Wilde_Guess

Admittedly, there is quite a lot to digest in the story. There are also many places where interesting spin-offs and back stories could become free-standing stories in their own right. From here on, I’ll just use the character names for clarity. David JMD Dvorak, the youngest of the three Dvorak brothers, was a published best-selling author, and the reader of my main story actually reads excerpts from his (withheld from publication by his wife and children) autobiography where Danny Dvorak (the main narrator) decides that David told the story better. John Dvorak, the father, spent four years in fighting during the Vietnam war as a Special Forces Medic, and for a short time a Team Leader, before losing the lower part of his left leg in a battle that saw him awarded the Medal of Honor, and being sent back to the United States. He was completing physical therapy and trying to stay in the Army and go back to Vietnam when he encountered the mother of the older two Dvorak boys, and in the space of about twenty months becomes the single parent father of two new-born boys. She was and continued to be a very successful Adult model until her death, and she and John did write each other frequently. John helped “erase” the body of his mother’s husband, after almost being raped by him. That would certainly qualify for a free-standing story. It’s also first alluded to in Chapter two, so it isn’t mere window dressing. He also literally immolated a car full of gang members in self-defense, without any law enforcement becoming any the wiser, when he wasn’t quite fourteen years old. In the main story, I’ll try to describe enough of that in under a thousand words. By itself, it could easily go over ten thousand and if I include the reactions that the incident caused, could go even higher. The reader of my main story might actually “see” and read carbon copies of John’s letters to Catherine Dvorak, and read her replies, even if it’s little snippets such as “’I still can’t come back for even a visit. Just give the guardhouse lawyer a buzz-cut and a spanking and call it a day.’ ‘but he swore an oath.’ ‘oaths are made to be broken. He was eight. He’s nine and a half now, and looks silly.’ ‘He’ll be ten next month. And if his mother won’t cut his hair, I think he looks trustworthy. And why would I spank him, anyway? He isn’t refusing to get a haircut. He visits a stylist to nip the split ends. He’s only insisting that you cut it short again. You could fly into O’Hare, cut his hair off in a bathroom, and fly right back out without leaving the airport.’ ‘Nice try, John. I’m not ready even for that. Just chop his hair, spank him, and be done with it. You could find a reason.’ ‘And that worked so well for you, Catherine.’” Even though he’s actually writing from fifty years past 1982, Danny is trying to tell the reader what he learned as a fourteen year old as he learned and experienced it, and he certainly wasn’t being kept in the dark. But he didn’t learn the intimate details of John’s first few trysts with Betty (nee Cook) Dvorak, other than her daughter telling him that “Mom wasn’t expecting me home, so she didn’t do anything about the sheets.” He didn’t actually want to, either. He did learn, along with everybody else in the household, that John and Betty had to get married, only minutes after helping Betty’s daughter lose her virginity to her future husband; his youngest brother. And while he laughs about it with one of his friends later that afternoon, he and Michael only ever address or think about Betty as “Mom” from then on. So, part of the editing fight is to not wander off too far into the weeds, yet still give the reader at least the same information Danny had, and at the times when Danny had that information. Going straight to “Rico Floyd married his rape victim and had more kids” without all the different details that would put things into their actual circumstances and perspectives would be nuts. I just need to find the right balance to put into the story without forcing the reader to hop out of the main story at Chapter 39 or so and read an extra 47,000 words of the detailed anger and recrimination turning into genuine interest and desperate sex and then into something non-toxic that might actually last, or putting all 47,000 words into the main story in one fell swoop. Danny (and the reader) need to know in at least some detail why John has allowed Rick back into his life almost like he’d never left, even while spurning both of his older half brothers, including refusing to attend the funeral of the one, and barely talking to the other one before that one died of AIDS. In your one-hundred-plus main character main story, having spin-offs is probably the only way. In my group of only ten, it is a serious challenge to keep all the plot bunnies running down the same track without becoming killer rabbits. And that’s on top of giving the characters their proper voices, keeping them believable, and keeping the whole damn thing readable and interesting. So, finding the balance between not enough and too much is a challenge.

Hi, all. For what it’s worth, here’s what I’ve noticed, and what I try for. “Background” people, the prose equivalent of extras in a movie or TV show, dress according to their station in life and the time in which you find them. The degree to which you describe them goes up in their importance, whether as background scenery, or as they emerge to actually become characters. So, “a teenager working the cash register at McDonalds” is background. “The order taker at McDonalds seemed sad as he was working. His company polo, while clean, was starting to fray around the edges of the sleeves, as was his composure. But he still took my order without delay, or getting it wrong.” is starting to become a character. “I picked Joe up at McDonalds as soon as his manager let him clock out. He had a fresh company polo in his hands when he got into the car. The company polo he was wearing was just as worn-out as he looked. The disposable paper hat, which he normally threw away the second he clocked out, was still on his head. His normally pale complexion was just that much whiter, and even his dark black pants were starting to gray. His work sneakers were also starting to blow out. Getting both outed and dumped by the boyfriend I told him he shouldn’t try dating was wearing on him far more than he was willing to admit.” has become a lead character, and is likely one you already introduced earlier. The way a person chooses and wears clothes can tell you about the character’s personality, or at least the personality you are having the character portray at the moment. In real life, people do deliberately dress differently from how they usually would. If your viewer understands this, then their normally jeans-and-tee shirt character showing up in a tuxedo. or the normally dapper and nearly overdressed all the time character showing up in worn out jeans also tells you about the character’s current mood. Likewise, the choice and condition of their clothing directly describes their wealth and social standing. “The twelve year old boy was wearing an untucked tee shirt that had been white, but was still clean He had what appeared to be a pack of cigarettes rolled into his left sleeve and onto the top of his shoulder. His jeans were faded and frayed, and about three inches shorter than what most boys his age wore. He wore a black belt, but its color was more a memory than a fact. His feet were bare as he walked briskly down the front steps of his house, grabbing a pair of work boots as he passed them. I noticed that there were no socks in the boots, either. He carried the boots by the laces and slung over his right shoulder as he walked past me, having some place he planned on getting to quickly yet without running in the early morning warmth.” The character’s choice of clothing, and how they wear it, can also help build the scene. “She was wearing a gauzy peach-silk and lace mid-thigh length chemise, over red lace see-through panties. The shoelace thickness shoulder straps stood out almost seductively against the skin of her shoulders. Her finger and toe nails also sparkled with peach nail polish. Her lipstick was a seductive dark red, and she wore only elegant traces of eyeliner. Her thong type sandals were also light peach, with darker peach gauzy straps. Her garments almost screamed passion and seduction. However, there are some things a fifty-six year old woman with graying alopecia riddled stringy hair, general hygiene issues, and who weighed over five hundred pounds should never wear, particularly not to their mother’s funeral at the Baptist Church in a small Southern town. And Chloe managed to easily check all the boxes.” Thanks.

Hello again, @Desiderius Price An alternate title for this thread, could be: “Why you should never write a story without an outline.” A “super-short” summary of the story itself would be “six boys and four girls from semi-dysfunctional homes get together and form a band.” The first flashback sequence is two and a half chapters, and a total of 28,261 words. By length alone, it could be a free-standing story. However, it “fleshes out” the third brother, and tells you a lot about him, including why the boy now has three middle names. It also tells the other characters about the boy, The boy telling the story when he does is both an act of giving trust, and an attempt to talk through his emotions and help himself accept and “move on” from that day. Less obviously, that trust is returned by the house literally coming to a stand-still to listen, including gathering all the other main protagonists to listen. The boy had been living in an abusive home that was getting worse. Despite not knowing any of the real reasons, the boy is aware enough of his state that he actually created a “normal” alter-ego as a tool in his mind to try to isolate the actual abuse from simply being in a non-affluent home with poorly educated parents and little social standing. The youngest of the six boys describes his perspectives and feelings while reliving the 28 hours of his life that preceded his becoming the youngest of the three Dvorak brothers who are the center of the story. The almost twelve year old boy starts his day with a beating, being raped (again,) and having to convince his almost nine year old brother to appear to willingly participate with his father in raping him to avoid becoming a tied down and beaten victim. The youngest future Dvorak wanders off into a nearby forest preserve and thinks about suicide (again.) He concludes that as worthless and unlivable as his life is, he can not die by his own hand or allow himself to be killed because the people he really loves would be harmed exponentially more than any relief he might gain by dying. He leaves the forest preserve feeling well and truly trapped by life. He returns home to be brought along with his mother and “father,” who we eventually learn is no relation of his at all, to a wedding reception for the younger son of their landlord. This is not being done as a treat, though. Part of the abuse his parents inflict on him is saying to anyone who will listen that the boy is too poorly behaved and “slow” to be left with caretakers, and they have to take him along to “keep him in line.” At the wedding reception, he comments on the people he sees and encounters. His future oldest brother is the “girl-haired boy,” and the middle brother, the “red-haired boy” is the target of his envy. At the moment he’s describing, he’s forced to wear prescription contact lenses to change his eye color, he is forced to dye his red hair brown, and he is forced to shave all the hair on his body below his head since it can’t really be dyed. He drinks what he thinks is a generous quantity of “adult punch” so he can get drunk and “forget” things for a while. The punch he drank, if it wasn’t removed from his body when it was, was enough to kill him outright from alcohol poisoning. That is also not counting that he would have been locked in the trunk of his parent’s car after the “spanking” he ultimately gets. As the early evening rolls on, the boy finds more and more to get jealous about with the “red-haired boy,” yet while also viewing his own life he actually allows his jealousy to die. The middle brother is the last one to catch him drinking his “Nectar of Lethe,” and that’s the actual phrase the kid uses. The middle brother overhears his father being asked by the current parents of the youngest one for the use of their basement to “spank” the youngest one. The middle brother corners the father into giving him the exact same punishment at the exact same time without the young kid being aware that the older one was only being punished in solidarity to “reach” the youngest boy, since he thinks the youngest kid is definitely self-destructive and probably suicidal. The younger kid hears this, and it’s the younger kid’s awareness of what the older kid is trying to do that actually “reaches” him. The older and middle brother were trained by their father as Emergency Medical Technicians. The middle brother is the one to get the younger one to vomit up the very potent punch before the kid absorbs a lethal amount, and does it without using syrup of Ipecac, which would leave the youngest kid unable to keep down any quantity of food or other nourishment for the rest of the night. The youngest kid also goes into an actual flashback based on an incident the kid witnessed the year before, where the two older brothers and the father were stabilizing a heart attack victim in the parking lot of a grocery store, including CPR, IVs, defibrillator use, shouted instructions back and forth, and everything. The boy’s stress, fear, and slight to moderate alcohol buzz fueled imagination conflated his own lifeless body into the mix even while he is receiving different help in reality. With the alcohol purged from the young kid’s body, before he actually had enough time to really absorb that much, the spanking is set up. And the middle kid throws enough extra bizarre shit into the mix that any sane real-life parents would have said, “Fuck it, just put the brats in a corner for an hour and call it job-done.” The youngest kid’s parents insist on the spanking itself to happen, which lasts for about fifteen minutes. The mother’s husband is an oxygen thief who receives sexual gratification. The mother herself realizes that she has become a monster. The mother decides to cooperate with the Dvorak father in getting her husband arrested, and removing her oldest boy from her custody She also tells the boy that he was the product of a rape that her husband cooperated in, as in selling her, holding her down for the rapist, and beating her. The youngest boy and middle boy independently get together and ask the father to adopt the youngest one. The youngest one spends one last night in the apartment, is given a fifteen minute beating the next morning, which is videotaped by the police, and is “kicked out” of the apartment wearing only a “onsie” pajama bottom that had belonged to his three year old sister and fit about as well as you’d imagine. The father picks him up, along with the police. Pictures are taken, evidence is collected, and the father has the kid dress in underwear and normal pajamas and leave there with him, ultimately to show up several chapters previously. The second “flashback” is still in progress, at 45,972 words and growing. It reveals the beginning of the relationship between the father of the three boys, and the “former off-screen villain,” “Father and villain” are actually full siblings, and the only full sibling each other had. The flashback describes their meeting at the ages of 14 for the “villain” and 12 for the father, and spending the summer at the father’s barely better than a shack house in a small town in rural northern Illinois. That flashback could also be a free-standing story. However, it has to be in the main story to explain why a former bootlegger gangster kingpin, who is first introduced in handcuffs and manacles, is unlocked, given fresh clothes, and basically the run of the house after the teen protagonists haven’t even known the man for an hour. The flashbacks themselves aren’t a problem so much. My bigger problem is portraying a group of real yet also incredibly intelligent, talented, and creative people without having a flock of Mary-Sues and Gary-Stu's. They face challenges equal to their talents, and have to struggle to overcome those challenges. They can also screw up, make mistakes, sometimes be unreasonable, and argue over what ultimately turn out to be pointless issues. They also try to learn from their mistakes, grow and individuals, become better family members and where the relationships exist lovers, and advance their professional lives. For a story that started off as a “one-shot” parody and bird-flipping to “erotic spanking stories,” it has indeed become a monster.

Hello, again. In my story, I’m putting the flashbacks where they are because that is when the lead protagonist learns of them. The flashback sequence I sampled leads directly into a confrontation between two of the secondary protagonists, and a very major change in their relationship. The second flashback goes back twenty-four years earlier, but also informs the lead protagonist that an off-screen villain, while generally villainous enough, wasn’t actually their villain, but just a villain. It also reveals that this character was much more closely related to the lead protagonist than they thought. The flashback also gives the lead protagonist new insight into his own relationships, and how those relationships were affected by events that took place nine years before he was born. One of the secondary protagonists actually tells this person, “You’re not my dad, but you might not be a total asshole, either.” This starts off in “witnessing a conversation,” and transitions to change of first-person voice, with an occasional break to the main “story-time” of 1982. Behind the internal fourth wall, the year is 2032, and many of the named characters have died of either natural causes, or “otherwise.” The lead protagonist is writing the story for the print and online addition of a major magazine. recounting the months leading up to, and at least for a while shortly after the first of several musical groups the lead protagonist’s younger brother and he started first achieved fame and wealth; denying false scandals, but admitting to much more embarrassing real scandal, which had mostly been kept quiet. Thanks.

Hi, @Desiderius Price The three chapter flashback is quite literally one of the main characters relating the events of a very traumatic day in front of most of the other main characters. This scene had already been described from the viewpoint of a different character. But different people have different perspectives. Here’s a “quick” sample… “I made my way back to the punch bowl for cups six, seven, and eight. I was starting on number nine when an older girl that looked like the electric piano player’s older sister grabbed my wrist and made me pour the punch on the ground. “She told me ‘Go. Away. Now. Twerp.’ “I didn’t realize then just how drunk I was starting to get. I knew I wanted to say something to get her just angry enough to follow me away from the punchbowl so I could lose her in the crowd and come back for just one or two more. What I actually told her was ‘Great boobies, honey pie! My lower intestine is full of spam, eggs, spam, sausage, go fuck your mother on a merry-go-round, and scram!’ “The look of shock on her face told me, even as drunk as I was starting to realize that I was, that she would enjoy breaking my nose so much more than she ever enjoyed Monty Python’s Flying Circus. So, I twisted my wrist out of her grasp before she recovered and walked away at almost a run. “She stopped following me just a few yards later, but I wisely kept going. I could see my busted and bloodied nose in her eyes, and I wanted it to stay there, even if I did deserve it for my rude introduction to her. I grabbed another Italian Beef along the way and almost inhaled it. I looked at the punchbowl, and didn’t see her, or anyone else guarding it. The biggest pain with those chapters is getting the stacked quotation marks in the right places—and I’m still finding ones I missed. Thanks.

Hi, @Desiderius Price Reviewing what I read would be easier if I was finding time to read anything.The AFF exclusive story, after being neglected for over two years, got 14 chapters since February 8th. These are not small chapters. They also included a three chapter flash-back, the breaking of the “inner fourth wall,” the change from the regular first person perspective to the first person perspective of another character and back, making major changes in the life of one of the main characters, the introduction of a former off-screen villain as an on-screen semi-hero who is much more closely related to one of the main protagonists than previously known, completely changing the character of an off-screen event by presenting a different perspective… I suppose you get the idea, and none of these chapters were small or easy to write, even though they further fleshed out the characters as well as telling a story. I did submit one review. I won’t name the author or the work, though I’m sure you could figure it out easily enough. Their ideas were fascinating. Their execution was exactly that—you watched this “author” use third-grade dropout prose to hang their ideas by the neck until they were dead. My first piece of advice to that author was to delete my review after he read it, because it was not a nice review. The author deleted it after a day or two, so, hey! At least the author could follow some of my advice! Thanks.

Hi, @BronxWench and @Desiderius Price FFN does have the “by chapter” hit counter visible to the author. They also figured out how to monetize the eyeballs out of content from unpaid authors. I have no idea what AO3 has. AFF has more responsive tech support to the authors, particularly since no one is getting paid to work on it. Deleting or splitting and shifting chapters will ‘break’ your metrics if you try to watch them going back ‘forever.’ It isn’t quite as bad if you make notes of if, when, and to what degree you up-end your story because you had a near-catastrophic continuity mess-up, and the only way to fix it was to put in several entirely new scenes, and seriously flesh out a couple more. “Whole story” counters are better than no counters at all. But it still comes back around to the original question, or at least my version of it; How do you know if anyone likes your story? Thanks again.

Hi, all. The “dragon prints” are fine for public display. Being able to track individual chapter hits, visible only to the author would be more helpful, since the “typical” reader doesn’t seem to leave a review. So, your dragon prints are going up. Are the readers actually trying to read the whole story, or are they just seeing “Chapter 1,” and running away in fright? If you update frequently enough, your story will always be on the first page of your “fandom,” and will get hits for that alone. But, absent reviews, you don’t know if the reader is making it beyond Chapter 1, especially if you only see the total hits for everything. If I have 2900 dragon prints for a 32 chapter WIP, did I get 91 readers reading everything, or 2850 hits on Chapter 1, with only my proof-reading and editing even making it to Chapter 2? Thanks in advance.

Hi, all. It started happening around or shortly before 11:45 EDT today. When I caught it, some pen names were still right, while others had the ‘123123” value instead. Or, it happened earlier, and there were just that many people who had already ‘fixed’ their accounts. But it didn’t look like that. And, @BronxWench, I’ll leave it up to the people who it’s actually up to, to diagnose and fix it. I know that whoever is suppose to actually do stuff like that, that it isn’t me. Thanks again, all.

Hi, All. @Desiderius Price’s ‘temporary fix’ is double-confirmed by me. I refreshed the Original Writing page, and his name came up instead of the numbers. I logged in, changed my user name back to what it is from the numbers, and logged back out. When I logged in again, it was as it should be, and when I refreshed the Original Writing page, both Price’s user name and mine were correctly displayed. Since the value was the same for every user, I’m guessing that it is a benign placeholder for an invalid field rather than an opening for ‘major mischief’ for the database itself. But it is a problem just the same. so good luck in figuring it out Thanks again for all the thankless work in keeping the site running.

Hi, all. And now I’ve also tagged @BronxWench too, in case she needed to be told. I’m sure they’re working on it, keeping in mind that none of the staff are paid full-time employees. Thanks.

Hi, Thundercloud. I sent a on-form PM to @DemonGoddess when this started happening just before Noon Eastern Time. No reply yet, but I’m sure they’re working on it. Thanks.

Hi. Are you actually a UK native? If so, where in the UK do you live? Thanks in advance.

I posted Chapter 27 earlier tonight.

Did you write it? Did it involve a time turner? Hermione Granger is the only JKR Verse character who both could and would pull off an incest scene as an only child. Cheers!

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I have posted Chapter 10. It hasn’t been majorly changed from “elsewhere’ yet, but I might change it. If I do, I’ll announce it here.

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I am now up to Chapter 9 here. There may be a major change from the version posted on “St. Elsewhere.” Reviews and Beta desperately needed. Thanks for reading.

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