Babypants

A promising beginning. Looking forward to the next installment.

Let me strongly encourage you to include a chapter on Liz's time in hospital, and a retrospective in a courtroom setting looks like a great choice for the setting. This is about pacing, and the analogy that I would use is the manual transmission in a car. This story begins at a leisurely pace as you focus on Liz and Mrs. Clark (1st gear). The pace speeds up/ time is compressed when the mother discovers what is going on and starts torturing her daughter (2nd gear), but it then reverts to the original, leisurely pace in the segments on computer manipulation. We are still in 1st gear with the dramatic scene in the restroom, which is very well written, and the detail here makes the speed at which you pass over Liz's hospital trauma (4th gear) stand out at all the more. It's OK to alter the pace in a story (although this is actually quite rare), but you have to run through the gears because, as Dale Earnhardt, Jr. discovered at Pocono in 2017, bad things happen when you miss the gear shift.

In the beginning, this story had the feel of a psychological thriller, and it continued to have consistent flow through the end of chapter 4. In contrast, chapter 5 is moving at a different, more compressed pace. Ten weeks in hospital recovery go by in the space of one paragraph. Is the discontinuity deliberate? Are you planning to revisit Liz's time in hospital in more leisurely detail, perhaps during the trials? Two other points to note here. In this chapter, you have Liz and Mrs. Clark burn clothing that in reality would have been removed by the police as evidence. And in the previous chapter, you have repeated incidents in which a 15 year old girl is publicly and indecently exposed on her front lawn. The police would have been all over this, and Social Services right behind them, especially with a concerned neighbor right next door bearing witness.

Natasha? Do you mean Natalie?

You are to be congratulated for taking the time, in outline form, to set this story up all the way to the end. I have repeatedly encouraged other writers on this site to write the end before the beginning, lest they write themselves into a corner. Moreover, your flow is very good. I am also strongly in favor of reveals, but remembering the old adage that you cannot introduce the murderer in the last two chapters of a mystery, I favor the layered onion approach rather than a single reveal. Giving the reader a steady diet of clues to decipher keeps his/her interest high. Two details in this last chapter caught my eye. First, Mrs. Clark lives right next door; and second, the mother is off at work 9 hours a day. Mrs. Clark is already conspiring with Liz, so what is to prevent the two of them from further, collaborative attempts to undercut the mother's apparent cruelty? I say "apparent," however, because Liz has just used one of Tommy's messy diapers to achieve multiple orgasms. I have wondered throughout whether Liz is manipulating both her mother and Mrs. Clark to achieve the exact outcome that she desires. Time will tell.

An excellent story which, at least on the level of fantasy, might yield a host of spin-offs: "The Domme in the Grocery Aisle," "The Domme at the Bar," "The Domme in Seat 17A," etc., etc.

Did something fall out of this chapter between "I don't think I can go back to vanilla life" and "Jim began to bawl ..."? He's just learned that his wife is a bi adulteress, and he doesn't react to this statement at all? Jim's failure to react here makes the balance of the chapter seem hasty and contrived. The flow from 21a to 21b would be much smoother without Pam's confession.

You did a nice job with foreshadowing to set this chapter up. Looks like the wife and therapist really opened Pandora's box when they set Jim up for his first gay experience. There are a lot of directions you can take the story from here, and it will be interesting to see which one you choose.

It's good to see that Alex wants to go to war, because she does have weapons to bring into play. From a physiological point of view, she can work on strengthening her sphincter muscles to stretch the time before voiding to the limit that the chemicals her body has ingested will allow. Better yet, she can defeat the chemicals by anticipating the looming need to void, and doing so on her own terms beforehand. Psychologically, her instinct to make this as tough on her "mother" as possible is sound. She should start by making every soiled diaper as messy as she possibly can. Still, there are things that puzzle me here. Unless no one other than mommy and daddy changes her, how can they maintain the charade that Alex is a boy? How can she be changed in public unless everyone present is in on the gag? And what is going to happen if Alex bursts her appendix, for example? Stories like this typically rely on the unwarranted assumption that nothing serious will go wrong to the victim over time, or on the assertion that money corrupts all, including suborning entire hospital staffs to ignore the abuse. Since some of these problems go away if Alex remains a girl, all in all it seems like a really bad idea to treat her as a boy. Of course, every problem disappears if you keep Alex in isolation and, in the manner of John Fowles' The Collector, are prepared to kill her off as soon as something life threatening does arise.

Sally, let me use a small detail as a point of departure for a few suggestions. As you well know, anyone who writes a long story in serial form is constantly threatened by discontinuity. Here's a case in point. In response to my earlier puzzlement about how Chris' personality could disintegrate so swiftly, you started chapter 16 with "the weeks passed." Then, in the preamble to chapter 17, "more weeks passed. Then some more." This is good, but if you go back to chapter 2, where Chris meets Gwen for the first time in the shop, she is already in ""late pregnancy" and experiencing the problems with bladder control that are so commonplace well into the third trimester. And yet at the end of 17 she has still not delivered! By now, her OB/GYN would have long since induced delivery; otherwise, she would be up for an entry in the Guinness book of records! So, just one word ("late") caught you out here. A professional editor would have caught this, and suggested that you preserve the time line by situating Gwen in the latter half of her second trimester, keeping in mind that this will be her second child, and her bladder control may have been permanently weakened by her first pregnancy (commonplace). But, you are on your own, so how can you keep such discontinuities from creeping into the text? One thing you might try is taking a page (pardon the pun) out of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936). In manuscript form, this epic came in at 1,037 pages, and 500,000 words plus-- and she wrote very, very fast. Her secret was to write "backwards." She wrote the last chapter first, so that she would have a destination, and didn't even write the first chapter until the manuscript had already been accepted for publication. And being a professional journalist in an era when journalists took pride in getting their facts right, Mitchell spent as much time looking for factual errors in the text as she did writing. And there aren't any. Mitchell was justifiably proud of the fact that there was not one, single anachronism, inaccuracy, or discontinuity in the entire text. So, when you turn to your next story, why not try the Mitchell technique, and at least write the last chapter first? Another useful technique when using the serial format is not to post a chapter until you have written the following 3 or 4. This gives you an opportunity to correct discontinuities before they reach your readers, but far more importantly, it allows you to catch discontinuities that you can't even see when you are writing any given chapter. This bespeaks the fact that discontinuities are not necessarily the result of carelessness, but often the result of not having a concrete sense of where you will take the story 3 or 4 chapters hence. The farther ahead you write before you post, the more wiggle room you create for yourself. At this level of detail, I've never seen an outline that was sufficient in and of itself to solve the problem. I hope some of these ideas help, because you write well. You have fleshed out Chris' character enough that his actions are plausible, and I have no doubt that you will reveal Abigail's motivation when it is time to lift the curtain and let your readers see what has been going on back stage.

I am also puzzled by the rapidity of the personality disintegration we are seeing here. This can be achieved in a controlled environment by utilizing a combination of isolation, sleep deprivation through accelerated sleep/wake cycling, and chemical induction. But I would expect it to take 72-96 hours to see meaningful results. As Kirababy remarks, Abigail must be "helping him along." Hopefully, another reveal will take us still more deeply into Abigail and Gwen's ominously well crafted plans. Like others who have commented to this effect, I suspect that the earlier Chris was also sucked in by these two. What is the fate that ultimately awaits those who are trapped in their web?

A charming story, but did you proof read this chapter? There are so many mistakes here that it reads like a first draft. Please, take a little extra time and polish it before posting..

Nice rewrite ... it ties in well with the content of 13. In my experience, hotels will hold your luggage for you if you have a paid booking for another room in the near future. Otherwise, well, if Chris arrived in London by train, there are long-term left luggage facilities just outside all of the major London stations. Around the world, many airports still offer left luggage options inside the airport proper (I'll be using one in Bangkok next week). However, I don't think that I would leave my ID behind anywhere in the world, much less in a highly intrusive surveillance state like the UK. On a separate subject, you asked about the interplay between male performance and incontinence. I have only taken the little blue pill once, and the resultant 6 hour erection scared me no end. But I didn't wet during the whole time. I asked my urologist about this, and he reminded me that urge incontinence centers on degenerative nerve damage, not the size of one's bladder. Since my bladder capacity is fine, "holding it" for 6 hours was no problem. Over the decades I have wet just before and just after intercourse, but never during. Curiously, I have also found that alcohol, by promoting dehydration, also limits the production of urine. I had 3 dry nights last year, thanks each time to a fine batch of margaritas. My urologist also lectured me about this stunt, reminding me that my earlier attempts to control my incontinence via induced dehydration put me on the operating table 3 times in 27 months for kidney stones (which really hurt). You simply cannot beat this problem my cutting down on liquids.

Chris must have a very complicated and tragic back story. In chapter one, he's an orphan who lacks real ties to or responsibilities for anyone. In this chapter, he's the product of a single parent household with two much older siblings, and in his teens his family was still intact. So, his time in the orphanage must have been relatively short, and it took place after his formative years. I'm guessing a car crash wiped out the rest of his family, and there were no relations to take him in, but there are other possibilities. All in all, therefore, a short but tantalizing reveal. Now, would you please check the poor guy out of his hotel! Personally, I hate paying for hotel rooms that I can't use because of a delayed flight or one of the other minor catastrophes that always seem to occur at the most inconvenient of times.

Another beautifully constructed chapter. Looking forward to seeing how this all turns out.