"Lucy in the Sky" by Sue. Sue goes for a short vacation in the Poconos (that's a "holiday" in the mountains, I think, to you British readers) with her old friend Lucy. She is suspicious that Lucy is playing matchmaker - trying to fix her up with a guy. "Naw!" I thought. "Lucy is inviting her to an orgy." (Having met with success in predicting Deirdre's plots, I had decided to expand to more complex cases. This one was simple: they will go to a mountain retreat with Lucy's boyfriend, and the three of them will fuck their mutual brains out in the great outdoors.) I was so close that I'm going to give myself a gold star for that prediction. However, even though I "knew" how the story would end, I found it to be a hot and sexy tale.

Sue again shows her ability to write a "rich" story - one with lots of details that appear to sometimes appear to be irrelevant but actually add to the story by developing the personalities of the characters or by setting the physical or emotional environment for the sexual activities. This is not an easy task; it's very easy to drift into extraneous details that distract from the story. Readers don't want an inventory of all the items in the physical environment or an anthropological description of "a day in the life" of the characters; and so it's the author's job to decide what to include and what to exclude. I once received a critical comment from a reader who knocked me for picking on Friar Dave in "Singapore Girl." My correspondent pointed out that he happened to know that what Friar Dave said in that story was all true - the way it "really happened." My reply was that if Friar Dave were writing as an anthropologist or maybe even as an autobiographer, then he should include details that have nothing to do with the focus of the story. However, since Friar Dave was writing a story, he needed to stick more to his focus (as he does in most of his other excellent stories). At any rate, this ability to enrich a story without losing balance is one of Sue's main strengths. Authors who want to enrich their own stories in this way should study Sue's technique. (Sue herself thinks she writes good stories because she's one hot chick with a vivid imagination. Not true! It's because she has an ability to enrich a story without losing balance. Right!)

I encountered some irritating formatting problems with this story: (1) I frequently encountered the words "Mail" and "Save as..." at strange places throughout the text. Sue must have some sort of macro with her mailer that interprets quotation marks as these commands. I simply used my global replace function to turn these back into quotation marks, and the story was much easier to read. (2) I noticed that Sue was omitting her apostrophes for possessives and for contractions. On an impulse, I did a search for apostrophes in the story and found nary a one of them. Since I am pretty sure Sue knows about the existence of the apostrophe, I think Sue should check her mailer, which appears to be deleting or altering some punctuation marks. I mention this publicly (rather than in a private note to Sue) because this happens more often than authors may realize. It's a good idea to download your stories yourself to see what they actually look like to your readers. Anyway, I resolved not to "take points off" for faulty apostrophes and quotation marks, but I encourage Sue to look into this when she reposts or archives this story.

This is an excellent story. The following sentence contains a subtle grammar problem. Can you tell what it is? "The trail was very rugged, showing little signs of regular use. " Answer: there should not be an "s" on "signs". The phrase should be either "little sign" or "few signs." The present sentence says that there were tiny (little) signs that the trail was used regularly. (Boy! Are my students in for a rough day tomorrow if I don't have an orgasm soon!) (Rating: 10)