A human and a pony share a tender and amorous moment together while music is playing on the phone. Things get heated up as they explore one another's venereal interests.
9616662 Thank you so much, dude! I'm sincerely touched by your words of kindness. It will take time for me to conceptualize the 2nd chapter, so I highly appreciate your patience. Brohoof to you! π
9674173 Thank you so much for the wonderful feedback! To know that someone like you enjoyed my story really warms my heart and soul .
To tell you the truth, the songs in the 1st chapter were meant for the next chapter in my Pokemon fic called A New-Found Blaze, which you can find in FFN and is currently on a hiatus. I set those songs aside due to suffering from writer's block.
Once I took an interest in MLP, particularly NSFW fan-art and the ability of changelings to transform into whatever pony or creature they wish to be, a bunch of ideas ran through my head and that was when I decided to use those songs to conceptualize this story.
I didn't read for detailed proofreading, since that can easily burn out my motivation to continue if I'm not careful, but here's some coverage of the first times I encountered various opportunities for improvement... and, to be perfectly honest, there's a lot of room for improvement.
I was on my bed, getting ready to sleep. I usually slept naked since I live alone in a nice service apartment. It would be downright pointless to sleep with clothes on while there's no one around. Living by myself meant I can do whatever I want and I can set my own rules and boundaries.
This doesn't grip me as strongly as it should. I suggest opening up some of your favourite fics with similar starts and paying close attention to recurring patterns in how those authors structured their introductory paragraphs.
The most obvious problem I see is that the "I ... I ... It ..." pattern of the first two sentences is repetitive and not very gripping. The reader doesn't yet have any reason to care about you as a character, yet you're putting yourself front and centre stage twice, then following with a sentence that has an uncomfortably similar start.
A lot of people don't realize it, but there's just as much art to writing your first sentence or two as to picking your story title. Both are supposed to embody what the story's about in very condensed form. The title in hindsight, and the first sentence or two as your first taste of it.
For example, look at Xenophilia. The first sentence is "Two figures lay sprawled on the Equestrian grass, talking and laughing merrily.", priming the readers for a story that's going to be a romance first and erotic second.
...or look at Idiotcornball's Pinkie Pie's Protuberance (the funniest futa porn you'll ever read): "Pinkie bounced up and down just outside of Twilight Sparkle's bathroom door. The sound of a shower filtered through it, only to be drowned out by Pinkie's voice as she shouted into it." A bit sloppier as far as starts go, but it fits the sequel to a fic where humanized Twilight Sparkle accidentally invents a futa spell and the beginning of a chapter where Pinkie goes off on a tangent and asks Twilight if she could magic up a penis that shoots ice cream.
...or, for a worksafe example, look at the first Harry Potter book: "Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."
...or for the ultimate in distilling it down to something short and sweet, how about the extended 1990 version of Nightfall by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg: "It was a dazzling four-sun afternoon."
I'd probably have started yours with something like "It was late, I was naked, and I couldn't sleep... not that there was anything strange about that. Why not sleep naked when you live alone?" It's punchy, establishes the "It was late" first, which lends itself better to setting up a mental image quickly, and a blunt "I was naked" in the first sentence gets the reader curious. Even if you immediately explain in the following sentence, the fact that you chose to lead with that makes your character more interesting.
The other issue is in the second half of the paragraph:
I was on my phone, scrolling through social media posts and all I saw was nothing but bad news such as terrorism and hatred around the world. I was getting pretty sick and tired of seeing the same shit there. I decided to stop scrolling for more shitposts and start dozing off with a blanket wrapped around me.
It feels stilted. My advice is to try reading it out loud, as if you were a voice actor. For me, that really helps to pin down whether something would feel natural.
(Though, to be fair, you are in a bit of a quandary. In real life, someone would probably say "Reddit" or "Facebook", so "Social Media" sounds like an explicit effort to say something like "the next leading brand", but you don't want to name specific brands in your fics because that makes them age poorly. See, for example, fics that referenced MySpace or the introduction to the 20th Anniversary Edition of William Gibson's Neuromancer where he says the one thing he regrets is mentioning details which aged poorly, like the sound of the mechanical printers of the day.)
Anyway, "all I saw was" and "nothing but" feel redundant together. Likewise, you don't need the "such as". Implying it may even help to pin down a specific speech pattern in the minds of the readers.
It'd also help to tweak your verbiage to better convey the emotions involved. For example, replacing "scrolling through" with "flicking through" makes it feel less formal and helps to convey a sense of emotional disengagement and disinterest.
I might have phrased it something like this:
"I was on my phone, flicking through social media. A bombing here; A hate crime there... nothing but bad news all over the world."
An hour has passed and I kept tossing and turning.
Never mix tenses outside of dialogue and when in doubt, tell your story in the past tense. "An hour had passed and I kept tossing and turning."
I went to Spotify on my phone
What else would you go to Spotify on? Nothing but your phone has been established so far. "I pulled up Spotify" is how I'd have written that. Also, "created" is a bit formal. Maybe "made" or "put together".
Another sensation I felt on my back and neck was several kisses and licks.
Ok, by this point, I can definitely see why the rating isn't better. Your prose has a combination of two problems:
First, too much "telling rather than showing" and, second, padding that out with awkward phrasing.
I'm not very good at correcting other people's prose at this level, because it takes me a lot of setup to get "into the flow" (about the same amount of setup whether I'm writing a whole story or just a sample paragraph), but here's the best I can do without going through the whole song and dance, with a bit of my own behaviour sprinkled in to fill the gaps:
An hour had passed and I tossed and turned. This was the kind night I always hated. Long enough in bed that I was getting uncomfortable, but I had to get to sleep. ...and I knew from experience that, if I tried a little longer, it'd eventually work.
Suddenly, I jerked to full alertness. Someone was touching my back! ...and this was definitely no dream. Paralyzed by indecision, I felt as the hands, too soft and dainty to be male, begin to knead and massage.
The fundamental problem with your prose is that it's covering surface details, but not doing a good job of communicating the thoughts, emotions, motivations, and sensations that go along with them.
There's also a sense that, with the prose about your phantasmal lover being so narratively weak, the frequent mentions of specific songs come across as distracting interlopers rather than helpful accents.
Regardless of hosting site or fandom, my experience is that authors underestimate the amount of skill it takes to pull off mentioning songs in stories.
1. They're stuff outside the normal flow of the prose, which distracts from the immersiveness of the story. 2. Most of the time, they don't carry the same emotional context for the author as for the readers (if the readers are even familiar with them), which makes them detract from rather than add to the reading experience. 3. You neglected to hyperlink the song names to YouTube videos so that the reader can start them playing as quickly and easily as possible. 4. You change songs far too frequently. (You want to try to guess at an average reader's reading speed and only introduce a new song around the time they'll probably be done the previous one. Even if they don't actually start them playing or even if they read much more quickly than average, this is a good rule of thumb.)
It's hard for me to remember an example of a good traditional song mention, because, by design, it's not the core focus on the narrative at that point, but a somewhat atypical one would be the mention of Ke$ha's Die Young in the MLP Time Loops when one of The Doctor's companions sings it for karaoke. Those lyrics and that drum beat can be reinterpreted surprisingly well as something being sung to The Doctor and, as a karaoke track, it makes sense in context.
In fact, that's sort of the problem in general. Everything changes so quickly that the reader can't really get properly engaged.
By the time Queen Chrysalis revealed herself, the story had worn out all my interest, so my only reaction to the rest of the chapter was "Yeah, sure. Whatever."
Oh, and sorry if there are any typos that I didn't catch in this response. With stories that have that "telling, not showing" problem, I tend to burn myself out on my feedback before I realize it.
Interesting lineup
It's never too late to become a brony! Welcome to the fandom, my friend. We hope you enjoy your stay.
Story-wise, you've got me very interested. I'll be tracking this.
Welp, that got weird fast.
9616662
Thank you so much, dude! I'm sincerely touched by your words of kindness. It will take time for me to conceptualize the 2nd chapter, so I highly appreciate your patience. Brohoof to you! π
9615872
Glad to hear that. β
9674173
Thank you so much for the wonderful feedback! To know that someone like you enjoyed my story really warms my heart and soul .
To tell you the truth, the songs in the 1st chapter were meant for the next chapter in my Pokemon fic called A New-Found Blaze, which you can find in FFN and is currently on a hiatus. I set those songs aside due to suffering from writer's block.
Once I took an interest in MLP, particularly NSFW fan-art and the ability of changelings to transform into whatever pony or creature they wish to be, a bunch of ideas ran through my head and that was when I decided to use those songs to conceptualize this story.
Wait a minute, i readed this in different fanfiction site
9804359
I published it first in fanfiction.net
I didn't read for detailed proofreading, since that can easily burn out my motivation to continue if I'm not careful, but here's some coverage of the first times I encountered various opportunities for improvement... and, to be perfectly honest, there's a lot of room for improvement.
This doesn't grip me as strongly as it should. I suggest opening up some of your favourite fics with similar starts and paying close attention to recurring patterns in how those authors structured their introductory paragraphs.
The most obvious problem I see is that the "I ... I ... It ..." pattern of the first two sentences is repetitive and not very gripping. The reader doesn't yet have any reason to care about you as a character, yet you're putting yourself front and centre stage twice, then following with a sentence that has an uncomfortably similar start.
A lot of people don't realize it, but there's just as much art to writing your first sentence or two as to picking your story title. Both are supposed to embody what the story's about in very condensed form. The title in hindsight, and the first sentence or two as your first taste of it.
For example, look at Xenophilia. The first sentence is "Two figures lay sprawled on the Equestrian grass, talking and laughing merrily.", priming the readers for a story that's going to be a romance first and erotic second.
...or look at Idiotcornball's Pinkie Pie's Protuberance (the funniest futa porn you'll ever read): "Pinkie bounced up and down just outside of Twilight Sparkle's bathroom door. The sound of a shower filtered through it, only to be drowned out by Pinkie's voice as she shouted into it." A bit sloppier as far as starts go, but it fits the sequel to a fic where humanized Twilight Sparkle accidentally invents a futa spell and the beginning of a chapter where Pinkie goes off on a tangent and asks Twilight if she could magic up a penis that shoots ice cream.
...or, for a worksafe example, look at the first Harry Potter book: "Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."
...or for the ultimate in distilling it down to something short and sweet, how about the extended 1990 version of Nightfall by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg: "It was a dazzling four-sun afternoon."
I'd probably have started yours with something like "It was late, I was naked, and I couldn't sleep... not that there was anything strange about that. Why not sleep naked when you live alone?" It's punchy, establishes the "It was late" first, which lends itself better to setting up a mental image quickly, and a blunt "I was naked" in the first sentence gets the reader curious. Even if you immediately explain in the following sentence, the fact that you chose to lead with that makes your character more interesting.
The other issue is in the second half of the paragraph:
It feels stilted. My advice is to try reading it out loud, as if you were a voice actor. For me, that really helps to pin down whether something would feel natural.
(Though, to be fair, you are in a bit of a quandary. In real life, someone would probably say "Reddit" or "Facebook", so "Social Media" sounds like an explicit effort to say something like "the next leading brand", but you don't want to name specific brands in your fics because that makes them age poorly. See, for example, fics that referenced MySpace or the introduction to the 20th Anniversary Edition of William Gibson's Neuromancer where he says the one thing he regrets is mentioning details which aged poorly, like the sound of the mechanical printers of the day.)
Anyway, "all I saw was" and "nothing but" feel redundant together. Likewise, you don't need the "such as". Implying it may even help to pin down a specific speech pattern in the minds of the readers.
It'd also help to tweak your verbiage to better convey the emotions involved. For example, replacing "scrolling through" with "flicking through" makes it feel less formal and helps to convey a sense of emotional disengagement and disinterest.
I might have phrased it something like this:
"I was on my phone, flicking through social media. A bombing here; A hate crime there... nothing but bad news all over the world."
Never mix tenses outside of dialogue and when in doubt, tell your story in the past tense. "An hour had passed and I kept tossing and turning."
What else would you go to Spotify on? Nothing but your phone has been established so far. "I pulled up Spotify" is how I'd have written that. Also, "created" is a bit formal. Maybe "made" or "put together".
Ok, by this point, I can definitely see why the rating isn't better. Your prose has a combination of two problems:
First, too much "telling rather than showing" and, second, padding that out with awkward phrasing.
I'm not very good at correcting other people's prose at this level, because it takes me a lot of setup to get "into the flow" (about the same amount of setup whether I'm writing a whole story or just a sample paragraph), but here's the best I can do without going through the whole song and dance, with a bit of my own behaviour sprinkled in to fill the gaps:
The fundamental problem with your prose is that it's covering surface details, but not doing a good job of communicating the thoughts, emotions, motivations, and sensations that go along with them.
There's also a sense that, with the prose about your phantasmal lover being so narratively weak, the frequent mentions of specific songs come across as distracting interlopers rather than helpful accents.
Regardless of hosting site or fandom, my experience is that authors underestimate the amount of skill it takes to pull off mentioning songs in stories.
1. They're stuff outside the normal flow of the prose, which distracts from the immersiveness of the story.
2. Most of the time, they don't carry the same emotional context for the author as for the readers (if the readers are even familiar with them), which makes them detract from rather than add to the reading experience.
3. You neglected to hyperlink the song names to YouTube videos so that the reader can start them playing as quickly and easily as possible.
4. You change songs far too frequently. (You want to try to guess at an average reader's reading speed and only introduce a new song around the time they'll probably be done the previous one. Even if they don't actually start them playing or even if they read much more quickly than average, this is a good rule of thumb.)
It's hard for me to remember an example of a good traditional song mention, because, by design, it's not the core focus on the narrative at that point, but a somewhat atypical one would be the mention of Ke$ha's Die Young in the MLP Time Loops when one of The Doctor's companions sings it for karaoke. Those lyrics and that drum beat can be reinterpreted surprisingly well as something being sung to The Doctor and, as a karaoke track, it makes sense in context.
In fact, that's sort of the problem in general. Everything changes so quickly that the reader can't really get properly engaged.
By the time Queen Chrysalis revealed herself, the story had worn out all my interest, so my only reaction to the rest of the chapter was "Yeah, sure. Whatever."
Oh, and sorry if there are any typos that I didn't catch in this response. With stories that have that "telling, not showing" problem, I tend to burn myself out on my feedback before I realize it.
9824428
This is the longest review I've ever seen
Imagine playing rip and tear or through the fires and flameπ
10103426
Heavy metal or any sort of metal doesn't fit the mood, so I have to disagree with you respectfully.
This was a bit too fast paced.