All Comments on 'Lost Times'

Thank you.

This was dark and sweet at the same time. Deep and disturbing for sure, but this will churn in my mind for a long time. Excellent writing.

MST, I am in awe of how you constructed such a powerful message in just a few pages of of superbly imagineered writing.

While I appreciate the effort, this seemed misplaced in romance. Certainly none of the girlfriends were keepers as they were constantly prodding and belittling their boyfriends (A pink cardigan? That's just mean). In the end, it just wasn't entertaining to read.

It was well written, but a bit too dark for what I want in the romance category.

The good: As usual, your writing is imaginative and your plots are unique, the stories sweet, the characters beautifully drawn, romantic stories with the sex implied but not realized. In this one I particularly loved the difference in the voices of the modern day couples contrasted to each of the historical vignettes associated with the paintings. All very lovely, and deserving of high praise. My kudos to you, sir.

The bad: The editing job is bad enough to detract from the story: typos, wrong words used in places (for example, in the last vignette flash should be flask), sentences that make little or no sense. Explain this one for me: "It added to her beauty I had to change what I had done to add it." At the beginning of the second vignette your tenses go from past to present and back. Then there's the double negative: "...to not know you wouldn't enjoy that..." And what does "drunkin'" mean?

A bit of vocabulary stuck out at me: lambert is too scientific, too dry for your story - luminant would have filled the role much better. 5 for the story, 2 for the editing, rounded up to a 3

You would benefit from reading your story out loud to yourself.

Please excuse my honest harshness - I know you can do so much better!

Sometimes, the higher they climb, the harder they fall.

I don’t want to say too much about this story as I see it as a work in progress, and at quite an early stage.

A – as others have said, it seriously needs a copy edit and perhaps the very fact that MST didn’t want to show it to someone-else to edit says something about how it still needs the author’s breath not the editor’s knife.

B – I see this as on the other side of the balancing scales to that excellent FAWC, My Lady. That was a positive, this a negative exploration of issues of power and sex. This story is almost anti-erotica, looking at the darkest side of sexuality. I see it too as continuing to explore the theme of sexual violence which MST looked at in The Darkness Next Door (in “Hot Summer Reads” on Amazon).

This story is like a page of sketches from an artist’s notebook. The idea is great – Nude Day story, have a story about going to see nude studies in an art gallery. But here we come to the first glitch. Readers will bristle at the way in which we are dragged along, being told about Great Art and that we ought to appreciate it better. This is beginning to be worked on by having the men dragged along, so we can feel Philistine-ish with them, and superior about art with the women – but not enough is done to invest us in this dynamic. We still feel indignant. (“I bloody know about da Vinci, I don’t need you to tell me.”)

I can’t put a vote, as I want to give MST a high five for the ambition of the story. I could write volumes about trying to understand the politics of gender relations implicit in sexual violence – because I have literally read volumes about it.

I hope MST keeps working on this fascinating sketch of ideas. Don't lose heart because the story's getting a mixed reaction - even just the number of comments shows that you've caught people's attention.

Found this intriguing story to be a great read and very well-crafted. Would you consider some more historical pieces that follow-up on some of the characters? That would be very welcome to this reader and am sure others. And, please do not let some of the pearls-before-swine comments deter you. This is the first of your stories that I have read and was very pleased to see that there are many more on this site. I intend to read them all and enjoy more of your craft.

I would love to know the paintings they felt transported by (if they exist)