Being nowhere near as nice a person nor anywhere near as erudite as AvgBlkGrl all I can say is that if, after having a couple stories rejected by story verifiers, you fail to simply learn from your mistakes and move on to something else it's your loss, nobody else's. Very little you, or anybody, can say is sufficiently important for you to exercise yourself over a single story rather than benefit from what those "editor Nazis" tell you and occupy yourself with penning another story as opposed to spending your precious time railing against those "Nazis" trying to help you find yourself and your own niche on Lush. If you actually think the editors here are "too strict" you need to see a tottering, toppling pile of publishers rejection notices before forming any conclusion.
I imagine that having studiously kept a low profile on the site and not being a story moderator on Lush are facts likely to add a deep discount to my opinion but I feel moved to tender it anyway: it seems to me that when it becomes possible to do an end run around the decision of the moderators by posting your work in the forums it won't be very long until Lush is mostly Forum and far fewer published pieces. A tragedy of epic proportions.
Not quite a reply to the OT but IMHO since so many have decided they possess poetic chops I think it might be a good change to give the preview of entries to that category in the poetic form in which the text is written. In that particular genre, form is often as important as phrasing. Returning to the OT: I think there are already sufficient categories from which to choose...or to confuse me, whichever comes first. The aforementioned preview ought to be enough to allow a reader to filter-out a peice he doesn't desire to peruse.
Not going to divulge where this comes from. Trust me, if somebody undertook to hang me up from the skin on my back you'd hear the hollering all the way to the UK. But from what I have been told the phenomenon of body suspension is less to tingle the masochistic nerve we all have on board than it is for erotic effect and to showcase the skill of piercing and/or the body jewelry involved. As repugnant as many of us find the practice it seems there is a highly specialized, very motivated group involved with this "art form".
As in so many of life's pursuits, what you don't say resounds more loudly than what you do choose to verbalize. Where personalities are allowed to trump honest criticism a system of selecting quality is useless. This, as I only learned through trial and error, is the way Lush works. Get over it, you aren't on a site dedicated to improving authors, you're on a social networking site that utilizes erotic vignettes as a draw.
