All Comments on 'At the Pleasure of the King'

After that line I couldn't stop laughing and was unable to finish. Hysterical!

I love the premise. D&B in a BDSM relationship. But the execution is so TIGHT. Too overwrought, allusive, cryptic. Do I really want to work this hard? Also for Nude Day wouldn't the bath scene be more appropriate? Seems like a classic case of who's seducing who. Lots could be done with that.

Some nice sentences, moments, others veering into turgid, purple prose.

Feel like this is a knot and I don't want to be the one to untangle it.

There are moments of real success, in this story, in evoking the atmosphere of David's and Bathsheba's time. The BDSM aspect seems artificially imposed, but OK. I agree with one of the previous comments that "Confess, suffer, and be free" interrupts the flow of the story by drawing too much attention to itself. It just doesn't sound at all like what David would have said. (And isn't confession more of a Christian concept, here superimposed on a pre-Christianity moment in history?) For those of us whose biblical studies were lacking, repressed, or too distant in the past, the story does seem too cryptic at points. I had to look up the legend in order to understand the reference to the dead child near the end. Overall it was a nice try but not quite fully realized.

I appreciate your skill as a writer. But this poetic style of literature isn't characteristic of what we typically see on this site, or in this category. There are writers who significantly out-shine others, but I have not even found those authors to be THIS poetic, and as others have phrased "cryptic". I couldn't make it through more than a few paragraphs. I skimmed to try and determine if the mood changed at any point, and it doesn't seem that way. Very slow, and not in the intense orgasm denial way. My advice, if you want it, is try to loosen up. Don't try so hard to be the next Shakespeare. It won't happen, and certainly not on this site. Or consider changing categories, like to "Romance" or "Erotic Couplings". At this pace, it was more in the "romance" genre for me, and definitely not what I was expecting in the BDSM category. Don't get me wrong. I don't always expect rough sex and whips and chains, but I expect one to be distinctly dominant over the other, and this story seems to lack that dynamic. If writing gives you pleasure, great. You are a good writer.

Perhaps a bit overwritten in places, but I didn't find it so difficult as some earlier commenters seem to have done. And I thought the sex -- and in particular underlying struggle of wills -- was really quite hot.

I haven't voted as I'm hoping you will do some work on this and then I can come back and give it a high five :)

I love orientalist stories, so I am totally there with the descriptions of rich jewelled accoutrements - I want more of those! I thought the sex bits were really sexy and erotic. I would definitely give a 5 for the erotic element.

There are some glitches though. Even the first sentence is a bit unclear; I was thinking 'what?' and had to pause and go over it to realise: The king is distracting himself but pretending to look like he is listening by focussing on the bits of food in the man's beard.

The allusions are a bit too vague. You could get over that by putting a quote from the Bible in the start, so we know what the story's about. But then that would make it a bit clunky when you come to the line about the dead child. Hmmm, needs thought.

The King didn't quite come across for me. I want him to be all-powerful in the start. Perhaps if you make it all from the prophet's PoV? Then when the King disrobes, we find he is a weak mortal after all.

Plus, when you wrote that the person in charge of concubines said Bathsheba was still too marked up to come, I wondered if this was going to be an anti-BDSM story and King David would go: "OMG, did I do that to you? I will foreswear the whips and chains and become a good boy." But there was a more exciting theme in here. Something about gaining a full exciting mutual sexual experience through admitting secret desires and pleasures, and about women's guilt at wanting to be pleasured in ways their husband hasn't quite guessed yet. We don't want to make a man feel he hasn't been good enough so we fake it.

Other elements of the story reminded me of one of my favourite books: Scheherazade Goes West, which is about concubines and about Western vs. Eastern ideas about women's beauty. I could say lots more! Please do work some more on this fab story. Love your rich allusive writing.

It read like a lyric poem. Sweet. You did a nice job with using well-known characters while not keeping someone ignorant of the references from enjoying the story.