So, my old story, written something like 13 years ago ... The House in the Woods (available here, go read it, it's the best thing I've ever written)
LawrenceKinden posted this comment on the story:
That was quite lovely and well written.
My only gripe, is that it was rushed here and there. I wanted more. We could have stood to linger a bit over the descriptions of the spankings and the sex. It would have been fun to watch Brianna suss out the nature of her spanker in the woods, perhaps talk to some of the others who had similar experiences.
I wonder what kind of experience the other girls had. They were disturbed by it, why? Did they not feel compelled to accept their spankings? If so, why not?
I was interested in the racism of Alice's time, not to mention the way unwed mothers were treated. That comparison would have made an awesome subplot in a longer piece.
All in all, though I'd have liked it to be longer, (and I'm often greedy this way) this was well done and I'm glad to have read it.
And after rereading that comment, many months later, I've had similar thoughts about the story. I'd like to revise it a bit.
"My only gripe, is that it was rushed here and there. I wanted more."
Yes. Especially the ending. I've always felt that the ending was rushed.
"We could have stood to linger a bit over the descriptions of the spankings and the sex."
The sex part ... I deliberately left that part vague because, like this site, the site I wrote it for didn't allow graphic depictions of underage sex (the main character is a 16-year-old girl). Though they did allow the original version of this story, where I wrote that the main male character looked "about 21" (I changed that bit for this site, so that the same character looked "a bit older" than the main character, leaving his age vague. But in any case, I left out any graphic description of the "sex scene" in both versions of the story. They had sex, but it happened "off-screen"; the story just says that it happened, and it was good. And that's actually how I would like to leave it. I've written plenty of stories with graphic sex scenes, but this story didn't seem to need it. It just wasn't important for the story.
The spankings ... yeah, I could have drawn them out, but, again, I didn't feel like it was necessary for this story.
"It would have been fun to watch Brianna suss out the nature of her spanker in the woods, perhaps talk to some of the others who had similar experiences."
I think this was kinda spelled out in the two relevant scenes. She was spanked, but there was no physical evidence once she left the woods. She knew something was going on, and it was weird.
"I wonder what kind of experience the other girls had. They were disturbed by it, why? Did they not feel compelled to accept their spankings? If so, why not?"
That's something I would have liked to explore, but it just didn't work in this short story format.
"I was interested in the racism of Alice's time, not to mention the way unwed mothers were treated. That comparison would have made an awesome subplot in a longer piece. "
The sad thing is that the racism of Alice's time hasn't changed much, at least in small agricultural towns like where I live. Yeah, I wrote this story from the perspective of an "outsider" living in a town just like the one in the story. The "unwed mothers" bit is just history.
"All in all, though I'd have liked it to be longer, (and I'm often greedy this way) this was well done and I'm glad to have read it. "
I would also like it to be a bit longer. As I said, I've always felt that the ending was a bit rushed. And I think I made a mistake by suddenly introducing Chief Ralston at the last minute. Especially where I described him as having "carried a torch" for Alice for 50 years. Like, why? What I would like to do, to revise the story, is add some flashbacks, in one way or another, to show Chief Ralston's love for Alice (and, first thing, give him a first name). He and Alice are the same age, so it makes sense that he should have been involved in the story when Alice was a teenager. So maybe a flashback where, as a teenager, he sees Alice disappearing into the woods with Joachin. And then, a later scene where, when the townsfolk are burning Joachin's house, he's the one trying to speak reason, but nobody listens. And maybe that's why he became a cop. To maybe stop that kind of thing from happening again. There just needs to be a reason why he immediately understood what Brianna meant when she said "Joachin".
