All Comments on 'The Floating World'

Amazing writing, such a change from the norm. Thank you.

I loved your text. Skillful gradual buildup and a great ending.

Very well written.

Much as I love many of the stories on here...this must be my all time favourite. So tender...so erotic..so sensual...thank you so much for allowing me to enjoy ...Johnxx

What a winner!! I have added this to my favorite stories list. Kudos!

What an incredible talent you have with 26 letters, turning them into words and paragraphs and forming incredibly sharp images in my mind. Wonderful storytelling, taking me away in my old age to another sweet time when that first blush of love consumes us. Thank you, dear writer.

Just barely outside of time and place. Thank you.

Excellent story - complete on its own , but will it develop?

I expect so.

The Floating World theme allows me a range of possibilities (I meet really lovely people when I'm out and about) - and I have a habit in my stories of taking a side character somewhere.

Also, I have loosely set up a tension between Amanda, Adam and Antony that I suspect needs to be resolved....

Wonderfully executed ......a trip to another time and place .

What a beautiful read. I felt it in my toes. Only way it could be any sexier is if someone read it to me... Mmmm.

Had the ending been followed with a Haiku I'd have been searching for a way to award it 10 stars,.

She lies beside me

Curled with cat's paw quietness.

Snow blows on the door.

We have our 5-7-5,now where are those well deserved extra stars

"Ah! I understand the urgency for coffee in the morning now, sweet friend," (says the purring cat at your feet.)

That was simply the best piece of fiction I have ever read on Literotica.

Thank you.

I can see why your female readers like you. Amanda is a very likable love interest. You treat her with respect. She’s a working woman. She’s not objectified until… until she’s ready for it, is what I want to say? When she notices Adam’s attention on her, and begins to angle for more? Adam is patient, and attentive, and very very likeable. He’s confident but also willing to simply give a foot massage a propos of nothing, and if that doesn’t win you some romance readers nothing will.

I had to really look for that, though. The characterization was almost lost among the driftwood, because the story doesn’t… do anything. RamosWashington’s Bootcamp for Boyfriends had the abstract of “Yankee city boy goes south and meets a Southern Belle, and she turns him into a man.” Comforting my Sister’s abstract would be something like “Broken hearted young girl with small tits gets dumped because she has small tits, and turns to the only person who doesn’t seem to care that she has small tits; her brother.”

The abstract for The Floating World would be like… “Man meets many people in the course of his day to day life?” In the big picture sense, there isn’t a plot. Adam goes here and has some coffee and we start to meet a woman that he has a connection with, but that ends fairly abruptly. It seems like you were setting that up to be some kind of deep existential crisis for Adam, but then you skipped to someplace else where he very quickly struck up a similar sort of unspoken connection with a Middle Eastern woman (cudos for giving her some body hair).

In your opening, you describe that the title is derived from a Japanese phrase that means “Meaningless pleasure”. You took that concept and made something interesting out of it, but meaningless is a pretty terrible place to try and start building erotica. It’s like building your castle in a swamp. Even if you execute every possible angle, you’re starting off in a bad place and that’s going to limit the overall potential.

It’s nearly one full Lit page before we meet Amanda, and it’s not even clear that she’s going to be any more important than the previous two baristas until maybe the middle of the second Lit page. Now, I’m all for a long drawn-out build up, but making the reader guess who will be important later on “feels” like even you didn’t know where you would end up when you started. Meandering down different streets and sometimes finding dead ends. Even if that’s not true, it’s how it “feels”.

To me, this is a two-fold problem. One is the large-scale plotting, and the second is pacing. I was fully on board with the story of Adam and his slow relationship with the first barista. Fool me once. I was skeptical with the Middle Eastern woman. I was straight up disbelieving of Amanda. Even once you establish Amanda as the love interest, there’s a lot of walking around. Going here and there. A lot of dodging glances and the internal gymnastics of “What did THAT look mean?!” The places they go don’t matter to the plot. They don’t serve a purpose. It’s like looking at someone else’s GPS history.

These two aspects, plotting and pacing, really come together to make a weird problem where your scenes run together without any kind of divide. It’s difficult to sort out what is happening and when in relation to the other thing that just happened.

Stories should have peaks and valleys of tension. In a romance, your peaks of tension should be visceral moments where the POV is right in the middle of the action, following an exhilarating and interesting conversation between two intelligent people, and then your valley would be the introspective moments after when the POV character thinks back and says “Wow. What a woman.” There’s no delineation between these things in The Floating World. Conversations on consecutive days run into each other, and it’s hard to feel like I, as the reader, supposed to be immediately present with Adam for a 24 hour period that you skip in a single paragraph.

You need scene breaks. Break your scenes up, and take care to give them proper beginning and endings. Each scene should be a small vignette within the larger story. The first half of the story, especially before Amanda really shows up, is a muddy swamp of overlapping and concatenated scenes.

Plotting has several layers to it. I feel like The Floating World struggled with the large-scale plotting, but at a scene level it was better. Slow and langorous, yes, but better; especially so in the second half of the story. Although I felt like the places the characters decided to go were haphazard, once they got there they were good together. The characters interacted well. In the TV and movie world, it’s called Blocking. How characters move through a dynamic room, full of other characters. The little touches that flesh out the world. The way Amanda having been on her feet all day at work kept coming back around.

The confidence that Adam has, that I mentioned earlier? That’s your confidence, and it shows up best in this aspect. You control the later scenes really well, especially in the second half of the story.

The sex scene largely had me feeling left out. It was well written, but the characters developed some very intimate pet names for each other very quickly, and while I have no problem with characters bonding I didn’t understand why it was happening in this particular instance. Maybe it has something to do with the way I’m very reserved in real life, and only share that kind of intimacy after a lengthy “getting to know you” period. In The Floating World, that intimacy feels unjustified, and thus feels either forced or fake.

Mostly, what I felt was that the story needed some kind of driving impetus. Something that gives some color to his motivation. As it is, it feels like we’re just watching Adam on a regular tuesday where he maybe kind of bumps into his soulmate and immediately begins addressing her as such. Even if you cut out the false starts in chemistry with the first two baristas (and I think you should), the stuff with Amanda is largely aimless. Drifting.

MD,

May I say, a brilliant critique, and may I also say, I have no issues with what you write. You "got" it entirely - your word is "drifting", my word is "floating".

That's the point, there IS no point. In the words of Pete Townshend (songwriter for The Who), Adam is "living a life of sweet ennui". He is aimlessly wandering through his streets, his life, nothing happening, watching, waiting. Drifting in his existential angst, perhaps.

There's no real plot. It's an encounter. It's not linear, not really going anywhere. It's got the logic of a dream - linear in the scene, jump, linear in the next scene, shift.

Anti story? I don't know. A mood piece? Yes, and I think that's why I received the comments I have for this story - my readers (a mix of men and women, I think) were responding to mood, and perhaps the still places I write about, the quiet contemplation.

Thank you again for reading this so closely and taking the time to compose your own words in response.

Wow! Wonderful. Like a long ski run or a running river, sometimes in control and sometimes not. An opportunity to have control, relinquish control and savor both. Satisfaction.

Thank you.

I just read your Gift series, and adored it.

Then I read your Amanda and Adam series, which I think I loved even more.

I’ve read a lot of erotica - I write it too - and you have blown me away. (Pun intended.) I love the patience, the slowness, how you focus on every single sense when you’re describing a scene.

You’ve made this woman very happy tonight :)

OK. Floating world, drifting world. But the story is as much Amanda's as it is Adam's, and hers is the "flower and willow world." To say that nothing happens kind of misses the point. The willow shimmers, the flower blooms. We contemplate their beauty, we inhale their gentle fragrance.

Besides, it's not clear to me that Adam really is plagued by the ennui that claims to be the necessary backdrop of the floating world. We do not really get to see him outside the coffee shops until his excursion with Amanda (at least in this chapter, which is all I've read so far). Perhaps he is happily married and has an important job that unfortunately requires frequent travel.

Or let me put it this way. Who of us in our happily married, importantly employed lives, does not interact with pretty baristas, perky supermarket check-out girls, warm-hearted, ever-smiling Hunan restaurant proprietresses. And who among us has not wondered, at least in passing, whether, despite the differences in age and social standing, she might not really be the one. And suppose that we had been away on a business trip, and suppose that we had encountered her heading in our direction, and suppose that our pleasantries had turned to pleasant flirtation, and suppose that she had been open to coming along to the exhibition, and suppose . . . So a fantasy, sure, but not necessarily a floating one. One that could well be grounded in our own everyday life.

Anyway, regardless of the big picture, the story itself---their romantic encounter---is engaging and delightful. They've already established a chemistry from Adam's visits to the coffee shop. Did he engineer bumping into her that afternoon? I'd like to think not, that it was just serendipitous. The way that the afternoon developed, at least, was spontaneous and mutual. The familiar, teasing banter, the more direct flirtation. "Are you in a hurry to get home?" "No, not really. Why?" He so sincerely delighted by her youth and her vibrancy, she so sincerely delighted by his confidence and his attention. Step by step they improvise their dance.

I've always been partial to first person narration for conveying the intimate details of a character's inner life. But this story wonderfully shows how third person narration can be used to convey the inner activity of two characters, even during the intricate steps of their dance. We see the evening not as we would see it in real life---where we know our own feelings but can only guess at our partner's---but privy to both sides, able to see the uncertainty and hopefulness and playfulness and arousal on both sides as flirtation turns to courtship and courtship turns to foreplay. It's two intimate stories, really, interwoven at every scene. A tour-de-force of patient, loving, doubly imagined detail.

Nice erotic story. Thanks for posting!

A true master story teller and such delightful prose. It's works such as this which makes this website so great. Such contrast with going to the bookshop and finding so many books which are just poor copies of other books with no originality.

I don't know how many times I have read this story, but I keep coming back and reading it again as it so incredibly beautifully written. I only have one minor gripe, and this is definitely a very personal foible, but I really don't like the word "cunt" used in a very affectionate and loving story. My prejudice, and everyone is entitled to disagree

in the anthology, The Floating World - Urban Erotica, or the print version, Amanda in the City.

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/A_A_Cain

Your words flow like music--rhythmic, flirtatiously dancing, rising and falling, yet rising a little further each time, reaching toward the sublime, halting climax. With fine, elegant strokes of your pen, you draw us deeper into the lives of your characters until we become a jealous picture on the wall, watching the sensuous, teasing ebb and flow and wishing, oh, god, wishing if only I could jump out of this frame and touch them, be with them, and share such anguished joy.

These stories are such a pleasure to read. I pray they're as much a pleasure to write. Thank you for the gift.

=a

What a lovely, romantic and beautiful story. The slow pace of Adam's lovemaking with Amanda, was so refreshing, a welcomed change to the hurried fucking of other writers. A joy to read and warming, 5 Stars are not enough praise for this top tale!

This is a real treat that flowed like warm treacle off the page and into my imagination. I know how much work went into writing this, but the best thing it doesn't show - it's seamlessly gorgeous. Thank you.

wow...

absolutely fucking stunning writing...

thank you so much.

Excellent work.

Very much enjoyed your writing but just curious why it's in the bdsm section lol

I came here from a thread in the forum. Looking for the first story in The Floating World you referenced for POV. I don't know if this is it. A few lines into this and I didn't care anymore. I stayed to the end. Lost in the wonderful floating world I fell into. Perhaps, when my mind clears again, I'll remember what I sought you out to discover. But this sure as hell beats what I was struggling with in the forum! Thanks for a great read!

You do have a thing for ponytails.

Makes me smile, I wonder if you've ever considered pigtails ;)

Amanda, while much younger than Adam, orchestrates the dance.

She reminds me of Lizzy. Will the young couple, with the pregnant wife, take her to her breast...and their bed...

I'll continue to take the path you sent me on and enjoy the sexual journey.

You have my own body needing release. xox

Is it just me, or is there more to this than what you promise in the intro with "meaningless pleasure and ennui that was the lifestyle for many people in the cities, particularly Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka. "Floating world" is the English translation." Maybe it is just me, but this level of intense connection, reciprocal pleasuring, exquisite attention to each other's and their own needs and pleasure creates something meaningful.

This isn't an easy subject, a much older man and a beautiful young lady, but it was written to perfection. Two wonderful characters, introduced to us slowly, until we loved them both. Nobody writes erotic sex better than this author and this was up their with his best off his writings, every word ( well almost) every action between the two made me wetter and wetter, cmj711. wrote their body needed their own release after writing their comments, I had to give mine it's release long before I wrote this. I believe that this series will only get more and more erotic with each chapter. I doubt that I will need to visit Literotica chat in the near future. How can it be that I can only give 5 * when it's worth far more.

Dear author, I wrote you a very personal feedback message, I am sorry literotica refused me permission to send it.

I feel like I'm up in the hotel room. I've never had sex like that before. I've never even read sex like that before!