All Comments on 'Scenes from the Scenic Motel'

I enjoy being nude, so this adventure with a like-minded girlfriend was fun to read! I also enjoyed the way you covered a range of experiences at the "Scenic Motel," without bloating the story. Many other authors might have delivered a story that was two or three times longer, by giving every blow by blow, every lick by lick, every single stroke, and so forth. Thanks for not doing that!

One thing that kept taking me out of the story was the repeated changes in verb tense -- from past, to present, to past, and and back to present... This often happened within a paragraph, and sometimes happened several times during a paragraph. My eye usually doesn't get distracted when that happens a handful of times. But, I felt, this was more than a handful. And they sometimes popped up in unexpected places in the story.

When I encounter this as a reader, I feel compelled to shift my mind back-and-forth too, in order to stay oriented within the timeline of the story. (For example, "OK now we're following the events of the story. OK now we're watching the narrator mull things over in the present day. OK now we're back to the story.") The more often these shifts went on while I read your story, the less confident I got that I was getting the flow of events in the right order.

After a while, I had to stop trying to keep track of when things happened, except in the most basic sense of the sequence in which events and thoughts appeared on the page. When I do that, I usually feel that I may be overlooking something crucial, because (I feel) I'm now reading vaguely. Some readers might feel distracted from the story itself, give up, and quit reading before they reach the end.

I don't have an impression that you changed the tenses deliberately, in order to create specific narrative effects. I think you simply "did it" at that moment, while you were "in the flow" of writing the story. That's not a bad thing, of course. But if it distracts your readers, and discourages some of them from finishing the story, well ...

So I would propose this. After you've written that first draft, "in the flow," set it aside. The next day, pull it out and look it over. Look for things that might distract your reader from the flow of the story.

If you find you've done something (for example, with verb tenses) that risks distracting your readers, sit back and think about it. Is it worth the risk? Make a conscious decision. If you decide it is -- keep it. If you decide it's not -- change it.

These changes won't be forced upon you by some rule. They will be *your* changes.

And then if someone complains about it, you can smile and tell yourself, "Yeah, but it was worth it."

Thanks, and appreciate the grammar observations. The story was written in several "inspiration" sessions over three weeks, so tense became a casualty of fragmented trains of thought. I let it sit for two or three days, came back to it, noticed the grammatical issues, tried to fix it... and did more damage than good. C'est la vie!

It was a first effort at writing more than a few 'graphs, so the learning curve is fully in play here. I'll strive to pay better attention to this.

Fantastic!!

A man with not only an obviously beautiful wife, but also a beautiful way with words.

Nesher