All Comments on 'Revelation Blues Pt. 01'

I hope you submit the chapters a day at a time. So far you have me at the edge of my seat.

This could go anywhere ( but nor likely somewhere nice ) . Indeed sweet, quiet Carla could be gaming him . The story went round & round the possibility in ever-tightening concentric circles over the possibility of Mary having a affair. The circumstantial evidence weighs against her. I wish the author had thrown a intellectual bone with more meat on it to gnaw on as a concluding note.

It's a bit dry and through recitation of vaguely intriguing facts. Scott seems a decent fellow but I'm not overwhelmed with empathy for him. Its hard when he, himself is dispassionate about his home life having it's foundations in the sand. . Mary sounds like a attractive woman but not indispensable.

Sojoman hasn't seen fit to give us a clue why this couple breaking apart would be deeply traumatic for anyone. The husband is merely resolute in terms of verifying or disproving Carla's claims. All the characters are where they are because of initial attraction, circumstance & convenience . There are no great passion in imminent peril sightings as of yet.

The author has established his credentials as a story teller in terms of getting my head into the current intrigue(s) . This is a impressive effort from a newbie author. Hopefully, however, the subsequent submissions will show someone in the thrall of a bona-fide emotion of one order or another.

Nicely written story which promises a sturdy plot.

A personal gripe of mine is that the exposition is just a tad verbose and could do with being brief but this certainly does not detract from the story as a whole. Also, the padding-out does paint a clearer picture about the characters and so they are more believable.

This story has potential and I am confident the author shall deliver instalments with consistent quality. Therefore, I'm certain it shall not conclude with an 'ex-marine, military precision revenge' ending.

An awful lot of repetition - as if you don't trust the reader to keep up with what's happening. I'm sure that first part could have been written just as effectively in 2 or two and a half pages.

and I'll be looking forward the following chapters but, not knowing what direction it's heading in, I'll do what I always do with multi-part stories and wait until I've read it all before awarding stars.

I do agree that it's a little bit 'wordy' in places - but I don't really have much room to talk about that - and maybe its a bit like telling Mozart that his music had 'too many notes' in it.

Is that one of the most frequent mistakes LW writers make is to focus on backstory way too early in the telling....before they've even bothered to hook.

It is nice to see a husband that doesn't immediately assume the worst, turn to hate, and begin planning his revenge on the words of a friend, though. Seems like this place has been trading emotional realism in for some misguided vision of masculinity, lately, and become almost sadistic in its love of murderous retribution. I like stories that feel something, personally.

This is a strong start to the story cant wait for the next chapter and see what he finds. I hope he nuts up and calls martin and find out the real reason they got divorced. I bet when he looks into andy;s suicide he will find that andy wanted her to be with him and she said no because he didn't make enough money. Hope the kid is his and if not it will be easier to cut her loose.

This story has one of the older cliche premises, but it appears that the author is thinking to take it in a new direction.

However, I can only say it appears that way because the author made one of the even older errors. He spends huge amounts of writing giving an extremely detailed backstory and telling us all sorts of stuff before we really get to know the characters. It's like he had written out detailed descriptions of the characters for his own use, and then decided to provide us with all of that informatoin.

Sadly, this isn't very good writing. Sojoman, you need to trust your writing more. Much of the information you revealed in the long "info-dump" that was the first half of this chapter could have probably been condensed considerably and brought out later as the specific bits of information were needed. Use conversation to talk about a lot of this. The revelation that the artist Andy might have been Mary's lover is a decent example of this. Yes, you again used the internal monologue flashback after he's mentioned, but at least you had a character bring him up. Earlier you had chapters which were nothing by long paragraphs of backstory.

Be interesting to see where you take this. The idea is good. Just wish the style of writing supported drawing readers into the story.

That's simply beacuse the writer took a very long time to tell us very little. We could have had the same information in a page. This is a story where I, and probably many readers, skim through the verbiage. I read the first sentence and last words of each paragraph to be certain nothing important is being missed...and it never was. This was badly in need of an editor. It needs to be trimmed by more than half. Learn to be more concise and stop saying things three ways to be sure the reader gets it.

A woman tells him that she thinks her husband is having an affair with his wife. She reveals things that only his wife would know and then talks about previous affairs. Then she mentions that a woman named Fiona is on her husband's cell phone. By coincidence his wife is having a girl's night out with her friend Fiona that evening. When he gets home his wife isn't there. He innocently muses to himself that his wife must be running late at Fiona's.

This is not humanly possible. He would be wondering if Fiona wasn't covering for his wife while she was out fucking someone else. Even if it isn't true it's what he couldn't help but wonder.

the stupid bozo is in denial and over analyzing, pathetic fool. better start greasing his asshole as he is soon going to get fucked by don and mary

But not when the story is primarily narration. Lacking action or intrigue, this tale needs more dialog to really hum. Still, so far so good.

I enjoy stories in which a lot of background is given

At the very least, fifty percent of this narrative (story?) is absolutely unnecessary. In addition, much of the background simply takes on the nature of a filler. Some writers seem to think that volume can replace quality. Not so!

I somehow keep hoping Mary is innocent and Carla/Don is/are playing a dirty game... but it'll probably be an other adultery story.

not its time for a tallyho and ride to the foxes, TK U MLJ LV NV

Obviously he needs facts. How he is going to go about it should be very interesting.

Also the Fiona connection seems very suspicious. His lack of interest in the previous divorce could be his weak point.. There seems to be a plot hole here, first he goes along with the idea that she had multiple affairs and that he forgave them which Carla presented. But later on he says that he never had any reason to imagine Mary having an affair. Why didn't Carla call him on that?

and can see you've tried too to write well. I found it labored and stilted and have given up after a page.

Continuity problems

"Mary was now a beautiful 43 years young woman,... Even pregnancy and childbirth didn't alter it for more than a few months."

Several pages later she is in her mid thirties and childless.

Renquist writes really long stories with tons of irrelevant detail, and gets good scores, so probably you will too.

I'll keep reading

You clearly have the ability to write in a way that catches the reader, but as somebody else mentioned, you do need to enlist the services of an editor, if only to help you overcome your mixing of tenses (not death to a story in my view but irritating nonetheless), and to correct basic errors such as 'career perspectives' which surely should be 'career prospects'? That said, like everyone on here you are an amateur writer and us critics are amateur at that too, so pick out the useful stuff and ignore the crap, but above all, keep writing! Thanks, I shall look forward to the next part.

Up front, Carla wants to talk to him. WE all know it is about his wife having an affair, because it always is. Then follows TWO entire pages of background that nobody cares about and doubtfully will ever be relevant to the rest of the story. Then, surprise, we learn that Carla thinks Mary is having an affair. Then TWO more entire pages go by without advancing the story one iota past what Carla and Scott have just discussed.

At this rate, the entire four part story could probably be told in two pages. An editor would help. I'm bailing. Life's too short.

The writing is too exact. Like this:

"He needed to find out about those 'affairs' Carla referred to. If Mary did indeed have one or several affairs in the past, she certainly managed to hide them, and hide them well. If he can find any trace of these affairs and prove at least one of them, then there is no reason why she couldn't be having one with Don right now."

Even if you just cut out words, this would be better:

"He needed to find out about those 'affairs'. If Mary did have one or several, she managed to hide them well. If he can find any trace and prove at least one, then there is no reason why she couldn't be having one with Don right now."

Not perfect but not as verbose.

Seems to be close to unanimous on excessive narrative AND excessive detail! I would vote right now with ConMan Don and LazyAss Sweetie planning to OFF our intrepid Boring Hero Hubby! If they do it while he is drinking single malts, we may get to go out to recess early! Will withhold rating at least one more chapter.

@BruceDoubleDeuce - Hubby stated to himself that he was going to go along with Carla's reportage. He did NOT say he believed it, he just didn't react by denying its possibility!

If you have to verify, then it's not trust. He doesn't trust or he would simply ask Mary "what the fuck is going on? Are you having an affair?"

You drag everything out. Fifty or more words to make a simple point. I like

long stories that move at a faster pace.

For what it's worth, you have readers who like your work. I liked this opening of what appears to be an interesting story that appears to be capable of going in a number of different directions, but almost certainly all bad ones for the husband.

I'll grant you that you need to work on some basic writing technique. In particular, the tense changes (from happened to will happen) over and over were a little bit disconcerting. But - and here's the big BUT - I kept reading and I think most readers do. Your writing is rough, but if you have a story that grabs readers, they will stay with you. One of the best writers on this site started off very rough as well, and not just in tenses, but has become one of the best currently working. Although not as much as he should be.

As to length, there's nothing wrong with your length. Some readers are pissed and say you're overwriting. So what? It's obvious that some readers on LIT consider anything over one page as a waste of their time. So let them go read something shorter. Maybe a telegram.

I won't deny there have been some very good shorts here. You can say a lot in a page or part of a page. But by and large and I'd bet money most veteran readers would agree with me, the best stories and the ones that rank highest and the ones that are remembered, are the long ones.

I don't know if Mary has been cheating on her husband. But I'd bet she has. I don't know if the husband will kick her ass out or somehow make it back to a reconciliation. Or wind up with the other guy's wife. But I know I'll keep reading to find out and I think a lot of other people will.

After you've read enough Loving Wives there is pretty much a limited selection of really different plots. So writing a good one involves working within the guidelines and keeping things off balance enough that you're not 100 percent sure exactly what's going on. Now you've got a guy who was happy and now isn't, who knows something is wrong but even now isn't quite sure exactly what.

The fun part is going to be following him as he finds out the truth and, if it's bad, has to deal with whatever he finds.

People can say whatever they want about your work, but I've read a lot of the stories in the Loving Wives category. And there's room for erotic stories about hot sex and for guys who get off on seeing their wives doing it with other guys - or girls (cuckold stories) and sheer revenge stories in which the wife's boyfriend is castrated and THEN thrown into a pool of piranhas and the wife is sold into slavery in a Mexican freak sex show.

But the best stories ever written and posted here and the ones that people remember, are the kind you're writing. No matter how bad or good it turns out to be, you're heading in the right direction.

Write it your way - your story is fine so far and needs no defending.

waiting, waiting, liked the begining and character introductions. waiting for the DNA on the kid. 5 for the start.

Overly-verbose and repetitive. Nothing much happened in chapter one. I still finished this part, but I began skimming (and even used the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics method to get through it). More dialogue would have helped. One question: If he's got the money for a new, custom Beemer, he should have enough for a good, private detective to get the goods on Mary.

All he did is make excuses for his wife. Very wishy washy and unobservant, it's like he was living a separate life from his wife while occupying the same premises. Too trusting, he pretty well let her do whatever she wanted.

You are taking a long and arduous path to get where you are going in this story. I merely skimmed the last two pages to help avoid the repetition.

I tend to agree with others that this could have been shortened a bit. Since Scott now knows about more than one affair, the next step should have been straight to a PI to find out what is going on. This time wasting of writing down all the little odd things that have happened is merely delaying the inevitable. Scott is a COO of a large corporation and should be pretty decisive, but he seems to be anything but in his personal life. No use sitting and wondering who is telling the truth and who is or is not cheating, just find out, since it is clear he has the financial means to do so.

NIce. Look forward to the rest of the tale

Hope its worthwhile. Waiting for ch. 2...

Longwinded, but still interesting. There were some points I wanted to mention, but others have done that already (dry, unemotional characters, long infodump, etc.).

One angle I like is that Scott almost has to play detective (and I don't mean private investigator). Who is lying? Is Don telling the truth about Mary? Or is it halftruth, and half lies? Is Mary lying to Don? Maybe even Carla is lying. This makes me want to read the second chapter.

Scott looks like a problemsolver, one with apparently great empathy (despite the way he's written). Then why, if his wife has been behaving erratically, doesn't he get down to business and find out WHY she's behaving weirdly? You can chalk it up to idiosyncrasy only to a certain point.

If I were him, I had definitely wanted to know WHY she'd suddenly want to move after she'd been so adamantly against it, and literally ONE DAY before he resigned from his work so he could stay in California...

I want to know how this plays out.

Scott needs to do what he does best, which is earn money - and use what he knows to get a decent PI on Don and Mary's tails. Do what you do best, and hire people who know how to do what you need done. And do a DNA test on the kid.

Really, Really slow. I will give 3 stars in hope.

Show don't tell.

Show Don't Tell.

SHOW DON'T TELL.

If you don't know what this means, google it along with "writing".

For me the story is not slow. The Author wrote in his preface the story will be long, so the long first part is suitable to introduce the main characters..

Regardless of what promise the story line offers, it is WAY to wordy. Whole paragraphs could be removed and the story would not miss them. DQS says it wordiness is OK, but look at his WWWM, it died of sheer weight.

If I had nothing else to do, maybe I would not worry about the endless fluff, but I have a life overflowing with other demands so my time for entertainment is limited. If Chapter 2 has as much filler pap as this one, I'll probably just give up. I'll then never know how it ends, but really don't figure it is worth my time.

with some interesting wrinkles..for example, could Mary literally be going off the deep end and including Don in her delusions (telling him what she did?)..or is she in fact cheating (which is likely). I do have a couple of problems with the story, one that is common to all writers including myself:

1)While I agree with DQS that wordiness in of itself is not a problem, there is something to be said for simplifying things. With details, ask yourself if it makes a difference to the story. UK writers especially live to go into details about what they had for breakfast that morning, but does it advance the story? Some details are important, like what a character did that was different (read a story once where I recall it hinged upon the detail of a husband buttering his toast leading to finding out he was a murderer, and it worked). Even if the details are needed, it is better to break up long paragraphs into shorter ones simply for readability.

In conversations they don't need to go on and on to make a point and so forth, keep it to what drives the plot forward. I run into the same problem, there is rich dialog there, detail, but sometimes it is just too much. The problem is it can lose the reader's interest, trying to get where they are going.

2)The character of Carla and Scott are too rational, too cold, they remind me of Robert Jarvik, inventor of the first artificial heart, who is this brilliant man but is as cold as a bar of steel. I realize that he is that type of person and people are in denial, but as other posters point out, he is too logical....he hears Don has Fiona's number, his wife is supposedly there, and he goes home and makes dinner? He doesn't drive to Fiona's house to see if his wife is there, to try and verify? Very few people would sit there and say "okay, let me build a logical case" like that, not if they have emotions. If I heard my spouse was having an affair, and one night she told me "I am staying with a friend" or something, you damn well better believe I would check it. Believability is important, and Scott is more an image then a person at this point. What is he feeling? Not logically dissecting "How could she be having a an affair" but rather "I love my wife, I truly do, but right now for the first time I am experiencing something I never thought I would have, doubt, and it is something I could have done without in this lifetime or others".

I do look forward to reading the rest of this, and I really hope that the way it is being told is indicative of the future plot, that even if she is cheating it has elements more then the bitch cheating on her husband, taking the money and running for a slime ball.

For the poster who said WWM by DQS died of its own weight,it didn't, it is now a book, 2 parts out there, and waiting for 3 and 4, and it has only gotten better.

A good story so far, but I seriously hope Scott isn't so stupid as to not get everything in order financial, his son, life, etc, before he confronts his wife.

will be very apropo in this instance, TK U MLJ LV NV

So far so good. cant wait to read Chapter #2 and see what Scott finds out. Maybe his son is really her Artists buddys child and his g/f left because Andy was getting into too many Panties.

BLAH BLAH BLAH I gave up half way through, there is no need for it to be so wordy and boring.

It is only a long story because you got a serious case of verbal diarrhea.

Strikes me as verbose Indian English. Sorry.

Tremendous story so far. However, you have four LONG pages of nothing but one conversation and a smattering of thought. Cut down on your descriptive bent!

Totally agree with 'tiredandold', needs more conversation . But I can't seem to be able to stop reading,

the character scott is as dispassionate as the telling of the story. if this story were a color - navajo white

Very slow start!!

But you've got WAY too much conversation and over drawn thoughts in this. Needs a good editor.

We got to the alleged affair on page 2 of Part 1 and I see that he confronts Mary on page 1 of Part 2, and Part 2 has 5 pages!. There must be some twists and turns that I cannot imagine. Otherwise, I will not finish this one. This story was likely written by a Brit who does a pretty good job of making it read like American English. But there were some weird phrases and some continuous misspellings.

I don't think we need CSI or Sherlock; Yet...TK U MLJ LV NV

but wasn't expecting Anna Karenina. I bailed midway through page three. On the plus side, author didn't tell us every time someone blinked or breathed in or out.

nor do the number of years they were married before, and now to each other.

If he is the COO of a major corporation, his people skills do not come home with him from the office.

I thought he was supposed to be the smart one.

I bailed half way through page 2. I see I gave it a 3 last time, bit high I think. This was an irritating & difficult read. I don't want to be mean but you wordmanship, grammar & general English writing are not of a high standard, now that often doesn't matter if the plot & storyline are interesting but this was long, boring & not very enjoyable. I don't intend to read the other chapters, I read to enjoy not to endure. 2 **

yes, the story is extremely wordy. But worse, the paragraphs are long, long, long. That may work for books, but for computer screens, extremely long paragraphs are daunting and very hard to follow.

Too many words for too little result. Get to the point.

Still five stars. Still a favorite.

when is it time to cut thru for the upcoming chase, TK U MLJ LV NV

Finished part one and only now is he actually getting concerned about what Mary is doing and with whom.

OH, Gawd! How I HATE These clueless, trusting, denying guys!

...didn't he just drive to Fiona's to see if Mary was there?

Quick easy resolution to some questions!

He is far too trusting to the point of stupidity. As someone mentioned why did he not go to Fiona's that night. That alone annoys the reader.

It is a fatal flaw for a writer to undervalue the intelligence of their readers. We shall see as the plot moves on but 5* for an intriguing, well written read.

I don't normally read many other comments, but did notice some here talking about the long paragraphs. I agree; for some reason, a long paragraph makes me want to read the first and last sentence and then move on to the next. Shorter paragraphs, more breaks, makes it easier for the reader.

As far as your writing goes, I have no complaints. The story makes sense; I can see how a husband, even a high-functioning businessman like Scott, could over-look any clues left by his wife. He trusted her, still does to an extent, but now suspicion has reared it's ugly head and he'll start discovering some things.

When you love and trust someone, it's very possible that some things that could be considered suspicious - will fail to register. Good story. Thanks for posting.

Interesting story and well developed.

I like it.

Top ratings from me.

I agree with a lot of what DQS posted, especially about getting an editor. I’m not put off by long stories and agree that some of the more enjoyable and memorable ones we’re the longer variety. That said, I would encourage caution to make certain the point, feeling or idea you are trying to get across to the reader isn’t lost in a forest of words.

Looking forward to the next chapter.

Agree with the previous anon comment about the mundane details in the story. What strikes me in the way that you've written Scott and Mary's relationship is that it seems very flat there appears to be little real love. At the moment I won't be surprised to find that Mary is cheating and it won't surprise me if Scott finds out that she cheated in her first marriage.

Just love the cat and mouse game of a cheating spouse. As they say let the games begin. Storyline is good and story flows well. Well done 5 stars

Wordy. A full page and a half between the opening phone call and the meeting it arranged. There's character development and then there's utterly and irrevocably losing your readers' interest. The balance here is not on your side.

LWlurker

Not much different from a lot of stories. Guy tied to work and doesn't mind the home fires. What but a stupid doesn't want to know history of woman before getting married. Especially at his age!

He worried earlier about all her time and suddenly doesn't.

Those stupid pills get them every time when married to work first and wife second.

He didn’t seem upset enough about the past affairs. His deduction about how the only way Don could know about Andy was spot on…and about as solid of a circumstantial proof as there could be. His focus SHOULD be: 1) to verify past affairs, and 2) to get prepared to divorce his cheating wife.

.

3 ***

LWlurker has said what's needed. There were too many irrelevant details about this and that. The pages simply didn't want to turn.