Dear Anonymous

At home,

Dear Anonymous,

I wanted to have a little chat with you. As you know, the contests on Literotica for this year are almost over, and we will probably go our separate ways after this, since I need to concentrate on some other projects that I have begun. There are a few things that I wished to say to you, however.

First, I want to thank you for being one of my most ardent readers. I just wish that I could read you a little better than I seem to do at the moment. While I appreciate the time that you take to read my stories and poems, I have to say that I wish that you would do a little more for me with your comments.

It seems to me that you are a moody person. There are times when you come out swinging, and tell me that what I have written is crap. You have even told me once or twice that I ought to take my story down because it does not fit in with what you want to read about for your gay and incestuous fantasies! There are other times though, when you are in a much better mood, and you tell me that I'm doing so well that I ought to consider going mainstream with my writing! It is lovely to hear that, but I must say that it confuses me greatly when you say these two sets of things about the same story. I suppose that it's a dispositional thing: sometimes you want one thing, and at other times you want something else; and I keep trying to please you instead of finding my own voice and sticking with that. That is something for me to work on since like you, I seem to have three distinct voices coming out in my work.

The times that I appreciate you most, are those when you take the time to explain to me why it is that you either liked or hated one of my stories. Even when the review is a poor one, at least you have given me the opportunity to either grow from your wisdom, or to defend myself from your ire. I appreciate it when you are in that kind of patient mood, because it is then that you help me to understand what it takes to be the kind of writer that will serve her audience well.

Do you remember the time when you didn't like my "Cinderella and the King" story? Do you remember how you mentioned that you found the development too slow for the twist to have been worth that? Well, as hard as it was to hear that, I learned from it. I challenge you to read any of my other stories and tell me where I have spent so much time in a slow development to then make the protagonist act out of character. Do you remember when you told me that "Soren and his Sisters" was confusing, and worse yet, how I switched my point of view in telling the story of Kyle's meeting with Cyn, and how you couldn't determine how George figured out that Ava was having an affair in "Marking Time"? You might be happy to know that I have spent far more time re-reading these stories since these tales were written, and I have a small group of three friends whom I ask to read things over for me now if I'm in any doubt about the acceptability of the story on the grounds of clarity.

That said, I may have lost you with the use of Jamaican dialect in "Marking Time", and with Soren and Cyn's "dreadlocks", and that would have been a real shame, because other people seemed to like the story despite these things. The way that the protagonist and her brother wear their hair had absolutely nothing to do with the Soren story! I put that in because I read the critique on someone else's story where the writer came out against people who don't even bother to describe their characters' physical features. See, I am so interested in learning that I even read the comments about other people's stories in the hope of seeing what works and what does not.

That said, I hope that you will not hold this against me if you ever take the time to read Girls' Night Out when Lit (hopefully) puts it out. For this I am trying another of my writing experiments -- I want the story to have appeal for everyone, so I have taken the risk to neither name nor describe either of the main characters. You may have noticed that I like to experiment! Some of these have fallen flat as in the case of "Talking Shop", but I will always keep trying to be innovative with my storytelling since even the dumb clock on the wall is right twice in 24 hours and one day I will strike gold.

I invite you to grow with me and keep an open mind, my friend. Dreadlocks are after all only a hairstyle for some, including me. The point about writing so many stories about my homeland, the home of dreadlocks in the West, is that I wanted to show you that although Jamaica may be small and for most people here, very foreign, we Jamaicans are, and do, pretty much the same things that you are, and do. Having big breasts, being a BBW, being a woman of colour, enjoying being spanked, being "mature", having a dark sense of humour -- none of these things matter in the long run, my friend. If you get the fact that I want to tell stories about people who love each other, and you can show me how my telling of the story obfuscates this message, then believe me, I will listen, and I WILL learn from you. You may not approve of the things that I say, but I hope that like Voltaire, you will defend (maybe not to the death) my right to say them.

So please, be at peace my friend, even if it was my inept storytelling that made you angry. Who knows, if you had taken the time to show me my mistake the first time you saw it perhaps I would not have made it in the story that caused you to lose your cool.

Until next time,

-Cinner