All Comments on 'End of Shift'

I liked this but perhaps it a little detail.

Awesome read keep writing. It was a really good quickie.

Thank You!! I’m glad you liked it!! :)

Heyyy Hannah, welcome to LitE. This obviously isn't your first attempt at writing, as evidenced by this strong effort. I really felt the stress the characters were under, and I can only assume you currently work in a hospital, or someone else close to you does, because you really captured the feel of the ER and the emotions of the frontline staff during the pandemic. I hope you didn't get the background information for the story by experiencing Covid personally!!

The only niggle I have is that you kinda left us wondering what exactly the relationship is between "Dr. Jessica" and "Nurse Lauryn".

At some point it would have been nice if you would have thrown us a bone and added a snippet about when, where, how, and why the tryst started. I get the feeling you left that information out to give the story the feeling of love born out of crisis and chaotic spontaneity, but there were clues that this had been going on for awhile which somewhat undermined that angle.

I tried to fill in the blanks with what little information I had to go on but I just couldn't come up with a satisfying answer.

I was still wondering what they were to each other at the end when Lauryn referred to Jessica as "Dr.Jessica". I'm guessing secret pandemic lovers who hook up on their quarantine rotation but I'm not sure.

A.very good story but I thought it could have used a little more clarity.

Wow! Thank you Anon! And thank you for caring enough to make such detailed observations!

It’s not the first story I’ve ever tried to write, but it is the first story I’ve ever finished, and the one of the first I’ve shared in public.

(I shared the first chapter of my other story I’m working on a few days ago.)

Your assumption is correct, I am medically experienced, as both a provider and a patient. Fortunately I am still corona free.

I decided to cut out a lot of what I felt was extraneous detail unimportant to the “scene” of the story. But, in the story, Jessica and Lauryn are work acquaintances who are becoming friends, and although I only explored it from Lauryn’s POV, they were secretly attracted to each other and had been taking breaks & meals together on a regular basis, trying to navigate the beginning of a potential friendship/relationship inside a hospital. My goal was to try to demonstrate a friendship rapidly evolving, and the stress of circumstances exploding them into intimacy for the first time. So, hopefully, no matter how my readers would rationalize what was happening, they wouldn’t be very far off.

In real life, Jessica’s character was inspired by a surgical intern I saw in the ER in the exact same manner I described in the story. Except, I was going off shift, and I had never seen her before. Just tired from a 16 hour double and thought she was beautiful. A little part of me has always regretted not sticking around to meet her, and a fantasy of that turned into this story.

My vision of Lauryn came from a mashup of several people.

I’m not real happy with the way my text was reformatted during publishing, but I think it’s a website limitation I’m just going to have to learn to work around. Some of the lack of clarity is my fault though. I wrote the first half pretty casually over two days, but then stayed up all night to write the second half in one go.

I’m getting really frustrated trying to settle on how much detail my stories should have. People here really seem to respond by just being pointed in a certain direction and left to imagine exactly what happens, but I’m so upset about maybe leaving out some critical element that I don’t know people won’t just know. I want my readers to enjoy my story the way I see it in my head. The three mini-paragraphs with the actual sex scene took me about two hours to write, most of it with my face moaning in the couch cushions, and not in a sexy way.

Anywayyy ... thanks for being cool, and caring about my story.

I hope you’ll like my other ones too. :)

Heyyy Hannah, I read your other story and I think this is a stronger effort which could/should be expanded upon. You could make up for the lack of backstory in the first part by doing a flashback of some sort in a second installment .

I cared about the characters in this story and I liked the premise that the women had two different worlds to live in. One during their week on at the hospital, and the other during their two week quarantine at the hotel. It allows for a variety of situations and emotions that could bleed into each world if you chose to do so. It's perfect for keeping a multi-chapter story fresh. Bringing some of the happiness from the hotel into the hospital would be nice, and playing doctor(and nurse) at the hotel would make sense, while being original due to the fact that they are actually a real doctor and nurse. You could have some fun with medical terminology and procedures in the sex scene if you chose to.

In a later chapter, you could revisit them after the pandemic ended, and how it ending affects their relationship.

I really see this story as having legs, and being very relevant and relatable at this moment in history.

Wow HeyyyHannah, thanks that was a great story -from the gritty realism of Hospital work to the joyful, loving ending. It was very different to some of the other stories I have read which seem too similar or almost written to a formula. I liked your unusual use of language also : the hairless flesh fuck machine now reduced to quick, short bucks against her cheek bone".

Well done, I'm really looking forward to reading more of your stories. I hope your own life is lit up by love also (& happy couplings!!)

Now that's what I call writing! Superb! Detailed, expressive, searing and to the point. A fine little scenario.