Story Discussion: 11/09/2010. "Jujubees" by PacoFear

[KillerMuffin]

First, my own comments, then I'll answer your questions.

I was totally annoyed (like I almost always am) by the phrase, "dripping like {...} a whore." First of all, it's cliched and familiar, which allows me to unaccept it and be annoyed by it. Second of all, the implications are offensive. I am not a whore and sexual situations still arouse me and make my body react in lovely, predictably, healthy ways. This phrase does not annoy me when the character is developed to make its use something normal and not just a trite-ism. Karen might have a catholic school background, but she's never displayed any of the prim, virginal, never seen a cock spinster personality of someone who would equate female arousal as whorish. Of course, most people don't have this problem with this particular cliche. They usually find it apt description, even erotic.

I felt rather ambivalent about Karen and I liked Dee. Karen had her own voice and her own personality, but I reacted negatively to her situation in the beginning, and once I'd gotten my head around the setting, I didn't find myself empathizing with her. After some consideration, I think the reason why I didn't care about her one way or the other was her development as a character. I didn't see emotional movement from the beginning of the story to the end. How did she feel about the shift from un-kinked to now-kinked? Best sex ever isn't emotionally satisfying. I don't think it would take many words to give her growth in the story, to get her from one point to another. Inexperienced to experienced is, well, not real growth, until some sort of shift in what makes the character fundamentally the character alters a bit, too. Dee, I liked, because she's a flat character (see E.M Forster's Aspects of the Novel) and therefore, I didn't want more out of her than for her to be who she is. Karen is a round character (also from Forster's definitions), and I needed more from her than an orgasm. Dee was interesting and fun.

I did wonder what Dee got out of all of it. I didn't wonder why Dee did the things she did, but I did wonder where her satisfaction was in the scene. I don't expect orgasm, or some nod to sexual completion because women can be fully satisfied without orgasm, but I did wonder what she got out of it. It's a BDSM truism that the sub is in control, not the dom, simply because scenes are designed around the sub's needs. That doesn't mean that a dom's needs aren't just as important or being met. Dee has needs as a dom, so what are they? How does Karen fill them? The story doesn't tell me anything about this and I'd like to know. Because the sex part is all one-sided, it takes away from Dee as a dom a bit. It turns her less into a dom and more into a fucking machine. I don't think I'd need dialogue or outright explanations of this. I'd just need a hint dropped here or there that implies that Dee is getting some kind of emotional satisfaction, or what kind of satisfaction she wants.

1) Did you notice that there was virtually no description of the appearance of either woman? I wanted to write something whose titillation was based entirely on the situation and the interplay between the characters. Does the story have enough detail without knowing what the characters look like?

I never describe my characters, actually. I've never had anyone wonder what they look like. It's my belief that description should first serve the needs of the story and then serve the needs of the audience. It's a misconception in porn writing that people need to know what characters look like. Now, if I was writing this story with an audience that prefer interracial interaction in mind, then I'd write a bit about how contrasting skin colors was hot. I wouldn't describe them.

I like how the lack of description about looks lets be free to imagine the characters the way I want. There are still descriptions in the story that let me know enough about them. Karen is caucasian, otherwise the wax marks wouldn't stand out so much.

I think you picked details that developed story and characters well. That's what's important in writing. If it doesn't develop something, it doesn't belong.

2) Did the story grab you right from the start? I'm obsessed with hooking a reader as quickly as possible. If it didn't, why?

It is attention grabbing. The first two sentences would have made me immediately leave the story because I thought this was a rape scene in progress. Moreover, I thought it was a candy-coated rape scene in progress, where a woman is raped repeatedly and because her body physically reacts to it, she's supposedly "likes it." The "Just super." Line nearly threw me off a bit on this initial assessment, simply because it was sarcastic and showed spirit, but it didn't give me enough to alter the assessment from rape to bondage scenario. Despite the category, it appeared that the speaker was arranged on the bed for sex she had no interest in. The succeeding paragraphs didn't do much to alter that appearance for me.

3) One of the things I've never been satisfied with on this story was the way the flashbacks cut in and out. Is it clear what's happening? Karen has three separate reflective moments: meeting Dee; dating in high school as an explanation for her jujubee safeword; and sex she had with Dee the previous week. Is this clear? Does it feel disjointed? If it feels like your being jerked around in time, any suggestions on smoothing this out?

I thought the jujubee flashback was interesting, but irrelevant. I knew we'd moved from the current time to the past, but its relevance was missing, and therefore a bit annoying. Why did it come across as irrelevant to me, when it is sort of relevant and makes for development? Because of what happened in the past. Making out with boys or doing things nuns say no to during school-age years in the back of theaters is not kinky. There was nothing about that flashback that made me connect the memory to the kinkiness happening now. So, I had no real frame of reference for why the jujubees were important enough to comment on. If there was a reason to connect jujubees with kinky, that would be different. For example, connecting the taste of jujubees with the first boy that held her down or restrained her in some way while kissing her, that would connect the past to the present.

The first meeting with Dee? I missed the segue into the past entirely and wondered when Dee had traded coffee for tequila. After some reflection, I realized that I'd picked up the necessary tense change, but not the setting change. I think a bit of context would help. For example, from the first time she kissed me, back at the bar next to McDonald's, Dee had explained. Of course, The word "from" should be changed to "after". Kissing and talking don't happen concurrently. It's an important flashback, not only because it's interesting, but because it's relevant, needed information.

I didn't even notice the sex with Dee in the past as flashback. It was more as musings of what had occurred in the past.

4) I'm a vanilla guy. Am I voicing a girl okay? Lesbian okay? Submissive lesbian okay? Dominant lesbian okay? [question expanded based on PenisMightier1's comments below]

If your name was *69SexyPrincess 69*, you'd be getting wanna-have-sex-with-me-hottie? emails from the Lit-must-be-a-pick-up-chicks!-site pervs.

I think the question is less did I voice a female, lesbian, domme okay, but rather, did I voice a character you can believe in. My suspension of disbelief kicked in just fine. Karen and Dee were rounded, believable characters and I had no trouble believing that they were what you created them to be. The reason? You developed them well. I found a first person story in your library from a male voice, though I did do a find on "my cock" to make sure. I hate that about some first person stories, so hard to tell if the I is male or female right off. Anyway, I compared the two speakers and while I didn't find anything in their personalities that was specifically gendered (which is not unusual unless the author over-emphasizes gender stereotypes), I did find them to be two completely different characters with a difference in voice.

In case you're interested, in my head, Karen was American with a midwestern, TV news Anchor accent, maybe a touch of Boston because I associate catholic schools with Boston (thank you Boondock Saints). Dee was British, with one of those Oxford educated, comes from a good family accent.

5) I'm trying to work out the kinks (hehe ) of writing in very immediate, present tense. Did you feel like you were living this scene with Karen? At one point she notes that she's "on a ride" and that she herself is a ride for her lover. The unstated follow-on notion there was that Karen should also be a ride for you, the reader.

Narrative time is funny. Past tense is the current moment. So, present tense is problematic. The tense did not bring me into the moment with Karen. To answer this question, I put the last few paragraphs in past tense and read them. It didn't make a noticeable difference in immediacy. It did make a noticeable difference in my ability to stop looking at the words and sink into the narrative dream. Frankly, tense shifting for immediacy is gimmicky. Tense doesn't deliver immediacy, what delivers that immediacy is intelligent use of POV and sentence structure. If you want me right there, feeling it with the character, then the sentences must have the same feel that character is feeling. Breathless characters will use breathless sentences, ones that are short and fragmented. If there is heightened emotions, the sentences will be choppy. If the character is mellow and meditative, the sentences will be, too. They'll be long, flowing, and complete. Structure variance is an absolute necessity, but it must be done with purpose and intelligently. A long sentence in the middle of a bunch of choppy ones will affect character and reader emotions.

Looking at your prose during the orgasm, your character is speaking in complete sentences, with rich word use, and generally lengthy sentences. This is not the manner of a person in orgasm. How articulate are you when you orgasm? Present tense makes the whole thing even worse, actually. Present tense does lessen the narrative distance with time. Past tense is the current narrative moment, present tense is the immediate narrative moment. But, with first person present tense, the reader must fix a bit of cognitive dissonance. How can the speaker write and exist at the same time? Yeah, they can't. In some cases, this isn't an issue. In others, it is. Like orgasm. How can the speaker orgasm and narrate at the same time? Yeah, can't. Past tense allows enough distance, narratively, so that the reader doesn't have that bit of whuzza? going on that they may not even be aware of. At your skill level, the whuzza? shouldn't exist. I should not be questioning the text.

So, no, your tense experiment failed. The reason it failed was because you replaced tone with tense. You could maintain this story as present tense without disrupting the narrative dream, but you may not allow it to fail the POV. If a first person character is engraged, the story itself must be enraged and the words and sentences used are the words and sentences of an enraged person. If the first person POV is orgasming in present tense, so must the story. The problem is that orgasm precludes articulation. That's a problem you, the author, must solve when using this kind of tense. That's not to say it can't be done, because it most certainly can, but it is to say that you didn't do it. Any immediacy, right there with the character-ness that I felt came from the story's tone, developed by diction and syntax choices, not from tense. Tense actually caused problem with immediacey because it immediately pulled me out of the story.

A fer instance:

"Shhh, don't talk, baby, Don't think. Just feel. No brain. Let this gorgeous little body of yours lead the way. It knows where to go."

She's right, of course. I let everything else fall away. My heart thuds once and it brings a tiny moment of stillness that stretches out like the warm taffy I used to love as a little girl on the boardwalk.

How can she use this very cognitive, intelligent simile when she's just feeling, not brain-ing, and everything has fallen away but her body? She would have to stop feeling long enough to connect the stretch of time with the stretch of taffy from a time she experienced a long time ago. That's the problem with present tense. Readers may not know it consciously, usually can never articulate it, but they do know it. Take this same scene in past tense:

"Shhh, don't talk, baby, Don't think. Just feel. No brain. Let this gorgeous little body of yours lead the way. It knows where to go."

She's right, of course. I let everything else fall away. My heart thudded once and it brought a tiny moment of stillness that stretched out like the warm taffy I used to love as a little girl on the boardwalk.

There is no real shift in the sensation of immediacy.

 

[KillerMuffin]

I'm not sure how best to handle your flashbacks. Have you tried putting the flashback action in italics? That serves to visually separate the scene for the reader, so the reader doesn't have to do the processing to realize "oh, this is something outside current action." It's visually outside the action. Just a thought. Italics work well for small diversions; less well for longer ones, which are better with scene breaks. But I understand completely why you don't want a scene break here. You have such a beautiful flow going.

Uhm. I must respectfully disagree with the italics idea. While it is handy and does immediately signal to the reader that something different is going on, and once the reader figures out how to understand the difference, repeated use of the pattern effectly tells the reader how to read those sections, I think it's a crutch, not a helper in the long run.

I think that use of italics, boldface, different fonts, different colors, even lines/row of asterixes, are thing to use in addition to not in place of good story and sentence construction. If I must have doodads in a story to figure out what's happening, then there's a good chance that the narrative itself needs some work. Flashbacks should be dealt with through words. It's actually not that hard.

First, figure out the plot itself, more importantly what are important parts of the plot.

Second, figure out what's so damned important about the flashback. For example in jujubees, in the first meeting flashback, we learned the important plot point that Dee thinks Karen must learn to turn off her brain. In the Jujubees flashback, we didn't learn anything important to the plot at all (though we should have).

Third, cut any flashbacks that don't forward the plot or develop the character in an important way.

Finally, use signal words and phrases to enter the flashback and exit the flashback. Use sentence structure and judicious paragraphing to move into and out of the flashback. Make sure tense is consistent. If you've got a past tense story, use simple past for the current time and past perfect for earlier times. In Jujubees, you used present tense for the current time and past perfect for earlier.

Here's a relatively decent example of moving from now to then without doodads:

I'd thought about asking her to untie me so I could check my skin where the wax hit me. She'd do it if I used my safeword, the one she'd made me pick way in the beginning.

Jujubees.

Yeah, it's a little silly but I've always liked them. When boys in high school took me on dates to the movies I always asked for a big box of them. Then we'd sit in the back of the theater and do all the things the nuns told me not to. So jujubees and sex are linked for me.

Yeah, I was a little kinky even before I met Dee.

I hear her take another long, slow, slurpy sip from her coffee cup then set it down on the nightstand. She opens and closes one of its drawers.

The reason it's decent rather than excellent is that the previous paragraphs have tense issues. The pillow was, not is and the first line of the quote is in current time, but uses past perfect tense. However, because I move into this tense problem with clear understanding that we're in currrent time, I didn't have any problems moving into to past time. The safe word (italics makes no difference in flashback segue) links the current time thought about jujubees to past time thought about jujubees. I have a link. The link is accompanied by a clever signal sentence: "I've always liked them." This is present time, telling me that the speaker is considering the past. This is immediately followed by the signal word "When" and the dip into memory. I clearly and quickly move from now to then without a ripple in the narrative pool. We leave the flashback just as smoothly. The speaker links past to present (jujubees and sex are linked for me. I guess I was a little kinky before I met Dee). There is a clear signal phrase that we're shifting in time "before I met Dee" followed by present time Dee herself slurping coffee.

As a reader, I have no need for doodads to make it clear what's happening. While I'm not opposed to doodads in narrative use, I am opposed to doodads replacing narration for reasons of clarity. Doodads should enhance.

 

[PacoFear]

Wow, thanks for putting some serious time into this, KM. I was too drunk on turkey to do anything nearly this productive.

I was totally annoyed (like I almost always am) by the phrase, "dripping like {...} a whore." First of all, it's cliched and familiar, which allows me to unaccept it and be annoyed by it. Second of all, the implications are offensive. I am not a whore and sexual situations still arouse me and make my body react in lovely, predictably, healthy ways. This phrase does not annoy me when the character is developed to make its use something normal and not just a trite-ism. Karen might have a catholic school background, but she's never displayed any of the prim, virginal, never seen a cock spinster personality of someone who would equate female arousal as whorish. Of course, most people don't have this problem with this particular cliche. They usually find it apt description, even erotic.

It's funny, I think the more smut I write the less and less crass it's coming out. "Dripping like a whore" or some variation thereof would have popped right off my keyboard a couple of years ago. Point is, KM, I must confess I actually, intentionally reached for this crass trite-ism. I wanted something tacky and crude and just plain, well, wrong. Perhaps that makes it even more criminal? I knowingly and with malice aforethought perpetrated "dripping like a whore." I accept your criticism inasmuch as there are no doubt far more original ways to ring that particular bell. Consider me chastened.

I felt rather ambivalent about Karen and I liked Dee. Karen had her own voice and her own personality, but I reacted negatively to her situation in the beginning, and once I'd gotten my head around the setting, I didn't find myself empathizing with her. After some consideration, I think the reason why I didn't care about her one way or the other was her development as a character. I didn't see emotional movement from the beginning of the story to the end. How did she feel about the shift from un-kinked to now-kinked? Best sex ever isn't emotionally satisfying. I don't think it would take many words to give her growth in the story, to get her from one point to another. Inexperienced to experienced is, well, not real growth, until some sort of shift in what makes the character fundamentally the character alters a bit, too. Dee, I liked, because she's a flat character (see E.M Forster's Aspects of the Novel) and therefore, I didn't want more out of her than for her to be who she is. Karen is a round character (also from Forster's definitions), and I needed more from her than an orgasm. Dee was interesting and fun.

I'm not surprised that you liked Dee more, KM. I do too. For my tastes, an ingenue is just an ingenue. Her eroding innocence is kind of a bank account whose balance steadily declines each time I draw from it. A femme fatale, she has nooks and crannies to explore. (Ugh, how's that for a mixed metaphor? ) I most enjoy telling, or here hinting, at the femme's story from the ingenue's perspective.

I like your point about it probably not taking that much more to round out Karen's character. I had tried a few different paragraphs on the subject in my various drafts and didn't like any of them mostly because my picture of Karen is that she doesn't know why she does what she does. The only one version of these paragraphs remember now went something like the one below which I ended up cutting because I didn't think it really added anything.

Why do I like being treated this way? Had Daddy loved me too little? Or too much? It doesn't matter, I have reasons even if I don't know what they are. I don't know how my car's engine works either, but it still gets me from place to place.

Oh, and E.M. Forster just earned a spot on my Kindle. If it's not patently obvious, I'm a rumbly-tumbly mess of a self-taught writer. Aspects looks helpful.

I did wonder what Dee got out of all of it. I didn't wonder why Dee did the things she did, but I did wonder where her satisfaction was in the scene. I don't expect orgasm, or some nod to sexual completion because women can be fully satisfied without orgasm, but I did wonder what she got out of it. It's a BDSM truism that the sub is in control, not the dom, simply because scenes are designed around the sub's needs. That doesn't mean that a dom's needs aren't just as important or being met. Dee has needs as a dom, so what are they? How does Karen fill them? The story doesn't tell me anything about this and I'd like to know. Because the sex part is all one-sided, it takes away from Dee as a dom a bit. It turns her less into a dom and more into a fucking machine. I don't think I'd need dialogue or outright explanations of this. I'd just need a hint dropped here or there that implies that Dee is getting some kind of emotional satisfaction, or what kind of satisfaction she wants.

The idea, unwritten, was that not all of their sexual encounters went this same way. In my head, Dee and Karen have a varied sex life and we're just getting a snapshot of one particular morning. You have a good point insofar as readers are probably wondering about Dee's end of things.

I think you picked details that developed story and characters well. That's what's important in writing. If it doesn't develop something, it doesn't belong.

That was a principal goal here: efficiency. I'm not good at it, I know, and so it takes some effort. Yay, a small victory.

It is attention grabbing. The first two sentences would have made me immediately leave the story because I thought this was a rape scene in progress. Moreover, I thought it was a candy-coated rape scene in progress, where a woman is raped repeatedly and because her body physically reacts to it, she's supposedly "likes it." The "Just super." Line nearly threw me off a bit on this initial assessment, simply because it was sarcastic and showed spirit, but it didn't give me enough to alter the assessment from rape to bondage scenario. Despite the category, it appeared that the speaker was arranged on the bed for sex she had no interest in. The succeeding paragraphs didn't do much to alter that appearance for me.

Wow, this was one of those go-back-and-re-read-your-stuff-to-see-how-it-might-come-across-moments. I see now that the opening two paragraphs can most certainly read the way you describe, KM.

Just super. I'm tied naked and facedown in the middle of a bed and waiting to get fucked. Again.

Well, at least the sheets are nice. High thread count. They feel pretty good against my boobs and the side of my face – the parts of it that aren't covered by the silk blindfold anyway.

The "just super" was intended to convey Karen's wry and cheeky acceptance of her predicament. For many folks it may read like a wry and negative detachment, particularly when combined with "Well at least the sheets are nice" as though they're the high point of her being held captive. The sheets are supposed to be the high point of her having to endure waiting for more sex. Eh crud.

I thought the jujubee flashback was interesting, but irrelevant. I knew we'd moved from the current time to the past, but its relevance was missing, and therefore a bit annoying. Why did it come across as irrelevant to me, when it is sort of relevant and makes for development? Because of what happened in the past. Making out with boys or doing things nuns say no to during school-age years in the back of theaters is not kinky. There was nothing about that flashback that made me connect the memory to the kinkiness happening now. So, I had no real frame of reference for why the jujubees were important enough to comment on. If there was a reason to connect jujubees with kinky, that would be different. For example, connecting the taste of jujubees with the first boy that held her down or restrained her in some way while kissing her, that would connect the past to the present.

Oi, the jujubees thing fell flatter than I hoped. That tangent was supposed to serve a few different functions.

1. Establish that Karen and Dee are in the sort of semi-organized D/s relationship that employs safewords.

2. Shed a bit of light/history on Karen's youth, that she'd never been, strictly speaking, a "good girl."

3. Setup Dee's bit of dialogue at the end such that she can verify, within an intimate code of their relationship, that Karen is content to continue.

4. Generally sweeten/cutesy the whole story up a bit.

The first meeting with Dee? I missed the segue into the past entirely and wondered when Dee had traded coffee for tequila. After some reflection, I realized that I'd picked up the necessary tense change, but not the setting change. I think a bit of context would help. For example, from the first time she kissed me, back at the bar next to McDonald's, Dee had explained. Of course, The word "from" should be changed to "after". Kissing and talking don't happen concurrently. It's an important flashback, not only because it's interesting, but because it's relevant, needed information.

Excellent point on making use of the setting for context.

I think the question is less did I voice a female, lesbian, domme okay, but rather, did I voice a character you can believe in. My suspension of disbelief kicked in just fine. Karen and Dee were rounded, believable characters and I had no trouble believing that they were what you created them to be. The reason? You developed them well. I found a first person story in your library from a male voice, though I did do a find on "my cock" to make sure. I hate that about some first person stories, so hard to tell if the I is male or female right off. Anyway, I compared the two speakers and while I didn't find anything in their personalities that was specifically gendered (which is not unusual unless the author over-emphasizes gender stereotypes), I did find them to be two completely different characters with a difference in voice.

Huzzah!

In case you're interested, in my head, Karen was American with a midwestern, TV news Anchor accent, maybe a touch of Boston because I associate catholic schools with Boston (thank you Boondock Saints). Dee was British, with one of those Oxford educated, comes from a good family accent.

Oooh, I'm very interested in your picture of them and it's a far better question than the one I asked. How much more fun it is to hear how other people filled in the blanks you've left behind!

Narrative time is funny. Past tense is the current moment. So, present tense is problematic. The tense did not bring me into the moment with Karen. To answer this question, I put the last few paragraphs in past tense and read them. It didn't make a noticeable difference in immediacy. It did make a noticeable difference in my ability to stop looking at the words and sink into the narrative dream. Frankly, tense shifting for immediacy is gimmicky. Tense doesn't deliver immediacy, what delivers that immediacy is intelligent use of POV and sentence structure. If you want me right there, feeling it with the character, then the sentences must have the same feel that character is feeling. Breathless characters will use breathless sentences, ones that are short and fragmented. If there is heightened emotions, the sentences will be choppy. If the character is mellow and meditative, the sentences will be, too. They'll be long, flowing, and complete. Structure variance is an absolute necessity, but it must be done with purpose and intelligently. A long sentence in the middle of a bunch of choppy ones will affect character and reader emotions.

Looking at your prose during the orgasm, your character is speaking in complete sentences, with rich word use, and generally lengthy sentences. This is not the manner of a person in orgasm. How articulate are you when you orgasm? Present tense makes the whole thing even worse, actually. Present tense does lessen the narrative distance with time. Past tense is the current narrative moment, present tense is the immediate narrative moment. But, with first person present tense, the reader must fix a bit of cognitive dissonance. How can the speaker write and exist at the same time? Yeah, they can't. In some cases, this isn't an issue. In others, it is. Like orgasm. How can the speaker orgasm and narrate at the same time? Yeah, can't. Past tense allows enough distance, narratively, so that the reader doesn't have that bit of whuzza? going on that they may not even be aware of. At your skill level, the whuzza? shouldn't exist. I should not be questioning the text.

So, no, your tense experiment failed. The reason it failed was because you replaced tone with tense. You could maintain this story as present tense without disrupting the narrative dream, but you may not allow it to fail the POV. If a first person character is engraged, the story itself must be enraged and the words and sentences used are the words and sentences of an enraged person. If the first person POV is orgasming in present tense, so must the story. The problem is that orgasm precludes articulation. That's a problem you, the author, must solve when using this kind of tense. That's not to say it can't be done, because it most certainly can, but it is to say that you didn't do it. Any immediacy, right there with the character-ness that I felt came from the story's tone, developed by diction and syntax choices, not from tense. Tense actually caused problem with immediacey because it immediately pulled me out of the story.

[...]

How can she use this very cognitive, intelligent simile when she's just feeling, not brain-ing, and everything has fallen away but her body? She would have to stop feeling long enough to connect the stretch of time with the stretch of taffy from a time she experienced a long time ago. That's the problem with present tense. Readers may not know it consciously, usually can never articulate it, but they do know it. Take this same scene in past tense:

"Shhh, don't talk, baby, Don't think. Just feel. No brain. Let this gorgeous little body of yours lead the way. It knows where to go."

She's right, of course. I let everything else fall away. My heart thudded once and it brought a tiny moment of stillness that stretched out like the warm taffy I used to love as a little girl on the boardwalk.

There is no real shift in the sensation of immediacy.

I've read your thoughts on present tense usage on another thread or two, KM. Most insightful. To be honest, I have one other present tense effort in the works, then I plan on settling comfortably back into past tense, content with having ventured out.

I'll agree with you (and Penny) that the orgasm paragraphs are out of sync. I agree because they're at odds with the dialogue. Had it not been for those "brain checkout" dialogue, the prosaic orgasm moment might have fared slightly better. Call me stubborn, but I still think there's room for the type of slow-motiony, bullet-time, reflective moments in the humble jumble of present tense smutty action. I blame my own lack of skill for this dubious execution.