Posted by Splay on June 30, 2004 at 20:24:47:
Sword and sorcery. Blades and blood. Bodkin-bebristled battle babe beheaded. (Sorry, got carried away there.)
This story is exactly what I expected to find in the archives but hadn't seen till now--straighforward amateur pervporn. Carthus wastes no time letting us know what we're in for--we get a moist hot pussy in the first sentence, glistening breasts in the second, and 11 swords in the third. Contrived suspense is unnecessary when there's impending thrill killing.
The writer shows skill. His timeline is steady, lingering lovingly over every second of Claudia's ordeal. He goes the extra mile to give the victim a personality, a life, so that we can better feel her death (the paragraph where she reminisces is pure poetry). His tone is consistent with the long-ago-and-far-away land-that-never-was setting. There's an ending. This is good, solid work.
Yes, good, solid work, but heavily marred by childlike grammar, misleading punctuation, and so many wrong homonyms that I started to think it was done deliberately for comic relief. It wasn't. I've made a list:
there/their
shear/sheer
bare/bear
site/sight
waist/waste
Misspelling is one thing, but to use the wrong homonym is to use the wrong word. It's distracting. As for the grammar and punctuation, what could one do but to go back in time to grade school but this time give a fuck about English class?
Despite its flaws, this story accomplishes what the writer intended for it, and that's the most important thing.