

"Mine," Maddy said, as she cleaned up the boxes and unpacked the tripod. "I just got rid of a bunch of stuff, so it's got a ton of space for capturing video."

Comment:

We've established that anonymity is important to them. Are they likely to realise that as well as wearing masks, they need to make sure their shooting location doesn't have any background stuff that might identify them/their location? If so, then that might be part of this conversation.

* * * * *

She pushed in so hard that Maddy's bubbly ass was deformed and smushed under her, which was an amazing sight that gave her an idea.

Comment on "deformed": It's not an *incorrect* word here, but I'm not sure if the baggage of this word is what you want.

* * * * *

She snuck an arm underneath herself, which was awkward with her fake boobs taking up all the space, and managed to get a fingertip on Maddy's clit.

Comment: Would Lyric call them "her fake boobs" inside her head? Is that at odds with her attitude to them as established earlier?

This is a complex one and I'm not actually sure what the answer would be, so I punt it to the authors for consideration because they'll have a better handle on that than I do.

Technically, this hasn't been presented as how Lyric perceives them, but for this passage she's the point-of-view character and it's generally a good idea to align the writing with the POV character's perceptions.

* * * * *

"How have you never been to the Bronx zoo?"

Lyric turned her head slightly, and gave Maddy an arched eyebrow, but Maddy was having none of it.

"Seriously. It's, like, twenty minutes by bus. On a bad day."

Lyric shrugged, wishing that her original explanation, sarcastic silence, had been enough. "I don't know."

Comment:

Lyric didn't grow up here, and Google tells me adult admission is $37.50. Having just mentioned ten-dollar blowjobs and fifty-cent raises, that feels like a major reason for her not to have come here before.

This is always one of the tough parts of writing a character from a different background -- it's so easy to miss things that might be small for us but huge for somebody else.

* * * * *

She liked Dave. Dave would banter with her. The fact that she saw him more than anyone else probably enabled him somewhat. Good banter requires a point of ingress, some personal knowledge to twist, and Dave was just about the only person who knew anything about her. It was the bare minimum, but even that was a far sight more than her johns ever knew.

Comment:

Recalling what she said earlier about her politics [Lyric is very much a "property is theft" kind of girl], I expect she'd have a pretty low opinion of landlords, at least on the theoretical level. It's quite possible for her to have those views and still like Dave as a person (for the next few paragraphs) but maybe the dissonance needs lampshading?

"Lampshading" is a technical term for the technique I was discussing earlier: figuratively hanging a lampshade on something, as a way of telling readers that yes, the author is aware of this thing and it's meant to be there.

* * * * *

He was gatekeeping her, paternalistically granting her access to things she would struggle to afford on her own as long as she behaved, just like he wanted to gatekeep transkids at schools. Buried in civil language that infantilized transboys and branded transgirls as dangerous sexual deviants, there were policies and changes outlined that would have gotten Mr. Liefler fired. It had been a long time since she'd thought about the guidance counselor who had supported her. Kept her confidence. Connected her with a clinic. Saved her life.

Comment:

I feel like this could be strengthened by explicitly acknowledging that folk like [Dave] (both in the "transphobe" sense and in the "landlord" sense) are the reason *why* she struggles to afford these things in the first place.

* * * * *

Maddy quickly waved to Enis, the barista behind the counter, as she closed the distance to Lyric, and moved in close.

Comment: Repetition "closed"/"close" feels awkward here. Could perhaps just go with "as she moved in close to Lyric"?

Additional comment: Similar name to "Eric" who also appears in this scene - if it's not important to keep this, suggest changing it to avoid confusion.

Minor character names don't usually merit much thought -- I think this is the only place where Enis gets named in the whole story, so it's not a big deal -- but two names of the same length, same gender, and same initial letter can get close enough to throw readers. Or at least me.

By the way, when writing erotica, be very careful with search-and-replacing names like "Enis" or you might end up with a scene where somebody's stroking their pTimothy.

* * * * *

On the big reconciliation scene:

I am not quite feeling this reconciliation scene. I need to sit with it a bit and think about why that is, but I'm wondering if I need to see a bit more of Lyric's arc leading up to this.

On Maddy's side, she has worked for this. She fucked up earlier and hurt Lyric, but she's reflected and we've seen some personal growth, walking away from A+F and stepping into the unknown.

On Lyric's side, though, from the point where Maddy tried to talk to her and Lyric pushed her away hard, their separation is something that Lyric's doing to herself. She mopes about it to her friends, and there we learn that she now understand she was self-sabotaging. Part of me wanted to shake her at that point and say "so have you tried talking to her?" - but I get that the self-doubt in this one is strong, and she has difficulty believing something like that could happen. Okay.

But we don't see her working towards that realisation, and from there the reconciliation basically falls into her lap due to other people's efforts and the power of karaoke. It doesn't feel satisfying to me.

Amy's [which should have said "Maddy's" - even editors need editors!] personal arc in this story has been about growing up and learning to assert herself, and her side of the reconciliation comes as part of that journey. It may be worth thinking about what Lyric's individual arc is in this story, and how that could tie in with her "earning" her half of this reconciliation.

I have my own ideas about what the answer to that might be, I know what I'd be doing at this point, but it's your story and I'd like to see what you think before pushing my own ideas.

This story is a romance, in its way, and romance stories usually require a certain kind of balance between the two lovers, that both of them are putting something in to make the relationship a success. For me, it just felt a little lopsided here, like Maddy's side of that was coming through stronger than Lyric's side, and perhaps it needed a little tuning.

For the record, if this had been my story, what I might've done here was to show Lyric thinking a bit more about why she pushed Maddy away, untangling how much of that was about what Maddy had actually done and how much was about her own self-worth issues. As long as Lyric doesn't believe she's somebody who can be loved, getting into a relationship is just setting herself up for eventual pain and loss, and pushing Maddy away is going to feel like a kindness to both of them. Having Lyric work on that, revisit their times together, and come to accept that she is lovable and capable of bringing Maddy happiness... something like that, to me, would help sell Lyric's side of the reconciliation.

After the story was published, I shared that paragraph above with AwkwardMD. Her reply:

While I agree that the ending focused on Maddy's arc of letting go of her bad relationship and taking a stand for herself, I disagree that Lyric didn't think she was worthy of Maddy's love. Lyric sees class differences between herself and others, so the times where she looks at Amy and Francois and thinks "Why would she want to be with me", it's more political than it is self-defeating. She saw the building they lived in and thought No trans person lives here. That's not "I'm not good enough for you", it's "There's no room for me in your world," a world that Maddy is not decoupling from (for unrelated reasons).

Lyric's arc through the story is of her expanding her support network. She is isolated at the beginning of the story. She can't trust. Over the course of the story, she opens up to Maddy, makes friends, and has brought her sister back into her life by the end. She is too scared to admit to Maddy that she's in love in the middle of the story because she thinks she'll look inexperienced and silly, but she's opened her heart enough to say it first by the end. Her arc is asymmetrical to Maddy's, which is why she gets a little more focus at the beginning and not so much at the end. It is unbalanced, but giving Lyric an inferiority complex would have conflicted with her strident independence.

We had already put a lot on Lyric's plate. I could probably write a character with an inferiority complex and a vicious independent streak, but that would be their whole deal.

That was a nuance I'd misread. The Lyric in my head was slightly different to the one in the authors' heads, and as an editor my job is to help their version of Lyric shine rather than push my own into the story.

And that gets us to the end of the story - thanks Omen and Awkward for letting me kibitz on this one!

The End