I sincerely hope not.

The march towards Omnium unfortunately includes the Novels category, so I've taken the plunge with a series based on a bunch of random photographs I found that I'll use as cover art.

The first 'Frame' as I'm calling the chapters, has dropped, so get in on the ground floor and find out how our photography protagonist gets on Exposing Summer.

Quote by LuceDevlin
trimming conjunctions

Trimming every unnecessary word.

Quote by LuceDevlin
trimming the fat off it once it's done, yknow ... those pesky conjunctions and such

Well it worked for James Ellroy...

Splish

Quote by Mit
is there a list of acceptable editing tools that will not be considered cheating when utilised

No. Keeping this list up-to-date would consume more time than there is in the universe.

Use common sense. If you ask some software to write a story for you or edit your work to improve the wording/phrasing/etc, it's the same as if someone else had written/edited it. Therefore it's not your own work. Therefore it's not permissable.

If you ask some software or a person to check your work for technical issues you might have missed (i.e. proofreading) then there's no issue.

Bottom line, the comp rules state (and have always stated) that entries must be your own work. This competition is no different.

Quote by keylime314159
It indicates no AI help, including editing. That includes Grammarly and ProWriter, since they use AI.

It's fine.

https://www.lushstories.com/forum/site-announcements-feedback/announcing-our-elements-competition?post=4520848

Quote by TheShyThespian
Is it still okay to use Grammarly to check grammar and spelling

Yes of course. Or any other tool of choice, as long as it's limited to fixing basic mistakes of tense, punctuation, spelling, etc. The technical stuff we all miss after having stared at the piece for the fiftieth time.

There's a huge difference between "please mop up any grammatical mistakes I may have missed" and "write me a story about..." and "rewrite my sentences in the style of..."

Quote by AAnna
Earth wind and fire that would make a good name for a rock band

Yeah. Presumably the lofty heights of their career came after they fired Water from the band.

Quote by Meagananne1986

does a story have to include all four elements in the story?

I'd say not, given the comp brief:

For this competition, we want you to use one of these elements as a theme...

Quote by sprite

what about the other 114 elements? You only listed 4.

By all means write a story based around Holmium, Ho. 🤭😁

Circling back to what seeker4 said above about categories here being an ill-thought out mishmash of genres and formats, it would be far better if our "format" type categories were entirely separate. So:

• Microfiction

• Flash Erotica

• Novel

• Poetry

• Story

Were entirely removed from the other categories and were separately filterable. That way, we would retain the main category so you could have a Flash Love story, Flash Masturbation story, Micro Spanking story and so on.

But TechGoddess, among others, have already said this isn't desirable in Novels because each chapter is not necessarily "about" one thing. That's a by-product of some authors making each publishable piece multiple chapters, but that's down to author preference.

My argument, for engagement and readership, should be that any chapters containing multiple different scenes should be broken into smaller chunks and linked individually and "tagged" (categorised) to help readers find what they want. That's what drove this entire discussion. That way, people can dive in if they find a scene that matches a category they like, and if they enjoy your scene, could jump back to the start and take in the rest of the novel that they might never have found otherwise, or thought: "Novel? Ain't nobody got time for that!"

Rejigging and splitting chapters is a lot of work for those authors who have invested time in writing novel-length content so it's unlikely to happen.

Overall, it would probably be helpful to subgenre the rest. 'Fetish' is a bit broad and imo would be better if it were axed, leaving the other fetishy things to take over. We could use Fetish as an umbrella term, but who's to say whether Cross-dressing or Watersports or Facesitting is or isn't a fetish? And BDSM? The masks, whips, chains and cages end of the spectrum is arguably fetishy to some, but completely normal to others. Tying someone's wrists, blindfolding them and teasing them with a feather is BDSMish, but it'd hardly be classed a "fetish" in most people's definition. It doesn't seem fair to marginalise one and not the other, so if I was redesigning the structure from scratch, I'd let each topic stand alone and be specific to an act rather than a type.

But then it gets murkier still. College Sex? Teen? Hardly acts. Those two are pretty much the same, barring mature students. Then there's MILF and Mature, again, types of people not acts. So maybe splitting categories further into broad sections would have been better: "Act" and "Characters" for example. Then we could have Teen + Anal + Flash. Or MILF + Exhibitionism + Novel.

But then we have 'setting' too. Fantasy. Sci-fi. Supernatural. Historical. Medical. Money. True. Etc.

So that begs the question: should there be a 4th umbrella group...? It's neverending.

At that point, it starts to make stuff really hard to find, if people need to know that they're looking for an act vs looking for a setting or style of story. So does it simply make sense, as seeker4 says (and I'd love to have), to scrap categorisation altogether and just use tags as the default search feature?

But then the concept of the Omnium badge disappears, and that's quite a draw for people who like stretching themselves. Soooo.... I dunno.

I doubt anything's gonna change soon anyway. But it's fun to think about ways to make this place better for both authors and readers to connect more easily and find content they want to consume.

Quote by Seeker4
The main Stories page... You can set it to be anyhow.

Cool, that's what I thought.

So depending on someone's settings, there's perhaps some confusion between what people consider the "front page". That could explain why some people claim the IF category shows up and some don't.

As a web developer, I class the "front page" as the bare domain (New stories, Classic stories, latest comp winners, who's logged on, etc). And I class any of the category list pages (/stories, RRs, any particular genre, story lists containing a particular tag, etc) as "landing pages".

Others may disagree with that terminology, so I apologise if I've been talking at cross purposes on occasion.

Quote by Seeker4
the 14th story down on the front page

You have more than 10 stories on the domain front page?

Quote by Down4anything23
Everything now must say “step.”

Yes, and everything is labelled with it because it attracts traffic.

Now our government are trying to say that term's illegal too 🙄

Quote by Down4anything23
There is something else obviously going on that I am not privileged to know.

You and me both! I'd blame the government meddling in issues above their paygrade. There's talk of passing a law that criminalizes any mention of step-relatives and sex because it causes untold societal harm. Or somesuch bollocks. Last draft I saw, it only mentions images and videos so we may escape, but we might be forced to axe the entire category.

Enjoy it while it lasts...

Anyone who likes that category can bookmark the category landing page instead and not be bothered by any other categories getting in the way. Trust me, it's of little consequence to readers whether it shows on the domain front page or not. That's not how the internet works any more: every page is the front page.

Quote by Alfresco
Which feels like a bug but may not be.

It's not, sadly. IF stories are not shown on the front page. I don't know the reason but it may be legislative or something. 🤷‍♂️

But almost nobody camps on the front page anyway. It's a transient location just to show the world that content is changing rapidly. Any readers who are into a category will watch that specific category landing page for stories of that type.

Quote by Ls63563

I love watching real normal people doing what they are doing because it’s what the want to do.

This, every time. Forget all the fake screeching and nails and spray-tanned "stars". Real people enjoying themselves is where it's at.

But it's gotta be respectful. None of this irritating face slapping fad. Spanking other parts is fine 😁

Little and larger

Hah, yeah.

For a project external to Lush I'm developing a taxonomy system based on synonyms that work a bit like your "see" example. Anyone who searches/filters a tem like 'oral' will first get results with Oral tagged directly, then results from content that contains the synonyms, as weaker matches. That way, anyone can use any of the related terms and get relevant results.

As you say, it requires someone to be on it and group related terms from time to time. The beauty is that the admin can deliberately include common misspellings like masterbation / masturbation as synonyms, so even searches with typos can find content.

I'd love to implement something similar here for tags.

Ape speaks sense. The mishmash of "categories* is a byproduct of over a decade of unstructured tinkering by various parties. And it's annoying.

Having said that, taxonomy and tagging is hard. One person's oral or blowjob is another's cocksucking and someone else's fellatio, so picking one for a category name doesn't always help everyone find what they want.

Further, as mentioned, changing them for the sake of it isn't exactly a priority. The Novels category is only under scrutiny here because it's even more of an outlier than the rest, and isn't travelled much.

Quote by MC1982

Theres one roughly one every three to four months. I think (and hope!) one is due fairly soon.

Yes, this is about the frequency. We're slacking at the moment. Hopefully there'll be one slinking along soon.

That is correct. If you please add a moderator note saying you've only changed the cover, anyone skimming the queue will see that, which should speed things up.

There's no requested novel tag. Tags are entirely up to you. And if you solely adjust tags in a published work, there should be no round trip to the moderation queue. Only if you alter the cover image, tagline, title or body text.

There's no decision been made on this category. Perhaps in future we'll revisit this but for now, please continue as normal.

Mmmm bikinis

Quote by Shyexhibitionist
that doesn’t mean they are perfect

Mine neither. I can look at a story fifty times and miss a basic word or typo 'cos my brain just glosses over it.

We're not after perfection. But you probably wouldn't believe the horrors we've had submitted that are barely coherent.

Quote by Mandapanda2025
Once it's submitted, it goes to In Queue or even Submitted until it's actually picked up for review.

It differentiates anyway. It goes Under Review and you can recall it. When it's assigned to a moderator you can no longer recall it. If they unlock it, you can. So it flips between states already. As AC says, the wording is immaterial.

The fact it's sometimes assigned to a moderator and gets passed around or held back while we discuss aspects of the story among ourselves doesn't change the fact it's under review. And while we're deliberating, we wouldn't want you to make changes (unless you expressly ask for it to be unlocked and returned) as that would invalidate our discussions. Moving goal posts, and all that.

On a general note, one way to avoid feeling the need to recall it after submission is to make sure everything is shipshape prior to sending it in. Who would send in a half-finished piece of homework or a partial manuscript for printing with the intention "oh I'll fix the typos or structure or add the artwork after someone has read it all*?

Surely presenting the best possible version from the outset is the most efficient route?

Is it summer yet...?

Inviting

Real life got in the way a bit, and we had two attempts at penning the finale to Love At First Bite, but Kimmi and I are done with the series and happy with it.

Part 3 is in the queue and will be out whenever a mod can spare some time. Don't believe the word counter: it's less than 5k words.

In the meantime, if you haven't caught up with the vampire action so far, now's a perfect time to make amends. Sexy fangs await...