Quote by simplyjohn

I have asked for an update but the support office is now closed until 9am (UK GMT) Monday.

The site seems to be down for maintenance for any submission now. It was about three days ago that I tried to submit a regular (not an animated GIF) story for for the first time since early December. When do you expect the maintenance to be completed?

Thanks!

Also, it seems that the site is down for maintenance quite a bit in the last couple of days, It seems to happen most in the middle of previewing a draft file that has opened for a few moments.

By co-incidence. "Chloe’s Confessions" has a sweet sixteen celebration that goes on all summer. The latest chapter is almost done and should be submitted this week.

I'm so old it was Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker. I loved that she drove the getaway cars (those 1930's vehicles were amazing). Also, she was pretty good at handling a sub-machine gun. Definitely a lady you could depend on in tough situations.

Quote by sprite

what bits are we talking about here? fingers? toes? lol

I took it metaphorically to mean that bits of her life will drop off. Which does happen, although there are no absolute milestones. That Billy Crystal bit from 1991, "It's All Downhill From Here," is kind of sad although at 68 I accept the truth of it.

That's a topic I've written about, most recently in the Chloe's Confessions series. The way I guessed it, the point is to look prim on the outside but naughty underneath. Yet they get turned on anyway; as Chloe says in Part 4, "I hope I don't drip on the sidewalk." Gina loses control of herself and flashes a passing train. She says in Part 5, "It's very arousing to do that, which I didn't expect." However, she so far has been unable to talk Chloe into doing another flashing stunt along with her.

Quote by Bagelbuns

Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I’d be writing from the male perspective but keen to make sure that any female dialogue etc are authentic

It took a number of years of writing on three different sites before I attempted a female narrator from her first person POV. I've done it on Literotica and I'm doing it here with the Chloe's Confessions series. It's a challenge but it's a lot of fun too. It helps that the women are from a time and place that I knew well in my own youth.

Perhaps it's a gimmick, but if there seems to be some break in the plot (a different day or even a different event on the same day), I will add a row of asterisks so the reader isn't facing walls of text. Once is a while I will put in bold-face section titles for the same reason. I guess these things represent gaps of time between whatever is being written about.

Quote by JdRobbins

I've been writing erotica for 20.+ years. Currently, I have 133 stories posted on [removed]. Every one far exceeds the 10k limit of Lush. I don't believe an author can complete character development, setting description and write extensive descriptions of sex scenes in under 10k. I'm currently working on a story involving a bridesmaid and a wedding quest. The current chapter deals with the woman giving her lover oral sex while driving. I believe this chapter will exceed 20k word count. The reason is because I write extensive descriptions including the setting inside the car how the street lights illuminate her face and his cock. Yes, I could write “she throated his cock” but that doesn't describe how much effort she made just to get his cock inside her throat. I want my reader to feel like they are in the back seat watching a highly erotic deep-throat blowjob. I know a quickie story of 3 or 4k has a place but the longer stories do too. Thanks for reading my rather lengthy post. J D Robbins.

[removed] is my favorite site, with Lush being a close second. I have 124 stores (including some non-fiction) on [removed] and 72 on here. That said, over the years I have read relatively little of other authors work. (I apologize, guys!) If a scenario seems to be getting near the 10,000 word mark, I will look for a good break point and make it into a series. The longest stand-alone story I have on [removed] is over 11,000 words. I seem to be averaging around 5,000 words for a story or chapter now. [removed] seems to have a lot of very long stories. But, in the end, you have to make the call and hope the readers will follow you.

Quote by sweetjohn69

I have a story. But I know my grammar isn't acceptable by lush standards.

Lush called me out once and rejected a story for bad grammar. They told me to try Grammarly; that was a couple of years ago at least. Grammarly is hardly foolproof but it helps. Some people prefer other programs. Nothing replaces careful human proofreading however. I think it is possible to get a volunteer editor on this site if necessary.

It must have started a week ago. I guess it's so that people can can keep track of what they have submitted. I once made that mistake myself, and story languished in drafts until a moderator told me it wasn't in the submission queue yet. I know, a dumb error on my part.

Quote by techgoddess

Liquid Sky

(1982)

Strangest movie I’ve ever seen. Can’t even describe it

It was strange, that's for sure. Yet, sorry, it struck me as a little too self-consciously weird yet clever. Aliens after heroin in Manhattan? Yet Repo Man also had a mixture of science fiction and realism (as well as being rather funny). You can't go wrong with Harry Dean Stanton. "Normal man spends his life avoiding tense situations." "Repo Man spends his life getting into tense situations,"

I'm not sure I'd call it truly obscure, but A Night to Remember (1958) is far better (and at least an hour shorter) than James Cameron's 1997 magnum opus - regardless of how much money and technical prowess he put into it. The earlier movie demonstrates that the sinking itself is so dramatic that there is no need to embellish the story. Honor Blackman, not as famous then, has a small but memorable role.

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

cough storiesspace.com cough

No, I meant Literotica. They haven't complained even though I wrote an series of essays about what it was like to drive a New York taxi years ago. There isn't a lot of sex in it because, let's face it, taxi drivers have a low sexual market-place value. I'm not fond of that term, but everyone seems to use it now.

Quote by RumpleForeskin

This is just a hunch, you understand, but judging by that somewhat strident recent outburst, Her Royal Spritefullness may need to add a bit more ruffage into her diet. ;)

Well, I agree that starting a series with a 300 to 500-word chapter is a bad idea. It strikes me as the inverse of what the late David Foster Wallace would do if he had somehow chosen to experiment with Lush. But there are sites that allow non-erotic fiction and also non-erotic non-fiction. I've done a few of those for a change of pace and they went over well with the readers. But I get that Lush doesn't have categories for that.

Quote by PJH

I can't answer your question but I have just looked at a story of mine that is in draft and I see the box but do not recall seeing it before. It could be that it has always been there and I had not noticed but I have certainly never entered anything there. As it is below a box saying 'series' maybe it is something to do with that.

Yes, it can be difficult to keep track of these gradual changes. This new story is not part of a series (it's still in drafts), and since I can't enter anything in there, I'm guessing for the moment that I don't need it.

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

I think it's meant to be for adding the usernames of calloborators. Start typing and pick from the shortlist.

But if that is its purpose, it's not the world's best named input field.

Thank you, I did see the list and I thought for a moment that my username would come up. But anyway, I don't have any collaborators.

I don't remember seeing this when I last submitted a story (in October, I think) but I may have missed something. At the bottom of the submission form, below "tags" and "series," there is a box for "username." What I put in there is not saved each time I do a round of editing. Am I doing something wrong?

The names can be important because most of my stories are set in New York and New Jersey (often in the late 20th Century), so the these can give information - or at least clues - about ethnic identity. Usually it was a topic of conversation among people who knew each other fairly well. A significant number of people had mixed identities from their father's and mother's sides of the family.

On all sites, including this one, the number of votes always far outnumbers the comments. I'm just looking at random at another site I'm on. There is one story with a pretty decent score that has forty-eight votes but only two comments. The one below has fifty-four votes but no comments at all. That is just the nature of online publishing.

Quote by PJH

I don't think you overstated it, getting a '2' or even a '1' on a story is not life changing. It just begs the question why? though. It is possible that some low marks that I and others have received are the genuine opinion of someone that has read the story. I think it more likely though it is just done for the sake of it by someone who has NOT read the story. That then goes back to the question why?

I'm being a bit facetious here, but they do it because they can! Maybe some of them have read it and maybe some of them haven't. Some of them are just messing with your for spite. or fun, or maybe even they don't know the exact reason why.

Never assume that the way you think or act is the same as how other people do it.

This quote from Oscar Wilde is pretty good. “I wonder who it was that defined man [okay, humans] as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational. ”

Quote by PJH

I agree that it is a relatively minor thing although the frequent '2' vote might damage my chances of ever getting The Nobel Prize For Literature.

I perhaps overstated that a bit. I didn't mean to belittle the fact that arbitrary ratings and comments can be - difficult to handle or accept. I will say that I've been publishing online for more than four years and I've been on various forums and other places long before that. So I've seen a lot of weirdness, or just plain craziness.

I had a guy just about a month ago (he was on an email list) who went off on me - in a really nasty way - because I questioned, believe it or not, the restoration of some Amtrak train that hasn't run in forty-three years. I mean, wow, Amtrak!

Quote by PJH

The usual '2' has just appeared on a story of mine only published within the last hour. The 2 does seem to appear quite early in the voting on my stories so I very much think that it is the same person every time.

I imagine they see that I have a story published, almost certainly do not read it and then give their 2 vote.

I just wonder why they do it?

It could be that it is not always the same person but I think that it is likely that it is.

Presumably, they get some sort of pleasure from doing it.

I rely on George Carlin for a rule of thumb: "Human beings are capable of anything." It's worse on another site that allows non-members to vote. (I don't think this one does.) But there are still thousands of readers , and who knows who they all are and what they are thinking? But, yes, I wouldn't be surprised if some got pleasure out of down-voting.

We live in a world in which people kill each other with tanks and missiles. (And some some version of that has been going on for over 12,000 years at least.) So the shenanigans on an online story site are a relatively minor thing.

Quote by Jen

Hiya, it sounds like you were maybe logged out. I've seen that happen when you're looking at the site as a general surfer and not logged in. Being logged out is happening intermittently for some and is still being investigated.

Notification of expiration dates should be coming shortly, I hope.

Thanks. It did seem to be linked to the expiration date, but I know that correlation is not the same as causation.

Interesting, I found something like this in a draft story. <p>advert.</p>. Then, when I wanted to post a query about it, I found out that my sliver membership had expired and I couldn't post anything. So I renewed it, and then the extra text disappeared. It would be nice, however, if you had a more direct way of informing us about expiration dates instead of this indirect way.

There is no formal way to end a series on this site. On another site, you have to mark the final chapter as "Story Is Complete." You always have the option of adding a new chapter and starting it up again.

Sometimes it's just easier to add sequels with different titles and link each one with the one before it. Or one can link to all the previous stories. I had a stand-alone story on yet another site that grew, in effect, to a series of about eight chapters that way. I even had a plausible ending for it.

On that third site, I once waited six months before I came up with Chapter Two. It eventually ended at ten chapters. When I wanted to later add an additional event in the middle, I made it a stand-alone story because the numbering system could not be changed. I told the readers where it fitted it and they seemed to be satisfied.

Quote by SinninForYou

One possibility is that they find that someone - the landlord or another tenant - has stored some equipment in the basement, including (say) a whiteboard and an ink stained desk or table: that and (say) the fact that both have their school uniforms. Knowing that this is about students using their imaginations as a lead in to losing their virginity, it shouldn't take much of their imaginations to unleash that spanking scene. Just a thought ... 😉

Thanks, I thought about a scenario like that, but I think I'm going with the apartment idea. They haven't used the apartment before because they haven't needed to. They only need a single afternoon to pull it off. What I think is going to start bothering them soon is that they have nowhere to go yet to spend a whole night together.

Quote by CumGirl

It's been a couple of days and nobody has replied so I'll give you my thoughts.

It seems you've created yourself an insoluble problem in your imaginery landscape, so either you'll have to adjust that landscape or ...

What I would do is to write it as a spoken scene. She doesn't actually spank him, she narrates the idea of spanking him and then both can respond to the arousal that ensues. This also sets up the possibility of her spanking him in a subsequent chapter when they find a suitable locale.

So, for what it's worth that would be my solution.

Good luck.

Thank you. What I've been thinking is that there must be times when both her sister and her mother would be out, and they could use her apartment. They haven't done that before because they haven't needed to. It would be easy enough to fictionally work it out - her sister goes to college (Lehman, I believe I wrote) and her mother works.

Quote by KimmiBeGood

Well #1 is do NOT watch the news... 😕

Oddly, not watching the mainstream news per se - but knowing what is going on in general helps me. It's going to be happening anyway. Just like there will be some guy collecting bottles from the trash outside my windows. And they're not from somewhere else - they live around here. It bothers me, but getting depressed about it won't help them.

Quote by Scotus
Find something to do, keep yourself busy, and get a sense of accomplishment

This is part of it, but a big part indeed. Writing - bailed me out more than once.