All Comments on 'Something New'

Sometimes you have to take a chance!

5

This is what friends are for. Loved it

Growth is the most exciting thing you can write about a character!

An interesting story from a great author. Just not sure if I should ask for more or let you leave it where it is?

I really liked this coming out story. I can see Janet and Tom together with Mandy as the tutor. Look out Tom.

Take Care

I have to say that I've grown accustomed to your 3-page stories, and on the balance I wasn't disappointed in this one. Certainly you draw Janet as reserved and boy is she, with Mandy being the liberated and assertive woman that she obviously is! The thing is however several things strike me that could have delivered more of a punch with the story had they been done.

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There's no doubt in my mind that Janet survived several blah relationships. What concerns me is that she continued to let them happen for security's sake, which in reality evokes a lot of verisimilitude; however, I felt that many of these relationships were drawn out way too long. If you could have somehow shortened it to where after her failed relationship with Bill, and especially once Cindy figured out their relationship @ 16.. I think it would have added a ton if Cindy, being the younger version of Janet, would have helped her mother cultivate a sexier side. At the very least if you didn't feel comfortable with that, I would have suggested making Cindy half of the vehicle for Janet redoing herself, then using Mandy to kind of be the extra impetus in the story. Why I say this is you make the point that Cindy figured out the relationship dynamic, which means she loved her mother very much, and also had her best interests at heart. So for example it seems obvious to me that Cindy could have helped her mother with the wardrobe and hairstyle sides of it, and at least gotten her to date other men earlier. In other words, Cindy could have been your vehicle to express the frustration that Janet was unwilling to! Janet just kind of took it and took it, which is kind of where it felt drawn out, as I think if you would have just wrapped that up and done something like written a short kind of conclusion where Janet had several failed relationships and yet nothing really ever seemed to keep her interest..

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I think when you use Tony to pierce her and suggest she try certain pieces of jewelry, that when you suggested he would be a good match through how he touched her and what he said, especially as it dealt with that he didn't want younger women but ones that had more experience.. then you could have by saving the writing space where you would have stripped away for Janet getting beaten into the ground by many dull relationships, you could have written more narratives about how Tony made her feel safe.. because that's another shortfall, where we know that Tony is interested, we can buy that Tony is divorced, because that's something you can find out in a very quick conversation.. however when you say that a woman feels safe with a man, you have to kind of follow the same process you did in your story with Katherine and Bird, where he showed over the course of a certain period of time that not only could Katherine trust him, but she knew and the readers knew without any doubt that he valued her as a woman. That's what's kind of missing here, and you could have still done that over the course of your narrative time frame of one month, perhaps through a little bit of extra conversation after the procedures were finished, and just showing that Tony would share equal amounts of information as Janet shared with him, and then even reveal himself to be slightly vulnerable in small ways to where Janet knew okay this guy is the real deal.

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Certainly, you succeed in painting Janet as an unnecessarily frustrated lady that definitely deserves better! Certainly her so-called paramours are unsympathetic and clearly not interested in her well-being. The thing that I've already commented on, which was about Cindy, was that she was very underutilized...because once you said she figured out the relationship, there were tons of possibilities you could have explored so that Janet's character could have evolved into a better version of herself a little faster, leaving room to explore how Tony really made her feel safe and wanted. Although I generally adore each one of your stories, I can't honestly say that every last one has been a five or will be a five despite that, because I have to be fair to the process...meaning I have to rate this one a 4, based on the missed opportunities that could have hacked a bigger punch with this story and those extra details.

I always love the rather tender care you evidence for your characters, and this one shows exactly that.