What went wrong with this one?

[gunhilltrain]

When Gunhilltrain's first stories showed up here I commented that they reminded me of Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn - they still do, and that's in a good way.

The writing does have a distancing effect, though, which for erotica might be a bit too alienating - it's not intimate. Your locations are important for the very strong sense of place and time I get from your work - a literary Edward Hopper. There's definitely a mood in your work, even if it doesn't always strike a chord with readers - but I'm always a fan of mood over plot, so there's that. Keep going, I say .

Thank you very much.

I did experiment with a revision of chapter 3 based on the suggestions in this thread. One thing I did was drop that damn soup thing. It was already a story within a story, so I reduced it to a single paragraph. Now I don't know what to do with it. I could edit the existing story and replace it with the new file. Then I could announce on the board, "Hey, read the new version." Maybe two people will do that, but I'll know what's there.

I don't think I'm anyway near as dark and pessimistic as Selby was. He seems to be suggesting that working class New Yorkers are all sociopaths or something. I lived in that neighborhood once and it just isn't true.

By coincidence, the novel is referred to in my first Holly Sykes story. She's in a car just out of the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel when she asks, "Isn't this the setting for 'Last Exit to Brooklyn?' " She's absolutely correct.