Purveyor of Poetry & Porn
Sorry that got posted twice...sorry that got posted twice...having trouble with my connection this morning and I hit the "post" button again...
I think you've gotten the gist of what everyone has been saying.. a reader only gets out of the story what the author puts into it.. spend a little more time in prep.. and be sensitive to how you are presenting your fantasy.. you want maximum arousal.. and appreciation.. you will never get that from a token effort.. good luck..
Purveyor of Poetry & Porn
You know, Jeff...you were doing so well until that last line...btw, was that you who made that speech??? Read something about you winning an Oscar...
I did proofread and edit a story for another member, Redhotmomacita who's story "Online Lover's First Date" got rejected by Lush...she spent a good portion of her life out of this country and her command of English was not up to the standards demanded by Lush...the story ended up doing really well for her...just checked 4.77 avg with 30 votes, and she hit the Top Author list after it posted, which was nice to see...but, I am not eager to ever do that again...it was very tedious, to say the least. She had a lot of basic structure errors...not starting a new paragraph when someone else speaks, for instance...and there were a lot of instances of things like not double spacing between sentences and bad use of commas. Plus, there were a couple of instances where I just did not understand what she was trying to say, so I had to e-mail her and wait for her reply. It took me longer to work on than doing a whole story myself...
I will offer suggestions here, but I think I have to pass on the mentoring, for now at least...
If mister reads enough stories to get the idea of how basic story structure should look, and learns how to use spell-check, I may reconsider...
But for now...I have to respectfully decline...
Later,
Alan.
Purveyor of Poetry & Porn
One more thing mister...I don't think you are an idiot for wanting to improve your writing or even posting what you wrote here...anyone who thinks so really does not have to read through the whole post...
I can understand the Lush team not wanting to encourage people posting their stories in the forums for public review first, though...
I did a quick Google search...there are quite a few articles on writing regarding paragraph structure, etc. I suggest you do your homework, read as many stories as you can, make corrections to your story and then re-submit it through the correct process...
There are also some forum posts right here regarding writing tips, I believe Necho posted one about paragraph structure recently, and she may have others...
I expect we'll all be reading it on the front page of Lush one of these days...
Again, good luck,
Alan.
I didn't read the whole thing, but if you want readers to remain engaged, aside the grammatical errors, spelling errors and punctuation issues. A few things I did notice right away. Your tense and point of view fluctuate. Its confusing to a reader when they are blurred, blending and staggered throughout a story. Pick one tense, one POV (for instance, you have several places where your 1st person narration is describing what the girl is feeling. from "his" POV, he doesn't know how it feels to her.) You have a lot of passive verbs, mixed with "telling" sentences, where you should be showing.
Grammar and spelling can be fixed, so I wouldn't worry about that if your intention is to revise this. First, clean up your points of view. Fix your tense. Next, concentrate on re-writing all your telling sentences, replacing them with showing sentences. If you can fix the story, the grammar is much less of an issue. Lastly, and I don't mean to be insulting, based on what I've seen of your grammar, I would cut and paste this into a word processor that has grammar and spelling check. At your apparent level, I would trust the word processor's recommendations for the first revision. After that, you should have a relatively workable manuscript.
Don't sweat it... I'm a published author and grammar is my bane, too! *lol* But it has to be readable and yours crosses that line. Few will ever know if the story is interesting, because the writing is plagued with errors.
(this post alone should be proof how lousy my grammar is. *lol*)