The Story Submission Issues Thread

Quote by oceanrunner
I've submitted two stories since the new system. With the old system, formatting such as italics survived the copy and paste. With the new, I've had to add those formatting changes in by hand in the submission pane. (and both times, as I've mentioned before, the copy and paste also added extra spacing between paragraphs).

I've only copied and pasted from google docs, my preferred composition venue. I haven't yet tried copying from Word, which I may try next time.

(using google docs on Safari, on a MBP running Sierra 10.12.2)

thanks!

Quote by browncoffee


Word has worked perfectly for me in the last couple of weeks. The formatting/bold/italics all come through beautifully. It's like manna from heaven!

Quote by oceanrunner
Good to know, thanks! I prefer working in google, but I can switch over to Word if necessary. I may try copying to Word from Google, and from Word to Lush. Has anyone tried it that way?

Quote by gav


This new editor should be a little more compatible with Word. Next time you're feeling game perhaps use the paste from Word button, what's the worse that can happen

Is this a good place to discuss overly strict story submission issues? Myself and other authors are getting frustrated by the overly strict story reviewers that prevent us from getting our stories published. I get that there has to be a reasonably high standard to maintain the quality of the site but I can't get published because of a few (subjectively) missing commas. As it stands, I feel like I am prevented from being published for it not being perfect. Even in senior honors english, I might have gotten a B- for a few mistakes but I still would have passed. I submitted the same story to another larger and more established site, that I won't name here, and was successfully published on my first try. It was the exact same story that I could not get published on Lush in two attempts. On the other site, My story was read over 12,000 times in just two days and had a 4.3 rating. People liked it! I don't think they stopped being aroused by a missing comma. I am never sure who to talk to about things like this in Lush but we are a community and we should be heard. If this was the wrong place for this, I would welcome a better outlet if anyone knows where I should go?

Quote by The_CunningLinguist
Is this a good place to discuss overly strict story submission issues?

Hello. This is a good place or you can always reach out to any Senior Mod (Listed as just Moderators) or Admin if you have concerns. https://www.lushstories.com/meet-team

We understand the frustration that you and others may be feeling. We also try not to compare ourselves to other story sites, which means our ways are not their ways. This is not dismissing your concern, just letting you know that we function differently. 

We do not want our members to feel as if they can’t be published here. We have a thread here https://www.lushstories.com/forum/writing-resources/before-you-submit-a-story that we typically go by. Of course, there are other things, but these are the main standards that we look for. We are all volunteers and sometimes there are inconsistencies among us, but the things in that thread, we are all together on. 

A few of the huge things we look for are dialogue format, story format such as no indents, paragraphs and titles, tenses, spelling, run-on, overuse of … !!!, too many repeated letters (ooooohhhhhhhh), etc, confusing plots, and breaking our site rules just to name a few. They are all in that thread. 

This goes for everyone, if you feel that you have completed all of those and you are still not getting published, please reach out to one of us and we can discuss it.

Quote by The_CunningLinguist

Is this a good place to discuss overly strict story submission issues? Myself and other authors are getting frustrated by the overly strict story reviewers that prevent us from getting our stories published. I get that there has to be a reasonably high standard to maintain the quality of the site but I can't get published because of a few (subjectively) missing commas. As it stands, I feel like I am prevented from being published for it not being perfect. Even in senior honors english, I might have gotten a B- for a few mistakes but I still would have passed. I submitted the same story to another larger and more established site, that I won't name here, and was successfully published on my first try. It was the exact same story that I could not get published on Lush in two attempts. On the other site, My story was read over 12,000 times in just two days and had a 4.3 rating. People liked it! I don't think they stopped being aroused by a missing comma. I am never sure who to talk to about things like this in Lush but we are a community and we should be heard. If this was the wrong place for this, I would welcome a better outlet if anyone knows where I should go?

feel free to contact me about it if you'd like - tbh, I completely agree and have mentioned it more than once in the backroom. it's one thing to want the stories to be high quality. it's another to be so nitpicky that it becomes frustrating for the authors, which i think has become the case in a lot of instances, so yeah, hit me up.

(I am probably going to get in trouble for this, but fuck it, when did that ever stop me? lol)

I have another friend on here who has been trying for 3 days to get her story accepted. She even ran it through grammarly. She has posted five other stories successfully and this one won't get through. And there is nothing major wrong with it

Quote by The_CunningLinguist

I have another friend on here who has been trying for 3 days to get her story accepted. She even ran it through grammarly. She has posted five other stories successfully and this one won't get through. And there is nothing major wrong with it

Please tell her she can reach out to Sprite(only because she offered), me, or any other Senior mod or Admin.

I will and thank you!

Quote by The_CunningLinguist

I will and thank you!

If I could suggest using QuillBot free online grammar checker, I think it does a better job of finding punctuation and other issues better than my paid version of Grammarly. Just a thought in terms of helping your friend. 😊

Thanks for the info. They kept telling us to use grammarly but the free version only gives you three corrections and then it's $30 a month. Ridiculous

ProWritingAid, Outwrite, LanguageTool, there are many more to try... They help, but they are not the Holy Grail. So maybe you could check each other's work, nothing beats the human eye, especially when it comes to understand sense and intent.

My supposition is, it doesn't have to be perfect, grammatically anyway. It should be good but even if it's a d grade it should still pass. Now an f is an f and there has to be a standard but I can't help but feel like the standard is too high because I don't believe people read erotic fiction or not because of some grammatical errors. I have seen plenty of stories in lush where a comma was missing or a word was misspelled. But if the story was good it did stop me from enjoying it. Bottom line is if a reader is annoyed by a person's grammatical mistakes, they can just quit reading and go find something else. But by and large I think you're going to find it. Most people don't care and I know for sure that some people are giving up on submitting stories that are probably pretty good stories but can't get through the vetting process. Feedback and suggestions and pointing out errors is helpful but setting a standard so high that people have trouble getting through. It is counterproductive to the site and what it is about. That's my opinion anyway

I'd like to say that as a reader, I care about understanding what I am reading. Sometimes a missing or misplaced comma can change the meaning, so there matters.
I understand what you are saying, in part. But maybe you could try seeing this from a different angle. If you as a writer don't care enough to make it right, why should I as a reader care to read your work? Why would you as a writer settle for 'just passable'? That's how I see it, anyway.

I guess I'm just saying that should be up to the reader . They don't have to read a story but at least they got the chance to make up their own mind. I would also like to take this opportunity to say that I appreciate this for him and everybody's input. I am not trying to be disagreeable and I hope I have not offended anybody.

I've found a huge inconsistency in the moderation. I read stories with glaring typos in the one liner or throughout the story and then some of my stories get sent back for ridiculous reasons. But this is completely understandable as we have mods from different languages and cultures. I had one story returned because I said the girl was middle class and the American mod thought I meant middle school which was underage.

Anyway, just send it to Sprite for resubmission is what I took from this thread.

I find the comma police can be over zealous though to the point where its hardly worth resubmitting.

I've never come across grammerly only allowing 3 corrections but I find gramerly wants to offer corrections that changes the nuance and meaning of the sentence. Grammerly seems obsessed with commas.

Thank you! I'm glad to know that we are not alone in this issue. I'm wondering if there could be a unified standard approaching something like a term paper being graded on both content and typos. A. Through d is still a pass and an f is not. That would allow for some minor errors without shutting down promising New writers. There are typos and mistakes in what I am writing here. I am using voice to text and that's the way it is. But I would like to bring up one other thing. My friend who is having trouble getting her story published. Her story was about a topic that some people really don't like while others do. She did manage to finally get her story published but she was kink-shamed and spent the rest of the day crying about it. I'm not going to mention any new names, but that should never happen. I am curious if the moderator is good to choose the stories they review. If the story is about a subject that they find repugnant, do they still have to review it? That they review? It seems to me that if someone had to review a subject that they did not like or found morally wrong that they may be more predisposed to flunk it. I don't know how it works. Can anybody explain it to me? All I know is no one should make an author cry.

Quote by The_CunningLinguist
I am curious if the moderator is good to choose the stories they review.

Absolutely. If a mod doesn't like a subject, they can skip over it. We're all volunteers and have a Verifiers' Guide. But it is just that: a guide. And it evolves over time, hence some stories (especially older ones) might be upheld to a different standard than today. We do what we can with the hundreds of submissions a day.

We're not grading papers. Everything is subjective. Some moderators are stricter about some things than others. It's the nature of being human.

If it was up to me, I would banish Grammarly and its ilk from the face of the earth. It makes stupid suggestions that violate its own clickbait guidelines and articles on various topics. But it offers a starting point, so can be a useful learning tool, hence we recommend its use.

On another moderator suggestion, I tried quillbot and I did like that a lot better plus it was completely free

Quote by The_CunningLinguist

Thank you! I'm glad to know that we are not alone in this issue. I'm wondering if there could be a unified standard approaching something like a term paper being graded on both content and typos. A. Through d is still a pass and an f is not. That would allow for some minor errors without shutting down promising New writers. There are typos and mistakes in what I am writing here. I am using voice to text and that's the way it is. But I would like to bring up one other thing. My friend who is having trouble getting her story published. Her story was about a topic that some people really don't like while others do. She did manage to finally get her story published but she was kink-shamed and spent the rest of the day crying about it. I'm not going to mention any new names, but that should never happen. I am curious if the moderator is good to choose the stories they review. If the story is about a subject that they find repugnant, do they still have to review it? That they review? It seems to me that if someone had to review a subject that they did not like or found morally wrong that they may be more predisposed to flunk it. I don't know how it works. Can anybody explain it to me? All I know is no one should make an author cry.

Quote by The_CunningLinguist

Her story was about a topic that some people really don't like while others do. She did manage to finally get her story published but she was kink-shamed and spent the rest of the day crying about it. I'm not going to mention any new names, but that should never happen. All I know is no one should make an author cry.

I like reading different stuff. Please PM me her story name and category so I can read it.

Quote by The_CunningLinguist

On another moderator suggestion, I tried quillbot and I did like that a lot better plus it was completely free

I'm glad you found QuillBot to be a useful tool. I appreciate knowing my suggestion was helpful.

Quote by techgoddess

I'm glad you found QuillBot to be a useful tool. I appreciate knowing my suggestion was helpful.

Need to have a boo at it. So far, I haven't found grammar tools to be that useful and sometimes get in the way if I am using an odd, but correct, grammatical structure. But I'm always game to look at a possible aid.

And to answer an earlier question, when I was moderating, I often left stories in certain categories or with certain tags for others. Not just because of discomfort but because I felt I didn't know those kinks well enough (e.g. S&M ain't my thing). So there was no obligation to take a certain story in that time and I don't think that has changed. But if a mod is rejecting stories just because the subject matter squicks them out, they are doing it wrong. The only time subject matter should matter is if rules about things like age and consent are broken.

The whole use of recommending AI apps intrigues me.

There's a thread in this section of the forum about not using AI and Jen states that Lush is for writers who learn the rules of grammar and horne their craft yet gramercly and Quillbot are being pushed... despite Quillbot being described as

" an online tool that helps people reword and rewrite sentences, paragraphs, and even whole documents. It uses advanced artificial intelligence algorithms. The tool can help improve your writing skills by suggesting more natural and polished language.

In addition to being able to paraphrase, QuillBot also has a built-in thesaurus, a grammar checker, and a summarization tool that can help users improve their writing."

I don't think Quillbot should be used any more than chatGBT. If an AI app is going to rewrite sentences to make it read better, then it's part author. Perhaps anyone using Quillbot should name it as an additional author?

Word's grammar checker already recommends changes and will likely be getting CoPilot support (which is MS's branded version of ChatGPT) very soon with the same promise as Quillbot: to recommend changes and corrections, maybe even rewrite stuff for you. And I imagine Google Docs will be getting similar capabilities using their Gemini AI, if it doesn't already have it (I stopped using it and use LibreOffice right now so have no idea). Sooner or later, there might even be some kind of open source AI for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.

So if the major word processors all end up with built-in AI for grammar, style, and spelling checkers, where do you draw the line? Disable pasting and thereby force everyone to write their stories in the Lush editing box? I would be out the door so fast it would make your head spin. The Lush editor is terrible as it currently stands.

My thought is that very soon, Lush is simply going to have to live with the knowledge that a certain percentage of submissions are assisted or rewritten using AI because there will simply be no way to control what tools a writer is using when those tools are built right into the software most people use to write.

I won't use it myself. I am hobbyist who enjoys the challenge of writing and using even a grammar checker interferes with that challenge aspect. But I don't begrudge those who do.

I only used it for punctuation and spelling, not to change words or phrases. I liked all the sentences and words to be mine. I only did this when it got sent back twice. Both times, I was told it was punctuation errors. Rather than use my old eyes to try and find every missed comma, I let the program find them for me. And then my story went through.

Quote by The_CunningLinguist

I only used it for punctuation and spelling, not to change words or phrases. I liked all the sentences and words to be mine. I only did this when it got sent back twice. Both times, I was told it was punctuation errors. Rather than use my old eyes to try and find every missed comma, I let the program find them for me. And then my story went through.

That's really how these tools should be used and I don't think that's a problem. Frankly, though, these tools are not perfect and I rigorously use the "Ignore" option when I know they are wrong. One worry I have with these tools is that they enforce a particular set of rules and styles when language is, and should be, more fluid than that. They can discourage artistic license and developing one's own style in favour of a bland homogenization of language (which is also my concern about AI writing tools, really).