Thanks, nicola. I'll just wait.
Good luck with this.
BTW, I got the covers from "amycovers" on fiverr. Fiverr itself absolutely sucks. I like amy's work. she's a bit slow, so fiverr repeatedly encourages me to cancel the contract.
I have had the unearned privilege of meeting a few notables.
While in college I went to a restaurant with my girlfriend. Sitting alone at a table was Cannonball Adderley. Uninvited, we joined him for dinner. His group was in town so I invited them all to my place. We jammed the whole night, with me playing piano. At the end of the night Joe Zawinul said to me, "You're right. You don't play very well."
While in Pohnpae researching a book I asked the local librarian, who had been of great help, to come to lunch with me. She asked if she could bring her husband; of course. We talked for two hours, and he was the most knowledgeable man I ever met about the island. Finally, I asked him what he did. He replied, "Oh, I'm the Emperor."
On an earlier trip there I met Bailey Olter. I had stopped by the U.S. Embassy where the U.S. Ambassador told me I should avoid Olter. He was a scoundrel and a drunk and she refused to have anything to do with him. She was right, but he was a delightful scoundrel and drunk. Two years later he invited me to his inauguration as President. The U.S. Ambassador was not invited.
Not exactly famous, at the Paris Air Show in 2001 I met Donald Evans, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. Later that day a horde of television cameras was following him as he toured the show. Every exhibitor gave away trinkets; we gave away propeller beanies. I walked past the tour wearing a beanie; the entire horde swiveled and started following me. I was all over French television that night. In fact, I was all over Portuguese television that night as well. A Portuguese television station had sent a crew to cover the show, but nobody in the crew spoke either French or English - only Portuguese and Spanish. I was the only person the reporter could find to interview in Portuguese. Fleeting fame.
Desert Song. The music is in my opinion the best of all, followed by Phantom of the Opera.
I'm not a gal, so perhaps I do not understand the question.
"...if a random sexy hunk smacks your ass from nowhere." I've dabbled in quantum physics, but this one is over my head. Grasping the concept of doing anything "from nowhere" is too difficult for my poor brain.
Could we call this "Schroedinger's Ass Slap?"
I had been married more than 25 years when I acknowledged to myself that I was bisexual. My capacity for self-deception is amazing. Bisexuality is an orientation, not a description of activities. We married 42 years ago and I have been faithful throughout the marriage.
About ten years after I acknowledged this to myself I told my wife. I still feel it was the right thing to do, but it did not work out well. She freaked out. She had always been distrustful, assuming that I was chasing anything in a skirt or that could spell skirt. This got to the point of checking the mileage on my car every evening when she was working in an office and I was working from home. Now, the number of people with whom I was undoubtedly having illicit sex doubled. I understand her attitude. She was raised by a (father) and a mother who treated her as property. My wife suffered serious emotional abuse up to the day of our marriage.
The "he's having sex with everybody" passed, and then my wife decided that there was no such thing as a bisexual but that I was gay. There is nothing I can do to change her mind. I have not had sex in about seven years.
I am what I am, as Milik Redman said. I am sexually attracted to both men and women. I do nothing about it because I took a vow to be monogamous 42 years ago.
Divorce or even separation is out of the question. We cannot afford it. Our youngest daughter is 37 and is chronically ill. We de facto (albeit not de jure) bankrupted ourselves paying her medical bills about ten years ago. We remain in debt, and I will work well into my seventies to get us dug out. My wife is no longer working and has become our daughter's caretaker. The Affordable Care Act has actually made our daughter's life worse.
By all means be up front. My problem is that I was up front because I thought I was straight.
I've started including clip art pictures done in powerpoint, grouped, saved as jpegs. They have something to do with the story, and most are non-erotic.
Is this desired, appreciated, ignored, or undesired by readers?
For our Spanish-speaking readers:
Disponible, desechable.
Steve,
1. There are hundreds of thousands of porn flicks that operate on the assumption that every female is a lesbian. Most of these are beneath contempt.
2. There are, equally, hundreds of thousands of porn flicks that operate on the assumption that every male is gay. Sure, tell me another one.
3. If you're going to do this yourself you have a lot of research to do. An all-lesbian universe requires that all inhabitants be female.
In botany, apomixis is reproduction without fertilization. In flowering plants it is clonal reproduction called agamospermy.
In animals, an all-female universe is possible only through parthenogenesis. In this case the offspring is a true clone. Because the clone comes from a female, the parthenogenetic offspring must be female. Invertebrates that can reproduce through parthenogenesis include aphids and some parasitic wasps (for a full list investigate parthenogenesis in invertebrates). Among vertebrates, parthenogenesis is known to occur in some fish, reptiles and amphibians, and rarely in birds.
Parthenogenesis is not to be confused with self-reproduction by hermaphroditic species. They are simultaneously male and female.
Now, aren't you glad you asked?
Principessa,
I was rude to you when I responded only to Milik and let readers infer that I thought you had used platitudes and condescension. That is unforgivable behavior on my part, especially egregious in a public forum. This was compounded by biting the hand that is offering to feed you.
My "damning with no praise" was uncalled for, puerile and shameful. And I am ashamed. You deserve better. Please accept my apology.
I will do my utmost to make a new mistake next time.
Milik_Redman,
Many thanks, not least for the absence of platitudes and condescension. You treated it as the serious question it is and presumed that anyone asking that question would have done some hard thinking before posing it.
I'm going to submit (separately) the two potentially-offending chapters with a request that neither be published until its immediate predecessor has been verified. Note will explain context and link to the foundation for the mental illness situation which, by the way, is genuine. I respect the time and talent of the mods and do not want to waste either. If nobody ever gets to reviewing the submissions, I don't need an explanation. You've already got plenty to do.
Thanks.
Not sure where to ask this.
I'm nearly finished a fifty chapter coming of age story. Twenty chapters are published and number twenty-one is in for review. The work takes a consistent and condemning view toward non-consensual sex.
In a chapter to be submitted in a few days one character becomes obsessed with another, and becomes sexually subservient. Neither character realizes that a form of mental illness is actually afoot. As soon as the situation is clarified the relationship is abruptly ended. The ill character gets help and the other character realizes the predatory nature of his actions and is beyond contrite. Will that violate the content policy?
If so, I have a great deal of work to do because the fact of the mental illness, but not the sexual subservience, drives huge swaths of the rest of the work. I can re-do the piece if necessary obviously.
In a chapter still about a month away from submission yet another character assaults someone, a new character introduced in this specific scene. The assault is stopped before it becomes actual . Not only is the not consummated, the assailant and his accomplices pay a heavy legal price for their actions. The victim of the assault drives about a quarter of the remainder of the work. His relationship with his rescuers is a key sub-plot.
Without the foiled assault, which is clearly an attempt at , I'm in a real pickle so to speak. Yes, I can fix it. If it does not need to be fixed I will breathe a sigh of relief. The ready alternatives to the assault are far less compelling.
Is my best move to submit the chapters in question and write a note to the reviewer that I need to be sure I am in compliance, please do not publish yet?
Thanks to all.
Abigail,
We are in violent agreement about the necessity of making text easier to read. Sometimes actions occur directly related to a speech, and sometimes they occur simultaneous with the speech.
"You're a cocksucker," Naomi said. Despite Rick's denials and protests, she stood her ground. "You're a cocksucker."
Separating this into three paragraphs would be done were the material written for a fifth grade reading level. Above that level, the flow often improves by including related statements and actions in a single paragraph. Comprehension also improves so long as the paragraph is relatively short. My sample paragraph could go on for 87 more sentences and cover eleven pages while remaining properly structured. Structured, yes; understood, no.
Lush only accepts stories in English, which is fine. Most of my hundreds of thousands of pages of writing have been business documents and presentations, about half in a language other than the reader's/viewer's native language. In those cases, an additional issue must be addressed.
When reading in a non-native language, white space is pure gold. Crowded pages with lengthy paragraphs are intimidating.
Thanks for your verifier work.
I can imagine things infinitely more erotic than any picture you can post.
On the other hand, where appropriate, I have started using "cover images" on a few of my submissions. They are .jpg "cartoon" files meant to illustrate some relatively non-erotic part of the story.
This thread is a real treat.
The request was for favorite line you've written. My favorite lines are all by other writers, but recently I actually had to smile at my own words. My sense of humor is beyond dry. From a forthcoming Chapter in the Power series:
"Freedom to swing has to include freedom not to swing. Chacun son goût.”
“Gesundheit,” I replied.
My current Lushcrush is Pixie. Rather than rewrite an unclear paragraph, she sent it back to me because it made no sense to her.
Of course it made no sense to her. Chapter One had vanished into the ether and had never been seen, let alone verified. And, without Chapter One, this paragraph in Chapter Two made no sense.
That caused me to do three things:
1. Ask Pixie to withhold Two until One was published. She did!
2. Figure out how the heck to get Chapter One in for review. Finally!
3. Stop writing entire paragraphs that made no sense unless one had already memorized all preceding work. I'll make a new mistake next time.
Master J, Catnip,
An objective review and an informed edit are both critical to producing a good, not to mention great result. Lush's editors/reviewers provide both, for which I am grateful.
An uninformed edit is a catastrophe, of course. I recall decades ago filing an intelligence report on the aftermath of a nuclear accident. "Every oncology patient also presented with (DELETED) cancer." That was changed by a nincompoop to "Every oncology patient was also presented with (DELETED) cancer." At the national level the report was thrown away as garbage because I obviously did not know what I was talking about.
I had an early lush submission rejected for "typos and punctuation mistakes" and mixing both narrative and speech in a single paragraph. The criticisms were all incorrect, but I got the important advice. I rewrote the chapter from its freshman college reading level down to eighth grade. Worked like a charm.
Normally I would expect this to be a "duh" question. For the past four months I have been enjoying the many benefits of Windows 8. I've enjoyed them about as much as I can stand.
Pressing "Enter" or clicking on a link engages a random number generator that consults the built-in critical needs detector. While doing a final edit of a chapter, the random number generator kicked in and I was suddenly trying to get back to lush stories from a huge table of 1997 historical commodity prices. I have no clue whether the chapter was submitted, or perhaps I had inadvertently changed the option price of pork belly futures.
Help? Anybody?
