Velvet D Coolette

My plan is to have 8 tattoos dotted about on my body, of played noughts-and-crosses games. Or tic-tac-toe, as you prefer. Here's my plan for whereabouts to have them: I also wondered what your thoughts were on having variations on the theme. I'm not massively into the idea of heart shapes instead of noughts, but if any other alternatives occur to you guys then I'd love to hear them. I am considering having one left empty, possibly with the words, 'Wanna play?' underneath. So, what do you lot think? Cringeworthy or good?

I recently bought the first two books of Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty trilogy. After reading for a while, I checked the Amazon reviews to see what other people thought of them. And... I came across this one, particular comment that I can't seem to track down, now. While I think the idea that 'women can't write accurately about male sexual desire' is a generalisation and as such is surely inaccurate, I think that male and female desire are very different, if only due to different societal expectations, so perhaps there is something in the idea that women will struggle to write male sex scenes and vice versa. I'm keen to hear what both male and female authors here have to say on the idea. For the record, I will say that I am female. Also for the record, I will say that the writing in the Beauty trilogy is quite pretty and flowery, even when the male POV is used.

Blimey, thanks you two! So much information, wanderingaddict!

When you have an erection, can you tell - without looking down - that you've got one? Is there a physical sensation to it? Please let a slash writer know!

*slaps forehead* My god DG, sorry! I must have had scales over my eyes! Anyway: thanx!

And add to it, soon enough I hope. Just need to run it through my beta first. Shame that the forum isn't particularly set up for original works. I mean, an equivalent of The Roadhouse (a reciprocal review/networking subforum on FictionPress) would be brilliant. Perhaps I should try and start one...

Oh! Gosh! Thanks!

Hi, I'm not quite sure where to put this, but I've had a look around the site and can't seem to find where you intend for original adult fiction writers to put their stuff. There doesn't seem to be a heading for it, depite original fiction being mentioned on the title / age consent page. Does such a thing actually exist here or is the original thing a misunderstanding on my part / typo? Thanks in advance.

Ooh, that's evil and I like it! Especially as there are timid students in the class and I suspect my teacher wouldn't like to humiliate them by making them sit through an unnecessary impromptu sex ed class.

I'm writing a story where an 18 year old male student has been trying to bully his teachers, but is failing miserably on account of them being much more streetwise than they look. Having given up on the poshest one, he's now trying on the young-looking one (who is actually about 27ish). The scene so far is going like this: The teacher has turned his back to the class to write something on the board and, while he's distracted so, our student has torn a quarter of a page from half-way down his notepad (so he doesn't have the incriminating square missing from the top), scrunched it up, and thrown it at teacher's back. The teacher looked around in surprise, looks down to see this ball of paper on the floor, suspects it's the very student it happens to be but can't prove it. So he picks up the paper, opens it, pretends it's got a question on it and proceeds to answer it, knowing that at least some of the students surrounding the culprit will know it was him. My question to you all is, what should that question be? I did think of, 'How do you cure premature ejaculation?', but if anyone can come up with a better one I'd be obliged. I can't really make reference to the student being a virgin because he's coupled up with a female student and they're sleeping together.

Aye, we've got two over on another forum I frequent. One of the women in question dated a man who ended up coming out as gay and she has a bit of a chip on her shoulder as a result. The other one is just a proper, brainwashed fundie who says her opinion on homosexuals is 'Biblical'. I'm not sure I want to know what that means, especially if I want to stay on that forum which, overall, I do. After a long - and rather heated - conversation about the ethics of homosexuality, she and the other woman decided that there was no reason for them to be prejudiced against homosexuals so they defended their right to continue with their prejudice based on 'variation of opinion', and congratulated themselves on that. Pricks. My mum used to be quite a lot like that - I empathise. While it wasn't so much about minorities and more about her caprices as an emotionally manipulative bitch, I certainly recognise the 'I'm not being unreasonabl!' stompfests. And I'm still glad I get to keep my distance from her after all these years. I'm selective in the contact I have and thank my lucky stars I don't have kids. I think people like you and I grow up to be more accommodating because we see the very worst side of prejudiced people. To see someone who has a worldview and is also angry, I think that makes a child grow up into an adult who does not share the same view. I think Christians sometimes get this with atheists - someone who is atheist and is also angry (perhaps because they keep getting preached at even though they don't want it) makes it look like all atheists are angry. We're not, of course, but people will forge these correlations sometimes.

Mythdefied, I have to agree wholeheartedly - you've broken down most of the worst offenders!

Just the name of one of my fancharacters. Nothing speshul.

Hmm. I'm going to proceed to say this carefully, as in part I agree with you: nobody in their right mind would want to be raped, tortured or any of the other things that happen to tragedy Sues. However, I wonder whether there are many people out there who would like for it to have happened to them. At some point in the past, so that the real trauma is over, and you just have a juicy story to draw on to get others' attention. As for Sue being unlikeable because it is hard to relate to her, I agree with this - reality is twisted violently out of true to make Mary Sue fit, and that certainly rubs some of us up the wrong way. I don't really buy the jealous, though. I think what annoys me the most is the authors' lack of understanding of how social convention, psychology and so on work. The lack of insight really becomes clear when you see someone write an untruth. Come to think of it, it's a pretty good lie detector. You can always tell when someone's lying when the story goes exactly as they'd just love it to, can't you?

I'm currently going further with a particular series than I thought I would when I wrote the first story. It's just developed. To this day (and I wrote the first story over a year ago), it is still my most popular, attracting a respectable number of readers. However, the second story in the series had to do something very subtle. While the first was a strong, simple message (Satirical Mary Sue bamfs into canon universe; actually gets treated like a jumped-up little tart actually would in that situation), the second story had to be more suble: (Mary Sue returns, doesn't reform because that would be too cheesy, but leaves with doubts over her attitudes). The third story, interestingly, is the second most popular in my cache (May Sue returns again, ultimately reforms into a nicer person, and gets on good terms with the canon characters). I've enjoyed writing up until now and am continuing to write, but story no. 2 just didn't attract the crowd. I've noticed something similar when reading trilogies: the first book has the powerful new idea, the third one has a long-awaited and satisfying resolution to the entire problem, but the middle one goes off like a damp firework. One of the reviewers for story no. 2 asked whether there'd actually been any point in the story at all. There was: story no. 3 wouldn't have worked without it. But I find the inherent flaccidness of middle stories to be frustrating. What I find to be a particularly sad thing about it is that, there's no way for the reader to be sure whether the final story will be satusfying. Therefore some, I suspect, just get bored half way through story no. 2 and don't go any further. Frustrating for the reader, soul-destroying for the writer.

Yeah, but the most productive way of improving is to seek concrit/feedback/advice/tips/whatever; just telling your readership you're rubbish isn't going to help in that direction. If anything it gives you an excuse to ignore the fact that they're giving you constructive criticism in favour of telling them (and yourself) that you warned them, so they've no genuine reason to complain. Ignoring for a moment that AFF.net is a notoriously bad place to get reviews for most fandoms, if there's something wrong with your writing, your readers will tell you. Why precede it with your own negativity? It seems an unecessary addition, to me. That's what boards like this are for: to ask how to improve characterisation, pace and accuracy, write compelling beginnings and satisfying endings, and everything else people ask about here. If you want to improve, why not just ask here?

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I hate it when I get into a conversation with someone who has been keeping up with the series I'm writing, so that we can talk about how the story should progress, and the whole conversation ends up as a long, lllooonnnggg and very in-depth dissection of social structures and how they relate to the fanfic. After doing this only on Saturday with a friend, I wondered for a while whether I should forget about using that particular plot as a story and just use it as a fucking sieve instead. Then I thought, 'nyah, fuck it! It was a fun-sounding story before I started wondering whether this world will want to do war with that, and what the peasant class is doing and all that. Sod it, I'll write it anyway'. And then I start feeling guilty that it's going to be poorly-constructed. I think I can find a reasonable middle ground. I think so...

The Tide is High in my pants!

Fucking hell, what a twat! Well, fair comment if she's playing that kind of game: give it to her with both barrells... when you can be arsed, of course

I'm writing a story in which a furry Mary Sue, who has rather chilled out and become less Sueish, kicks back and chats with a group of animals from the Sonic the hedgehog continuity. As part of this chat, I'd like to write her as explaining her ancestry, hence this topic. Want to help me out? As reference for what this character looks like, here's a picture: Their conversation turns to what they should call Starla in terms of her gender. Sonic would be called a boar, Bunnie a doe and so on, so what do you call a female of what she is, they ask? She says that if they tried to call her a combination of her species, they'd just come up with something nonsensical like, falcatfess or something equally silly, which nobody would be able to make any sense of. Therefore she says, all females from her world are called Mary Sues, and all males Gary Stus. This is the result of a very old childrens' bedtime story (which I won't describe but will be fairly similar to Hansel and Gretel) which carried over into common usage. I'd like their conversation to expand a little on this, but wonder if anyone wants to add any suggestions for the Sue culture? What I have so far: - A few generations ago, scientists from her world designed a way of making genes 'clump together' in such a way that positive attributes such as wings, physical strength, some telekinetics, sharp claws, very insulating fur etc. transcend species boundaries. Benefits of genes, rather than species boundaries, become the determining factors for the template of a gestating foetus. These genes were 'labelled' by the scientists, perhaps by virtue of some kind of proteins/amino acids, to make sure they were the ones that were carried over to the next generation. Therefore the scientists also managed to tag genes for good looks in the same way, hence Sues and Stus are invariably good-looking. - A culture for good looks surfaced as a result of this. The young, who are usually the best-looking (looks are assumed at this point to tend to fade with age) became the focus for their society. Youth, in Starla's society, is highly valued and only teens/possibly early 20's are influential in society. (On saying this, I'm planning on having her realise how she's disregarded her parents, older neighbours, aunts and uncles, etc. and that is really hasn't been fair on them) I realise this is not particularly workable, so it's possible older members of society do some of the important stuff, but they are seen as unimportant and rather dull by comparison. So, any other ideas? By all means pick apart my theories, but bear in mind they don't necessarily need to be too thoroughly plausible. They're only having a relaxed chat, after all. I'd just like to weed out any glaring problems with the description of such a culture.

Well, as The Adams Family song goes, Your sister is your mother, Your father is your brother, You all fuck one another, The Bible family.

She sounds like a compulsive liar. I tend to find boys are more likely to do this than girls, but it sounds like she's fabricating this made-up world to protect against people knowing who she really is. Possibly stays at home a lot and is single, or something. Whatever it is, she's not proud of her real self. Might as well leave her to it; you'd struggle to make her snap out of it unless you found a group of friends she invests a lot of trust in by telling them her lies and then call her out in front of these friends with blatant contradictions in her story. But then, if she's not doing any harm, is it worth it?

A bit of Modern Toss for you all: .Mr. Sneezman And my favourite... . Bet everyone who watches this one will start being abusive on the boards.

Same here, absolutely. I always grow my plot bunnies to the end of their gestation but then leave them just before they're about to pop out of the womb, so to speak. I'll write a brief outline of what I want the story to do, where to begin and importantly, where to finish. Then I have a rough framework I can work to which I'll be able to see at that point might be too long here, or be uneventful there, or whatever. The framework in this case tends to be hollow enough that I can pack in all kinds of stuff - set pieces etc. But importantly, a rough plot framework allows the characters to form organically. It's like with The Wager in my signature - I started writing that not long ago, then I found two of the characters who I'd never put together seemed to have become a couple. I'd never have put the two together myself, and even if you'd suggested MaCavityXJennyanydots to me I'd have said, 'that sounds far too artificial'. But they've done it.