The Pub Discussion Board

Hello there!  I wanted to give a bit of feedback on your story so far!
First off, great narrative.  I think the characters are well thought out and your descriptions of them are precise and succinct.  Your prose leans very Hemingway in its brevity and simplicity.

I would suggest, however, that before posting you make sure to give the whole chapter a read through for editing purposes.  You may not catch all your errors, but you'll catch most.  "It's different for a young girls to help me" and "I'd be real, proud to be seen in public..." stand out as examples on the first page of chapter 1.  In the first example, you could either lose the "a" or drop the s from girls, and in the second, the comma is not needed, unless you meant to imply that he would be BOTH real AND proud as opposed to really proud.

It's rated XXX, so it's porn, I get it.  We're not here for the story.  But as I said, it's a solid story, and little things like this tend to detract from that.
Food for thought!

(posted from the Item Information Page)

I have made this point before, but to add to what DoomCock said:

He's absolutely right that you should proofread your story right before you post it.  ("Right" before is so that you don't make any changes to it after the proofreading process is done, potentially adding in new, un-proofread errors.)  The thing I would add is that you absolutely must wait a few days between finishing up the writing, and doing that final proofreading.

The reason for this is that the human brain has the ability to fool your eyes.  This is why it's so hard to proofread your own writing (as opposed to someone else's) to begin with:  Your brain knows what you meant to say, and it just feeds that back to you, ignoring what's actually written in front of you.  The fresher the work is in your mind, the worse this phenomenon is.

If, however, you give your brain time to "forget" what you meant to write, then you'll have a much better chance of spotting the errors you made.  I personally give myself at least a week to let the story become stale in my mind, but I would say that you should wait absolutely no less than three days before proofreading.  The longer you can wait, the easier it will be to spot the errors. 

Yes, I do realize just how difficult it is to have a completed chapter or story, just sitting there, waiting to be posted.  Do it anyway, for the sake of the story.

One way to enforce this habit is to get yourself a couple reviewers for your work.  It's going to take them a few days to get their reviews back to you, which means you'll have automatically waited the minimum number of days necessary.  Not to mention the possible help that their reviews themselves will bring...  Every story I've written with the help of my reviewers has been better because of them.

Eric Storm