I've talked a few times about me writing a new story. It's been almost a year since I published Thesis on Fictionmania. My original plan was always to just pick up the baton where I left off and start a new story. I even had a story idea I'd been working on since before Thesis with some great sexy scenes and a pretty good overall idea. But then the reality hit.
First were the reviews. The biggest theme was that it was difficult to read because it was too long. Several people even talked about how they never finished it. Now, almost every word about the story was positive... just that it was too long. I can get over those that thought it was 'trashy' or a 'sex fest' as honestly that's what I write. I'm not intending to write a good story with a few sexy scenes peppered in, I'm writing sexy scenes with a story around them. But for whatever reason, the length comments hit me hard and I lost ALL interest in writing.
But around December I started up again. I had the fairly simple idea of a slight sized male dancer being coerced/forced/tricked into posing as a female dancer to try and prove to an all female dance troupe that a guy could be good enough to join them. He'd then get trapped into having to keep up the female disguise as the troupe was relying on 'her' being their new member to get onto a TV show. And sexiness would pursue. The details of the story have changed since I started writing it and the sex scenes have varied. Like most of my writing I didn't have an ending I was going for, or at least I didn't have a specific ending. There were several beats that would stay the same:
- Our heroine would start with his/her female fellow student and roomate. They'd get involved in a sexual relationship once he was enfemme.
- Once part of the group, the heroine would be paired up with a male dancer that would be just as important as her.
- The male dancer would be attracted to 'her' but she'd be completely turned off.
- The roomie is completely smitten with him as a her
- She would be encouraged/forced to have a relationship with the male dancer to keep him interested in staying with the group and being good on TV
- There would be a lot of TV cameras forcing her to say/act/be girly and innocent and ultra femmy.
- A dark side of the story would be the creator/producer/director/host of the TV show forcing himself on her.
- The male dancer would save her from the creator/producer/director/host, making her truly appreciative of him.
- She'd eventually agree to giving him a hand job... that leads to a blow job... that leads to...
And the ending would come. Maybe she ends up falling in love with him. Maybe she ends up hating her position but is stuck being his girlfriend. Maybe she ends up with her roomie. I didn't know and I didn't think it was important, at least in the beginning. If, when I finished the story, it ended up needing some spice peppered in to make it a theme, I could always go back and add it in. I've done that with caps, obscuras, and even my stories Opals and Pearls and Thesis.
So, I started writing. I have saved versions from December 30th, December 31st, January 18th, March 20th, March 28th, and April 11th. For the most part I'll take my last saved version, read the last page or two to get me back into the moment, then start writing. If I write more than a few paragraphs, I'll save it to a new version. But if I only add a line, edit the previous scene, or make little headway, I'll just save it over itself. So, it's not like I only wrote on those days. Then again, that feels about right. I was enamoured in late December, then mid January, then late March, then again last weekend.
But I'm coming across a problem again and again and again as I write. I keep asking myself when I'm halfway through a scene "Is this relevant? Is this worth a whole section of the story?"
The biggest example is the audition. The subject has already been transformed into a femme version of himself, at least enough to perform the one dance, and goes to show off his dance moves with the plan to reveal himself at the end. If I put that scene and just that scene into MS Word, it's four and a half pages. I talk about how she feels in the moment, how she doesn't know if she should do well or not, how she gets so flustered when there are actual men auditioning that she screws up and does her best dance ever. I talk about her moves, her body, her face, and even the music she chose. I's 2842 good words of story. It needed a little tightening up as it was still a first pass, but I liked it.
But when I finished it, I wondered again if it was right. I mean, realistically this didn't add too much sexiness. Instead of just plowing on like I normally would, I stopped, clipped that section, and started over. Instead of talking about the audition I started the scene with our subject and his/her roomie going into the audition and immediately followed with them coming out afterward. The whole scene is then talked about in the past tense as our subject is upset. This was to try and trim down the scene... but while the new version is shorter, it's not a LOT shorter. It's 3 and a half pages. It's 2047 words long.
It does feel better... but I'm not sure if it's just the generally different take or the fact that its tighter and less wordy.
And this problem keeps coming up. I know there are goal posts I want to hit, but I keep going off and talking about how she gets there instead of just getting there. One of the goal posts is to get the troupe leader in on the deception. She's very incentivized to keep our heroine and her male dance partner doing what they're doing as it keeps them in the competition, so she'll be a good foil to push our subject. I wanted this to be from the subject and his roomie, and not a 'a-HA!' moment of the troupe leader finding out. I wanted them to go to her for help as even they realize they need to keep this up for a short while. So... now I need problems that only the troupe leader can fix. How about the fact that she can't get undressed/dressed in front of the other girls? A padded sport bra gave her curves, but she has no actual breasts. And how about that bump in her dance shorts? They'll need her to choreograph her dance to not show off her lack of camel toe.
But damnit, just writing out a scene to explain those problems was several pages. And all of that is just to set up a force to push our heroine into the situations I want her to be in. Maybe I could do it again the same way... I could skip over the scenes and write them up as a conversation between the subject and her roomie... but how much can I do that before this is a story about people talking about things and not actual things happening?
Another thing that comes up is my own writing style. I'd like it to be better. There are a LOT of things I'd like to change, but some that really stick out and that I can't seem to get away from are my over use of And, But, ellipses, commas, and So.
When I write out a sentence, I'll often continue it into the next action. It requires an 'And'. But how many Ands are to many? I feel like, especially in a longer form like this, I use to many. But at the same time, it doesn't feel write when I separate them into separate sentences and drop the and.
You can see in the above paragraph my problem with But. I start off two sentences out of three with But. It doesn't really matter if I add the period and start the next sentence with But or use a comma and just continue with the But... it's to many!
Ellipses... I feel like they really represent the pause I put into my thought and/or speech. It's better than a comma, and it's better than spelling out a pause. But it looks 'cheap' to me. I don't see many ellipses used in the literature I read (Yeah yeah, it's mostly Stephen King, but he's still literature). So, does it belong in my writing?
I'm not exactly sure where commas belong if I'm to be completely honest.
I'm not exactly sure where commas belong, if I'm to be completely honest.
I'm not exactly sure where commas belong if I'm to be, completely, honest.
I think all of those may be right... but I just don't know. Looking up the grammatical rules for properly using a comma is all fine and good, but understanding it and putting it into use as I write out a thought before it exits my head is something completely different.
And finally So. So, I use So a lot. I know that when it starts a sentence it should have a comma after it, but while that's proper grammatically, I'm not sure it's proper form. Because... I mean, I do it a LOT.
So, you can see some of my frustrations and reasons I'm writing this. I think I'm doing well. But at the same time, these thoughts stop me writing mid sentence to think about it and that pause is often enough for me to lose the thread I'm working on. I might be able to fix it and move on, but then I have to back up and start the whole paragraph, or even whole scene, over. How much should I worry about this verses letting it go and letting it be a quirk of my writing style?
Another thing I was thinking about was sharing my writing. Eventually I will of course share the whole thing up on Fictionmania... but would anybody be interested in seeing the story unfold? Would it be less interesting to see it come out in bits and spurts as opposed to final structured sections? Because I don't always stop at the end of a section, the end of a scene, or even the end of a paragraph. Sometimes I just stop because it's time to stop and go to bed or time to stop and eat.
So, is it worth even trying to share? Would you want to see something like the scenes I talked about above, where I wrote it one way, then write it another, knowing they both won't make it into the story?
Then there's the distractions. I'm obviously big on imagery. I've already shared a few images I bring up to keep me in the right 'sexy' mindset for this story, but here they are again, along with some others I've found:
Now, obviously, I've centered our heroin on looking similar to Cadey Mercury. I don't want to insinuate even one little bit that I think Cadey looks masculine... but with her short cropped hair, her lower voice, and her smaller breasts, well, she's almost perfect. And yes, at some point and in some way, our heroine is going to get breasts of her own. I'm not sure about 'down there' but I'm thinking one of those slide up wearable pussies where she'd be tucked away and at least with her clothes on would have the right bulge/shape/camel-toe. I'm not sure if it would be realistic enough for that last animated gif, where a guy could finger 'her' and feel that its real, but maybe it would look real enough for her to offer her ass, like in the second to last gif, instead of having him try to fuck a fake pussy.
But I digress... I think keeping to one model/actress is good for me inspiration wise. Even if I don't write it sounding the same, I can 'hear' Cadey's voice in my head and put my subjects voice like that. I can see the way she moves in her videos (yeah... I'm a fan!) and have our heroine move like her. Here's a clip that I can share on here of her acting and talking the way I picture the heroine...
The problem with this is that I distinctly have someone to focus on. And sometimes when I'm stuck, I'll look for inspiration. Well, where you find videos of Cadey? Yeah, porn sites. And what kind of images you find of Cadey? Porn images. The distraction becomes the focus and then... well, once I'm spent I lose interest in writing, at least for awhile.
I've heard of people writing out certain parts of a story first. Like I could write the scene where the male dancer saves our heroine from being used by someone now and only link up to that scene later. But I'm not sure that's a good method for me. I did that on my previous story attempt, but most of what i wrote has already ended up in other stories now as I felt it was done. There wasn't a reason to go back and write the other parts, but without those other parts these scenes just don't go together. So I'm not sure I want to kill this story with that.
Anywho, I wrote out this post hoping to get a better grip on writing this story out in particular and writing in general and I'm not sure I accomplished that goal. I don't have a better idea in my head of when this story will be done, let alone IF it will ever be done. Lemme know if you want more behind the scenes about my writing... I'll still have posts like this occasionally when I think it will help me but if YOU want them, I might add more for you.
Oh, and one last thing. In case the title of this post doesn't make sense, the title of the story is already solidified as 'Just Dance'.
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