A big thumbs up from a NordVPN user. They usually offer multi-year deals if you time it right. But annoyingly, and stupidly, some services such as free wifi access points in public spaces block their servers now. Which is ironic because the whole point of me having the damn thing is so I can conduct business more securely with web dev clients than over a free-to-air network entry point.

sigh

YouTube force you to sign in to watch anything via a browser with the VPN enabled ("to protect the community" haha, yeah right) but if you use the app, it's fine.

If there's a place I can't get onto the web over NordVPN I also have one of the freebie ones installed that do in a pinch. Otherwise NordVPN is a solid choice.

I read this shortly after it was published and agree it's a fantastic piece of writing. A well-deserved award indeed.

It also spurred me into publish a piece at the end of last year that had been rattling around my head for ages. So thank you doubly, for this wonderful example of BDSM and denial, and the kickstart to penning my own.

Quote by pinkysurprise
I just submitted all my ebooks

Awesome news. All linked for you (the counter will catch up eventually).

Quote by deviantsusie

Surely masturbation fits into the DIY category? 😊

Teehee

Quote by simplyjohn

...caravanning. If I bundle those articles into a sort of ebook am I ok adding that please?

If caravanning is like dogging, for people with towbars, then sure 😃

Although we have had the ability to upload and list ebooks for a little while now, it's not had much of a fanfare. If you now visit the Author ebooks link in the site footer, you can browse (by recently added / author / title) and search for ebooks by our talented authors on the site, as well as add your own Amazon or Smashwords ebooks so they show up on your profile.

Just supply:

• The title

• A description

• The cover image link

• The Amazon or Smashwords link (they're the only two supported at present)

• The (optional) Amazon ASIN

Hit Add. The moderation team will be notified that your submission is pending and will review it, then approve if it's a good fit for the site. So, please no links to your gardening tips or DIY ebooks (unless they end in nookie).

Please note, adding ebooks are only for authors who publish on lush too.

Hope this feature is useful. Enjoy!

stares

rubs eyes

stares again

Nope. Still not sunk in. Maybe it will tomorrow. The more stories I sat down and read in this fiercely contested competition, the more I felt my chances slipping away. I mean, Lyfbuz and Ensorceled absolutely nailed it. I laughed at the antics surrounding "Amy's Mom" and loved dronette56's take on flashing, and sprite's wacky goat, and people bonking wearing fairy lights, and was whisked away to many imaginative lands full of horny elves and Santas and Mrs Claus' and goodness know how many more well written stories. It's a wonder there was a shortlist of only 15 and I'm absolutely blown away to take 1st place.

Embarassingly, I haven't read some of the stories that made the shortlist so I'll try and make amends, plus catch up on some of the others I didn't reach.

Congratulations to my fellow podiumers, the remaining top 15, and everyone who set their imagination to 'fun and naughty' mode by entering. Lush comps always bring out the best in our talented community of writers here. Thanks to everyone who read, voted and commented on stories. And of course, behind the scenes, thank you to the judges, Jen and the moderators who kept up with the entries piling in daily on top of the already bulging moderation queue, and the team keeping the server plates spinning.

Thank you all.

Lumping them at the top of the page is probably not gonna work. Just because someone has bought Platinum doesn't make their stories any more or less important, or better written, than anyone else.

I'd honestly get rid of the highlight altogether. There are plenty of other Gold/Platinum perks like increased media and messaging limits, plus the little extra editing assistance from moderators.

Not my decision, though.

The highlight occurs in the moderation queue as an extra clue for us to know where the priority stories end and the rest begin. But they're mixed with the Golds anyway, in order of submission, so it doesn't really add anything useful there either. I think the same style rule bled over to the main site and it stuck.

I'd be happy if the highlight died. It looks amateurish, imo. And is patently ridiculous on your own Stories page with a sea of yellowish boxes.

If we were going to go with any highlighting at all, I'd approach it using something like the attached screenshot, with the header bar of each story matching the member ship status and a very very subtle off-white for basic members. That helps delimit the stories in lists and grids, and makes the page easier to visually scan too. Silver and platinum are still a bit too similar, but y'know, details...

Quote by dave5360
why do some stories have a light yellow background

As far as I'm aware, that horrible background is on stories written by anyone who is a Platinum account holder. I've no idea why someone chose to highlight stories based on who has bought that membership. There was probably a reason lost in the mists of time.

Pro tip: if you use dark mode, there's no differentiation at present.

Quote by centrum1000
If a character is drinking and conscious and not being coerced but acts a little more freely than they might normally even though it’s of their own free will is that problematic?

No, that's fine.

Quote by centrum1000
Let’s say a guy puts a woman under and while in trace he asks her to undress. Under normal circumstances if he had gone up to her and asked her to do that she would say no, but under trance she agrees. Is that problematic?

As long as she agrees to the hypnosis and agrees beforehand to whatever he does, it's fine.

The key is establishing consent. He could even say, "You realise I could make you do things you wouldn't normally do, like undress?" If she says that's fine, it's game on.

Edit: There are grey areas of course (reluctance) so if she half-heartedly says "no we shouldn't" but is into it and moaning... well, it may be okay. Just proceed with caution.

Quote by centrum1000
when does being drunk cross the line of consent?

When the person does something, or is coerced into doing something, out of character or they're uncomfortable with, because they're unable to make an informed decision due to being under the influence.

Same with mind control. Suggestion is fine, but the ultimate choice over whether to go through with any act must be taken by the individual, either at the time or prearranged.

Quote by M_K_Babalon
I was told by a mod, that one main thing they and the site goes by, is Chicago writing style.

If a mod told you this, they're wrong or were pulling your leg, lol. The guidelines are:

1. Is it readable?

2. Is it formatted consistently and legibly so readers can follow it (i.e. standard English conventions for paragraphing, basic grammar, spelling, dialogue formatting, etc)?

3. Does it fit within our terms of service?

4. Will someone find it sexy?

That's pretty much it. There's no house style, and certainly not one that's mainly useful for academic writing. Moderators do have differing levels of interpretation of the guidelines because we all come from varying backgrounds and countries of the world, but the basic principles are those above and no more.

There's no "need" to do anything different. It's up to you. The Novels category may well stay, who knows.

Quote by wxt55uk
With each chapter, I find myself changing the original storyline to mould it to fit a genre... this novel feels like it is being chopped up into a series of short stories within the longer one

That's surely down to writing confidence and structure? A movie is made up of scenes and each scene is about something and they join together to form a cohesive whole. Chase scene. Love scene. Dramatic tension scene. Backstory scene. Character hits rock bottom scene. Overcomes it and learns something scene.

In an erotic novel, if you can't break a story down into defined scenes that fit together then it implies the overall structure might need work. I doubt anybody embarks on a movie with no idea of what highs and lows, scene beats and character interactions are taking place along the way. So if an author doesn't have a plan for the novel and just writes each chapter as it comes, it will feel choppy.

I don't know what obstacles you need to overcome to adapt your existing work to Lush (content terms of service violations or simply editing, for example) but if the original isn't able to be broken up into scenes as it is written, then maybe restructuring it as a whole would be prudent before attempting to serialise it?

If all you want to do is break it up every 8k words or so and publish each part in Novels, go for it. Now we have the ability to refine by tags, and improved searching is on the way, maybe it makes moot the fact that there isn't much of a signal in the Novels category as to what the story is about?

The only reason removing it was even being considered, as I've mentioned a few times in this thread, is because putting things in defined categories with appropriate tags and threading them together with the Series link feature is a stronger signal to readers and search engines that helps put your work in front of more people who want to read it. If you're happy not taking that opportunity, it's entirely your call.

Quote by kistinspencil
So the only way to add to it is to use the Lush design thing or do an upload from the story edit page

I think so. I've not found any other way.

Quote by kistinspencil

Where is that located?

From your profile > Stories panel, click the Covers subtab.

It is a thing. And you've commented 😃

However, due to the manual nature at present, if you've emailed your audio story off, it won't have been assigned yet because the dev team are on holiday till next week.

I think it pulls from your Cover Images folder.

Quote by HoseJockey55

How can I edit or change a cover image

Visit your story, scroll down and hit Edit. You can then click the cover pic to upload or select a new one. If it's been designed in the on-site designer it should load it up and be editable, but sometimes if there's a lot of site traffic it struggles for some reason.

Bear in mind if you change the pic, it removes your story from the site and puts it back in your Stories > Drafts area so you'll need to Preview it and resubmit to the moderators. Please put a quick message in the Moderator Notes box to say you just changed the cover and we should be able to get it back on the site fairly quickly.

It is supposed to notify you but I think it got inadvertently missed off the list of alerts. I'll prod the dev team when they're back in the office and see if they can add the notification.

RRs can be awarded any time, even years later if a mod stumbles across a piece from yesteryear and loves it. So a notification is important. Thank you for raising this.

Woohoo! First one of these things I've managed to place. Really enjoyed reading everyone's takes on the theme, and loved the other deserved winning entries. Honoured to be the filling in a Susie-Annie sandwich.

Thank you Kimmi (and Jen) for the generous prize coins. And to Dom Twin for reading and judging. Kimmi, you are a beacon of awesome here.

Triple titfuck, ftw.

Yeah that's all good. Entirely up to you how you use them. I'd love the site to have some UX love one day with regards navigation hierarchy, content positioning and, most importantly, a few colour accents that aren't bloody red!

With regards the Refine By Tag functionality, as it stands, the unfiltered tag set is fairly static because the 8 offered are the top, most popular tags for that category. And for the home page it's the 8 most popular tags across the site. The tags are filtered based on other search criteria you type as well, so if you type more options, you get a different list.

When you select one, you then get a list of tags based on the most popular tags used in the stories that feature the first tag you clicked on (plus your other search criteria). And so on for each one you click as it narrows the filter to a smaller pool of stories that feature all the ones you select.

So, unless there's a glut of people writing stories about Bon Jovi lyrics who also use your tag, it's highly unlikely to pop up in the Refine By Tag set.

Quote by Chet_Morton
Imagine the disappointment of debuting the tags triple titfuck and bon jovi quotes and then discovering that newly created tags get buried at the end of your list. 😅

Yeah they're ordered by creation date at the moment, which is a bit annoying. But, side quest, before making any more you might like to read up on how to make the best use of tags. 😃

Yeah, dunno. There's a ruddy great chapter series drop-down at the top of each story if authors use it to thread chapters together. How many readers gloss over it because it's styled in yet more red 🙄🤣 or don't care about the rest of the novel because they're only interested in jacking off to the specific content in this particular chapter is anyone's guess.

Quote by JustForYou
a synopsis feature

Yeah, this is a good idea. If there was some way to autogenerate a table of contents, or for an author to state that chapter 1 is straight sex, chapters 2 and 3 are BDSM, chapter 4 is facesitting, etc, and that was available as a flyout on every chapter / submission of a novel, it would help readers and search engines to find and index the content more meaningfully. That way, we could keep the Novels genre and still benefit from more nuanced searching.

The only way to do that at present is with tags. But until we can set the tags in order of importance (and if all authors adopt this convention!) it's difficult to achieve with the current site tools.

Quote by JourneyYoung
if you tag something "novel" you basically lose out on what the top-level category for the story actually is.

Yes, and that's the primary driver behind the proposal. "Novel" carries no weight at the URL level, both for potential readers and for search engines. The only way to determine genre is via tags or reading the whole thing. And as you say, tags aren't sortable. Yet.

But if you were to put chapter 7 in the Facesitting category, you attract people who camp on categories to find new stories, and it's a strong signal to search engine spiders that the story is about that topic, allowing better results for people who search outside of the site (i.e. potentially bringing in more specific traffic from people who don't know about the site).

The predominant arguments against ditching it seem to be:

a) People who combine chapters into one submission can't easily categorise the various story arcs in one genre. That's a valid concern, except multi-chapter submissions are a bit of a hack to get round writing too-short chapters. Even a chapter of 1-2K words is still a chapter and could be a discrete unit, published separately. And according to the story length poll, combining chapters with the intent of beefing up the word count may harm your chances of people reading the entry.

b) Authors don't want people to dive into a chapter in the middle of the story and would prefer it was read from chapter 1, in series. This is impossible to achieve on the web. That's like saying you wish people would always land on the home page of your website and navigate from there to find what they want. Every page of a website is potentially a home page when search engines allow you to jump in anywhere. It's your job as a website content creator (or story teller, in this case) to make sure they land on something relevant and to inform them it's a multi-chapter piece and might not make sense without the earlier bits.

Interestingly, the above phenomenon is not unique to putting the stories in specific categories vs putting them all in the Novels category. If someone searches for a set of keywords, and chapter 11 pops up in the search results, would you as an author want to stop them reading it and force them to start at chapter 1? No. It's conceited to think that you would. The only way you can mostly guarantee that outcome, would be to publish it all in one loooong story (a single URL) and omit anchor points at chapter junctions.

We do have the same issue with Microfiction and Flash Fiction: neither of them indicate genre. And it is annoying. But the difference there is that each offer a specific and defined challenge for authors, while the Novels category doesn't. And we don't allow chapter series in the Micro and Flash categories.

End of the day, the site needs to connect readers with content they want to read. So any and all signals we can use to achieve that is a win.

Quote by wxt55uk
I have slowly been adding a novel tag to my many novel genre chapters.

That's fine. If you want to duplicate tags and category, nobody is going to stop you. All I meant was that it's usually redundant because people will tend to search for stuff in that category anyway so you can use one of the 10 slots for other tags instead. But if you want to use both, by all means do so, which allows people who are maybe not specifically interested in that genre alone to find your work when browsing tags.

In the case of "novel", it makes total sense to add it as a tag in case the category ever gets axed.

Quote by wxt55uk
There doesn't seem to be a way to orderly arrange tags

No, sadly not at present. It's system-determined. The dev team are aware of it and are seeing if there's a way to let us set the order.

You could thematically link them. That would work. If there's no obvious follow-on from one to the next, it's fine.

What we're trying to avoid in Flash and Micros is someone telling a single story 100(0) words at a time: chapter 1, 2, 3, ... Anything else is fair game.

Love this idea, Kimmi. Thank you. Here's mine...

City lights stretch twelve floors beneath my open robe and juice-coated thighs.

“For real?”

Cole’s measured tone, tinny through the speaker: “You'll know as the clock strikes midnight.”

The hotel TV broadcasts New Year’s countdown. New opportunity.

Heart racing, I withdraw sticky fingers from my pussy. Inhale. Shuck shoulders, silk pooling my ankles.

The muzzle flash from the building opposite precedes the tinny ricochet.

“Good girl. You just made partner.”