Celestial Reviews 250 - January 17, 1998

Note:  Jane was a first time contestant on the $65,000 quiz show, where 
contestants have to answer questions to win the cash prize.  Lady luck 
had smiled on her, as Jane had gained a substantial lead over her 
opponents. She even managed to win the game, but unfortunately time had 
run out before the show's host could ask her the final question.

Needless to say, Jane agreed to return the following day. Jane was 
nervous and fidgety as her husband drove them home. "I've just gotta win 
tomorrow.  I wish I knew what the answers are. You know I'm not going  
to sleep at all tonight.  I will probably look like garbage tomorrow.

"Relax, honey," her husband, Roger, reassured her. "It will all be OK." 
Ten minutes after they arrived home, Roger grabbed the car keys and 
started heading out the door.  "Where are you going?" Jane asked.  "I 
have a little errand to run. I should be back soon." He replied. Jane 
waited impatiently for Roger's return.  After an agonizing 3-hour 
absence, Roger returned, sporting a very wide and wicked grin.  "Honey, 
I managed to get tomorrow's question and answer!"

"What is it?" she cried excitedly.   "OK. The question is 'What are the 
three main parts of the male anatomy?' And the answer is 'The head, the 
heart, and the penis.' "

Shortly after that, the couple went to sleep with Jane, now feeling 
confident and at ease, plummeting into a deep and restful slumber. At 
3:30 in the morning, however, Jane was shaken awake by Roger, who was 
asking her the quiz show question.  "The head, the heart, and the 
penis," Jane replied groggily before returning to sleep. And Roger asked 
her again in the morning, this time as Jane was brushing her teeth.  
Once again, Jane replied correctly.

So it was that Jane was once again on the set of the quiz show. Even 
though she knew the question and answer, she could feel the butterflies 
conquering her stomach and nervousness running through her veins.  The 
cameras began running and the host, after reminding the audience of the 
previous day's events, faced Jane and asked the big question.   "Jane, 
for $65,000, what are the main parts of the male anatomy?  You have 10 
seconds."   "Hmm, uhm, the head?" she said nervously.   "Very good.  Six 
seconds."  "Eh, uh, the heart?" "Very good!  Four seconds." "I, uhh, 
ooooooohh, darn! My husband drilled it into me last night and I had it 
on the tip of my tongue this morning..."

"That's close enough," Said the host; "CONGRATULATIONS!!"

Second note:   If you have sent me a story for review and have not seen 
the review yet, I may have made a mistake.  It's OK to write to me and 
ask what happened.

Third note: * Bumper Sticker: * Snatch a kiss, or vice versa.

Final note: Remember: even though someone else may be posting my reviews 
for me, my e-mail address is still Celeste801@aol.com.

- Celeste

      "Burning Letters" by Lord Malinov (breaking ties) 
            10, 10, 10
      "Spare the Rod" by Tiffany (sexual abuse) 10, 8, 1
      "Doubts and Uncertainties" by Kim (torture & revenge)
            10, 10, 10
      "Power and the Word" by Taria (interracial sex) 10, 10, 10
      "The Call of Desire" by DG (a.s.s. and phone sex) 10, 10, 10

Guest Reviews: 

      "Midnight Pleasures" by Myschief (cybersex & real sex) 4, 6, 4
      "Kissing Cousins" by Candy Kane (ff adolescent sex) 10, 10, 10

"Burning Letters" by Lord Malinov (malinov@mindless.com).  Malinov 
has been writing stories at a prodigious rate lately.  I saw a 
note on a.s.s.d. that suggested perhaps he has been scanning 
stories from Readers Digest and simply inserting sex into them.  
You might think that a person who writes so many stories so fast 
would write weak stories, but that is not the case.  The stories 
are short.  They differ from more fully developed stories.  But 
they have a distinct impact, and they are well worth reading.

In the present story we have a woman who has been told by her 
husband to burn her letters from her old lover.  He owns both her 
and the house now.  It's time to cut the ties.  Or maybe it's 
Independence Day. This brief story conveys an intense atmosphere 
and has a surprise twist at the end.

My advice to you is to download this author's stories whenever you 
see them and to save them for a time when you have just a few 
minutes to read a quick story.  When the sexual revolution REALLY 
comes, maybe we'll see these stories in a futuristic Readers 
Digest.

Ratings for "Burning Letters"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10

"Spare the Rod" by Tiffany (posted by Phil Phantom 
<slutmissy@hotmail.com>).  Phil Phantom, who posted this story, says 
that this is Tiffany's favorite fantasy as a young teen. She wrote it 
down as an adult, imagining herself as her mother and writing the story 
from her mother's point of view.  If this is true, Tiffany is a deeply 
troubled person.

The story is a well-written description of a seriously dysfunctional 
mother who encourages men to sexually abuse her daughter and enjoys 
watching it happen.  Although the story is linguistically coherent, it's 
really a stupid story.  It's the moral equivalent of reading about a 
person who vomits, scoops the vomit into a bowl and re-eats it, vomits 
again, and repeats this process ad nauseam.  I guess there are people in 
the world like this, but they're just not fun to read about.

I originally sent this story to a guest reviewer, who declined with this 
comment:

"Yucch!  Sorry, I couldn't finish it.  Too sick and horrible for me.  
The
writing is acceptable, nothing special, but the subject matter is just
too repulsive.  The idea that anyone actually enjoys reading this, or
gets aroused by it, is not pleasant to me.  I doubt I'd be a good
reviewer!  Good luck finding anyone well-adjusted enough to actually
write a review who's also willing to read it all and try to comment
objectively...   <grin>   I could I suppose review it as a case study
in sexual pathology, but I doubt that that's how it's actually
intended."

So I read the story myself and discovered that the reviewer was right.  
I think the author thinks there are readers who will take this story and 
say to themselves, "Hey!  This is really neat!"  Well, all I can say is 
that if anyone ever publishes that vomit story, I'll try to call it to 
the attention of those readers.  Perhaps they'll like that one too.

Ratings for "Spare the Rod"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 8
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 1

"Doubts and Uncertainties" by Kim (ghost@nym.alias.net).  In the 
first few paragraphs of this story we are given the vivid 
impression that a man who raped the narrator has now been captured 
and is going to be executed by her in revenge.  Specifically, 
she's going to burn down the wooden shed he's in, while he's 
securely chained to the workbench by a chain around his balls.  
The only way he can escape would be ripping off his own balls....

If you have ever watched Dragnet, you may recall that the plots 
often consisted of an essay embedded into the dialogue.  I'm 
convinced that the screenwriter would read an article on, say, the 
need to lock one's doors at night.  Then he would write a story 
about a middle-aged women with two little children who would fail 
to lock her door at night.  Sergeant Friday and his faithful 
psychic would then come and interrogate her, and the dialogue 
would include things like this:

"You really have to lock your doors at night."

"I know, but sometimes I forget."

"When you forget, bad things might happen.  I know, because I'm a 
cop."

Kim does something similar here; but she does a much better job, 
because she's a smut writer, not a cop.  Since I have given this 
story high ratings, you can pretty well assume that it's not a 
senseless rape and torture story.  For more details - and for an 
interesting embedded essay - I recommend you take a look at this 
story.

Ratings for "Doubts and Uncertainties"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10

"Power and the Word" by Taria (tariat@aol.com).  I labeled this 
story "interracial sex."  I could have perhaps labeled it 
"emerging sexuality," since the narrator's increasing self-
awareness in the context of her sexuality and black literature is 
the main theme of this story. I went with the "interracial" label 
mostly because I wanted to show you that it's possible to have 
interracial sex without monster cocks and white girls who love to 
be called sluts.

Cleanthe is a young black woman who has arisen from her poverty to 
attend college at Columbia University.  She is intensely attracted 
to her professor of African-American Literature, who is a white 
man.  The story describes the development of that relationship.

This is an excellent story.  It does a marvelous job of 
integrating into the story line poetry and sensible insights about 
a person's personality.  This is the sort of story that I would 
love to have my students read; but I can't, because the Puritans 
who control American school systems severely harass teachers who 
try to introduce this level of realism into literature classes.  
So I'll just ban it instead, and that way my students will find it 
and read it on their own.

Ratings for "Power and the Word"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10

"The Call of Desire" by DG (dionysian1@hotmail.com). As I loaded the 
word-processing file to write this review, I became aware that my 
husband was gazing at me from the doorway.  At least I thought it was me 
he was gazing at.  Sometimes it's hard to tell.  We share the same 
computer, and he has two Sports Illustrated calendars hanging on the 
wall right above the computer.  He refuses to throw away the 1995 
calendar.  He says it might become valuable some day.  And so this babe 
with a leopard-skin bathing suit and sand on her breasts is probably 
going to stare down at me into eternity. I have a religious calendar of 
my own - complete with Catholic fish symbols - right between his 
calendars.  Anyway, sometimes it's hard to tell what he's staring at.  
However, on this occasion, judging from the bulge in his shorts, I 
quickly ruled out the religious calendar.

"Are you happy to see me, or is that a banana in your shorts?" I asked.  
Ever since I started reading and reviewing stories for this newsgroup, 
my clever repartee has improved.

"Can you do this?" he asked.  He was wiggling his nose and moving his 
mouth in grotesque circles.

"Sure I can," I replied, imitating his facial contortions.

"Good!" he said. "Why dontcha stop what you're doing, and we'll go to 
bed and fuck like bunnies?"

I smiled.  It WAS a good imitation of those cute little rabbits that eat 
the lettuce in my garden each spring and summer. 

"Let me finish this review first."

"What's it about?"

"A guy who writes stories has been discussing his stories with his wife, 
and she's fucks him during the story.  It's pretty hot stuff!"

"I'll bet!" he said, as he walked over and stood behind me at the 
computer.

"He's always been a good author," I continued; "but his stories are 
getting better and better.  I'd like to think I had something to do with 
that improvement."

"You don't need to wear this shirt in order to write a good review, do 
you?"  I had been wearing nothing but my panties and a South Park 
Elementary tee-shirt proclaiming that someone had killed Kenny; and so 
when he pulled the shirt over my head, I was topless.  My panties were 
already moist from the story I had just read; and when he began to 
fondle my nipples and kiss my neck, I guess you could say I was primed 
and ready for action.

But I was a bit miffed at the fact that he had been ignoring the 
intelligent conversation I had been trying to have with him.  Fair is 
fair, I told myself.  If he can ignore me, I can ignore him.

"I mean, this guy would probably write good stories without me, but I 
suspect that my reviews help motivate him."  I was impressed at the fact 
that I could make this reasonably intelligent statement while my 
hormones were already registering about 5.7 on the Richter scale.  "At 
the very least I have helped get him an audience, and that's gotta be a 
factor in his development as a writer."  I nodded with pride.  Not at my 
influence on this author - which was probably negligible - but at the 
fact that I had managed to utter a sentence that was almost as insipid 
as a Rye Crisp.  A nun in high school had once told us that if we ever 
found ourselves getting sexually aroused, we should think of something 
insipid or really bland to cool ourselves off.  Rye Crisps used to work 
for me.  So did her lectures.

My husband continued his ministrations, but he glanced at the screen.  
"Straight 10s!" he said.  "What's so good about this story?"

"Well, first the husband and wife have a great relationship."

"So do we."

"And the first half of the story describes a really sexy, intimate fuck 
between the two of them."

"Better than ours?"

"No, but a lot like some of ours."  The bastard was clever.  He had 
stopped ignoring my conversation, but now I was more turned on and more 
distracted than ever.  My Rye Crisp was becoming a chocolate sundae.  
Pretty soon I would be imagining Sister Mary Sex Education in the nude.

"Then the man quotes to his wife from his fan mail.  A woman who runs a 
phonesex operation had written to him.  She said she liked his stories 
and she offered to return the favor by giving him a free phone call.  
That's why the story is called 'Call of Desire.'  The woman's name is 
Desire - or maybe Day-zee-ree, but Usenet can't transmit the French 
accents."  If this digression about computers and linguistics didn't 
cool his fervor, I was going to be in real trouble soon.

Fortunately, the phone rang at just that moment.  With any luck it would 
be for him, and I could finish the review and then join him for a romp 
in the sack. 

"It's for you," he said, grinning roguishly as he handed me the phone.

The caller was a really boring old biddy from the PTA.  The kids in our 
high school band had been invited to perform at Epcot Center during 
spring break; and she was trying to get us to cancel the trip, because 
the Disney people have been letting gays and lesbians have a Gay Pride 
Day or some such thing at the park.

Now you may think that this phone call would interrupt my husband's 
attempted seduction, but that's not the case.  He loves it when this 
woman calls, because he considers it to be a personal challenge to make 
me have as many orgasms as possible while I'm on the phone line with 
this prissy bitch.

I knew when I was defeated, and so I faced the inevitable.  I turned 
away from the computer, leaned back in my chair, spread my legs, and let 
him remove my panties.  He immediately slid around in front of me and 
knelt on the floor between my legs.  While he kissed my thighs, he slid 
two fingers into my pussy.  My husband is a very generous winner.

Now, you may think it's hard - er, difficult - to be brought to a 
roaring orgasm while carrying on a telephone conversation; but with Rose 
it's no problem at all.  She talks constantly.  She never listens.  So 
all I had to do was say "uh-huh" several times in the next five minutes.  
She had no idea that I was bucking up and down with my free hand wrapped 
around my husband's head, desperately pulling his face into my muff, 
while his tongue played my clitoris with the expertise shown by a Cajun 
fiddler manipulating his instrument.  

When I finally collapsed in exhaustion, my husband was short of breath, 
and he withdrew his head for a moment.  I think he had some pussy hairs 
in his mouth as well.  I took the opportunity to speak a few complete 
sentences into the mouthpiece.

"Rose," I said; "Disney isn't sponsoring the Gay Pride Day.  They are 
simply letting gays and lesbians do their own thing.  Nobody is going to 
be copulating on the midway. I'm sure the gays and lesbians are every 
bit as discreet as heterosexuals."

By this time my husband was back in action again.  He began to kiss and 
caress me again, and by now I was really getting into the swing of 
things.  If I didn't have to talk to the MotorMouth on the phone, then 
surely I could put my mouth to a better use.  I startled him by 
engulfing his cock completely in my mouth.  I moved up and down on it 
gently, each time withdrawing completely on the up-thrust and muttering 
"uh-huh" into the telephone.  I wasn't really certain what I was 
agreeing with, but I was pretty sure it wasn't anything important.

After a while, I realized that maybe Rose could go on forever, but my 
husband could not.  I was also getting pretty pissed at the self-
righteous bitch who was interrupting my review writing with her petty 
nonsense.  Well, maybe not.  But anyway, I decided it would be fun to do 
something really outrageous - something that would blow Rose away if she 
knew it was happening.

Gently, I removed my mouth from my husband's cock, kissed the pee-hole 
gently, and shoved his face away.  Before he could register an 
objection, I rose from the chair, turned around, knelt down, leaned into 
the chair, and spread my asscheeks. 

My husband grinned with delight.  I know this even though I couldn't see 
his face - because I don't have eyes in the back of my ass.  We don't do 
anal sex very often, but he and I have both grown to like it.  My first 
anal experience came during the Tonight Show, when I found myself 
awakening with my ass pulsating in a manner strangely similar to a pussy 
having an orgasm.  As I gained consciousness, I realized that I had 
fallen asleep while my husband had been lying with his head on my 
asscheeks, caressing me from behind.  I found out later that he had 
switched to my asshole after I started snoring, and since my ass had 
begun to pulsate, he assumed I liked it and had been doing it for 
fifteen minutes or so.  It sounded dirty and felt dirty, but only in the 
best sense.  And so we discovered something new.  On that first occasion 
I simply played with his cock while he continued to diddle my asshole; 
we both came gently, and we fell asleep very comfortably.

Back in the present, he replaced my fingers with his, caressed my 
buttocks, and began to kiss around the edges of my rosebud.  With my 
freed hand I reached into the drawer next to my desk and found a can of 
WD-40.  Casting it aside, I found the tube of KY lubricant and passed it 
back to him.  I keep KY in several places around the house.  You can 
never tell when you'll need a lubricant to help insert a large object 
into a small aperture.  I also keep WD-40 and duct tape in the same 
places, because they are almost equally useful, but for slightly 
different purposes.  Ooops - I forgot - I'm no longer trying to restrain 
my passions.

Anyway, while my husband unscrewed the cap and prepared to prepare my 
anal cavity for heavenly rapture, I found time to express a coherent 
thought to Rose.  "You know, Rose," I said, with rising irritation in my 
voice, "I don't think Minnie and Mickey were ever married.  And what 
about those three 'nephews' who lived with Donald Duck?'"

My husband didn't miss a beat.  I had barely completed my sentence when 
I felt first one finger, then two, and then three fingers gently slide 
into my freshly lubricated backdoor.  I knew that he was just priming me 
for the Real Thing.  Almost on cue, as I returned to my "uh-huhs," I 
began to experience the wonderful fullness of his penis filling my ass.  
I know lots of women don't like anal sex and lots of stories present it 
as a form of humiliation, but I consider it to be a rare delicacy.  I 
also knew that Rose would be horrified to know that the woman she was 
talking to was really a slut who enjoyed having her ass reamed out by a 
sexy stud.

My ass muscles are even easier to control than my cunt muscles.  I knew 
my husband had been almost ready to shoot his wad near the end of the 
blowjob, and his thrusts and undulations suggested that he was at least 
equally ready now.  A joint orgasm during anal sex can be scary, but we 
have learned to coordinate our efforts wonderfully.  My ass muscles gave 
him one last kiss, and immediately I felt warm cum shooting into my 
asshole.  Simultaneously, my entire body began to shudder in an enormous 
orgasm.  The earth moved.  Our bodies continued to share this ecstasy 
for what seemed like an eternity - a very nice eternity.  I'm getting 
wet just proofreading this.

As his cock eased out of my ass, I regained my composure and spoke 
calmly into the phone.  "Rose," I said, "your problem is that you don't 
have a life.  You oughta go out and get laid by a real stud.  Why don't 
you try taking it up the ass like I just did?" I paused, then added, "I 
wish you could see me now, with cum oozing out of my asshole, and my 
husband's cock continuing to throb as he removes it from my ass and 
continues to gaze at me with unbelievable lust." Then I hung up the 
phone.

My husband looked at me in amazement. "Did you just say what I think you 
said?"

"Yes," I replied.  "But she hung up back when I made the crack about 
Huey, Dewey, and Louie."

While my husband went to get some towels to wipe off the wet and sticky 
stuff from our bodies, I turned back to my computer.  I had a feeling 
that we weren't quite finished for the night.  When he returned and 
handed my a towel, I already had my tee-shirt snugly stuffed between my 
legs, preventing stains via leakage onto the chair.

"So this guy wrote a story about writing a story, and it turned out to 
be really sexy," he commented, as he kissed me several more times.  "Too 
bad you can't write a review about writing a review and have the review 
turn out to be really sexy."

Ratings for "The Call of Desire"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10

"Midnight Pleasures" by Myschief (myschief@aol.com).  Guest review by 
Bookman.

Coming up next here on KASS, "Midnight Pleasures" by Myschief. . .

But first, this brief announcement.

Authors, have you written a story you would like to see on A.S.S.?  Then 
here's something you should know.  There's a free, yes FREE! 
proofreading service available for you.  Simply send an email to Celeste 
and ask her to connect you with one of the many fine proofreaders 
available.  That's all!  It's that simple!  The proofreader will then 
contact you and work with you to put your story in the best form it can 
be.  Wow!  What a bargain!  Why send in a half-baked story when, with a 
little teamwork, you too can look like a professional writer?  Don't 
delay.  Send today!

And now, back to our regularly scheduled review. . .

It's a pity Myschief didn't (obviously) take advantage of Celeste's 
standing offer.  The story has a number of problems that a good 
proofreader would've caught immediately.

First, the plot. . .

A young woman decides to cruise the chat rooms and goes into unfamiliar 
territory.  She picks up a conversation with a guy who's into dom/sub 
and will be visiting her town soon.  Will she meet him?  Of course she 
will.  To prepare herself for the meeting, she bathes and dresses 
carefully (described in loving, if typoed, detail), and attends a 
women's strip club (ditto).

Thoroughly warmed up, she leaves the club and heads for her rendezvous.  
She meets the guy at his motel room and they have torrid sex.

At least, the sex would be torrid, if there just weren't so many typos.

A really, *really* good writer can put together a story so interesting, 
so compelling, that the reader will bounce off the occasional typo and 
keep going unslowed.  Friar Dave is a good example.  A superb writer, 
but prone to the incidental error. But even the best of writers can't 
keep the reader's interest if there's a cascade of errors getting in the 
way of the reader's involvement with the story.  For the average or 
mediocre writer, accuracy becomes even more important.  A weak but 
viable story can be made uninteresting, if there are a slew of typos 
constantly breaking the reader's connection with the storyline.  It 
says, loud and clear, "I don't care enough about the reader to work that 
hard."  When I hit an obvious, glaring typo in the third sentence, I 
know I'm in trouble.

Some other problems:

Myschief sets up his character as being interested in 
domination/submission, but except for a brief flirtation with leashing 
her wrists, it isn't touched again.

The final line, obviously intended for closure, simply doesn't make 
sense.  They've been corresponding by email; he knows where she lives; 
and at the motel he knows and calls her by name.  Then to close it with, 
"I kiss him goodnight, he doesnOt even know who I am.". . .huh?  (Oh, 
and that thing in the middle of 'doesn't'?  It and its cousins appear 
throughout the story, nearly requiring in some places a translator sheet 
to figure out what was intended.  It's caused, I understand, by using an 
archaic word-processing program like Wordstar that Usenet no longer 
reads well.  Not necessarily the fault of the writer, but still. . .)  
{Note from Celeste:  It's probably not an archaic word processor - it's 
probably a very good one.  The funny symbol probably stands for a "smart 
apostrophe."  It's a good idea to turn off such features on your word 
processor, because Usenet usually cannot handle them, and the result is 
these funny symbols.}

And finally, the POV (point of view).  First person is fine, but first-
person present tense is problematical.  If you're going to involve the 
reader that closely in the speaker's life, so closely so that they're 
following the narrator's moment-to-moment activities, then all of those 
activities have to have importance, a narrational cohesion that brings 
the picture of the individual together.  Check out James Joyce, 
*Ulysses*; see how he did it.  If you don't achieve that importance, 
then all the reader is left with is a pointless jumble of "I did this, 
then I did this."  And if you're not aiming for that close an 
involvement, then don't use a first-person present tense POV.  First-
person past tense works just fine, without the dislocation.

This story, well, anecdote, since there is no conflict/resolution, has a 
lot going for it.  It also has so many self-defeating mistakes and 
problems it's almost not worth reading.  Pity.

Ratings for "Midnight Pleasures"
Athena (technical): 4
Minerva (general appeal): 6
Apollo (appeal to reviewer): 4

"Kissing Cousins" by Candy Kane (rytr33@hotmail.com). Guest review by 
David Rills.

Pamela, 18, is baby-sitting her 13-year-old neighbor, Michelle. The two 
girls are sitting in front of the TV when they channel surf across the 
adult channel. After scenes of a boy and girl making love, two lesbians 
appear on screen.  The scene sends Pamela's thoughts back to the sexual 
encounter which she had with her "kissing cousin," Becky.  

Awakening from her reminiscence, Pamela finds Michelle on top of her 
begging for sex.

The story is extremely well done and the dialog is convincing. The plot 
is very believable and the descriptions of the lesbian acts between 
innocent young girls is arousing.  This story is well worth the reader's 
time.

Ratings for "Kissing Cousins"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
David (appeal to reviewer): 10