All Comments on 'Winter Flowers'

5 stars for the ending and concept.

The two problems might be the beginning and the category. It starts slow but It is a romance and those often do. It is also a first time story mixed with the romance. All and all, a sweet tale with a happy ending.

Damn you write a good story. Sweet, loving, erotic. Absolutely lovely.

5/5 and if I was the deciding vote you'd win. 😀

Wonderful story. Please write another chapter. She may have found her husband and father to her children. He gave her his cherry, but they both may have found the future. Husband, wife, and children. A loving family, something Florian never had.

What a great story. Enjoyed the attention to detail describing their surroundings and activities.. would have enjoyed little longer ending but still an excellent read that was fun and sexy.

Really well written! I found myself hoping that something like this could really happen between a man and a woman. Please keep writing,

If a story deserves to win the prize, this is it. Quite interesting to make a call girl the protagonist in a Christmas tale. Save fpr Florian's youth and lack of wealth, there's definitely a touch of the Pretty Woman in the plot---a five star tale indeed. That said, it's not without its flaws. I thought both Florian's character and the story's ending a little implausible. In real life, the whore with the heart of gold tends to be a huge myth. Nevertheless, I liked it very much.

This is as close to perfection as it is possible to get! A beautiful story well told that is both romantic and erotic. Very well done!

A marvelous story. Hit every romantic chord on my heart strings! Absolutely a 5!

Really good story. Would have liked a bit more at the end, but still a great read nonetheless.

Sweet story. For some reason I can’t put my finger on I really liked your line, “The words had been thrown into the air like invisible snowballs, and both of them were waiting for them to soundlessly land.” 5 stars of course.

It's a sweet story. Unfortunately, it doesn't even try to resolve the main conflict in this constellation (one "straight" partner, one sex worker): how can a relationship grow with the knowledge that one partner is/was selling sex. Don't try to tell the reader that this is of no concern for the "straight" one....

Really nice story! 10 out of 5.

You write beautifully

with affection for your characters and respect for your readers. Other authors take notice, please.

As an older (69+), reader, I am still a hopeless romantic. I really enjoyed this well written balanced story. There appears to be an element redemption for both Irini and Florian (gosh I love a happy ending!). And yes, the exuberance and perseverance of youth!

Part 2 should be the 2 lovers celebrating "New Years" Is she still continuing her sideline ? Are the moving forward? Questioning readers want to know ...

Since people are curious if I was planning on a sequel: yes.

I left some plot threads open for a reason. How will it work out from now on? What is up with Irina's dad and her reminiscing of the past? What about Florian's family?

Maybe people should tune in next Winter to see if there is more to the story!

I loved the seamless character development and felt they were real.

This was wonderful and very sweet. Have gone on to read more of your stories and enjoyed most of them. Keep writing! You are very talented. Can tell English is perhaps not your first language but it doesn’t detract too much from your stories. Thank you.

Good story!

5

Sex for sale. Was it consensual?

A sweet story. Most appropriate for a Christmas romance. If you see fit to write the second part, I will be looking forward to reading it.

Great story,will there be a continuation ?

Yes, great read love Europe (dam covid no travel) reading your area at Christmas dam beautiful!! All the to ya in 2022 ! We all need a happy new year !! And yes to part 2 of winter flower but it’s your story

Wonderful! I take it, she was a whore no more. Hopefully, her pill will fail, the condom break and Irina has a new name, not Therese, but MOMMY. Her last name will be the same as Florian... Please write another chapter!

Absolutelly stuning. I tried to double mark five stars, but does not work. Nice romantic disposition and not pages long descriptions of sex, all the same and borring. Sex is nice in nature, but describing is useless.

I am not really sure what to make of the almost unequivocal praise the present story has received by other commentators. Is it just I, or does no one else see the many slight to grave inconsistencies in both main characters? But let us not get ahead of ourselves, instead let us first take a little inventory of the characters whose love story we are supposed to believe in here.

There is Irina, alias “Therese,” a law student and former model, who is now working in the “industry” as an escort and cannot “imagine doing anything else.” She has a penchant for charity, which is why she deals out her services to one of her clients for free or “pro bono” for a single night every Christmas season; this season the lucky one is Florian.

Meet Florian, a nineteen years old fellow student, who has just come back from a student exchange in Vietnam and who upon his surprise early return caught his (now ex) girlfriend in the act with another guy. He is a self-proclaimed “virgin” who nonetheless seems to have mastered every single sexual act there is apart from P/V intercourse, which is why he finally wants to catch up on the latter with the help of Irina, our heroine.

Well, let us start right away with the story’s fatal flaw: the “virgin” Florian. Seldom have I read something equally (let alone more) ridiculous in erotica as the tribulations of this supposed virgin who turns out to be a bona fide sex god all but in name! That he has already the looks (tall, dark, and beautiful) of one is almost trivial since that is a given in the romance genre, but then to read of his agony because he “waited this long” before having P/V intercourse (reminder: he is just nineteen!), which, after all this time, for reasons not given now somehow seems to equal pure madness, and next to read of him being so nervous that his legs are literally “shaking” just sitting next to Irina in a public tram only to then become a little while later “best lover she had ever had,” making her squirt constantly in unending orgasmic bliss by simply “play[ing] on her clit” and “hammer[ing] his cock into her,” which, I suppose, are practically speaking exactly the same acts her other clients would have done when in bed with her: all of this taken together is patently absurd, teetering in its inconsistency on the brink of supposedly romantic, but ultimately just laughable hooey.

(Side note: How come that at nineteen our sex god virgin Florian has already done a one year student exchange? I mean, it is rather unusual to start one’s university studies with one or two terms abroad, so is he also some kind of scholastic wunderkind who started his studies at what, fifteen or sixteen?)

But apart from the ridiculousness of the male love interest, there are also remarkable inconsistencies in our heroine, Irina. One, for example, reveals itself in her adoration of Florian’s “anecdotes” about his travels, for the narrator informs us then that “she had never been outside Europe” and “[e]ven of Europe had seen very little.” Since she had formerly been working as a model, it seems rather implausible that she would not have been traveling around for her modeling jobs, if only around Europe where nonetheless many international fashion weeks take place, e.g., Frankfurt, Milan, Paris, London, etc. (Although, admittedly, the narrator does not explicitly state that she was working as a fashion model; still, if she instead was working as some kind of fetish model, or something similarly niche, it would then have been an even graver oversight by the narrator to not inform the reader about the specific modeling our heroine had been doing in the past.)

Furthermore she comes off as an oblivious hypocrite when she cannot “help but empathise with her client’s [Florian’s] heart ache” after he confesses to have been cheated on by his ex-girlfriend, all the while she is the working girl with whom many of her clients would be cheating on their spouses or partners regularly! Hence Irina is a phony, or, as O.J. Berman from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” might observe, a “r e a l phony,” at best, insofar as “[s]he believes all this crap she believes” (Capote 32). But that is precisely begging the question of whether our heroine’s feelings—as conveyed by the narrator—are to be believed at all? How could we believe such an inconsistent character in the first place?

While the characterizations of our heroine and her love interest may arguably be the greatest and gravest flaws of the present story, there are still some finer points too that I want to cover in this in-depth critique.

First of all, I noticed several uncalled-for point of view (PoV) changes where the narrator suddenly starts to hop from the heroine’s to her love interest’s head in the same scene or even sentence, for example: “That his strange behaviour had not ruined the night for her, and that she was willing to forgive and forget was something that he [Florian] knew to appreciate.” Reading this sentence, we might at first intuit that the narrator is conveying, albeit a little obliquely perhaps, the heroine’s thoughts only to then discover and realize at the end that we were inside her love interest’s head right from the start, which the more sensitive reader may find rather jarring. Another example, this time of a perhaps even more ambiguous PoV change, provide the following two sentences: “Florian was studying her face. He was expecting some kind of a reaction.” Is the narrator here telling us really what Florian is expecting, or is he rather telling as what Irina concludes of his “studying her face,” viz., that he must be “expecting some kind of a reaction” from her? The first sentence is unsuitable to decide this question since it can either be construed as a marker of PoV change (Florian becoming the grammatical subject) or as a neutral description by the narrator of what Florian was doing and Irina merely seeing him doing!

Generally speaking, changes of PoV within one scene, paragraph, or even sentence should be avoided since they are almost always unnecessary because nothing of substance in the narrative framework tends to change within these loci, thereby making changes in PoV in disregard of this appear unnatural, superfluous, a/o confusing. (Examples of substantial shifts in the narrative framework would be a scene break, a mood change, or, to suggest something a little outré perhaps, a character with a dissociative identity disorder who might even justify changes of PoV within single sentences.)

From a moral perspective, which given the subject matter is indispensable, I find the glorification of prostitution—and escorting is just that—expressed in paragraphs like the following rather questionable, if not distasteful or even dishonest:

“And how she loved her secret side job! It allowed her to freely explore her sexuality and discover an entire world that had previously been completely hidden from her. Unlike guys her age, these men knew what they liked, and they were eager to share the joys of their kinks with her. No judgement, no attachments: sex that was more than just premature ejaculations and penetration. She was essentially being paid to have a sex life that most people her age could not even dream of.”

To cite O.J. Berman again, that might be the “crap” a real phony believes (see above), but, alas, the story is missing any indication, even if expressed only by an easily dismissed goof character, that prostitution might not be all our heroine is making it out to be. Instead we get even more phony pontificating from her re the shady side of prostitution:

“Irina understood perfectly. Sex work has a bad rep. Sometimes Irina would see a side of the industry existed outside of law. Irina was resolved to keep her business clean. Therefore, she appreciated it when her clients expressed concern over the ethics of participating in the industry as consumers.”

Hence it is only a question of a prostitute’s “resolve[] to keep her business clean,” and then everything is A-OK? Rings true? Well, I think that this sounds a little flippant rather, to say the least, and does not suggest an entirely adequate or proper understanding of the possible—if not, in fact, probable—pitfalls and perils of prostitution!

However, up until now I have not yet touched on the erotic aspect of the present story. Concerning this matter, there is a rather interesting anonymous comment, dated 30th March this year, which says:

“Nice romantic disposition and not pages long descriptions of sex, all the same and borring [sic]. Sex is nice in nature, but describing is useless.”

I firmly disagree with this sentiment, especially the latter notion that describing sex is “useless.” Far from it! In the present context of erotic writing, this notion even strikes me as rather bizarre. Or would you think it logical to state that filming sex is “useless” in porn? I think that it is neither useless to film sex in porn, nor to describe it in erotic writing; rather it is one of the conventional main attractions in either medium. That is not to say that sex must be described in erotic writing as it is not essential to it—you can write an erotic story without a single sex scene in it—but if sex is described, it ought to be done right (as everything else too).

Now, after these preliminaries, I think that the sex described in the present story could have been done better—much better indeed. One of its main weaknesses is due to the absurd characterization of our heroine’s love interest who is basically a sex god virgin doing everything just exactly right: “He knew perfectly well where to touch, rub and kiss, when and how long. He didn't rush but took his precious time. There was a wonderful choreography to it all. . . .” Since he knows and does everything “perfectly well” and is “taking the lead as a man should” (which our heroine follows only all too naturally), there is absolutely zero tension to the sex: no nervousness, no hesitation, no exploration, no nothing. The dominant voice Florian suddenly takes (e.g., “Then show me how much you like it. Cum for me.”) rings all the more hollow for the same reasons: it is not the voice of an inexperienced virgin, but of a stunt cock playing his agreed-upon role as a dom. In consequence, as our heroine is going along and enjoying everything he does to the nth degree—though what he is doing is essentially the same as every other client of hers would be doing when having sex with her—the sex becomes predictable, unbelievable, and boring. (See, anonym quoted above: even though the present story does not offer “pages long description of sex,” the sex is still boring!) In short: it is all just a crafty, fake, and phony love affair. Ironically, not unlike the real thing: a real date with an escort!

That at the story’s end our heroine really seems to make herself believe that she is in love with her sex god ex-virgin just underlines O.J. Berman’s saying quoted above one final time: she is indeed a “r e a l phony.”

(Final side note: There is another anonymous comment, dated 27th November last year, which aptly observes that the present story does not even try to resolve the central conflict of pairing off a prostitute with a former client of hers and asks the question of how on that basis their relationship could “grow?” Well, I would argue that this question only concerns real people, but since the characters in the present story are, at best, only real phonies [or, at worst, failed attempts at characterization], there is no basis for a genuine—let alone growing—relationship anyway!)

To end on a positive note, I may point out that the Christmas atmosphere of the fictitious town was captured quite well and that the numerous descriptions of the different places that our couple went while wandering through the streets were also quite evocative (though, to be honest, I think they also distracted a little from what, narratively speaking, should have been the main objective: the main characters’ love affair). Their banter was also quite witty in places, which made for some amusing diversions from the rather dragging development of their romance (a problem that could be easily rectified with tighter editing.) And, all in all, the narrative will, so to speak, was evident from the start all the way through to the end: a quality that by no means all—and perhaps not even the majority of—stories on here can match!

—AJ

WORKS CITED

Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Penguin Classics, 2000.