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Sprite's Pet Peeves - writers should check this out before submitting stories - it's just go

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sprite
Her Royal Spriteness
Quote by Magical_felix


This is highly sexually aggressive. It's not right and I feel uncomfortable.


good.

You can’t truly call yourself peaceful unless you are capable of violence. If you’re not capable of violence, you’re not peaceful. You’re harmless.
Forbiddenwriter
Advanced Wordsmith
Thank you, Sprite, for this list! I think new writers, especially, would benefit from reading this.

I admit, when I started on Lush about two years ago, I was guilty of the laundry list. I'm trying to do better now, and hopefully I can do right by the mods. Time will tell.
ThePhantom
Active Ink Slinger
Thanks for all the advice..
Unknown User
Quote by sprite

3) proof read and edit. YOU don't want to put yourself out there with mistakes nor do you want to get rejected for them. we don't want that either, so make sure it's as close to perfect as possible when you send it in. yes, i will fix typos or little mistakes, but i'm not going to re-write the thing for you (i actually did that one, taking a straight story into a lesbian love fest - i spent a month on the bench for that one - oops!).

word of advice - i've been doing this for a long time and i know who you are if you're sending in stories - that means i know who sends in clean stories (Hi Master Jonathon!) that i can get up really fast (thanks to those of you who do, and you know who you are), and i know who sends in stories that i have to constantly send back. so do the other mods. at some point, they see you in the que and go 'fuck that, it's going to be another nightmare, i'm skipping over them). sorry, but that's how it happens - you make this harder then it needs to be for us, you go to the back of the line. simple as that.


This is really, probably the most important one. I proof the hell out of my own stories so during my tenure as a story mod I hated dealing with people who didn't do even a minimum amount of proofing themselves. And, as sprite says, we figure out pretty quickly which authors are going to be a hassle in this department.

As for laundry lists, description is best sprinkled throughout the story where it fits in. Describe your friend in a scene where you're talking to her or undressing her or tying her up or something. Drop details about the narrator in a first person where they fit. No one needs to know your dick size until you get naked so don't include it in a descriptive blurb ten paragraphs before that happens. And so on. Exposition is not sexy, action is.
Just_A_Guy_You_Know
Wouldn't you rather have a nice cup of tea?
Quote by Master_Jonathan


I write a LOT of multi-part stories - in fact, I'd hazard a guess that most of mine are multi-chapter stories. And I know just what you mean about waiting for the next installment (if there is one) or the writer not finishing the story because of loss of interest.
I make sure my story is completely written before I publish the first chapter no matter if it's a two part story or a ten part story. I don't want my readers to have to wait for more than a week to read the next installment. And with a couple rare exceptions, I keep my stories all in the same category and link them so they are easy to find.


That's a good approach. I haven't posted anything for a few months because I'm working on a much larger piece than normal (48K words and still going). I'm not even going to begin submitting the first part (estimated 5100 words), until I've reached the end and am satisfied with it as a whole. I'm thinking I'll stick it in the 'novels' section, and tag each part with the appropriate key words. I haven't decided on a title yet, but I think I'll include "[Part X of Y]" in each chapter so readers know it's a whole piece. I haven't written anything this length for this site before. I don't know how well it will do, but we'll see how it goes.

Don't believe everything that you read.
Poppet
Cheeky Chick
Sprite is 100% correct on this. I learned a lot by mods given me many of these tips, hints and suggestions when I first started as a writer. The mod team is amazing and WANT to help you improve. They certainly don't do it to be asshats, they have a job to do, they want us to do better and put the very best up on Lush. I mean, who wants to read a bunch of shitty, half-assed stories that make no sense?
sprite
Her Royal Spriteness
Quote by Poppet
They certainly don't do it to be asshats


actually, that's my prime motivator smile

You can’t truly call yourself peaceful unless you are capable of violence. If you’re not capable of violence, you’re not peaceful. You’re harmless.
Master_Jonathan
Active Ink Slinger
Well Just A Guy, I wrote a novella with Poppet that was 13 chapters long and I have written another on my own that is 12 chapters The one I wrote with Poppet - "Tea and Strumpet" is getting read slowly and the one I wrote myself hasn't been published yet.

To tell you the truth, Novels and Novellas do move slowly. They don't get the reads that other categories would but it's a good exercise in writing and helps broaden your horizons as far as what you can write.
Poppet
Cheeky Chick
Quote by sprite
actually, that's my prime motivator smile


Much goes over my head. I guess it failed for me.



I have a few novels, but my favorite being Fuck Doll was highly read whilst I was publishing it. Every so often someone reads it, but it doesn't get much attention anymore. However, with over 150 stories to choose from within what I've published here, that goes for many of my stories. **Shrugs**
Just_A_Guy_You_Know
Wouldn't you rather have a nice cup of tea?
Quote by Master_Jonathan
To tell you the truth, Novels and Novellas do move slowly. They don't get the reads that other categories would but it's a good exercise in writing and helps broaden your horizons as far as what you can write.


I expect as much. I mean, how many people actually watch porn films the whole way through? Most people I think have more utilitarian motives for those viewing those films (or this site) that don't require sitting through X number of scenes over the full 90s minutes, or however long. But my 'novel' will find whatever audience it will. I had a bit of a writing marathon last weekend, and finished it. Now I've posted the first couple of parts (of 14 in total), and so far I'm pleased with the response it's getting - the people who are reading it seem to like it. Most importantly, I like it.

Don't believe everything that you read.
Coco
Cocolicious
Good job here, sprite.

Might I add:

Then and than, too and to, there is a difference.
Be careful with breath and breathe.
To make a word plural do not use 's; it's either s, es, or ies. (stories not story's; 's refers to possession)


Read your story out loud to someone. Their ears or yours will likely pick up some issues.
charmbrights
Active Ink Slinger
Quote by Coco
Good job here, sprite.

Might I add:
Then and than, too and to, there is a difference.
Be careful with breath and breathe.
To make a word plural do not use 's; it's either s, es, or ies. (stories not story's; 's refers to possession)
Read your story out loud to someone. Their ears or yours will likely pick up some issues.


I actually take the 'laundry listing' ban a little further, (though I call it 'forensic pathologist's report') in my thirteen published novels about Kobekistan the main character, the Emir, has only one reference to his physical appearance, and that is that he is not so tall as his principal bodyguard, but Maktum is also described as almost seven feet tall, so that does not give too much away. The reader will always see someone in their mind's eye and that image will always be exactly right for them. I do describe clothing, however.

As to reading aloud, there are products on the market which will read your work aloud automatically. Microsoft had a product which read .lit format aloud to you, but I don't know if it is still available. A word of caution though, some technical terms can be mispronounced - as JKR found out when Hermione was pronounced Her-my-one.
News of ALL my novels (and where to get free copies) via charmbrights@yahoo.co.uk
Little_wanker
Advanced Wordsmith
Thanks for the advice and will definitely take it on board.

With regard to (2) you are judging that solely in quantity of views rather than quality. It certainly gives no impression of how many people read the story to completion. I would guess that although quantity declined the quality increased with each chapter because if you're reading ch 2, 3, 4 etc then you're clearly invested in the story. This assumes that the majority of people reading later chapters started from the beginning.

A little while back Facebook got into bother because it was claiming video viewings on the basis of a 3 second minimum. How do we know we don't face a similar situation? One way to tell would be the number of comments, votes etc on later chapters. Do these increase showing a higher quality of 'view'.

Of course, we all want lots of viewings but we also want people to read to the end and enjoy and come back for more. Chapters is a good way of doing that.
sprite
Her Royal Spriteness
Quote by Little_wanker
Thanks for the advice and will definitely take it on board.

With regard to (2) you are judging that solely in quantity of views rather than quality. It certainly gives no impression of how many people read the story to completion. I would guess that although quantity declined the quality increased with each chapter because if you're reading ch 2, 3, 4 etc then you're clearly invested in the story. This assumes that the majority of people reading later chapters started from the beginning.

A little while back Facebook got into bother because it was claiming video viewings on the basis of a 3 second minimum. How do we know we don't face a similar situation? One way to tell would be the number of comments, votes etc on later chapters. Do these increase showing a higher quality of 'view'.

Of course, we all want lots of viewings but we also want people to read to the end and enjoy and come back for more. Chapters is a good way of doing that.


the point i was trying to make is, if you have a 8k story, submit it as one story, don't go breaking it down into parts. it's not about quality, it's about common sense. smile

You can’t truly call yourself peaceful unless you are capable of violence. If you’re not capable of violence, you’re not peaceful. You’re harmless.
ChuckEPoo
Chuckanator
Quote by sprite
i will bend over backwards to make you happy


I can only imagine...

Actually I was wondering why my readership on my Detective series was diminishing. That explains it. Not sure if it's worth finishing now.
Little_wanker
Advanced Wordsmith
Of course it is Chuck. I hate it when a great story I've enjoyed reading just doesn't get continued for some unknown reason.

I don't think it's as straightforward as it seems. For example, your most viewed chapter was not ch 1 but the only one that was in the 'first time' category. You must remember that a % of those that viewed ch1 didn't get past the 2nd paragraph. Either they clicked the link by accident or just quickly realised it wasn't for them. But I think you're conversion rate in ch6 would be much higher. Quality not quantity.

Further, why do you think the first three books in the Harry Potter series were relatively slim volumes whilst from book 4 onwards they were 700 page tomes?
RuNe
The Creep
Thank you so much to all the moderators who patiently reads and give advices to better our submitted piece. I am not a writer but it helps to be appreciated by the mods and I am very thankful for that. Hugs to all. smile
TonyaL
Snake Charmera
As a fairly new writer thank you for this thread and as always thank you to all the mods. They've always been very kind in telling me my mistakes. I try to have several people read over my work as I know grammatically I'm horrible at proofreading. I tend to do a lot of my writing either on actual paper or an app on my phone so I know I'm consistently messing up. The other thing is the story is in my head and trying to get it down never seems to go the way I planned. I will try to make sure I check things better.
Again thank you to all the amazing mods who keep this site running and the wonderful writers who keep us entertained with their work.

My Anti-Valentine Entry 💔

https://www.lushstories.com/stories/cheating/a-valentines-date-to-remember

My first EP and a top ten from the Pride Competition
https://www.lushstories.com/stories/lesbian/-love-is-love-.aspx

Hanging in the background but around
Verbal
Gravelly-Voiced Fucker
Quote by ChuckEPoo


I can only imagine...

Actually I was wondering why my readership on my Detective series was diminishing. That explains it. Not sure if it's worth finishing now.


It's worth finishing! Readership isn't everything. It's a really good series.
NymphWriter
Unicorn Wrangler
Quote by Coco
Good job here, sprite.

Might I add:

Then and than, too and to, there is a difference.
Be careful with breath and breathe.
To make a word plural do not use 's; it's either s, es, or ies. (stories not story's; 's refers to possession)


Read your story out loud to someone. Their ears or yours will likely pick up some issues.


That last one is really helpful. I can't tell you how many times either I or the person I'm reading something to catches the mistake.

Another suggestion if you miss silly spelling errors is to read the story backward. This forces you to look at every word individually. As Mods and any one who has written for any length of time knows, we miss our own errors becasue we know what we meant to write.
Simmerdownchick
Creator





What?
I guess I
must rewrite
my newest story.
I thought it was ok
if I made shapes.
I was inspired,
and I wanted
Sprite to re
write my
story



(giggles)

I have three famous stories, 2 recommended reads and have come in the top ten in two competitions~ Come in and make yourself at home.
Elder1
Active Ink Slinger
There's a difference between trying to help a writer & merely busting balls with excessive nit-picking. My story Reaching Out has been " fixed" 5 or 6 times, & each time a particular mod finds a whole new set of faults not mentioned previously. This very easily leads me to believe there's some ulterior motives involved? To close to Christmas? My story offends you personally? Or that it's coming from an old man that went to college in another era that doesn't jibe with today's methods of writing?
Also, I think your uploader has glitches, or doesn't fully delete previous versions of the same submission or something? I fix all missing punctuation, always have the spell checker on, Separate quoted speech between characters like she said...
All the things she complained about on my part I've seen in published stories here & worse. So don't bust mine if someone else's story got printed with what your busting my hump over. I could point out a lot of them.
For now, unless I can email the word processor version for another mod to look at, I just give up. I've published full length novels, books on home brewing with history & all, even the historical realities of American true tall tale's real-world people behind them.
These are just sex stories, not Nathanial Hawthorn, HG Wells, etc. I'd really like to get my stories read, but they never will be if they're constantly nit-picked to death over some aspects of the list of perceived problems that are literary devices up to the writer to use & not 100% correct if used only one way. This person really needs to stop filtering my work through her style, as I'm sure many of you do from time to time.
I try to write like real-world people actual speak & behave...not this stylized malarkey I all too often see.
Look y'all, I know you have a lot of submissions to go through- she reminds me of that & being short-handed as well- , But damn, I've seen worse than mine published on here, but I ghet nit-picked to the point I just give up. Damn. I really wanted something I've written to be seen by more than just a few scattered readers around the world...
Buz
The Linebacker
As a longtime story verifier, I can accurately state that we certainly don't have time to 'nitpick' stories. We'd much rather approve them and move on. It takes much more time to reject a story and let the author know what all they need to fix. Plus, on those we often do some edits to help them out. Having to deal with a lot of rejections leaves us much less time to socialize with our Lush friends and write our own stories.

Stories that break the Lush rules will be sent back. Stories with a lot of poor spelling and grammatical mistakes will be sent back. English grammar has not changed. It's still the same as it was many decades ago.

We give tremendous leeway on dialogue sentences to allow for real world and colloquial speak.

There are many authors here, both older and younger, who consistently get their stories approved on their first submission without the need for editing.
Katherine
Nerdzilla
Quote by Elder1
There's a difference between trying to help a writer & merely busting balls with excessive nit-picking. My story Reaching Out has been " fixed" 5 or 6 times, & each time a particular mod finds a whole new set of faults not mentioned previously. This very easily leads me to believe there's some ulterior motives involved? To close to Christmas? My story offends you personally? Or that it's coming from an old man that went to college in another era that doesn't jibe with today's methods of writing?
Also, I think your uploader has glitches, or doesn't fully delete previous versions of the same submission or something? I fix all missing punctuation, always have the spell checker on, Separate quoted speech between characters like she said...
All the things she complained about on my part I've seen in published stories here & worse. So don't bust mine if someone else's story got printed with what your busting my hump over. I could point out a lot of them.
For now, unless I can email the word processor version for another mod to look at, I just give up. I've published full length novels, books on home brewing with history & all, even the historical realities of American true tall tale's real-world people behind them.
These are just sex stories, not Nathanial Hawthorn, HG Wells, etc. I'd really like to get my stories read, but they never will be if they're constantly nit-picked to death over some aspects of the list of perceived problems that are literary devices up to the writer to use & not 100% correct if used only one way. This person really needs to stop filtering my work through her style, as I'm sure many of you do from time to time.
I try to write like real-world people actual speak & behave...not this stylized malarkey I all too often see.
Look y'all, I know you have a lot of submissions to go through- she reminds me of that & being short-handed as well- , But damn, I've seen worse than mine published on here, but I ghet nit-picked to the point I just give up. Damn. I really wanted something I've written to be seen by more than just a few scattered readers around the world...


lol I assure you there's no ulterior motive--that'd be ridiculous. And I think it'd be difficult to offend any story verifier, unless you write something excessively against Lush rules. Also, you're not the only person 60 or older who writes here. We don't subscribe to agism; verifiers treat everyone the same. Lush has standards for writing, offers forums and links to aid in learning, and incredible members and mods willing to help out total strangers even if it's difficult. We will continue to build our community of dirty, sexy writers and bring their well written stories to the front page of the site.

In the past week or two, we've been having glitches and have been working our asses off to help writers pass stories even through those issues. You can always PM the verifier who modded your story if you think there's a problem. Not doing so, yet publicly swinging at the mod team, accomplishes nothing.
Guest
Lurker
Quote by Elder1
There's a difference between trying to help a writer & merely busting balls with excessive nit-picking. My story Reaching Out has been " fixed" 5 or 6 times, & each time a particular mod finds a whole new set of faults not mentioned previously. This very easily leads me to believe there's some ulterior motives involved? To close to Christmas? My story offends you personally? Or that it's coming from an old man that went to college in another era that doesn't jibe with today's methods of writing?
Also, I think your uploader has glitches, or doesn't fully delete previous versions of the same submission or something? I fix all missing punctuation, always have the spell checker on, Separate quoted speech between characters like she said...
All the things she complained about on my part I've seen in published stories here & worse. So don't bust mine if someone else's story got printed with what your busting my hump over. I could point out a lot of them.
For now, unless I can email the word processor version for another mod to look at, I just give up. I've published full length novels, books on home brewing with history & all, even the historical realities of American true tall tale's real-world people behind them.
These are just sex stories, not Nathanial Hawthorn, HG Wells, etc. I'd really like to get my stories read, but they never will be if they're constantly nit-picked to death over some aspects of the list of perceived problems that are literary devices up to the writer to use & not 100% correct if used only one way. This person really needs to stop filtering my work through her style, as I'm sure many of you do from time to time.
I try to write like real-world people actual speak & behave...not this stylized malarkey I all too often see.
Look y'all, I know you have a lot of submissions to go through- she reminds me of that & being short-handed as well- , But damn, I've seen worse than mine published on here, but I ghet nit-picked to the point I just give up. Damn. I really wanted something I've written to be seen by more than just a few scattered readers around the world...


If it's not too long of a story, I could take a look if you like. I'll try to edit when I get time and send it back for you to publish.
Katherine
Nerdzilla
Quote by TabbysTales

If it's not too long of a story, I could take a look if you like. I'll try to edit when I get time and send it back for you to publish.


lol, I was just talking about incredible members!
Taggerdoo
Active Ink Slinger
Quote by Delphi


lol, I was just talking about incredible members!



Thanks! Oh darn, you weren't talking about MY incredible member!
Katherine
Nerdzilla
Quote by Taggerdoo

Thanks! Oh darn, you weren't talking about MY incredible member!


Not THIS time... ;)
sprite
Her Royal Spriteness
Quote by Taggerdoo



Thanks! Oh darn, you weren't talking about MY incredible member!


inedible member? what? *confused look*

You can’t truly call yourself peaceful unless you are capable of violence. If you’re not capable of violence, you’re not peaceful. You’re harmless.
LikeToWrite
Active Ink Slinger
Quote by Simmerdownchick



What?
I guess I
must rewrite
my newest story.
I thought it was ok
if I made shapes.
I was inspired,
and I wanted
Sprite to re
write my
story



(giggles)


Oh, you are so bad. Poor Sprite, everyone picks on her, but I guess that is because we all love her so much. I can hardly wait to see what her response to you will be, but I’m sure she will have something to say about your creation. Just between the two of us, I think it is cute.

Sprite, this is just for you.
If you're feeling bored during this Covid-19 epidemic I’d like to suggest
you take a peek at a story I collaborated with SueBrasil, a brilliant author.
It's about a mistake in judgment a lady makes concerning a friend, based
on the hurtful words of someone that only thinks of himself. Will that
conniving person succeed in ruining a beautiful friendship, or will she see
through his lies? It's gradually creeping up towards the 30,000 mark
and we’d love any votes or hearing whatever comments you may wish
to make. It is listed in my profile under ‘FAVOURITES’ as Apologize.

www.lushstories.com/stories/first-time/apologize.aspx