Celestial Reviews 143 - Dec 14, 1996
Note: I am compiling my Top 100 List for 1996. It should not surprise
you to know that “First Love” will probably be on that list. It is still
not clear to me who the author is of that story. I would appreciate it
if someone would tell me who wrote that story, so that I do not have to
list it as Unknown Author.
Second Note: For the past year I have been hoping to find time to write
a sexy story that could teach vocabulary to horny young people who
normally resist traditional vocabulary instruction. Really bad teachers
tell students that they can do better on the SAT by memorizing the
definitions of a bunch of words. This approach rarely works. My plan
has been to take a subset of those words and put them into a really good
story. Then the students would be instructed to read the story at least
three times before the test. I’m willing to bet that learners reading my
story would score better on a test administered, say, a month after the
original test than would students who were simply told to learn the list
of words to prepare for a test.
Since I spend so much time reading and reviewing these stories, however,
it is obvious to me that I’ll never write my story. So I am proposing
the Third Annual Celestial Writing Contest. The story can be of any
length, but students should reasonably be able to (and eager to) read it
three times in one week. It should use all of the words on the following
list. Preferably, it should use them in creative ways that enable
learners to see their meaning in context, and it should use the words
more than once - in fact, as often as possible without becoming silly.
The story should not be obviously didactic - that is, it should be a
story about sex, not about learning these words.
If this idea catches on, I’ll be happy to supply to the authors or to
others a vocabulary test based on these words. When I announce the
winners and the authors post the stories, I’ll post the vocabulary test.
Readers can use the test before and after they read the story to see if
they actually learn the words.
Since the Christmas holidays are coming up, I’ll give you a generous
deadline - January 15. However, as I tell my students, don’t put this
assignment off until the last minute. Your best bet is to start now and
then come back to it many times in the coming weeks. It IS fair to
communicate with others and even to take advantage of my proofreading
service. If you send me your story early enough, I’ll even give you
feedback myself.
Here are the words (all taken from one of those SAT study lists):
acerbic, adept, ameliorate, apocryphal, assuage, blithe, constrict,
credulous, dilatory, egregious, fatuous, guile, hedonism, impervious,
incipient, irascible, lethargy, mundane, prolific, redundant. It’s OK to
use alternate forms of these words - for example, blithely instead of
blithe or incredulous for credulous.
All 20 of these are words that intelligent people use when the context
calls for them (Quite possibly I may have used them here in Celestial
Reviews.), but most high school students have no idea what they mean.
They are useful words; and if you write a story with them, at the very
least YOU will probably learn some functional vocabulary words.
Have fun! And thanks to Mark Aster for accidentally giving me the
stimulus to suggest this contest.
- Celeste
“Bike Rides” by Dulcinea (sexy bike ride) 10, 9, 9
“A Fireside Love” by Ron Glick (masturbation &
dreamlike sex) 5, 8, 9
“Panties” by Tom Bombadil (bdsm) 9.5, 10, 10
“Eating Out” by Unknown Author (threesome) 9, 8, 8
“Dreaming” by Unknown Author (sexy tryst) 7, 6, 6
“Young Stuff” by Jefferson James (teenager rape) 7, 8, 7
“Restless Memories” by Poppet (female masturbating)
10, 10, 10
“Positive Therapy” by Sam Phencer (hospital sex) 6, 7, 7
"Chauffeur's Dirty Job" by Caesar (employee humps boss’s
drunken wife) 10, 10, 10
“Cousin Tanda” by Unknown Author (youthful frolic with
a cousin) 9.5, 9, 9
“Bike Rides” by Dulcinea (Dulcinea97@aol.com). The man and woman are
racing their bikes. I suppose he could overtake her, but he enjoys the
view from behind - muscles, buttocks, and all that. In fact, he sort of
envies the bicycle seat - right there between her legs, up tight against
her pussy - well, you get the idea. It’s enough to give a guy a hard-on,
and a boner makes it difficult to race a bicycle. Is that a bicycle pump
in his pocket, or is he just happy to see her? This is a very short,
pleasant, and sexy story.
Ratings for “Bike Rides”
Athena (technical quality):10
Venus (plot & character): 9
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 9
“A Fireside Love” by Ron Glick (phoenixprime@marsweb.com). This story
describes a woman masturbating in front of a cozy fireplace. Then a
mysterious lover joins her, and together they rise to new heights of
ecstasy.
In a preface the author states that he changed from the first person in
an original version to a second person narrative in this version. He
says that this didn’t catch on with magazines, which have apparently
rejected the story. My advice is that it’s not the “person” that stands
in the way of publishing a story like this. {Actually, “he” is the THIRD
person.} The problem is with numerous other grammatical errors - such as
verb tense and verb agreement and slightly awkward sentence structures.
I say this not to be unfriendly, but to offer encouragement. This story
is highly erotic - almost poetic in many places. The author should take
advantage of my free proofreading service or at least have an {initially}
unaroused friend proofread his stories before posting them. The result
would almost certainly be an exciting improvement in the quality of his
stories.
Now remember: I’m being friendly; but this sentence is simply too good to
pass up: “Abandoned is his sense of gentile behavior.” Since the
sentence means that the lover expresses his lust more forcefully, I think
the author meant to say “gentle.” As written, the sentence seems to
suggest on-the-spot circumcision.
Ratings for “A Fireside Love”
Athena (technical quality): 5
Venus (plot & character): 8
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 9
“Panties” by Tom Bombadil (stbush@iglou.com). The title refers to the
fact that various people (the ones who are not constantly naked) often
have to change their panties, because they have become severely moistened
through sexual stimulation, usually resulting from observation of ambient
nudity and concomitant fantasies but sometimes from more direct
involvement in the action.
The protagonist takes a job as a sort of governess for a rich family.
Her main responsibilities are to look after the children and occasionally
to administer discipline. In America, such people are known as teachers.
The author says he tried to write a deirdresque story. In a way, he has
come up short, because Deirdre would never write a story this long. That
is, there tends to be an inverse relationship between deirdreness and
story length. Other than that, the story does a good job of expressing
the logical irrationality of a Deirdre-style story.
Ratings for “Panties”
Athena (technical quality): 9.5
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10
“Eating Out” by Unknown Author. This story’s title may deceive you. You
probably thought it was about a guy and a girl having oral sex, but
actually it’s about two young ladies who run a catering service. But
then, you see, what turns them on the most is sharing a guy, putting on a
little lezzie show for him and getting him really horny before they fuck
him. This story describes one of their escapades when they do just that.
A good time is had by all; and you may have been right about that title
after all.
Ratings for “Eating Out”
Athena (technical quality): 9
Venus (plot & character): 8
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 8
“Dreaming” by Unknown Author. This melodramatic little THC repost tells
of a man and a woman who pull together their “tattered lives” by
consummating the love that they began in cyberspace. Isn’t the Internet
wonderful? “So blindly they tumble on, down the path to fulfillment,
finally seeing the light ahead, in the absence of the whistling train.”
That metaphor escaped me too. The story has potential, but it’s
carelessly written, overly dramatic, and incompletely developed.
Ratings for “Dreaming”
Athena (technical quality): 7
Venus (plot & character): 6
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 6
“Young Stuff” by Jefferson James (Tymm@cris.com). She couldn't be more
than 11 or 12 years old, with long, straight, sandy brown hair and big
green eyes, wearing a pair of slutty-looking hot pants and a halter top.
He’s 6’3” and 300 pounds of biker-style hormones, working as a bouncer at
a club that she’s trying to get into. She wants to go backstage; and his
fatherly spirit leads him to try to scare her off by telling her that
she’ll have to suck his cock first. She doesn’t scare that easily. She
doesn’t give him a real blowjob; she doesn’t play with his balls, stroke
his dick, or even move her head. She just sucks on his cock like it’s a
straw. But, being a swell guy, he doesn’t want to discourage her. So,
rather than tell her what she’s doing wrong, he decides to face-fuck her.
Then he lets her visit a dressing room, and after that he rapes her. He
gets caught raping her, but the other guy just joins in. The story ends
with these words: “Sure, Chrissie was tight. But, in my opinion, she was
a pretty lame fuck.”
I found the story to be depressing. I have known girls to act this way,
and the guy didn’t even really enjoy what he did to her. Aside from a
lot of messed up grammar, this is a reasonably good description of no-win
sex that benefits no one.
Ratings for “Young Stuff”
Athena (technical quality): 7
Venus (plot & character): 8
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 7
“Restless Memories” by Poppet (woodruff@bobcat.ent.ohiou.edu). The woman
wakes up in the middle of the night, thinking of her lover, who is not
there. So she masturbates while she thinks of him. That’s all there is
to it, but it’s a very good story. I know the feeling, and I know the
response.
I suspect that this was written to excite the lust of an unknown
recipient in cyberspace. Second-person narratives rooted in chat groups
usually are weak stories, but this one is in a class with Dulcinea’s best
erotic snippets. Read it, if you need a quickie.
Ratings for “Restless Memories”
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10
“Positive Therapy” by Sam Phencer (phencers@spowell.demon.co.uk).
Caitlin is a sexy nurse. The patient in Intensive Care was the victim of
an accident three months ago, seemingly uninjured except for a blow to
his head which had rendered him completely unconscious, oblivious to any
form of stimulation, such as needle pricks, scratches, or other
intrusions inflicted by numerous doctors trying to coax him back from his
nearly comatose state. The title is “Positive Therapy.” What do you
think will happen? The doctors have simply been using the wrong form of
stimulation.
One night, while Caitlin is holding his penis in her hands (That’s how
Swedish nurses take the pulse of male patients), she feels it twitch.
Quickly, she administers mouth to cock resuscitation. It works! Not right
away - but when Caitlin returns the next day, Sleeping Beauty has been
moved out of intensive care.
This is a nice little story, but it has even more interesting potential.
In the canonization of Catholic saints, the saint-makers have to
attribute miracles to the candidate for sainthood. Now what if this
young man’s mother had been praying to, say, Blessed Anthony Beelzebub
for a cure from his hopeless state? Caitlin never did report her
therapy, but the guy was cured. It would be possible that Blessed
Anthony could gain sainthood under false pretenses. This may sound
farfetched, but one day when I was younger my Dad threw away the little
plastic Saint Christopher statue that he used to keep in the car. He
explained that the Church had just decided that there was no St.
Christopher after all. You don’t suppose....
This story suffers from faulty grammar and sentence structure. I suspect
that English is not the author’s native language. If that’s the case, he
does better than most of us English speakers would do in a second
language. The language barrier not only causes grammar errors, it also
makes the entire story seem a bit stilted. The story would have benefited
from someone proofreading it before the author posted it.
Ratings for “Positive Therapy”
Athena (technical quality): 6
Venus (plot & character): 7
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 7
"Chauffeur's Dirty Job" by Caesar (caesar@bigrock.com). When the
chauffeur is asked to drive the intoxicated wife home, she comes on to
him by masturbating wildly in the back seat of the limousine. By the
time he pulls the car over to have sex with her, she is asleep in her
drunken stupor. He screws her anyway, and she wakes up mumbling the
name of a third party - neither the chauffeur nor the husband.
This is an edited version of a story that originally included a large
number of typographical errors (usually correctly spelled but wrong
words) that were often extremely distracting. This story proves the
value of proofreading. Those errors are now gone, and this has become
a very good story.
Ratings for “Chauffeur's Dirty Job”
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10
“Cousin Tanda” by Unknown Author (editor@spellbinder.bc.ca). The guy has
been staying on the farm with his cousin Tanda. One morning she awakens
him early and asks him to join her in some voyeurism. By that I mean
they watch some pigs copulate. There may be something to the old theory
of “Monkey see, monkey do,” because immediately afterward Tanda asks him
if he’d like to have a shot at it - with her, of course, not with a pig.
They do pretty well!
This is a short, but very good story. It was presented as a sort of an
advertisement for Lust So Stories, who have a web site at
http://spellbinder.bc.ca/lss/.
Ratings for “Cousin Tanda”
Athena (technical quality): 9.5
Venus (plot & character): 9
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 9