And every time I do think I have something, what's 99 or 100 words in WP shows up as 102 or 104 once pasted. Any attempt to tweak ruins the flow, and it's game over. :: sighs ::
Directional microphones for "Hooters". Also had to hunt up a kind of owl that would be exceedingly rare but not completely out of the question for the region in the story.
I did a lot of digging on the serum run for a story that's not here ( chain story where the authors in the chain take turns adding chapters, so the individual chapters don't stand alone so well ) An interview transcript with one of the mushers of the time heavily influenced the narrative/dialogue.
Those flashlights you shake to charge them, how much power they produce, how/whether they can charge while discharging, etc. for "Going Green"
Oximeters for XXXam. Side note: huge numbers of those were out of stock on every website I was checking because of Covid-19. Good thing I just needed information and not a device.
How to logically integrate a child into the world whose dryad mother obviously can't present herself anywhere, for an upcoming story in my Magic of the Wood series. After random digging here and there through various legal resources, the answer for that one came from Adam Sandler's "Big Daddy" LOL
Legal requirements for who can fill out death certificates, when autopsies are required, etc., also for Magic of the Wood. When you have characters who are so long lived as to be considered almost immortal, it's something you have to be prepared to explain eventually in a long-running series of stories that spans decades. I've been putting pieces in place for that to work out since story 5 in the series a decade ago. I'll need to activate all those Easter eggs soon, because the first character I'll need to phase out of the legal world is 86 in the next story of the series.
Just a few off the top of my head. Throw that on top of looking up various articles of women's clothing, stuff I actually need to look up for real life, my nerdy personal pursuits, etc. and Google is very confused by me. My FBI tracker probably needs therapy.
Well, at least I'm having ideas for the new categories as fast as they go live. Medical hit me as soon as I saw it, and then this one too. Now if I could just knock down the ones that have been sitting and haunting me for a while. LOL
This one's off brand for me, but I like it.
You're writing a long series, and no matter where you post, that comes with diminishing returns. It typically results in higher scores the longer the story goes on, because anyone who's no longer interested drops out, leaving you with a core of fans who will tend to vote with high marks. Lush isn't exactly a haven for long-form story readers, so that limits you a little as well.
The #1 way to attract new readers is always to keep producing new work. That applies to here, any other story site, and even the marketplace. The more your name is out there in new release lists, the more people are going to find you.
If this series is your passion, keep running with it. That's especially true if you're working toward a conclusion. I haven't read the stories, but if you need to read part 2 to understand what's happening in 3, as opposed to a group of stories that share characters/settings but are self-contained stories, then you want to finish that arc. Some people do enjoy never-ending stories, but many will fall away if you don't give them a conclusion.
And then as soon as you wrap up everything in a pretty little bow, you'll be deluged with comments asking for more. LOL
If you do have any other plot bunnies hopping around in your head, you might want to let them out of the hutch and see where they go. More work = more eyes, and you might just discover that plot bunny hops over into a category that has a large readership you weren't aware of. Most readers tend to have particular tastes, and won't necessarily follow you from category to category, but you'll always pick up a few who enjoy your work enough that they'll give something that's not usually on their radar a chance because you wrote it.
Building a readership base is a slow, steady process. Very few people break out and become superstars overnight. Nothing wrong with the suggestions to read, comment, and otherwise network with others on the site either.
I don't get poetry. I'm sure I'm not alone in that. My "not getting it" grows more pronounced the farther beyond simple rhyming couplets the form is. All I see most of the time is the most complex words possible rammed into a form that is utterly incomprehensible to me.
You'll still get a proportionally much larger response here than you will anywhere else. I took a look elsewhere, and when comparing poems posted vs. the absolute lowest traffic category on the site ( which is an unpopulated wasteland only really worth posting to if you're trying to hit every category ) during the same time frame, that wasteland category still had double the numbers of the poetry. Go with the most popular category on the site, and even a poor story can get as many votes in five minutes as a poem will get in a decade.
The most favorited story of all time has 71x the favorites, 44x the views, and 21x the comments of the most favorited poem. The poem was published five years before the story. That's the kind of disproportionate response I'm talking about elsewhere.
If you make the same general comparison here, using the main page popular tab, you have the most popular story clocking in at 3x the votes and 1.75x the comments of the most popular poem.
That's as close to apples to apples as I can get, because you can't search by favorite numbers here, and you can't search by vote totals there.
Mine were 3rd for Short Erotic Story with "Rim Fire", 3rd for Seasonal with "Hung by the Chimney", and 2nd for Voyeur/Exhib. with "At Heaven's 'Bate".
Rim Fire was a bit of a surprise, because that was a far more competitive category with more SOL finalists. ( where most of the voters have historically come from ) Seasonal had fewer finalists, ( and one of them was another of my stories) and there were only three finalists in Voyeur, so placing in that one was a foregone conclusion. LOL
Nominations are already open for 2020, so no need to wait if you want to see someone from Lush recognized next year. Take note of the categories that have few finalists, and fill them up with worthy Lushies for next year. There are some where Lush's trend toward shorter stories give authors an advantage over the other big 2 sites where longer and epic length stories dominate.
I don't know about anybody else, but I saw noticeable bumps in reads, favorites, and votes on mine throughout the last month or so of nominations and final voting.
All of the Lord of the Rings films, which shocks people who know my fantasy work just as much as learning that I've never read the books. Never watched any of the Godfather flicks. No Pulp Fiction. No Titanic. The only bits of Avatar I've ever seen was when it was playing on all the display sets at Wal-Mart while I was picking out a new television. Lots more.
Why? Just never been interested enough. That's all I can really say. I suppose there's a bit of an additional reason for Pulp Fiction and anything else Tarantino, because I absolutely hated Natural Born Killers. It put me off from considering anything he's made.
I'm suddenly getting a message through my Lush inbox every time someone leaves a comment on a story. I have it set up to email me whenever I get a comment, but this is new. It at least isn't doubling up, because I also have it set up to email me whenever someone sends me a Lush message, and I'm only getting the email alert from the incoming Lush message that someone has left a comment, instead of both.
New means of processing those alerts?
Very minor issue, but on "My Stories" the Display Date listing has a fraction of an overlap with the links on my Galaxy S9 in portrait. Fine in landscape. No issues on tablets. So you may need to tweak it a little for some narrow displays. It shouldn't affect functionality, but it just looks off with them overlapping that way.
The desktop display for that page changing was disconcerting, but there's nothing really wrong with it other than it's different. Just my OCD rebelling against change.
Certainly not typical. If you have any difficulty getting off with woman on top positions, then it's probably got to do with you being angle sensitive. The on-top is the positive, because a woman can ride you until she's out of breath, limp, and quivering from multiple back-to-back orgasms. The blowjob thing is the negative, because you end up with blue balls quite frequently when she gets upset because she can't get you off. If you're anything like me, you probably do your best to try to skip past it every time someone new wants to slob the knob, in order to avoid that.
Don't even bother with any standing, sitting, or anything like that. Prone, with her coming at it looking down toward your feet, where Mr. Happy is as close to the natural angle he wants to stand at as possible. It's less visually stimulating, because you only see the back of her head for the most part, and alien/uncomfortable for many women, but that angle is probably going to be what turns the trick for you.
The couple of times you've gotten off, it's probably been because of a position like that, a lot of hand action with the blowjob, or a woman who has that special skill to keep her lips locked without a hint of a leak for the critical amount of time necessary to get you rising toward the point of no-return. Once you hit a certain point, the angle sensitivity seems to take a back seat to inevitability — provided she's not trying to pull back on it while going down on you. So hitting that bar beforehand ( only you can figure out the signals ) can make most any technique she prefers lead to a successful finish. Best practiced with someone you're already comfortable having sex with. Even then, you're probably going to experience her getting frustrated once in a while. If a woman knows she's got the skills, and they ain't working on you, it's difficult for her to accept that in the heat of the moment.
Steer those first time partners away from blowjobs and toward riding you if this sounds familiar.
The main and mobile sites are somewhat peripherally connected, with the mobile site lagging behind by varying degrees. Give it a little time and it should show up there.
Temper your expectations for anything long enough to consider breaking up, and especially anything over 10k words. The Lush readership trends sharply toward shorter pieces. Which isn't a bad thing, because most of the other sites trend sharply in the other direction. Having a place where shorter work gets a fair/preferred shake is a welcome arrow in the quiver.
If you do break it up, don't draw out the releases. As soon as one is approved, put the next part in the queue. The natural bleed of readers to progressive parts will only increase with time between submissions. That means having the complete story ready to roll before you submit part 1. You don't want to get into a situation where life intrudes and prevents you from delivering the ending in a timely manner.
Give some consideration to potentially triggering content that will appear in later parts of the story. If there's anything coming later that you think might make readers squeamish, you might consider coding for it with part one, or perhaps utilizing the author note section, or both. ( Describing that the tags are there for later parts of the story ) Little will make readers balk more than starting something and feeling as if they were blindsided by the later parts when they appear. They not only back away from that story, they think twice before opening the next submission they see from you.
Let readers know up front how many parts to expect. Add 1 of 3 to the title, or leave an author's note saying how many chapters there will be. If it was originally written as a single story, and not written as a serialized story from the beginning, "Part x of x" is probably the better strategy. This is especially true if any of your break points don't feel like an ending to a chapter. Readers have a different mindset when they see "part" as opposed to "chapter"
Off the top of my head.
I'm seeing a bit of a spike in favorites and add to read lists that I wouldn't expect with so long since my last publication. ( Here, and on the other two sites where I post ) The one or two stories I've been looking at with spotty regularity ( the ones in my sig that are closest to "famous" do seem to be showing a very slight uptick above what I would expect.
I would say that increased activity is likely going to be suppressed by having kids/grandkids who are out of school in the house as well. Not exactly conducive to adult entertainment.
I can't explain that any more than why I haven't read the books. I write high fantasy, played D&D for years, still play RPGs, and have never even ventured into what's essentially the origin of the whole kit-n-kaboodle. I've almost picked it up in the book store several times, almost clicked on it when I've seen it available for streaming... I've just never pulled the trigger. 
Started with LauraDJ and Ping's stories to find the bar somewhere in the stratosphere. The A game is strong. 
