'Everything in Its Right Place' (corruption, power dynamics, slavery) - Your thoughts?

[Therion_]

Hello there,

I would like some creative feedback and review of my first part in a new story 'Everything in Its Right Place.'

https://www.literotica.com/s/everything-in-its-right-place-ch-01

I tend to write stories in fantasy or sci-fi settings about princesses, heiresses, or other powerful women who are placed in situations above their means and end up becoming pleasure slaves, accordingly.

My concept with this story was a slightly different character.

Please let me know what you think. Thanks.

 

[Nightwander]

Therion,

Not enough happens. Stories need to begin with something that draws immediate interest. This is slow-moving (literally -- nobody moves or speaks for five paragraphs) and it feels like the whole scene is just setting the stage for other, better stuff that comes later.

I appreciate the desire to set the stage and ground the reader in your world ahead of starting the real action, but it runs the risk that they'll go read something else. To be blunt, I wouldn't click on chapter 2 based on this opening. There's no conflict, tension, intrigue, or action.

Recommendation: what's the first exciting thing that happens in this story? Start the first chapter THERE.

Also, there are a few POV bugs. The scene is in Sariel's POV, but we keep getting flashes of Julienne's internal memories and thoughts: "her memory of being a chaste, modest virgin and resident of a Tir fishing village just four months ago", "Julienne had tried to find the same woman in the mirror at night in her dungeon cell", "...Julienne replies, her owner's touch of her hard pierced nipple challenging her focus".

Just my $0.02, of course. Hope this feedback is useful to you!

 

[Therion_]

Thanks!

Re-upping this.

 

[darwin1859]

@Therion_ I don't have time to read this right now, but I started. I thought there was a lot to praise. You write well, aside from one issue...

The one aspect of your style that was actually hard for me to read: you use a lot of sentence fragments. This is one of your paragraphs: "But, Sariel was a free woman. Unlike Julienne was, and unlike she probably ever would be, again." Not sure why; you choose to; write so ungrammatically. Subjects. Predicates. You have verbs; obviously. But they live in sentences; sentences good; fragments inherently less clear. In short, you need an editor and you need to let them fix your grammar.

I don't read much sci-fi (no one does; the average LE reader reads no sci-fi), but I have heard that word-building is important (makes sense) and you get right off. But I found the difficulty style and the number of details I was being asked to remember to be noticeably challenging. I gave up reading and started skimming. And I don't know whether the sci-fi crowd will welcome this content or not, but by Literotica's standards this is pretty harsh. I assume that's part of the reason you don't have more folks with feedback. You might consider posting in C/NC or BDSM categories. Depending on where this is headed, you may have trouble getting future parts posted.

The distinction between pleasure slave and pleasure house was lost on me as I skimmed. Maybe think of a different class of slave for Julienne.

When I make up female names, I try to end the name in 'a' (for English) because we are still influenced by Latin. Such names seem feminine, even if they are alien/novel. Julienne and Sariel don't seem feminine.

I also wondered. You have a slave girl and a slave trainer. That's interesting to me. But you seem to spend more time initially on the jeweled stage. That repeated detail completely distracted me. I wondered how, exactly, one bejewels a stage edge? Like they're glued there? And why? Why on a training stage? Most training studios/rooms I've seen have been utilitarian. If it's the end of the day, why is it so bright outside that you need to talk about dazzling jewels? <<-- If THAT is what you wanted me to be thinking about as I started your story, then 10/10... But if that's not your point, then you should have some dramatic opening that gets to the point and then fill in backstory.

Why is Soriel the one cleaning up at the end?

And I think you should write something longer. I'd be inclined to just move on when I see a chapter 1 that's 2k words. To get to novel length, you're going to need a couple dozen such chapters. And I'd lose the thread in between posts. So, I'd probably hold off reading until you had a few short chapters posted.

Finally, the people who've found your story like it (4.67 rating right now). It's not poorly-written, but you asked for feedback.

 

[Therion_]

@Therion_ I don't have time to read this right now, but I started. I thought there was a lot to praise. You write well, aside from one issue...

The one aspect of your style that was actually hard for me to read: you use a lot of sentence fragments. This is one of your paragraphs: "But, Sariel was a free woman. Unlike Julienne was, and unlike she probably ever would be, again." Not sure why; you choose to; write so ungrammatically. Subjects. Predicates. You have verbs; obviously. But they live in sentences; sentences good; fragments inherently less clear. In short, you need an editor and you need to let them fix your grammar.

I don't read much sci-fi (no one does; the average LE reader reads no sci-fi), but I have heard that word-building is important (makes sense) and you get right off. But I found the difficulty style and the number of details I was being asked to remember to be noticeably challenging. I gave up reading and started skimming. And I don't know whether the sci-fi crowd will welcome this content or not, but by Literotica's standards this is pretty harsh. I assume that's part of the reason you don't have more folks with feedback. You might consider posting in C/NC or BDSM categories. Depending on where this is headed, you may have trouble getting future parts posted.

The distinction between pleasure slave and pleasure house was lost on me as I skimmed. Maybe think of a different class of slave for Julienne.

When I make up female names, I try to end the name in 'a' (for English) because we are still influenced by Latin. Such names seem feminine, even if they are alien/novel. Julienne and Sariel don't seem feminine.

I also wondered. You have a slave girl and a slave trainer. That's interesting to me. But you seem to spend more time initially on the jeweled stage. That repeated detail completely distracted me. I wondered how, exactly, one bejewels a stage edge? Like they're glued there? And why? Why on a training stage? Most training studios/rooms I've seen have been utilitarian. If it's the end of the day, why is it so bright outside that you need to talk about dazzling jewels? <<-- If THAT is what you wanted me to be thinking about as I started your story, then 10/10... But if that's not your point, then you should have some dramatic opening that gets to the point and then fill in backstory.

Why is Soriel the one cleaning up at the end?

And I think you should write something longer. I'd be inclined to just move on when I see a chapter 1 that's 2k words. To get to novel length, you're going to need a couple dozen such chapters. And I'd lose the thread in between posts. So, I'd probably hold off reading until you had a few short chapters posted.

Finally, the people who've found your story like it (4.67 rating right now). It's not poorly-written, but you asked for feedback.

Appreciated, Darwin!

 

[anthrodisiac]

Hey, some of us read Sci-Fi! Some of us even write it!

You've gotten some good feedback already, so I'll just focus on the things that I noticed that have yet to be touched on (expect to expand a bit on POV, because I like talking about POV).

Lore/Backstory:
You have some solid bones here, but you need to work on tightening. It feels like you're trying to cram too many concepts in such a small space. Given it's a multi-part chapter, especially in Sci-Fi & Fantasy, you have plenty of room to expand on concepts when they come up. One of the best things a sci-fi author can do is let the lore and backstory drip in, not hose the reader right out of the gate. And the best way to introduce lore is to do it when it adds something to the scene, or is at least pertinent to the scene (judgement call most of the time, to be honest).

I know it seems like, "If the reader doesn't know this particular thing, then how are they going to understand the wider context?" But the reader doesn't always need to know the wider context. Sometimes a bit of mystery is good. You can sprinkle in little things, something that gives you a bit of foreshadowing about the backstory or some societal dynamic, but not explain it right away. It's good to have lore, and even to have a lot of it (my non-Lit writing tends to have a lot of lore), but you don't want the lore to become so dense that it impedes the story and flow. For novel-length works, I try to keep my lore to half a page at most at any given time. In shorter works like this, where you're posting one chapter at a time, any lore beyond two paragraphs is going to be excessive. Given it is a shorter work, you also want to make sure that you focus on the lore that's pertinent to the story — unless you plan on massively expanding this into a giant world, in which case, you can get more into the weeds but I'd wait until later chapters when you already have established readers.

The thing about lore in serial work on Lit is that your first couple chapters need to be designed for maximum interest and reader engagement. That's going to mean being light on lore except when absolutely necessary, because you want to titilate the reader and draw them in first and foremost. Chaptered works here tend to drop off readership pretty fast as people read the first chapter and realize it's not for them (especially in more niche categories like Sci-Fi & Fantasy, or my niche, Non-Human, where there are tons of subgroups looking for different things). Once you've gotten a few chapters in, the people who are still reading are going to want to learn more about the wider world and deeper society, and that's a better/safer time to go into more depth with your lore (but still not too much at any given time). But they'll only be interested if you keep their interest, so your first 2 - 4 chapters are going to have to focus more on story, character, and sex (it's an erotica site after all) to keep them engaged long enough that they become invested and are more likely to stay and want to hear more about this world you've built.

POV:
I agree that the POV isn't overly clear. If you want to go third-person omniscient (i.e. narrator who knows everything and allows the reader to see into everyone's heads), that's fine. But it does feel a bit more like you're bouncing between Soriel and Julienne. You'll either want to stick with omniscient narrator, which might work better if you're into heavy lore and backstory from many angles, or pick one of the two women. You can alternate between sections, but try to avoid having two people competing for POV in the same section, so either section breaks (usually some sort of character delineation like ***** or between chapters).

Tense:
You also have a couple tense issues where you slip into present tense, though most of the narrative is in past. Bolded to point them out. You have a mix of present and past tense. Make sure you stick with a tense, probably past since the vast majority of this is in past tense.

"Within the first twelve months I was there, I became senior performer in Slave's Dance." Sariel's tone "Made a name for myself in Remos in the next five years." The edge of the crop touches the ring of Julienne's slave collar. "And when the previous ownership finally died... I was freed," Sariel states coyly.

"And now I'm here. To teach new sluts such as yourself to dance well enough, so that you don't get sold to a pleasure house yourself." Julienne had been accustomed enough to her new home that she was capable of laughing at her teacher's dark humor, at least in a manner that was muted and respectful.

"Yes, madame." Julienne adjusts her kneel slightly for comfort. "I'm glad I wasn't sold to a pleasure house," she admitted, quietly.

Direct Thought:
There are also inconsistencies in how you address direct thought. In one case, you italicize the thought, in another case you don't. There are a couple different approaches to this, but I'll make it easy for you and say your approach should just italicize a direct thought like:

No kidding that Julienne was fortunate to be sold into a harem instead of a pleasure house, Sariel thought.

But you'll want to use it sparingly. Overuse of direct thought is kind of a crutch and really sticks out to readers. Maybe once or twice a page (per 3500 words on Lit), and not in close proximity unless it's part of the same thought, but broken up with a tag.

Paragraph Structuring:
Last thing is that you want to look at how you're structuring your paragraphs. Sometimes the action and the dialogue don't seem to match. You have a couple instances where either you have one person's actions and another person's dialogue, or you have the same person, but it's very unclear for one reason or another. Dialogue and action should (emphasis on should, there are definitely cases where this is not the case) be confined to a single character per paragraph. Mixing actions that clearly belong to one character while having dialogue belonging to another, especially where there aren't tags, can make it harder to parse who's doing/saying what.

Original:

"And now I'm here. To teach new sluts such as yourself to dance well enough, so that you don't get sold to a pleasure house yourself." Julienne had been accustomed enough to her new home that she was capable of laughing at her teacher's dark humor, at least in a manner that was muted and respectful.

"Yes, madame." Julienne adjusts her kneel slightly for comfort. "I'm glad I wasn't sold to a pleasure house," she admitted, quietly.

The dialogue belongs to Soriel, but the thoughts belong to Julienne. Splitting them up helps with clarity:

"And now I'm here. To teach new sluts such as yourself to dance well enough, so that you don't get sold to a pleasure house yourself."

Julienne had been accustomed enough to her new home that she was capable of laughing at her teacher's dark humor, at least in a manner that was muted and respectful.

"Yes, madame." Julienne adjusts her kneel slightly for comfort. "I'm glad I wasn't sold to a pleasure house," she admitted, quietly.

Bonus!:
Also, since I have you here on that section, it's usually better to avoid chopping up dialogue between multiple speech/action tags in the same paragraph. Usually it's best to use one or the other (again, not a hard rule, one I break sometimes). If you want to keep both, you could do:

"Yes, madame." Julienne adjusted her kneel slightly for comfort. She admitted quietly, "I'm glad I wasn't sold to a pleasure house."

(I went to clean up the writing, but I decided against that and will keep all the same words, save for the tense issue. My job isn't to improve the writing style, so I kept my grubby little mitts off your word choice.)

Now you only have one block between the two dialogue sections, instead of multiple layers:
<Dialogue, action/speech tags, dialogue>
instead of
<Dialogue, action tag, dialogue, speech tag>

Helps with a flow a bit better and improves readability.

Man, this was way longer than I was expecting, sorry

Anyway, hope that helps! Keep up the good work.