All Comments on 'The Best Laid Plans'

I read your post in the Author's Hangout and kind of identified with the satisfaction you feel in putting down your fantasies on paper. So I picked one of your stories to read.

It's pretty good. I especially found the hide-and-seek in the dark scene quite titillating. The Mary character, though, seemed a bit more of a fantasy girl than a real person. Beautiful, falls for the narrator from the very start, initiates intimacy herself, skilled at deep throat blow jobs. But, I guess, that's what fantasy is all about.

Here are a couple criticisms about your writing.

Your sentences, especially in the narrative sections, tend to be very long and complex and somewhat difficult to follow. Take your opening paragraph. Try reading it out loud to yourself. Do you really think it will grab the reader's attention and make him/her want to read on? My paragraphs often start out long and complex like this, but then I try to figure out what exactly it is I'm trying to convey, and to straighten out the logic and prune away the unnecessary tangents. Here's how I might have edited your opening paragraph:

"The big changes in our lives sometimes begin with little events that scarcely even register at the time. But sometimes an event will knock us for such a loop that we can't help but think it must be a harbinger of something big to come."

I'm not sure that this is exactly what you were trying to say. It's just an example of how a similar idea could be expressed in a less convoluted, less redundant, less scattershot style.

I also wasn't crazy about your continual coining of descriptive phrases like "my hard fuck rocket" and "her beautiful chest mounds." It kind of distracts from the scene itself. Probably better to stick to the customary vocabulary, anatomical or vulgar, even if this means using the same word more than once. The scene should convey the feelings of the characters in the moment, not the wit of the author at the keyboard.

Anyway, I hope you keep on having fun with your writing. Thanks for sharing.