Finally started (and caught up with) Dick Picture Perfect. To me, it suffers for just having tooooo many characters. The story is alluding to Will overcommitting, and I really hope it follows through on that thread. He's up to what, seven women? Ten? It just expanded insanely fast, and it can be tricky to keep them all straight*.

*no pun intended

Having said that, this tale has some of the best-written sex scenes I've encountered. If you're a regular reader of my stuff, you'll know sex scenes are a real weakness for me (I often skip them entirely), but dang the first threesome is well-written.

Quote from: MCaesar on December 27, 2019, 03:00:09 am

Some quick Day-Old Thoughts on Flightback:

...What are the odds of an EMCSA writer meeting an EMCSA reader by chance in the wild?...

Has happened to me exactly once, and I've only been a writer for 18 months or so. I guess I should play the lottery more often. 

(Although, as far as I know, this person did not know that I was an EMCSA writer, was not a fan of my work, did not hypnotize me into a deep, relaxing trance, and did not bump me up to a better seat class on an international flight. But, there's the whole 'you will remember nothing' thing, so...)

This has been a very illustrative conversation about, to me, the dangers of asking rhetorical questions. Though that sounds like an anecdote I'd be interested to hear. Given that we've been talking about improbability as it pertains to smutty fantasies, I'll try to keep my expectations low.

"More statistically significant than lottery win" also applies to getting hit by a meteor, but I take your point. And of course many of the criteria I listed are not independent of one another at all. Just lampshading the improbably perfect scenario. A story about a very probable scenario, where an EMCSA author does something mundane and nothing particularly interesting happens, wouldn't be a story worth writing or reading.

Never read any Thomas Hardy, man. Especially The Mayor of Casterbridge.

Some quick Day-Old Thoughts on Flightback:

I'll echo others saying that the prose and trance are well-done. Warmth and relaxation, unsurprisingly, suffuse the reading experience.

I found my suspension of disbelief rather strained, though. What are the odds of an EMCSA writer meeting an EMCSA reader by chance in the wild? And that reader being a fawning fan of that writer specifically? And of that fan being a hypnotist? And of that hypnotist having a profoundly ethical philosophy, which I suspect mirrors the author's own exactly? And that author falling into a deep trance quickly on his first try with little or no previous trance experience? I'm no mathematician, but I think the Venn diagram there is pretty small.

But then again, I like stories about magic spells, psychic powers, superheroes, and aliens too. Maybe I shouldn't poke too much fun at a premise that's trying to be a bit more grounded. I'm finding the grounded ones more and more appealing the more mature I get. Besides, if people didn't submit their blatant self-insert gratification fantasies here, the archive would be empty.

Let's see... there are more than 2500 authors on the EMCSA. If each author has a thousand fans, and meets a thousand individuals "in the wild", then, ignoring all cultural clustering, the chances of some EMCSA writer meeting one of their fans by chance would be around 28%. The fan being the sort of person the author writes about is not that surprising, given they're a fan, and an author who writes about people like himself going into hypnosis quickly, deeply and easily is going to have primed himself to respond well to hypnosis from people like the hypnotists he writes about.

Of course, the things I've left out of that analysis are that a lot more gets written about "magic" mind control than about realistic hypnosis, and that a lot of authors don't go around mentioning the EMCSA to casual acquaintances, both of which will reduce the odds considerably. Still, I'd guess at the actual figure being more "statistically significant" than "lottery win".

Some quick Day-Old Thoughts on Flightback:

I'll echo others saying that the prose and trance are well-done. Warmth and relaxation, unsurprisingly, suffuse the reading experience.

I found my suspension of disbelief rather strained, though. What are the odds of an EMCSA writer meeting an EMCSA reader by chance in the wild? And that reader being a fawning fan of that writer specifically? And of that fan being a hypnotist? And of that hypnotist having a profoundly ethical philosophy, which I suspect mirrors the author's own exactly? And that author falling into a deep trance quickly on his first try with little or no previous trance experience? I'm no mathematician, but I think the Venn diagram there is pretty small.

But then again, I like stories about magic spells, psychic powers, superheroes, and aliens too. Maybe I shouldn't poke too much fun at a premise that's trying to be a bit more grounded. I'm finding the grounded ones more and more appealing the more mature I get. Besides, if people didn't submit their blatant self-insert gratification fantasies here, the archive would be empty.