If you want to see your story published on its first submission, here are some tips:

Please read our site guidelines to make sure your story is compliant. This is very important. Certain scenarios and sexual practices are not allowed. Cardinal sins are rape, sex with an underage person (under 16 years of age), violence and bestiality. Submitting a story containing any of those could see your whole account terminated.

Please do not depend on spell check to edit your story. Read it carefully to check your spelling because spell check will allow misspellings that are words, often with hilarious results, e.g. I put my arms around her waste. (That was in a story. I did not make it up.)

Please format your story into paragraphs of about four sentences or where the narrative should logically break. All dialogue should be formatted into separate paragraphs each time someone speaks. A mass of prose with few or no paragraph breaks will be returned to you.

Please read your story paying attention to where you pause. There should be a comma there if it is a phrase or a full stop if it is a complete thought.

Read the Writer's Resources about the use of apostrophes if you are not sure. They are not for plurals. They are used either for contractions or to signify possession. Read it for other punctuation marks to know that you are using them correctly.

Please do not overuse exclamation marks. They lose their power if used in every other sentence.

Please check your verb tense throughout your story to be sure it is consistent. Many submissions have tense shifts from past to present and back again.

Please take a look at the proper form for punctuation, formatting, and capital/lower case letters for dialogue in published stories and follow that example in your story.

Please do not use text speak in your story or short forms like & or ok or lbs. Use the entire words.

Please do not expect that you can spend an hour putting your thoughts in writing and that it will be published. The writers whose work is most admired here on Lush spend time editing and improving their stories before they are submitted and published. If you put in the time and effort, you will have the satisfaction of only minor edits being done by the mods and your story will be posted on its first submission.

Please do not resubmit your story as new with no changes after it has been returned to you for editing. This is a waste of the volunteer time of the mods as well as your time. Lush maintains a high quality of erotica by insisting that stories be literate before they are published. We are certain that you would not want that to change.

Walk away from your story for a few hours, or as long as a day. When you keep rereading your story, you see what should be there because you know what you have written. Time and distance will give you the perspective to see your mistakes.

Please take the time to read the resources available on all aspects of writing in the writers' forum. They will help you polish your work and allow it to be published more quickly.

Please read some of the Editors' Picks stories to get an idea of the standard of stories we'd like to see submitted.

Finally, a thank you when you have been helped by us would be appreciated. As I said, we volunteer our time and spend hours working on your stories. We really do want to post them for you.

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I had a story yesterday that began with a note saying that the writer knew it had grammar and spelling mistakes but it was a first draft. The story had no formatting, all one paragraph, and not one capital letter but for the characters' names. It indeed was full of spelling and grammatical errors and more. I sent it back to her with a list of the problems and a suggestion that she read the resources and take the time to edit it before resubmitting.

Wonderful writers like sprite actually do several drafts and spend hours polishing their stories before submitting them.

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the biggest issue we have is grammar, spelling, typos, punctuation, etc - when we ask you to proof/edit, it really should be just a matter of fixing all those bumps in the road - and no ones asking for perfection. i still miss a few things myself, and go back and edit them months later and if i find them when modding a story, if there's not a lot of them, i usually just go ahead and fix them for the author. what does make our job difficult is when a story comes in like the one Princepessa spoke about - worse, are the ones that lie somewhere inbetween, where you don't really know if it's going to tip the scales until you get to the end - thoughtful writers we can mod as fast as it takes to read their stories - others will cost us up to 4 times that, keeping us busy on a single story and holding back everyone elses story from being published.

here's a secret, btw, we WANT you to get your story out - we don't like rejecting them, we even go to great lengths, at times, so that we can get it out on the front page. that said, we want to get your story out so that you can be proud of it, that other can enjoy it. there are some, i won't mention names, who were hot messes when they started submitting their stories, we sent them back, explaining why, and they took it to heart and have gotten good and popular and that kind of makes our day. we want you to succeed and keep this site as what it is, the best f'ing erotic story site on the internet fueled by you, the writers. you guys make this place happen - without you it would just be endless forum questions about girls shaving their pubes or guys with average sized penises! :)

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Bitches in the Basement on Amazon by our own Dancing Doll

lol - i know. one day i am going to go back and totally clean up ALL my stories - i think the only thing i ever wrote error free was my comp story, and omg, you do NOT want to know how many times i picked through that before sending it in. :)

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Bitches in the Basement on Amazon by our own Dancing Doll

This is excellent advice, Principessa. I would add only one more instruction: Pease read the Lush site forum, posting, publishing and profile guidelines.

Even when a story breaks guidelines, we still have to take the time to read it all the way through, to see if there is a way to possibly re-write the story so that it can be acceptable. So the time consumed by a story that breaks rules is the same (or greater) than the time consumed to verify one that does not. That is unfair to writers who are not breaking the rules. If you are in doubt, follow the rule for theater pit musicians: "When in doubt, leave it out."

Incidentally, all of us verifiers have, at some time or another, received an argumentative message from an author who feels his or her story is no good without the rule-breaking scene. In the year since I started verifying stories, I have seen only one story that broke rules which was so well written that I wished there was some way we could bend them. So please don't waste our time (and yours) arguing with a mod's decision to reject a story.

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"There's only three tempos: slow, medium and fast. When you get between in the cracks, ain't nuthin' happenin'." Ben Webster

On the proofreading note, a question: Does anyone have advice on how to effectively proofread for typos? When I reread something I've written my brain can pick out things like verb tense, overuse of a particular word, or phasing that sounds clumsy. But for whatever reason if I make a simple typo - say, "lake" instead of "make" - when I go back and reread it, my head puts the sound "make" in my head and I don't catch it no matter how many times I reread.

Does anyone else have this issue? If so, how do you deal with it?

My suggestion is that you walk away from it for a few hours, or as long as a day. When you keep rereading your story, you see what should be there because you know what you have written. Time and distance will give you the perspective to see your mistakes. It usually works for me. Unfortunately, I have picked up small errors after something is posted too, but as I said before, you can always go back and edit even then.

I hope that helps a little.

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It's nice when the mods DO work with the authors though, if they've put in the effort that is...

Sometimes a few kind words, some gentle encouragement and pointers to resources where they can find the help they need from the story verifiers can be the difference between a writer working to get his piece up to scratch or giving up completely. I know that there are a few mods who do this and some great writers have come out of it. It's good for Lush and a good way of encouraging people who might not really have the confidence to write, to actually give it a go.

They do say that we all have a book in us, don't they (eeew not IN us, you perverts)

Great thread PP!

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Thanks, Mazza.

I think all of the mods will spend the time working with someone who clearly wants to make an effort and learn. There have been some interesting and gratifying transitions in the quality of the work. It does get frustrating when we receive things like the first draft that I mentioned above. If someone demonstrates that they do not want to spend any time on their writing, why should we rewrite it entirely for them? Sometimes they just need to understand the process and the standards that are applied.

I think the expression is sweat equity. If you put some in, we will spend lots of time helping you. It is satisfying for both the mod and the writer when this happens and we do get the occasional thank you.

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I have an idea about how that might have happened but I won't embarass both of us by posting it publicly.

Thank you for the thank you. All of the mods (especially me) appreciate it. Seeing your stories posted in good shape and the thank you makes all of the work, yours and ours, worthwhile.

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Great advice...

xx Steph.

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"I would do anything for love, including the thing Meatloaf won't do... (In fact, I sometimes insist upon it...)"xx SF

Excellent advice Principessa, I've stickied this post.

Thank you, principessa. Remember Marcos?

My first effort was wonderful, or so I thought. It got rejected several times before I resorted to reading the guidelines and the advice the moderators were sending me. (So, I am a stubborn bitch) Now I have to admit that the first story was not good, and what is more, I now know why it was rejected and agree that it should have been rejected.
I cannot thank the moderators enough for their time and patience. As a result of the advice, from them and from reading the writers' forum posts, the next story I submitted was published after only one rejection and that was over a single sentence which came close to breaching a site rule. The next was published (yesterday) with NO rejections or editing needed.
Thanks sincerely.

Something I learned when I submitted my first story was to make sure your English is American English. I am from Australia and we use British English and according to the mods my story was riddled with spelling mistakes, but to me it was spelled fine. Maybe it was because I was so close to my story to not see the errors, as you normally are as the writer. On another thought there probably were a few errors but hey? Writers are touchy you know? Haha :)