And Your Little Dog Too

At the end of second stage of the Chuunin exam, the Hokage sees that seven teams have survived the Forest of Death. That's twice as many as he was expecting. To reduce the number of people advancing to the third stage, he decrees that the survivors must fight an elimination round, with the fighters chosen at random. The winners go on to the next stage. The losers go home...possibly. That's how it usually goes. This year, however, most of the surviving genin are from his own village. And they all seem so deliciously young and good-looking. Being the not-so-closeted perv that he is, the Hokage decides that this year's bouts will be sexual rather than (or in addition to) straight combat. RULES: The participants will be the original 21 survivors of the 2nd stage: Team Kakashi, Team Asuma, Team Kurenai, Team Guy, Team Dosu, Kabuto's Team, and the Sand Siblings. You may allow some to quit before the bouts begin but don't overdo it. You may set the pairings as you wish. If you want to throw in a two-on-two or a tag team, that's fine. The elimination round, or even each individual bout, will have clear rules for who wins and who loses. You create the rules. It can be as simple as making the other fighter orgasm first, or one forcing the other to submit, or perhaps something a bit...darker. Don't make them parodies. One or two is fine (Chouji's bout, for example) but not all of them. Gender bending, even for each bout, is fine. Any combination of yaoi/yuri/het is permitted. Aging the participants to 18 (or whatever) is allowed. Any fetish is fair game. I'll leave the handling of Akamaru to your discretion. Each bout should be written primarily as a fight scene. Give us surprise moves, secret techniques, reversals, lots of tension, and the back-and-forth shift of power. Not all chapters need to be truly erotic, though all must be sexual in nature.

You just about gave me a heart attack. For a moment, I thought you were asking for fanfic based on the book Push, which became the movie Precious. Loved them both, but there's no way I'll attempt a Precious fanfic

Naruto-as-playwright came from the movie Cruising. Much of Chapter 4 is based on the scene where Al Pacino's character first goes undercover and moves into his apartment. The playwright neighbor comes out of his room, starts a similar conversation, and invites Pacino out for coffee. His description of his play (boy meets boy, boy loses boy. boy goes out with analyst) is taken directly from the movie and, like the movie, also serves as confirmation that the neighbor is, in fact, gay. Itachi is no longer around (alluded to in Chapter 1) for reasons that are currently a mystery, at least to Sasuke. The canon material can only stretch so far, and I won't cover the entire 4th Hokage/Naruto/Madara backstory. It just doesn't add to the plot. If you're curious about what this whole Cruising-the-movie thing is, check out the trailer at . A sample of the backroom bar scenes is at http://youtu.be/Wi0CxmDYKGA. Now you might understand why I'm infatuated with this superbly homophobic mess of a film. Just imagine Sasuke as Al Pacino, Sakura as Karen Allen, Naruto as the gay neighbor (not in any clip I can find), Kiba as Skip Lee (the violent guy by the pinball machine) and that about covers it.

When I started this story, I thought that I would only get a few reviews, and most of them would be flames. After all, this story isn't set up in the same way as most yaoi fics, and the sparse appearance of the Sasuke/Naruto relationship would piss off most SasuNaru fans. In short, this forum was originally for camage control. Since I seem to be getting a lot of positive reviews (so far), I will start responding to the ones I've skipped Thank you. The killer will certainly be in the list of characters already introduced (or at least talked about.) Thank you. The chapters will now come out about once a month. I've had a lot of time in June to write but my work is now monitoring for any 'non-work-related' computer activity even during my lunch hours, so most of my writing time has vanished. Personally, I've always hated both SasuSaku and SasuNaru. Part of the reason for this story was as a self-challenge: can I write SasuSaku & SasuNaru fiction that I do like? Thanks. I will.

Sasuke's not the type to waste words on description, so I've got to make every description count. And you're right. I've got to stop starting every chapter with a question. It was a cute trick at the beginning but now it's getting old. Sasuke is definitely responding to Naruto's personality, just as everyone eventually does in canon. And, down deep, Sasuke could probably become a pretty good guy. But first, he has to get past his deeply-entrenched thoughts and values, which will require extreme measures. This fic is a chronicle of those measures. Thank you. And your review summed it up. Sasuke's never experienced anything other than military life, with its long-standing values and assumptions. He's never encountered anybody who's gay, or that he knows to be gay.

Thank you. Exactly the effect I was looking for.

I understand your confusion. A majority of fanfiction is written in the Romance genre, or as one of the genres. In Romance, the intended couple meets in the first few chapters or in the first fifteen minutes of the film. After the "meet-cute", the central question become "How will these two people overcome the forces that keep them apart and achieve their happily-ever-after?" The pairing is obvious, the ending is obvious, and the only room for creativity are in the struggles they endure in between. Romance isn't one of the genres of this story. Here, the central question is "Who is Sasuke Uchiha?" Once that question has been answered, fully and completely, then everything else follows: we will know the direction of his life, who he chooses to pair with, and how he comes to terms with his orientation, his family, and his role in life. Being a mystery as well, finding this answer must also show him who the killer is, or at least provide the key for unlocking the mystery. Revealing the pairing now would spoil the story. HOWEVER... The "Self-Indulgent" in my username is not an accident. When I work up story ideas, I often do so according to my own dubious tastes and desires. And I often forget about the needs of the readers. To that end, I will reconsider the ending chapter. The original is a bit of a downer and is not likely to satisfy anybody except myself. I can easily made the ending more fan-friendly with only minor alterations in the theme and plot. Thank you for reminding me to be less self-indulgent.

Thank you for the nice review and for enjoying my story. "Straight cop infiltrates gay leather underground to catch a killer" is the high concept of the movie Cruising. It would have been an interesting film, too, if the director (William Friedkin) didn't turn the whole thing into a homophobic mess, where Al Pacino spends half the film drowning in a orgiastic sea of grinding male flesh. (To get an R rating, forty minutes of flesh-wallowing bar scenes had to be cut out. Forty!) In short, it's a lot like it's more famous predecessor, The Exorcist, except that Catholic guilt and ritualism has been replaced by fits of homosexual panic and messages of gay=serial killer. Yes, you are right. The whole point of this story is to explore these exact issues. The film Cruising does none of this. We have no idea what goes on under the surface of Al Pacino's character, or anybody's character. It's like somebody's holding up a cue card saying, "Resist the urge to act." We never find out who the real killer is; in fact, we see at least three separate killers...if you don't count Al Pacino's character, who is strongly implied to be the killer of his gay neighbor at the end of the film.

Sorry, Tribalista. I ran out of time before work and didn't include your review. I will rectify that shortly. Sasuke's life is compartmentalized because all of our lives are. We are one person at work, another at school, still another in bed. This also has to do with the mountain of exposition that I have to shovel out, and getting it to sound semi-natural is tough. The nice part about writing in the first person is that we have instant access to Sasuke's thoughts. More importantly, we can watch those thoughts get increasingly less logical and detached once the feces start hitting the fan.

[quote name=Reviewer Jen' Well so far, this scenario is all kinds of complicated romance-wise, but I like it. It seems like Sasuke really enjoys being straight and has a good, serious relationship with Sakura--to the point where he's even thinking of marrying her in the future. Sakura seems to really like him too, but may also have a soft spot for Kakashi. But as happy as the two of them seem, there was that weird scene at the end of the chapter where Sakura took too long in the shower to kiss Sasuke goodbye (on purpose?) and Sasuke suddenly felt out of place in her bedroom. Was that foreshadowing a deeper problem in their relationship--Sasuke thinks he's managed to emotionally connect with Sakura, is he wrong?--or was that indicative of a deeper problem within Sasuke--maybe he doesn't have as clear of an idea of himself as he thought?--or perhaps both? And then there's Naruto who, whatever his involvement in the gay leather underground may or may not be, is the son of a man who was probably assassinated by one of Sasuke's relatives. These are some serious hurdles for all of them to clear, will be interesting to see how you resolve them. I'm a little worried about Sasuke's mission in the next chapter, though. It sounds like he's got all the military training he needs, but has never been on a serious police investigation like this one. (He's done secret missions for the military, but has he ever done police undercover work before?) I hope whoever Sasuke's contact person in the civilian police is that s/he can help him out with some of the finer points of investigating, particularly since he'll be the bait, more or less, for a killer! (I almost wonder if there isn't some kind of setup in choosing the relatively inexperienced Sasuke for this type of mission.) Wow! Nice review. There are deep problems in Sasuke and Sakura's relationship. Future chapters will show this a little more. Their biggest problem is that the core of their relationship is no longer valid. He likes her because she is the exact opposite of the women of his clan: bright instead of dour, outspoken instead of subservient, sexually assertive rather than prudish. In short, she is one of his forms of rebellion. He performs the same function for her. His ne'er-do-well antics and punkish attitude are exactly the things which drive her parent up the wall. That's fine, until they reach the age where marriage starts looking less like a prison sentence and more like a personal goal. So, how do people who spent their idle hours deriding their parents drop all that and become parents themselves? Can they do it without shattering the relationship? (And many stories do exactly that--shatter the relationship--and then they reforge it into something stronger,) And you're right, Sasuke's completely unsuited for this investigation. His only real qualifications are that he's the right age and looks similar to the victims. His father, who has spent all his time grooming Itachi to be the next chief, is too focused on his fantasies of restoring his clan's honor that he doesn't question the orders. And Sasuke questions everything; why should this be any different? And what's Ishikawa's motivation? Does he believe in Sasuke, or is he simply desperate enough to throw an inexperienced, hot-headed punk into the lion's den? Is he hoping that Sasuke will freak out and knife somebody, so he can claim the corpse as that of the killer? We'll see.

It's fear. Pure fear. If the author pretends that they don't take their writing seriously, then they can't be hurt when somebody hates it. Which is silly, since it hurts just as bad. Write! Dream! Dare! Be brave! And grow a thicker skin. In the circle jerk of life, everybody has their turn at being the pivot boy.

When you ask us to leave our usual places, are you talking about fandom (Sailor Moon instead of HP), genre (political thriller instead of romance), content-wise (instead of slash, doing something, uh...less slashy), or spiritually (in my case, writing fluff instead of making cartoon characters act out scenes from my twisted psyche)?

This forum is for my story Cruising (http://naruto.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600103689). It's a place where readers can ask questions and I can respond to reviews and comments. More to the point, it's also a place where I can respond to flames, since there will be sections of this story where flame-retardant underwear might be needed.

--- Reply removed, on account that the person who wrote it has suddenly realized that he is a pedantic boor. Sorry.

1965. November. As a kid, I remember Ultraman and Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot and programming an IBM 370 with punched cards, a geeky otaku even then. Now, I spend my days designing equipment for spacecraft and my nights writing trashy, slashy fanfiction for AFF...when I'm able to get my wife to stop reading slashy, trashy fanfics long enough to write it.

I've been watching the kids, so I haven't had much writing time this weekend. I'll just post comments in sections. My goal is not to supply endless lists of rules, but to point out why those rules can make and break the story. Okay, so what makes a story good? Ask most people and they'll say, "A good story needs to be...good." Or great, or well-written, or has a certain quality, or something equally as useless. What makes a story good is it's ability to suck the reader into it's world and not let go. That's it. The things which create this state are the Holy Grail of writing. The things that can get between the reader and the story are well-known, however. Capitalization:The first thing that pulls us out of the story is the word "Woods" which is capitalized. Immediately, the reader must stop for a moment and ask, "Is this place special?" And it's not; the reader soon finds out that it's just a place in the forest. There are many other moments in this story that the reader finds unexpected capitalization. Each time, regardless of whether you're a grammar fascist or not, the brain must store a mental note to keep track of the inconsistency. Too many of these and reading becomes a chore. The Fix: Adopt a single, consistent capitalization policy. Good online grammar resources are Grammar Girl (http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com) and, for British English, the BBC Style Guide (http://www.bbctraini...sstyleguide.pdf). Even if you wing it and use your own policy, make sure that you use that exact same policy everywhere. Sentence and Paragraph Structure: The next thing is the structure of the sentences and paragraphs. Almost all of the paragraphs are single sentences, all strung together with commas. There's nothing grammatically wrong with this, I guess, but it's very tough on the reader. Image going out to the store to get a couple of doughnuts. Just as you start to close the door behind you, your wife says, "While you're out get some milk. And a can of tuna. And some cookies, those kind I like. Well, not that kind but those other ones, the ones with the stuff on them. And some toilet paper. And...." An hour later,you're lugging four heavy bags up the stairs. As you struggle to reach for your doorknob, you realize that you forgot to get the damned doughnuts. That's what the way-too-long sentence feels like. TheFix: Break up the sentences into simpler parts, each focusing on a single action or reaction. You can combine actions when the rhythm of the sentence needs it, but you can't lose by keeping things simple. The paragraph/sentence... The ninja seeing this dishonorable act before him filled his heart with anger as he made three quick slashes across the mans back cutting thru his spine while the tip cut deep enough to reach his heart and lungs, forcing him to let go of the woman, he then kicked the bandit off the cliff with blood splattering his boots and the ground around him as he fell to his death screaming all the way down, the ninja was just about to offer his hand to the woman to show her he meant her no harm when a Kunai with an exploding note attached to it flew into the cliff's edge. ...is really hard to slog through. Breaking it up, it can become... The ninja, seeing this dishonorable act, felt his heart fill with anger. He made three quick slashes across the bandit's back. The powerful cuts severed the bandit's spine and tore open his heart and lungs. Those wounds forced the bandit to let go of the woman. Still enraged, the ninja kicked the bandit off the cliff. The spray of blood splattered his boots and the ground around him. The bandit screamed all the way down. The ninja offered his hand to help the frightened woman stand. A kunai flew into the cliff's edge and stuck into the fractured rock. His eyes opened wide when he saw an exploding note attached to it. In this way, each sentence is free to concentrate only on getting the doughnuts. When the single action is simple enough or needs a little company, you can add the milk and your wife's cookies to the shopping list. She'll appreciate that. More to follow-->

How much honesty can you handle? I can certainly give you my opinions, but you won't like me very much after I'm done.

From the picture, it would seem that this time it is Haruko that has acquired the powers of the Pirate King.

To the AFF techs and moderators: Thank you very much for adding the "Archive Penname" field to the profiles. That really helps a lot. (And yes, I know this will be deleted.)

Okay, I guess I'll bite the hook since no one else will. The secret ingredient of the Secret Ingredient Soup is...tension. Everybody's too happy in this story. They start happy, end happy, and have plenty of happiness in the middle. 1. In the first act, introduce something that comes between Naruto and Hinata. The obvious place to look is between Hinata's legs. The non-obvious place to look is in their psyches. Both of them have undergone profound changes since their last significant interactions during the chuunin exam. Both of them have a lot of baggage, and the revelation of Hinata's "condition" provides an excellent excuse for them to dredge it all up. N: Oh. My. God. You've got a-a... H: Yes. And so does Hanabi. Another of the Hyuuga's many secrets. I can still bear children, but- N: But... I mean, how can you... H: You said you liked me. A lot. N: But you've got a... (brow furrows) I'm not a fag! H: And I'm not a boy! I'm Hinata. Your girlfriend. If you weren't lying about how you felt, then come over here and kiss me. N: But you're a...a freak. H: (Steps forward) Yes. Just like you. 2. For the second act, have the two struggle to resolve their differences. Make sure that there are a lot of surprises and reversals of power. Always defy expectations. Make it hurt. Make us worry about how it's going to turn out. H: Naruto, lend me your kunai. N: (Angry) Why? So you can... (Lifts head, looks in her eyes) Is that why you were so brave against Pein? Because you wanted him to kill you. So you didn't have to suffer with being a- H: I did it for you! So you could defeat Pein. And live. I would do anything for you, Naruto. Anything. Now lend me your kunai. N: Why? H: (Reaches down, grabs self) Like I said, Naruto. Anything. If this thing is all that's standing between us, then- N: No! I-I'm sorry. I'll...kiss you. H: Not if you don't mean it. Nothing could hurt me worse than that. And so on and so forth, grinding deeper and deeper until they come to their most fundamental difference. 3. In the third act, they resolve that fundamental difference in an inevitable, yet unpredictable, fashion. Reunited, they then proceed to release their pent-up tensions by having the best make-up sex in the history of the world. Massive ejaculations ensue and people leave reviews that say "I don't usually read het or F/D, but this story really drew me in. Plz update!" The couple has been hurt, then healed, then satisfied. And so has the reader.

Absolutely yes. Last year, I had a long period of writer's block, a weird case where the same image entered my head and everything I tried to write was a reflection of that image. This lasted for months and months. Eventually, I went all out and wrote it up in the most contrived and purple fashion I could muster. When I posted it on FF.net, the whole subject line was an apology. Got good reviews, though. My greatest guilty pleasure is finding stories like one you describe, where the inspiration just "hits" and you write it all out and post it and then say, "What the hell? Where did that come from?" I love those moments where the muse does an end-run around the internal editors and says, "Write this! Now! Before they put me back in my cage!" Stories like that are secret windows into the soul, where normal logic no longer applies. Perhaps there's something in your soul that secretly gets off on lactation and slavery. More likely, there's something in your id that hates being told what to do and how to feel, and tells your ego/superego to go screw themselves and all their "pretty good reasons."

Pen Name: And Your Little Dog Too Story link: http://naruto.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600103501 (Oops, posted wrong link earlier) Type of fic: Drabble Rating: Adult Fandom: Naruto Pairing: Itachi/Sasuke Warnings: NoSex, Oneshot, WD