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Howdy! If you panicked that I'd finally written myself into an early grave with Teaching Her A Lesson, don't! I am alive and whatever passes for well in 2020. I've been catching up on all the work I put off for my contribution to an idea Limerick proposed a couple months back on the MC Forum, namely, a VIRAL anthology by some well-liked authors on the archives (and also my humble-braggy ass). I'm so excited about this for so many reasons. First and foremost, it might raise a few bucks for a good cause, namely Feeding America, a group that's doing good work in the fairly obvious realm their name suggests. With soaring unemployment and covid doing its best to fuck up and disrupt our food supply, this is more important than ever, and it's always important. The link is in the story, but one more time, you can go to https://www.feedingamerica.org/ways-to-give and donate if you can.

That said, this was also an opportunity to contribute to a joint project with my very favorite author in mc erotica bar none, and just to see my pseudonym up there next to his is going to feel so freaking awesome. I know mc erotica might not be something to get starstruck over, but man. That guy can fucking write. Love his stuff or hate it, I don't know any other author who can drag out a slow burn of raw hotness for so long. I love his stuff to death.

Also also, as to what I actually wrote, it's called Slut Zero. It's about a doctor with the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Branch Epidemiology and Analysis branch who gets a strange tip from an old acquaintance about a possible lead on a covid origin/cure. This story does not have much to do with the real nightmare of the real disease aside from using it as a pretext to launch the mystery, but trigger warning: it does come up here and there. This is also a loooong piece, over 17,000 words, but I didn't see a way to tell the story I needed to tell without cutting out either the necessary or the good. While it's still in the realm of mc erotica with its tropes and subject matter, I think I went a good deal off my usual path with this, so I'll be curious to hear what you folks think. It's kinda freakin' weird, probably, but that can be fun sometimes. It should go live tomorrow on mcstories.com, but I was literally up for the past 30-some hours finishing it, so this was as early as I could get it to ya. (And yes yes, mother hens, I'm off to grab a bite to eat and catch some sleep.)

Without further ado, here's Slut Zero, and again, consider donating if you haven't already. And if you have, you're a fucking rock star and I love you.

Comments

doulomb

nothing wrong with using your skills to help people!

WDB

As always, I'm in the middle of reading this and had to talk about something in it. (It's really good so far!) I'm at this moment where Sabatino loses it at Amber, when she suggests setting up camp. There's a very specific cadence to someone who is a mix of befuddled and enraged, where every irritation they have with someone just spills out in a rush. Every accusation ends in a question?! Because you can't believe the shit that you have to deal with right now?! It's... I love it. The best Ice Bear stories have it in there somewhere, and it's so *evocative*. It's such a skill as a writer, to be able to quickly center you in someone's steadily boiling brain. Anyway, it's a small thing maybe, but I really like it.

ukyo_rulz

I'm not sure what I just read but it was definitely *something*!

cuzimhavingagoodtime

I’ve kinda noticed a maybe not great pattern with your writing when you go for stuff that isn’t pure porn and is also a real story. Criticism ahead.

cuzimhavingagoodtime

Your characters end up having to drag the idiot ball around somethin fierce so the narrative can work, as opposed to the narrative being informed by how your characters would reasonably act. This was a big problem with TIOS but to use this as an example: Amber’s characterization makes no sense over the course of her hiking trip. To recap, she starts off thinking theirs no possible way that the theory that Stacy spontaneously slutiffied because of 5G towers is correct. She starts noticing hints that her body is changing! Now, How does she react? giving that we know Amber is a scientist, and is highly invested in this “case” already, we might expect her to connect the dots, sensing her into a full blown panic as she realizes she’s on a ticking clock. Or, given that she’s already dismissed this possibility as ridiculous, she might be pushed further into denial, reaching out desperately for less stupid Explanations. So what path does she go down? How does she react to the fact that she is being non consensualy slutified? ....she doesn’t! She just. Doesn’t. React. She isn’t scared, she isn’t panicking, she’s not even dispassionately trying to solve the problem of her impending fucking ego-death. Each time she notices a new change, we get the description of the change, and that’s it, zero reaction. it’s like there was meant to be a section each time designated for her to emotionally react to this awful thing happening to her, and it just never made it into the final draft. I actually thought her ridiculous lack of reaction was like a mental block the virus placed on her, But then she wakes up in the house and she’s like “yup, turning into a bimbo, that’s def a bad thing we should do something about”, so what the fuck?

cuzimhavingagoodtime

It’s a problem both in terms of fucking up ambers characterizarion, but in terms of story structure. The story up to this point is passed and written like mystery/thriller. Amber gets mysterious new data, she tries to investigate and understand this new data, rinse and repeat. The goals of the protagonist and the reader are aligned, we both want to figure out what’s going on. So for Amber to seemingly just stop caring about her mystery, this is frustrating, because I still do! This is why I think this was a bad choice regardless of how internally justified her idiocy is do to ply reasons, it’s inherently frustrating for the the reader to be forced into ignoring the main thing the’ve has to care about up to this point.

icebear

@Bob Johnson: I'm at least glad to have invoked strong enough responses to merit such thorough critique. :) I won't engage in any sort of defense, especially since for a number of your points there really isn't any beyond "I'm not exactly John Grisham here". By way of explanation to the general phenomenon of Amber's under-engagement in the Mystery, though, a good deal of that came from a very late stage decision to shift the tone of the story from what was originally going to be another teehee-bimbo-virus thing to... whatever it wound up trying to be. I was burning the candle at both ends so hard on Teaching Her A Lesson that I basically gave myself ~48 hours to take this from a couple thousand words of that starting point (basically the opening scene with Dr. Campbell in her office) to completion. Somewhere along the editing process I was like "whoa, what if I get all, like, serious or something" and so in the process, it wound up somewhere between "ha, silly army doc and her bimboizing shenanigans!" and "the Others are coming to wipe out civilization" which, evidently, some folks did not quite dig. :) Anyway, like I said, not intending as a defense, merely an honest explanation of how I tried and maybe failed to split the difference between a couple different visions. I hope you still had at least *some* fun with it, or do with the next thing, because like a fella says, more to come.

cuzimhavingagoodtime

I definitely did, and I hope I didn't cut to deep, it wasn't my intention to come at your overall writing ability! I think we've all been in a situation of being unable to spend as much time on something as we would like. Still a fan, still looking forward to everything you do next!

Sagesse

I totally meant to mention earlier that I appreciate the minor nod in the direction of TG in this one. Thanks for dropping that in there, and nice work all around.