Review Requests: OFF
66 Public Reviews Given
72 Total Reviews Given
Public Reviews
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Review of What is Erotica?  
In affiliation with Unofficial Erotica Newsletter ...  
Rated: 18+ ★★★★★ | (4.0)

While I value the question, I do not know how accurate the opening line of this poll is. I feel this poll is more about the highly opinionated than it is the highly educated. It is a very frustrating argument to make, defending what is or is not "art". I think that the essence of concepts like "art" or "love" or "god" remain purely subjective, something each individual sees, experiences, and knows for themselves.

While we empower communities of "informed" people that are allowed to make declarations on what constitutes one of these lofty concepts, ultimately it is a choice we make for ourselves. The commonalities of our idiosyncrasies is one of the wonders of the human condition, we are the same because we are different. Where is the proof that Erotica and Art are mutually exclusive? Why would anyone suggest a division between sex and love? The informed will go on and on about the impact "art" has on you, how it effects a sensory immersion that can be overwhelming and emotional. That the response to art is "pure" while Erotica is banal and vulgar, evoking only our crudest of instincts.

Like Yoda said "unlearn what you have learned." Art is always in the eyes, hearts, and minds of the beholder but the choice is never just Coke or Pepsi, yes or no...

--Onyx
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Review of HOW MANY  
In affiliation with The Talent Pond  
Rated: E ★★★★★ | (4.5)
I Loved this, and the only thing that might (might!) have made it better would be an enhancement of the male from caricature to 3 dimensions. I do understand and appreciate the satire and the male as an anonymous cardboard cut-out suits the flow and theme but imagine the further humorous opportunities presenting themselves in the processes a male would go through selecting, courting and securing five wives! Maybe that could be Part:2... This was great and thanks again for the opportunity to read it!

---ONYX
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Review of A Mark  
In affiliation with The Talent Pond  
Rated: E ★★★★★ | (4.5)
Hello, your poem was elegant without being overbearing, efficient and to the point without being abrupt and had a consistent voice and easy-to-absorb rhyme scheme. There is a spirituality to it and its theme of introspection, with what I took away as the final message I experienced a commonality with similar thoughts of my own. Thank you for the opportunity to read this and I look forward to more of your work.


---ONYX
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Review of A Dozen Roses  
Rated: 18+ ★★★★★ | (5.0)
FANTASTIC! Light, fluid, engaging, and ADULT! Absolutely nothing wrong with this piece and while I would not consider myself a "poet" I believe I have read enough to know when what I have come across works or not. This definitely WORKS; the humor, the rhyme, all of it rolls along like the proverbial well-oiled machine.


---ONYX
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Review of Masquerade  
Rated: 18+ ★★★★★ | (4.5)
Don't you just LOVE word-limits? They drive me crazy but you distinguished yourself well in meeting the standards of the challenge. I appreciate the verbal imagery and overall composition and your choice of classical artwork to illustrate it. My only critique would be that in the judge's shoes, I would have suggested you aim for higher impact, higher intensity to set this apart as both romantic and passionate. A shade more energy in the visualizations, in the verse to allow your theme to achieve its most favorable
fruition. By this I mean an escalation in the emotive "temperature" of the piece, from relaxed to feverish to satiated. I respect your efforts, and I am glad I had the opportunity to read this.

---ONYX
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Rated: E ★★★★★ | (5.0)
This an excellent cross-section of imagery. The photographs are all high-quality and paired well with the accompanying messages. Great work, great attention to detail and it's nice having this feature to utilize.

---ONYX
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Review of Bound  
Rated: 13+ ★★★★★ | (4.0)
This is an interesting work, interesting and very imaginative. The opening sets a tone that piques the interest and that is always a good thing. By way of suggestion I have a few points to offer which you may or may not want to consider in future projects in general or for this work in particular. Either way, in the end, we all find a track that fits us and so will you; the following opinions come from a track I have found comfortable...

Your voice/ narrative perspective: it seems heavier than it "needs" to be in the sense that you could thin out the omniscient and
advance your plot instead with more active dialog and real-time voice. Bring us the audience
inside your story to a point where we are moving along in the narrative, not standing on
the side being told everything that is happening and why. Also, when selecting a narrative tense,
be consistent to that tense throughout the story, because slips with that create hiccups in the
continuity.
Like narrating as first person in one line then taking a plural perspective in another. If we are
hearing a story told by a third-person omniscient who is a character we don't encounter/ discover
until the end that's one thing, but when setting up a tale being told from the lead character's
perspective that voice, like the character, must have a consistent identity.

Dialog, Dialog, Dialog: I can't express more how biased I am to the use of dialog as a plot device. All the best stories (to Me) are
character-driven and nothing sets a character-driven atmosphere more distinctly than hearing them speak.
Dialog establishes personality and texture in a form we all are innately familiar with since, simply, we all
talk. Dialog is a very organic narrative device and offers great opportunities for subtle layering of both the
character and the plot without spelling out every nuance. It allows for a departure from the limits of "proper
English" by allowing you as the author and we as the audience to get into the more casual, more "normal"
realm of dialect. When writing dialog, I suggest as a tool for crafting and proofing that you always
ALWAYS take time to read it out loud. Listen to it, see how it sounds, how it feels to say. How credible is
it? Would a person be able to say the lines easily? And never be afraid to minimize or streamline, that's a
lesson I am still trying to learn. I Love language but it is so easy to get lost in the creating and over-burden
a story with heavy language. Try to write the way you personally think, include the details you would
notice and find important. An exercise in becoming familiar with that is taking walks wherever other people
congregate and making mental notes of what you notice, how you notice it and why you noticed it. It's great
for finding character inspiration too. Have fun with it---but don't behave like a stalker---the results may
surprise you!

And that, as they say, is THAT. I hope something of what I said is beneficial to your endeavors---supportive, not frustrating---and I look forward to reading more of your work soon.

Today IS A Good Day To WRITE!
---ONYX
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Review of The Treatment  
Rated: ASR ★★★★★ | (3.5)
Hello, this is my first visit to your Portfolio and I hope that through this review I can offer some useful suggestions and peer support.

First, I believe this story has the potential to have expansive depth in both plot and character development. I scored you 3.5 Stars for that potential, but it appears for now that this story is either unfinished or was never edited. It is suffering from very simple mistakes involving punctuation, structure, general word-choice and incorrect usage of specific words like "ensure" instead of what you meant to say which was "assure". "Therapy's" instead of "therapies", etc.

None of this is out of the ordinary or indicative of a failing on your part. Editing is a process, like writing, that must be practiced and refined. Tools like spell-check can hamstring you since it has no way of discerning the context of a sentence, only to tell if the word you use is in fact a word. The best editing tool I suggest for any writer is you and another person reading your work aloud. This is especially true when crafting a narrative using plenty of dialog between characters. Reading silently to yourself never accomplishes what open air reading does because inside your head, you will---often without realizing it---look past errors because you already know what you mean or meant. Doing this also, by turning you into "the audience", lets you pick out holes or inconsistencies in the narrative. Sentences you find yourself having to reread a few times are generally ones where the idea in your head didn't translate in the way you wrote it. When you struggle to get the point of your writing, you can then imagine what an uninformed newbie to your story might feel and through that tweak the errant sentences until the idea is as close to seamless as you can make it.

I would guess that this piece was not written here within WDC, but instead copied from another location in another format that didn't translate in its original form. Structural issues like paragraph layout, paragraph spacing and sentence spacing are all things that can get jumbled when copying & pasting from different formats and easily, after a reread, corrected. A basic suggestion when writing stories in the future is always divide your lines of dialog with a space to distinguish which character is speaking as well as dividing your paragraphs with a space and indenting. This practice makes for a cleaner presentation and overall easier read for your audience.

Finally, descriptive details! In order for suspension of disbelief to occur, for your audience to forget they are reading a work of fiction, try your best to include "little" commonalities. details that any of us can relate to like being hungry, or taking a shower. Either in a galaxy far, far away or a street in New York city, certain humanizing details are universal, and effective usage of these will enable you to get your audience to do that all-important thing which is to believe and, ideally, to care.

I look forward to seeing what becomes of this as well as reading other items in your Portfolio. Remember, EVERYDAY is a good day to write...

---ONYX

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Review of Sensual Fantasy  
Rated: 18+ ★★★★★ | (4.5)
As far as contests go this seems like a great idea, my only point of contention being the slant on vampire fiction. While I understand the flood of uninspired, un-researched, unoriginal concepts is the reason why, it still sounds more like a personal predisposition rather than an objective one. Wouldn't it be best to establish the contest's base parameters and just see what comes up? A fisherman has better chances of a good catch with a broadly cast net, contests of any type can follow this metaphoric formula to success. The creative process being unique to each of us, doesn't the spontaneity of creating narratives flow best and true with less outside leaning not more?

For my part, I do applaud the start of a monthly Erotica-related writing contest since, for one reason or another, members are "skittish" about writing erotic stories. There is, it seems, a prejudice against Erotica as a genre, an attitude that implies it is a low-brow narrative vein that lacks the "legitimacy" of Poetry, for instance. I disagree with that perceived prejudice because what is more legitimate, more true to life as we live it than sensuality, sexuality and passion...?

I hope the contest becomes a mainstay and I look forward to competing in the future as often as I can.

---ONYX

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Review of The Haunting  
Rated: ASR ★★★★★ | (5.0)

I like the interplay between horrific images that induce fright then through a shift here and there you leave the door open for the audience to wonder if the monsters were real or if it was a play on kids in costumes or, perhaps BOTH. Allowing the content to be interpretive subject to the audience's individual perspective without losing the poems direction regardless of what take you have on it is a skill, a very accomplished skill which you display almost effortlessly.

I laugh to myself as I reread the poem because for some reason I keep hearing the song THRILLER in the background. Great work for this or any other season!


---ONYX

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Review of The Lovers' Dance  
Rated: 13+ ★★★★★ | (5.0)

WOW. Does that count as a review if it sums up the entirety of my impression...? That was excellent, an elegant poem with an equally elegant, magical theme. Whatever the inspiring image was, you have taken it and run and delivered a slice of verse that is no less artful in its presentation and likelihood to inspire. The idea of the eternal cycle of Life, Death, and Rebirth is a personal philosophy I share; all that is is the fruit of all that was, and the seed of what is yet to be. Beautiful work, beautiful...

---ONYX

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Review of The Crow  
Rated: E ★★★★★ | (4.5)


Your poetry makes the reviewing process too easy! I enjoyed this theme, Animal Spirits and the idea of the world that is both within and beyond our world intrigues me and inspires story ideas as well. The poem was deserving of an award and I suppose your competition must have been fierce to keep you from 1st Place because again, as in your other works the execution was on point and appreciably rhythmic.

My only "suggestion" is merely an offer to rephrase the 4th stanza. When I read it I thought perhaps this might work in there as well as what you wrote:

Flying high above me
black wings stain the sky.
Delivering me a message
in your wild, raucous cry.

Not a major change, just different and truly, only a suggestion, not a shortcoming. Keep up the beautiful work...


---ONYX

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Review of In Your Eyes  
Rated: E ★★★★★ | (4.5)

Its melodic, has an easily followed rhyme scheme and beautiful sentiments and imagery as your theme. I know there is a schism about "Love" poetry in that one side of the fence considers "poetry" & "Love" to be synonymous while the other side of the fence looks at "Love" poetry as a recluse for the uninspired. Well, I am a Gemini and I go my own way; I am entirely for writing what you feel, how you feel it when you feel it and believe the judging of that subsequently by others isn't worth much. Having said that, I would still like to complement you; the person this was written for is blessed to have you and I found the poem an entirely enjoyable read.

I have no suggestions for edit, the work articulates itself excellently as is.


---ONYX

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Rated: E ★★★★★ | (5.0)

EXCELLENT! It puts my own Halloween poem to shame! While I don't consider myself a poet though I write what others have called poetry on occasion, this piece here is wonderful in a whimsical, visual way where neither the verse nor the imagery overpower one another. It flows in a harmony much like the envisioned dance of the Harvest Moon congregation, with an attention to the folklore and detail that would make any Wiccan proud.

I cannot imagine a thing I would change or edit; your rhyme scheme was flawless, the imagery and context was accurate and you delivered a large impression in short number of stanzas. Fantastic work, and I will be exploring more of your poetry soon!


---ONYX

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Review of The Best  
Rated: E ★★★★★ | (3.5)
Okay, here we are, review, review, review... Now without being too critical, I want to say first and foremost this isn't my typical genre so I will stick to the technical aspects as opposed to the actual content. You had mentioned to me that you have a problem with dialog. I understand and empathize; we ALL have a problem with it at one point or another. In a narrative, dialog can truly make or break your story in the same way poor casting can make or break a movie. Finding your character's "voice" and then continuing that in a consistent vein can be tricky and may require plenty of rewrites before a believable string of words comes together.

When I am dealing with this I will often speak the lines out loud, tossing them around in the air to see how natural--- or how ridiculous--- it sounds. Other good practice is to spend time in common areas and just unobtrusively listen in to how people converse; pick out and really soak up the dynamics of their verbal interaction. Listen out for slang and phrases that can help frame your characters roots and draw your character into sharper relief. Audiences love it when that can really identify a character and recognize his or her personality, well-conceived dialog is what will do this.

Next, find YOUR voice, your narrative voice and perspective. Establishing your tone is also crucial to telling a good story. Its equivalent to watching a movie in Hi-Def versus watching a movie where the volume fades in and out and the colors randomly invert.
Maintaining a uniform narrative tone keeps you from distracting your audience away from the story and you ALWAYS want your audience to be able to follow your story with as little "guidance" from you as humanly possible. By that I mean you want to tell a story that doesn't constantly keep reminding your audience that they're READING.

That all said, you're off to a great start. And like the rest of us, remember it's all just a work in progress...
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