For certain, it must have been easier to be a contestant than a judge in this one. I've been blown away by the sheer level of writing on display, and it's an amazing feeling to slip into the runner-ups.
That said, while there are a good 20 stories I could have seen reach the top 10 and at least five or six that could've ended on the podium, I'm pretty sure the consensus winner was always going to be fuzzy. "Zoo" was just that kind of a special effort, by a special writer, and even amongst such good competition it was in a class of its own. Anyone looking to improve in character creation needs to read it, it's basically a masterclass in craft.
I guess all there's left to say is congratulations everyone, and fuzzyblue in particular!
Interesting conversation going on here. It seems to have diverged into what feels like a tengent considering whether or not erotica stories needs sex... It obviously doesn't, but that doesn't mean that you won't occasionally fall into the "insert sex here" writing issue.
The conception that "insert sex here" evoked by sprite and Wannabee consists of adding sex to an already finished and self-sufficient story is a tiny little bit of an underestimation of both these writers. Some stories need sex, some stories don't, but it has nothing to do with having "Add sex here" in a story that does need it.
I have been very specifically challenged by this in my latest competition entry because for the first time I felt like some sexual elements ("Add sex here" for a long while in my drafts) were somewhat ungraciously "bolted" on the story as a whole. They did not feel like they had the perfect flow with the rest of it. But the issue was with writing balance and skill, not necessity of the scene itself. In editing I grinded out much of the bloated feeling (without getting rid of it entirely as far as I'm concerned), trying to remove the obstacles in the story without removing the elements themselves.
In order for sex to feel like an integral part of a story you must know exactly where you are going and what you're trying to get out of a scene. Yet the writing challenge is different enough that I'm not shocked by the idea to keep it for later. I think of it as directing a movie, scenes don't need to be filmed in order, keeping entirely different challenges for different moments makes a lot of sense.
But to be fair this is valid for literally any scene, any element in any story. I've never written a story strictly in the narrative order. I assume very few writers do. Writing methodically from beginning to end only appears to make sense for the reader, but it is something that at this point I find extremely counterintuitive as a writer. To go back to the movie analogy, I always write in a storyboard fashion, with planned elements that can be flashed out in any order I need.
As I particularly enjoy stylistic motifs and echoes through my stories, writing in that way allow for any idea at any point to feed the story in any direction. An idea can stem from the very end of a story (let's say the sex) and pour into the very beginning. It gives the story a very circular feeling to write. Any story element, any stylistic motif, is just as likely to have its beginning as a consequence of its ending than the opposite. The difference is almost imperceptible for the reader, but very significant for the writer.
In that regard I find erotica much easier than any other genre because of how unapologetic I can be about messing with the story that way. Sex and erotism have a particular taste of "wholeness" about them, treating them as powerful and inevitable and fucking with causality just feels right to both the writer and reader. People are also much more forgiving to outrageously bloated style and motifs about sex than they would be about pretty much anything so it's a joy to just mercilessly mess with without excessive subtlety.
It's even more significant when writing in English. French as a language has much more of an appetite for some stylistic forms. Assonances, alliterations, the occasional zeugma are almost always tasty, while English is much more business about itself. You need something as decadent as erotism in order to allow yourself even half of the stylistic nonsense you can pull off in Latin languages. It's one of the reasons a much larger part of my scribbling in English are erotica compared to the fiction I write in French.
Well, very many to choose from around here without surprise. And while it may sound easy and obvious, you can't really top the best Bordeaux around. Seriously, even a bad millésime from Yquem, Lafite or Pétrus is an other type of wine entirely, where nothing is left to chance. Same goes for the great Loire whites. But because there's no way I can afford that more than once a year (and I don't have any kind of import tax to pay), let's list some wines you can actually afford.
Table red: Faugères
For red wines, these are quietly getting a nice reputation in France. It's one of those areas that used to make some very "peasant" wine, hard red without much work in either the vineyards or the assemblage. Just leave some grabes on a souther rocky hill, harvest when ripe, press and serve. Similar to what Fronton does, or to a lesser extent Madiran and Cahors. But "piquette" just won't do anymore in winemaking, and in the past few years there's been an interesting move towards quality production around Faugères. You've got yourself young, small producers really looking to make something of the grapes. They're still learning, but you can already feel that southwestern sun and environment. It's very round and mature, so it's great for the table, but there's also more and more nuances. It won't ever cost you more than 10€, so I highly recommend it.
Pleasure red: Lacrima di morro d'Alba
These are very weird wines that definitely aren't for everybody (and I don't mean that in the snob way, it's a love it or hate it kind of a deal). The Lacrima grape has a very peculiar taste, extremely powerful and abrasive to the tongue, so it's not an aperitive wine in the least. Actually, it's closer to a digestive than anything else. That said, I personally love it for sheer strangeness. Try it once.
Table white: Albariño
So, this choice really comes from my habit of only serving white wine with seafood. I have a strong preference for red even with white meat (for which people would probably enjjoy a Muscadet or Sauvignon more) or pork meals. But for seafood, no one does it better than the Galicians. It's really an amazing wine, very fresh, although it's a risky choice because it's also very acidic which in the wrong hands can make for excessively agressive bottles. Find the one you like best and stick with it.
Pleasure white: Eiswein
You guys will notice that I made an effort not to stay french in this list, but however much it may hurt me to recommend GERMAN wines (*shivers*), I just love eisweins. They can be quite expansive and hard to find, and I usually default to some Alsacian Riesling eisweins, which are starting to get far more than decent. But still, Austrian eisweins remain the best I've tasted so far. Because I tend to drink white mostly at aperitive, I also have a taste for Sauternes (you'll see the pattern for very sugary stuff, these and eisweins are worse than soda), or on the complete other end of the scale you can keep things fresh with a good Graves.
Congratulations to everyone engaged, this was probably the highest level competition I've seen yet.
And despite not being able to enter it in time, I was at least able to correctly guess the top 3! Congratulations to Verbal in particular, you really locked this one away as soon as you hit the "Publish" button.
So, as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an increasingly big part of my job, so I can try to answer a couple of questions. First, interestingly, the number of users clicking on the specific link has actually relatively little to do with its final ranking, so you hardly ever "climb" among the pages as a result of that. the weight of users was largely diminished (along with a few other factors like number of incoming links to a page and meta tags) precisley in order to make SEO more difficult. Webmasters could generally "buy" either incoming traffic, massive redirection links or lie in the meta-tags in order to fool early SEO.
Contemporary SE use literally hundreds of factors to order their searches. So it has generally become a "best guess" thing as to what actually works. What we do know for sure is that Google crosschecks tags with the overall semantics of a page to consider its relevancy. The number one SEO recommendation for professionnals now is to remain extremely consistent between content and tags. Recently, Google has notably mentionned that "usefulness" of the pages was their top priority.
In your case that probably means that with the tag "instruction for masturbation", you've employed semantics Google estimates from billions of past searches that the users are actually looking for. And because SEO is not only a personal thing, but a constant competition, it's probable that you first appeared behind pages Google considered less relevant but more established, and slowly climbed the rank in competitive evaluation as users kept searching.
Another parameter likely to be involved is the lack of commercialization. Google heavily favors websites that aren't trying to sell anything, so that there's more of an interest for commercial websites to actually pay Google to appear high in web searches. As the page you mention is non-commercial in an heavily commercial domain, it probably helped you a lot to climb in ranking.
As to how to do it again: Your guess is as good as mine. The main element of SEO tends to be luck, you only really know if it works when it has worked.
While I'm in no way a significant figure on lush, I feel I should at least mention that I am distraught the addition/return of an category.
Now, this is not so much a debate about on this website. While I personally find extremely disturbing, I'm free to simply ignore every story.
But as far as I've seen on every single website out there, stories are consistently unoriginal, trashy and badly written. They're always a channel for the absolute worst in erotica. And while I would love to believe that lush will be different, that moderators will protect us from the flow of atrocious writing going on out there, I just don't. I trust that they'll try, our mods are awesome. But I am convinced that even if the worst might be kept out, the overall quality of the place will inevitably be lowered. That in turn, always spills into every category.
I understand that lush needs to be financially stable, but lowering its standards isn't something I'm comfortable with as a writer. I personally chose to publish on lush because it seemed to be the site that had, by far, the highest quality-control on stories. That in turn, made lush a place for actual exhange between writers and readers rather than a dumping ground for every poorly written fantasy out there.
If that fades away, so will I.
I have been carefully explained, after referencing Lewis Carroll (who is so far out of copyright Disney made Alice in Wonderland decades ago), that it was not actually authorized for the sake of simplicity.
The difference between a quotation, a reference, a copyrighted or uncopyrighted work can be tricky, and as good as our moderators are, they aren't meant to check legal issues. You could pile on exception after exception too.
A bit disappointing, but it makes sense.
I've actually only ever had sex with foreigners...
I guess that in itself tells you how relieved I was to have gotten out of high school.
I was really going to come back to a novel this time, but my favourite bookshop has had the devilish idea of putting the History section in between the entrance and the fiction section.
Long story short, I walked out with: "The Divan of Istanbul" (approximate translation, in turkish, the "divan" is the informal assembly of ottoman ministers. The word exists in this sense in french, but I don't think it's been kept in english) and "Charlemagne: Father of a Continent", both by Alessandro Barbero. I highly recommend both.
I feel that so far, nothing coming out of Hollywood really has struck a chord with me. Logan was decent, but very full of itself I felt. I did really like that a superhero movie would go to reference the sunset of westerns, after we had so much of these throw at us in the past few years. So I'll give it the temporary title of best US film so far.
Still, I think that to find the best movie until may, you have to get out of American productions. My personal voice would go to The Other Side of Hope, from Aki Kaurismaki. It may not be a masterpiece, or even Kaurismaki's best work as of yet. But it was touching, subtle and talked about immigration at the right time.
Until better things come out, I would highly recommend it.
Mahaha, found one of my stories there as well. I'm almost flattered, it's the first time that my work is being stolen...That I know of. :')
Would you believe that it was actually sex ed? Like, in school? Because unlike some countries(*COUGH...COUGHAMERICASTOPWITHTHEABSTINENCEBULLSHIT..COUGHCOUGH* Sorry, allergies, you know how it is.), France actually has a decent and relatively thorough sex ed program, connected to bio classes, as early as secondary school and going all along high school.
The rest came from my parents, who were very tactful, and of course a lot of movies I watched too early for my age. Didn't watch porn until my late-teens though, which I'm pretty happy about, or had actual sex for that matter, which I'm not as glad about restrospectively.
In non-fiction, I'm currently finishing "Black Gold" (L'Or Noir), a really thorough and fascinating history of oil by Williaum Auzanneau. I don't know if it's been translated into english (I doubt it), but it's really a fantastic work, maybe my favourite History back published in the past few years. I HIGHLY recommend it, but it does require tremendous investment in time and attention.
I'm also lazily going through an History of Antic Rome by Julien Jerphagnon. Again, a fantastic book, that I don't think exists in english yet. But any well-written roman history is pleasant.
In fiction, I found a collection of short stories from Stefan Zweig that I had forgotten I had. Of course, being Zweig, it's absolutely amazing.
I'm actually loving her, because judging by the first episode, the fact that she's a lesbian black girl is about the least interesting thing about her?
They seem to orient her in the direction of a strong character, who isn't too complacent with the Doctor's ego "why do you run like a penguin with its arse on fire?", but still capable of feeling a sense of wonder. It's a welcome change from Clara, whom I really loved, but by the end she was just written to be a complete enabler to the Doctor.
Also, the writing seems funnier than last year? Judging by one episode. That could make Bill a great companion as well.
A sprite story set in 1930s Paris? Yes please!
But seriously, I feel like it's a major difference in tone.
Hollywood in the 1930s is still the dawn for global Americana, it's cultural dominance being born. Stars rise and burn, photographers burn lightbulbs after lighbulbs. It was in fact, very much a roaring place and it only had a brighter future.
Paris, on the other hand, feels different. It's seen much pain in very recent years, and the smart ones feel another storm gathering. It shines a thousand lights and craves culture, but the party might be a little too wild to be completely innocent. France's sun is still bright, but it's setting. It won't rise young again until 1968.
Just a couple of thoughts for you. WHatever you choose, I can't wait to read it.
(If you need translations or trivia for Paris, I am at your service of course.)*
EDIT: Heeeeey, how about an American meeting a Parisian? On a boat? From Le Havre to America? Metaphor and all? (He said, completely changing the original point).
