Do you write stories you don't intend to post?

There's an old joke, you may or may not have heard it or a variation thereof:

A man enters a bordello. The madame trots out the stable, the man makes his choice. They enter the boudoir. The man removes his trousers, displaying a five inch erect penis. The woman laughs and says, "Who you gonna please with that little thing?"

"Me," the man says. "me."

Do you write for yourself? Stories whose plot lines went to a dead end? I've had some of these. Do you abandon those whose development goes awry? What happens to them?

I tend to just start them in my head and roll them around and see if they go anywhere. I'm good at ideas, less so with the execution, so unless I'm really excited about it, it probably won't even make it to draft.

I hate when I have a great idea, then what makes it to paper is just... mediocre, lol. Ah well.

Yeah, it happens. Some are odd fantasies I likely would not publish for various reasons, some are ideas that I get off on but that don't really fly when I actually write them. Usually they languish a while, then get deleted unless I think it's an idea I might come back to someday.

I have a couple that are stashed away. I don't publish them because I can't come up with a good way to end them. And by that I don't just mean a couple of concluding lines.

Nearly every day. I write things out longhand and there is a stack of filled steno pads on my desk. It is finally getting cold enough to warrant an evening fire and they'll be useful lighting it.

Quote by kistinspencil

It is finally getting cold enough to warrant an evening fire and they'll be useful lighting it.

The pre-computer version of SHIFT-DEL (permanently delete, bypassing Recycle Bin), eh. 😉🤣

I have a number I’ve written that I feel are flawed in some way. Eventually I’ll will figure out what about them displeases me and they will be published. Many of the stories I have published now spent time in that file.

I have about a dozen more that I wrote knowing they couldn’t be published on Lush for one reason or another. I wrote those as a matter of creation, just to see how they developed. But I knew on the outset they would never see the light of day

Quote by Seeker4

Yeah, it happens. Some are odd fantasies I likely would not publish for various reasons, some are ideas that I get off on but that don't really fly when I actually write them. Usually they languish a while, then get deleted unless I think it's an idea I might come back to someday.

I find it almost impossible to delete them. I have at times gone back and pulled a single line or paragraph from them to include in a different story but I keep it all.

Maybe it’s a little obsessive compulsive behavior but I just can’t bring myself to hit delete

Quote by David_LeRoy

I find it almost impossible to delete them. I have at times gone back and pulled a single line or paragraph from them to include in a different story but I keep it all.

Maybe it’s a little obsessive compulsive behavior but I just can’t bring myself to hit delete

I have at least a dozen or so stories that live on my flash drive. I can't bring myself to hit delete either. Once upon a time, The Office Whore was one of those stories, and look what happened there when I finally submitted it!

I always feel like there must be at least some part of the story that has redeemable qualities and may be useful in another story. OR I might finally figure out how I want a story to end and finish it. But DELETE is gone forever and if I spent time creating stuff on my laptop, I hate to just let it go completely.

I have a food few completed drafts(not edited) just existing. One day they will be published. Just a matter of giving more of a damn to make them make sense before publication.

Some of these drafts have been around for years too.

I have tons of unpublished work, some of which are finished, some are half done, and a stack of serials pending my attention which will probably never get sent to lush. Reason being the slow process of submission. I expect to publish elsewhere for those.

Quote by techgoddess

I have at least a dozen or so stories that live on my flash drive. I can't bring myself to hit delete either. Once upon a time, The Office Whore was one of those stories, and look what happened there when I finally submitted it!

I always feel like there must be at least some part of the story that has redeemable qualities and may be useful in another story. OR I might finally figure out how I want a story to end and finish it. But DELETE is gone forever and if I spent time creating stuff on my laptop, I hate to just let it go completely.

I agree some of my best stories were in my delete file until I keen back to them much later and realized I could do something with them. I have plenty of storage on my phone and I have pretty decent filing system for my work so I see no reason to get rid of them.

I’ve never gone to the effort of actually writing (which I take to mean spending the hours to get a story past the outline stage) unless I really intended to publish it someday.

Not counting my many brief sketches of ideas, my unpublished work tends to be either (1) fully- or mostly-written stories into which I’ve put a few hours to flesh out a first draft, but not yet the many more hours needed to make it ready to publish, or (2) leftover story fragments too good to throw away after rearranging or cannibalizing to make some other story ready to publish.

In both scenarios, the intent to publish was there while I was making the effort to write, and at least with the scenario (1) stories it still is. Like everything else in life, it’s a matter of taking the time to get it done. That’s not just idle hope, though, because my backlog of semi-finished stories has gotten shorter in the past two years. EDIT; just fact-checked this, and yes, I’m down to about fifteen stories in the hopper that are mostly-written but need polishing.

Quote by Jen

I'm good at ideas, less so with the execution

I'm actually pretty great at executing bad ideas.

As for the original question, I've started many stories that just run out of gas before the finish line. When that happens, they sit on the hard drive for years until I decide to tidy things up and then I delete them. It's very rare I return to an old incomplete story and try to finish it. But I may return to an old idea and rewrite it from the ground up after I work it out in my mind a little more.

Not really... I have some unfinished stuff that just didn't go anywhere, but I plan on publishing them as is, somewhere.

There are times, particularly when I get lonely AND horny that an idea or theme will come to mind an I try to write about it. To take a sex act and work it into a story where it will be applicable just doesn't work without the right characters and a plot. Then it gets frustrating and embarrassing that I even had such a decadent idea. So I trash it and move on, basically rarely writing.