It’s time to share the results of Round 4 of the 2020 Smut Marathon. Below you’ll find a few details and insights about that round’s assignment as well as dates for the next round.
Now that Round 5 is in progress, read on to see what I wrote and how I fared for Round 4…or click the link(s) below to read my entries for past rounds.
►► Previous entries: Round 1 | Round 2 | Round 3 | Round 4
Round 4 Assignment – A Story Featuring Dancing
For the fourth round of the Smut Marathon, writers were asked to draft an erotic story comprised of 275 to 325 words, but that also featured dancing.
My entry for this round was listed as #45 and is shown below:
Tera-Bitten Tango
Dex hates not having control. Still, he sets his sync-ware to scan for Tera’s signal — her siren’s song.
Come to me. I’ll take care of you. Protect you…*
Her words resonate across a pirated frequency, flooding his biosensors with erotic, electrical impulses that harden his cock. His biomechatronic legs set out in search of her, traversing backstreets awash with neon. Sector loudspeakers blare curfew warnings as if fighting for sensory dominance over the scent of decay and prevalence of dejection. But, hell if he’s stopping.
Stepping inside the club, the music hits him like a wave. It blasts him back then pulls him towards the empty seat at the front of the stage. Tera’s dancing now, her cybernetic limbs cutting gracefully through sound and space like scissors as she moves in time with the binaural beat.
The smell of her, sweet and pungent, fills the air as she thrusts her naked sex towards the patrons. She wears a crotchless bodysuit to entice the crowd. His cum has stained the shiny latex numerous times, but he doesn’t need such gimmicks. Just the wet, whirring sounds from her vaginal conduit is enough to make him desperate. He pulls his erection free of his standard-issue uniform and begins to stroke its length.
I’ll catch you. Destroy all that is keeping you back. And then I’ll nurse you…
He ignores those laughing at his eagerness. Soon, their humor becomes disbelief when she carefully lowers herself from the stage to straddle his hips. With Tera impaled upon him, he grinds in a frenzy until she takes control and sets the tempo. Resting her forehead on his, she closes the circuit — connecting flesh, bone, and electronics.
Dex knows she’s exploiting a software glitch, accessing the fuck out of his hard drive until her backdoor upload is complete. But, hell if he’s stopping.
*Italicized lyrics by Bjork Gudmundsdottir | “Come to Me” from the album Debut (1993)
My Thought Process
I wrote several drafts for this round.
At first, I drew a bit of a blank on how I wanted to incorporate dancing into an erotic storyline. Using a stripper or exotic dancing as one of the characters seemed an obvious choice—and likely one many other marathoners would use. But, no ideas are bad when brainstorming. So, I allowed my creative process free reign to see if I might uncover an original angle.
I settled on using a couple of randomly chosen, drastically different songs to act as my inspiration. I ended up creating 2 workable ideas. From there, I drafted about 4 or 5 differing outlines that featured dancing in some manner.
Though I liked several of my outlines, all but two required more words than the allotted word count requirement to tell the story to my satisfaction. I tweaked the two workable outlines, making one a crime/horror story (just for the hell of it) and taking the other into a more dystopian/cyberpunk direction.
Never having attempted a cyberpunk story, I decided to develop that storyline in a third-person/present POV.
To get the right ‘feel’ for that story, I had to research a bit of cybernetics and computer terminology to ensure the story reflected the genre. I enjoy speculative fiction, so it wasn’t too foreign a concept for me. Still the resulting story, about two cyborg characters, had to come off as authentic…and sexy too. So, the extra bit of research actually helped with that.
I had fun with this story and will definitely slate it for one to be re-written and developed to be a 3K-7K word short story at a later date.
My Round 4 Results
I scored 4 points over all—with 3 points coming from the public vote and 1 point from the jury. My entry moved me up one place from the last round, being as I ended up with 7 actual public votes this time. As a result, I’ve moved up from position 23 to 22 in the overall standings.
As always, I tend to get a range of comments and feedback from readers. Below are a few of the comments I received…in no particular order:
“A different take on the lap dancing theme that a few other stories ran with and all the better for it. The imagination of the descriptions was great, and I’m a fan of sci-fi. But it didn’t quite work for me as an erotic piece.”
“This is so far outside my interests and comfort zone that I’m not sure I can give meaningful feedback on it. I appreciated some of the artful alliteration and I did like the ending, with its echo of his earlier determination/thrall, but I have no idea whether a whirring vaginal conduit is erotic in this genre.”
“45- Wow! This was fun and unique and sexy! I really enjoyed this little sex adventure!”
“I laughed at “standard issued” but really loved the “completing the circuit” line. It felt poetic but had payoff in the final few lines. I didn’t immediately like that they just get to sex so easily… but the weird sci-fi scene debased me enough to wonder if this isn’t so abnormal. Respect for going out there with so few words and still trying to engage with potentially boring techno jargon. You handled this task well! My imagination and curiosity is engaged. I’d like to read more!”
“45) A novel story. Powerful impressions of lust and satisfaction in a futuristic setting – I was fascinated and hooked.“
“I love the dystopian, yet futuristic feel of this story, and the connection they have. I smiled at his ‘hard disk’ and her ‘backdoor’.”
“45.Tera-Bitten Tango */ Star: It’s an intriguing setting. / Star: Unique synopsis. / Wish: I wish I knew more about these characters.”
General Overview of the Field
Overall, I was quite impressed with everyone’s efforts. Sure, there were several that had similar portrayals of ‘dancing’, which resulted in many entries blending together as opposed to standing apart. Still, the technical aspects of writing this round were quite sound. And everyone used the ‘dance’ theme in a way that fulfilled the assignment requirements.
Each voting round, I remain mindful that entries will reflect varying degrees of experience and writers who are in varying stages of their writing journey.
I know that every participant is writing the best they can and try not to have unrealistic expectations that every story will be on par with that of my favorite best-selling writer or within the genre of my choice.
So, dancing wasn’t such an inspirational theme for this group as a whole. (It certainly wasn’t for me.) Oh well. I still appreciated the effort put forth by everyone…regardless if the entry was ‘obvious’ in its use of the prompt, wasn’t overly erotic, or tended to be more of a ‘scene’ than complete story.
It’s hard to come up with original ideas under pressure, especially if it’s not something one is use to doing. Yet, stories were submitted. Kudos to those who did!
Getting any words down at all—especially in a coherent manner and with such few words to work with—is a feat in and of itself…whether writing in a competition or not. I applaud everyone who was able to get an entry written, edited, completed and submitted by the deadline.
Without entries, there would be no stories to read…nor to judge. So, while others might feel a sense of disappointment in the offerings this round, I sincerely appreciate the hard work behind each entry.
To those needing encouragement…keep your head up and be proud of what you’ve accomplished.
To those who have left the marathon—for whatever reason—your writing journey doesn’t have to stop there. PLEASE KEEP WRITING!
My favorites (and my votes, in bold) were as follows this round: 42, 27, 24, 2, 49, 6, 17, 26, 32, 52, 3, 4
Concluding the Fourth Round
Writing cyberpunk was fun. I’ll definitely be doing more writing within that genre in the future (not necessarily as a part of the marathon). As far as the dancing theme was concerned, I’m not likely to include that as a central part of any future erotic works. But, one never knows.
In any event, I qualified to move on to the next round. So, I’m looking forward to the next assignment.
. . . . . . . . .
►► Round 5 writing ends MAY 27 and voting begins on MAY 31. ◄◄
— All writing and fiction © 2020 Beatrix_B | The Pink Seam —
VOTE SOON for Round 5!
Click here for a countdown to the next vote!
Want to cheer on the writers? Come and binge-read several rounds of smutty stories written for this long-running writing competition hosted by Marie Rebelle. Check out the reader info, which explains how the voting works. Then be sure to note the upcoming Smut Marathon dates for the next voting rounds here.
masturbating (while describing what the voyeur is seeing) or from the vantage of the voyeur watching someone masturbate. The more I thought about it, the more I complicated things, I think. But, I really wanted to create something different and unexpected.