Celestial Reviews 55 - Jan 24, 1996

Note:  The proofreading service is in full operation, and people are reporting 
successful use of it.  IF YOU WANT FREE HELP AND FEEDBACK BEFORE POSTING A STORY, 
contact me, and I'll match you up with some of the reviewers.  Remember: you're not 
admitting to being a "bad writer" by asking for a proofreader.  Everyone can benefit 
from having someone to help with their work.  Please note, however, that this 
proofreading service is loosely organized.  I think the proofreaders are doing a good 
job; but if you get a proofreader that seems to have forgotten that you exist - or if 
you get an assignment to proofread for someone who never corresponds with you - either 
be patient or contact me for a new arrangement.

Second note:  I have had so many complaints about people not finding the postings of 
either my reviews or of other stories that I am going to make it a policy to repost all 
of my reviews at least once.  This week I am reposting CR 54.

- Celeste

      "Storm" by Deirdre (anal sex & sex slavery) 10
      "Summer" by Deirdre (domination & bondage) 9
      "Surprise" by Deirdre (bondage & anal sex) 10
      "Lucy in the Sky" by Sue (sex in the outdoors) 10.  
      "Rocking My Canoe" by Rachel Taylor (mystery sex 
            in the outdoors) 10
      "Casting my Die" by Brian Colby (sex with a mathematician)
            7
      "Churche House" by Deb Atwood (Romance) 9
      "Dr. Quinn Meets Reality" by Reality Lines (Celebrity sex) 2

"Storm" by Deirdre.  "Janet was very particular to warn me to do my best to make Stacy 
feel at home."  With these words in the second paragraph the author gives away the basic 
plot of the story.  My theory is that Stacy, whom the wife remembers as something of a 
frump and extremely shy around men,.will be a conniving, horny dominatrix who will get 
the narrator to have relatively non-traditional sex with her.  Either that or (more 
likely) Stacy will seduce Janet while hubby looks on.

First, let me admit that I was wrong.  Second, let me point out that I think Deidre 
wrote the following lines with no pun intended:  

    "OK," Janet finally said to me, "do her ass!"  

    "Honey!" I managed to ejaculate.

I say no double meaning was intended, because the guy obviously did not cum at this 
time.  In spite of this faux pas, this is an excellent story.  From a psychological 
perspective, however, I'm not sure most women would be as grateful as Stacy was for 
getting over her fear of thunderstorms.  (Rating: 10)

"Summer" by Deirdre.  The substitute gym teacher tells the young narrator to come to her 
office later in the afternoon.  He does so, and he is instructed to fuck his beautiful 
English teacher while the gym teacher corrects papers.  Eventually, however, hubris 
takes over and he and one of the cheerleaders (whom I forgot to tell you about) go too 
far and start fucking the English teacher at home during the summer without the gym 
teacher's permission.  Therefore, they get punished.  This story is somewhat 
unrealistic, because it suggests that adolescents think with their hormones and don't 
follow directions very well.  Also, I object to the idea that it's OK to fuck one's 
English teacher if one gets the gym teacher's permission first; and who ever heard of a 
gym teacher correcting papers anyway?

A surprising element of this story is that the English teacher's name is Ms. Sherwood.  
Coincidence?  I think not!  For the significance of this name, please refer to CR 54.

This is another weird but excellent story by Deirdre.  (Rating: 9)

"Surprise" by Deirdre.  The man and his wife make romantic love on the afternoon of 
their fifth anniversary.  That evening they are visited by her old biker boyfriend, who 
ignores the woman and fucks the guy in the ass, while his wife proclaims her love for 
the biker.  Naturally, this leads to an improvement in their sex life and to further 
experimentations with bondage.  I'll admit this all sounds a little lame, but the 
contrast between the two halves makes this a very interesting story - even though it 
perpetuates the silly myth that bikers are typically something less than sensitive, 
poetic individualists.  (Rating: 10)

"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)

"Rocking My Canoe" by Rachel Taylor.  This is another repost by William Gann.  Two 
couples go for a canoe ride and stop for lunch on an island.  After lunch, they decide 
on naked sunbathing, and the woman falls asleep.  She awakens with the vague feeling 
that someone is massaging her.  As she relaxes to enjoy it, she realizes that she isn't 
really sure whether it is her husband or the other man who is gradually increasing the 
intensity of her sexual arousal.  She doesn't peek (as in peekaboo) until she peaks (as 
in climax) twice.

Being gently fucked by a mysterious person is one of those fantasies that would be 
really dumb in real life but which I enjoy immensely in my imagination.  This story 
gives a good presentation of that theme.  It's interesting to compare Sue's "Lucy in the 
Sky" with this story, because they both focus on outdoor sex.  Sue's is the better 
story, because it is richer in detail and character development, but this is still one 
hot story. (Rating: 10)

"Casting my Die" by Brian Colby.  This is another repost by William Gann.  A young man 
who has recently completed a doctorate in mathematics meets an old flame; he invites her 
to come up to his room to see his etchings (linear algebra textbook); and they fuck 
pleasantly.  A flaw with the story is that it's a little too unique to the Boston area; 
I had a hard time getting the setup clear in my mind's eye.  In addition, although I 
like quiet sex, this was a little too gentle for my tastes.  (Rating: 7)

"Churche House" by Deb Atwood.  This is the last in this week's trilogy of William Gann 
reposts.  As I suggested last week, the stories Gann is reposting seem to be of 
reasonably high quality.  I am reviewing several of them, because I think readers may be 
following my advice to download them.  This one is about a college woman and a slightly 
older male graduate student who live in some sort of residence associated with their 
school.  At the beginning of the story the woman has started writing an erotic story of 
her own, and her first meeting with the guy occurs when he glances over her shoulder 
while she is typing in horny rapture.

After they have dinner and while the guy goes to a meeting, the girl finishes her story, 
prints out a copy, and puts it under the guy's door.  "This is my kind of woman!" says I 
to myself.  "She's hoping he'll proofread it, correct the errors, and give her 
constructive feedback."  Actually, she's hoping to get laid.  I've never thought of 
that; I suppose someone could write erotic stories for some ulterior motive rather than 
for the intrinsic motivation inherent in giving birth to a work of literature.  Also, 
this story has one of my favorite pickup lines: "You're beautiful when you're having an 
orgasm."  I guess it isn't really a pickup line when my husband says that to me.  To be 
an official pickup line it would have to be, "I'll bet you're beautiful when you're 
having an orgasm."

This is a very good story, but it reveals one of the shortcomings of reposts.  This 
repost was labeled Chapter 1; Gann posted only this single chapter.  The chapter stands 
reasonably well alone, and I'm not criticizing Mr. Gann; but if I liked it, how will I 
ever find the other chapters?  (Rating: 9)

"Dr. Quinn Meets Reality" by Reality Lines.  Sexual parodies and celebrity sex can be a 
lot of fun.  I especially like the stories that take a show that is goody-goody or in 
some other way unrealistic and inject sexual realism.  For example, in the "Star Wars" 
movies it often occurred to me that any sensible Evil Emperor or his agent would 
certainly do more to Princess Leia than simply hold her captive.  To get her to give 
away rebel secrets, the bad guys destroy her entire planet; but it never occurs to them 
to rape her!  And how likely is it that the folks on the Starship Enterprise would 
really spend their free time exchanging scientific pleasantries rather than engaging in 
occasional ribald sexual exercises.  So "Doctor Quinn" had potential.

However, the problem is that the character in this story bears little relationship to 
the female western doctor of American television fame.  The title character in this 
story is a prissy bitch:  "I'm perfectly capable of getting out of a carriage myself," 
she says harshly at the beginning of the story. "And I won't require any help with my 
bags either."  This is a story about a bitch that pretty much deserves to be humiliated.  
It's a parody of Doctor Quinn as she would have been if she had been a completely 
different person - which means it's a lousy parody.  A good parody would leave her 
pretty much in character but force her to react to the "realities" of the wild west - 
perhaps people with little evidence of a moral code, maverick cowhands who would be 
eager to stick their cocks into anything female, and whatever else the author might 
conjure up.  

This is a relatively weak rape and humiliation story - it's not a parody at all.  
There's no reason to believe that this author's depiction of "reality" is any more 
accurate than that shown in the TV series, and it's a lot less entertaining. It's hardly 
worth the effort to struggle with the incoherent grammar and spelling to find the plot 
in this story.  (Rating: 2) 
