Babypants

I think this device is working well. Above all, it reminds readers that there are two adults in the room.

Thanks a heap. Cindy's character is a labor of love, who should be instantly recognizable to any reader who has had the misfortune to go shopping at an upscale mall with a teen aged daughter.

This is actually a feasible solution, which John Fowles adopted in The Collector. It's a 2 person story, and John gives the captor's perspective in parts 1, 3 and 4 of the novel, but gives the captive's (Miranda) perspective in part 2. It's your story, so there is nothing to prevent you from following in John's footsteps. A postmortem between Sarah and Julia would be a good place to do this because the story calls for it, and there are obvious reasons why Michael should not be a party to that conversation. And now you have a sense of what it's like to sit on the opposite side of the desk from an editor at a major publishing house!

This is a good starting point for addressing the structural problem I see in this story. It is new territory, but you are exploring it from a single narrative point of view. The spanking scene is logical given its popularity on this site, but if you were to post the story in a neutral setting, I suspect many readers would see this as revenge pure and simple given how sharply Sarah reacted when the shoe was on the other foot earlier in the marriage. Give Sarah her own voice here, and we would expect her introspectively to express doubts about whether Michael really thinks so trivial a lapse deserves a spanking, or is going along with her because he fears this will all come to an end if he begins selectively objecting to his treatment. The same thing applies to the money. Rule 2 is unambiguous. The way the conversation between the 2 sisters plays out, with Sarah telling Julia that she won't get a dime if she breaks the rules, it turns into a Sword of Damocles hanging over Julia's head. The whole passage strongly suggests that Sarah does not trust her sister, and that's where the chastity cage comes into play. Frankly, if Michael agrees to this, Julia should be outraged, as you also seem to sense. This is tricky territory because you can only narrate what happens from Michael's point of view. If Julia's reaction is subtle, will he catch it? Sarah undoubtedly will, but we can see her backpedal only through Michael's eyes. Logically, therefore, Julia will need to have a melt down here. That's the only plausible way for Michael to see what's happening. But do you really want to put the onus on straightening this mess out on Michael, when your first rule situates him in infancy? Given her own voice, Sarah could respond to a much wider range of reactions on Julia's part than Michael is capable of.

Thanks for this. It is a very good read, and would make an excellent chapter in its own right. I have been following the bread crumbs: Michael and Sarah are wealthy enough that neither needs to work; the money comes from Michael's side of the family; Julia is badly in need of money, and is being paid a ridiculous sum to babysit Michael. This trail suggests what is known in certain circles as "a long con" that the two sisters are playing on the husband. And you still have the problem of Sarah laying down the law to her sister. Shouldn't she have waited to set out all these rules as a fallback if Michael chose not to wear the cage? Putting the cart before the horse is an open invitation to hurt feelings. Your last paragraph goes to the heart of why I have always discouraged writing fiction from a single narrative point of view. In fact, you have put it more eloquently than I ever have. Structurally, it is very hard to convey the misunderstanding that is an ordinary part of day to day human experience when you have only one lens. As a police officer once explained to me, if you take down seven eye-witness reports of an accident, when you type them up and spread them out on the desk, you will be looking at seven different accidents. In sum, this is a great story because you are staying away from the overworked themes of abuse and humiliation. When you finish, I hope that you will offer us a second helping, but in the process take on the challenge of writing from two or more narrative points of view.

Thanks to you all for zeroing in on the dreaded mother-in-law. I still recall locker room conversations from my younger days when we compared horror stories. No one had anything good to say about these creatures. In the next scene, the cat and mouse game will continue to play out, but in a public setting. We'll see how Ian holds up.

The next logical progression down the worm hole, but the more I think about it, the less sense the cage makes. Why explain all those rules to Julia, and then spring the cage on her? Talk about saying that you don't trust your sister! I'm beginning to think that this is all a scheme that Sarah and Julia have planned out in advance. We shall see.

This is an example of something that I strongly encourage writers to plan into their texts. Real life is messy. People misunderstand one another day in and day out, change their minds at the drop of a hat, and so forth. But one rarely encounters this messiness in our stories. Far too many characters are wooden to the point of being robotic because their fictional lives are far removed from the chaos that is daily life for so many of us. Streamlining the text (and this is but one example) to turn the spotlight on the fetish object is understandable on a site like this, but it makes stories less compelling. Could somebody please have a flat tire when driving home from a restaurant in their soggy, sagging diaper?

Have you stepped back and analyzed the 33% that needs improvement? Is there a weakness that is consistent, which you could address?

Like many authors of my generation, I compose via a hand held tape recorder. Pacing is critical to good storytelling, and I need to hear it to make sure that I've got it right. So, the text is pretty much finished before I ever sit down to start typing; indeed, in the old days I paid a secretary to do this chore for me. When I get around to reading the text, apart from typos the only thing that I'm hunting down is superfluous adverbs. I prefer blocking particles because they give me greater control of the pacing. So, the Open Office text gets converted into PDF and sent over here, where the italic and bold text and paragraph divides all disappear. I reconstruct them, keeping a keen eye out for missing quotation marks above all else. They're easily misplaced on the back end of a blocking particle. Let me encourage you to have a go at writing your story without these technological aids. Try it the old fashioned way and see what comes out the far end.

Logical progression, though I suspected that Mike would be the one to bring up the cage. Now that we know Julia is desperate for money, I'm guessing after Thursday night goes well, at some point she will be moving in to cut her expenses down to size. Will the mother-in-law also get in on the action? Am staying tuned.

I've had 3 mothers-in-law. One was a lunatic, and another from the "no one is good enough for my daughter" camp. But my third was very nice, proving that there are exceptions to the rule. Oh, and having 2 of them living on other continents was a mixed blessing. Peace and quiet at the dinner table was offset by the thousands of dollars being laid out for airline tickets each year. And now it's all grist for the author's mill. As Van Wilder would say, "write that down."

This is the point where I strongly disagree. I have been writing on a computer for decades, but for my purposes the computer is a typewriter. When I was sending the finished work to a publishing house, what they received was a manuscript and floppies, which the publisher used to generate still more manuscript copies for in-house and external review. I used Word Perfect 4.0 for quite a while, but had no use for any tools that might have been in the program. To the contrary, currently writing in Open Office, it is at once amusing and irritating to have text underlined in red for correction when the text is correct. I am not kidding you here: 100% of the suggested corrections to over one hundred chapters have been wrong. As she indicated above, Baby Sofia has the same problem with the program that she is using. Bottom line: if you are using these programs to write text, then you are at best a co-author. Agreed.

Baby Sofia is quite right. In an academic setting using the work of others without attribution, regardless of source, is almost universally considered to be plagiarism. In my classroom, this would have resulted in a failing grade, and a hearing before the academic disciplinary committee. On this site, given what you have written above, I would hope that you would tag your work as AI.

As you may know, eerie houses that are home to interdimensional travel are also a Lovecraft specialty. Have you read The Dreams in the Witch House or The Shunned House?

And that's how a loving couple deal with erectile dysfunction. I wonder how many other secret places on Mommy's body baby has yet to discover. Remembering that the tongue is a muscle, it appears that baby will need strengthening exercises. And Mommy will need to master the art of giving a good neck massage. In this particular classroom, the neck is vulnerable.

Interesting the way her bra simply disappeared. As I read this, I kept thinking about William Hope Hodgson's House on the Borderland. The woman's superhuman strength is suggestive.

100,000 views is a milestone. Heartfelt thanks to all of the members and guests who have taken the time to stop by and have a go at this epic. I hope that it is proving as enjoyable for you to read as it has been for me to write. Thank you, all.

Just hoping it doesn't turn into a cuckolding story. Figure there's a reason why you have mentioned more than once that she has night classes getting her out of the house.

I find it ironic that these tools are so poorly designed. There is an auto-correct feature on Open Office that red lines everything it sees as a spelling error. There have been occasions when I have gone on line to run its objection against other tools. And guess what ... to date, Open Office auto-correct has proven wrong 100% of the time. I am not exaggerating here. Another thing that astonishes me is the number of outright factual errors that these programs commit. Case in point. A couple of days ago, I asked google how long Mother-in-Law was on the UK charts in 1961, and how high it climbed. It answered 11 weeks, reaching #1. No. The correct answer is 7 weeks, topping out at #29. I found this in (a) a book in my library, and (b) in a separate but equally massive on line guide. Google must have been eavesdropping on my research, because when I looked it up again some hours later, it had corrected its mistake. The old saw used to go "trust but verify." How quaint the concept seems today.

Many thanks for this. Did you know that The Olympics, of Western Movies and Hully Gully fame, recorded this? And while I much prefer Madeleine Peyroux's version, an obscure band performing in Hamburg, West Germany also recorded it on 31 December, 1962. Who would have ever guessed that The Beatles could pump out such hard rock? You'll find it on youtube if you search "Shimmy Like Kate The Beatles."

In academia, this has been a subject of intense debate over the last couple of years. A line seems to be emerging that separates generative AI products as plagiarism from products like auto correct that allow students to express their own thoughts with fewer grammatical or stylistic mistakes. But programs like Grammarly evolve over time, and once they straddle the line, their use raises difficult ethical issues for students and faculty alike. Bringing this issue home to this site, we have a steady stream of individuals writing their first stories here, and given that it's a learning process, it seems to me that those who ask for constructive criticism should be applauded and rewarded for contributing their time and effort to our community. Asking them to compete for the limited amount of time that we can spare them with AI generated stories IMO is grossly unfair. At a minimum, we should require tags for AI work, and I would prefer to divide it off and give it a separate heading akin to the Poetry Corner .

Take a look at the most recent chapter of Crossing Worlds 2. What can one say?

At a minimum, we should have a requirement that AI stories must be tagged, although this does not answer the question of who should be credited with authorship. Personally, I agree with Pizer's suggestion that these works be separated out and housed in a silo of their own, if not banned altogether.

ANNOUNCEMENT: a fourteenth tranche, scene 42 opening season 2, is now up and running on the STORIES page of the site. Once again, comments have been removed to enable readers to enjoy the story without interruption. The balance of season 2 will follow.