July 26th, 2017 at 03:13am
I'm here judging the entries for the Yet Another Smut Filled A7X Contest.
Content
Right from the get-go, I empathise with Brian. I was that kid at school who went to band and was an uber-geekoid. I think the first paragraph especially resonates with me because you do have all of that pressure right away when you become a teenager, and it's all peer-pressure and sex and smoking and...I think it's just a really accurate rendition of what kids have to go through nowadays.
Honestly, I think it's a nice twist to have the main jock being gay. I read so many stories where it's "oh, band geek meets artist / photographer / other artistic subject", so it's nice to have someone be 'controversially' gay. It isn't a character that you expect to be gay and although the whole falling in love with a polar opposite is a little cliché, it works. It's a nice way to approach the subject.
Concrit
to drink, to smoke, to ‘pop their cherry’ and just, to becool. - The comma before to be cool isn't needed. Also, be and cool are too close, there isn't a space between then. I'd check if there's a space between the italics code and be, just in case that's caused it.
he was just Brian, who is also very gay - tense switch here. is also should be was also.
Mr Sharp stated cooly - cooly should be coolly.
no emotion what-so-ever - this should be whatsoever.
Matt as the later had motioned - later should be latter.
into the chlorinated water as Matt into his ass - I don't know if I'm reading it wrong, but it seems as if there's a word missing somewhere here?
While I do feel the jock and outcast/geek trope is quite overdone, I thought you wrote it well. You put a bit of a 'twist' on it with Matt being gay, which I've also read quite a bit but isn't quite as common, and I liked that Matt and Brian actually ended up getting together at the end, and it wasn't some big thing where they got busted and it was really damaging to Brian or anything.
However, I did have some problems with the story as a whole. It felt weird that Matt knew Brian so well when they had never spoken, and basically had nothing other than being gay in common. Considering they only spoke once, it felt weird that Matt invited Brian to a party, he accepted, and then they ended up having sex. Since Brian seemed so separated from the whole teenager culture of partying and what not, it was odd that he just accepted the invite and went without a second thought. I would have liked to see more development of their characters so things like that made sense, instead of just leaving me confused.
You also switched between past and present tense a ton throughout the story which was really distracting. Even from sentence to sentence the tenses were switched and I wasn't really sure which tense you were trying to go with. Adding to that, some of your sentences were worded quite awkwardly and I had to read them a couple times to understand what was happening.
Overall, this story had potential but I would definitely come back and fix up a few things if you were to come back to this story. Thanks for entering!