Creating a blackhole effect on a letter?

I'm new to Illustrator and I've managed to learn quite a bit but I've been having trouble with an effect that I'm trying to do on the letter "S", which is like a blackhole sucking/pulling effect where the letter stretches and shrinks at the same time. What I have so far is pretty bad:

All I've been using is curvature pen to get the rounded stretched lines to the left, and pen to connect a small area where I use gradient to gradually change colours from orange to black the further the letter gets stretched and I use scissors to cut some of the black outline out.

I don't know if there's other tools I can learn to get a much better result or if it's just about practice since I can't find any references of anything similar so far.