Sorry to disappoint!

Mine were great with a little splash of tonic water, a slice of lemon, 3 cubes of ice and a few fresh mint leaves.

Top tips!

These are delicious!

Our "Spring Forward" competition is now up.

I'm keen to see how this one is interpreted!

https://www.lushstories.com/forum/site-announcements-feedback/announcing-our-spring-forward-competition

It's competition time, and Spring is in the air.

Spring is the season for change. Festivals, spring cleaning and new growth in nature. It's a time for "out with the old, in with the new". A time of resurrection, reevaluation and regeneration.

With that in mind, for this contest we are looking for steamy stories around the theme of renewal / rebirth / regeneration. Perhaps the new season provides the impetus to rekindle that old flame you let slip through your fingers, or affords you an opportunity to spice things up in the bedroom, reinvigorating your stagnant relationship.

Maybe your character decides on a metamorphosis to embrace their latent sexuality / gender identity and explores hot new avenues in this newfound freedom. What if after a mishap, you and / or your crew come out of cryo-stasis after a generation and have to forge new connections on an alien world for the good of furthering the human race?

Maybe at the church spring fête after a chance encounter, a member of the parish chooses to abandon their faith or marriage and go on a sexual journey to enlightenment? The theme is wide open to interpretation, as long as it includes an element of renewal / restart in some way. So let your imagination run wild and wow the judges with your inventive tales.

The maximum word count limit for this contest is 4,000.

Prizes:

Winner: $150

Second Place: $100

Third Place: $50

Full dates and details:

https://www.lushstories.com/competitions/spring-forward

Has anyone else been forced to reset their PW today on ?

I've heard from a friend she's had to do the same as me.

Apparently there's been some kind of non-google related data breach and everyone is being forced to reset their passwords.

It's kind of annoying when you have 4 accounts with them, and 3 devices all synced.

The first Moderator of the Month award this year goes to someone who spends a great deal of time helping others in the chat rooms.

She's respected by all, very polite and helpful to others. 

She's both an angel, and worthy of this award, so please give a big thanks to AngelWorthy for all her effort and kindness!

Angel - I'll be in touch regarding your $100 prize!

Nicki xx

Good idea?

The M.O.T.M. award for December goes to someone who not only topped the story verification charts in November AND December, but has been doing a brilliant job helping to maintain the blue "mainstream" version of the site, as well as set up and run competitions there, and generally keep the place ticking over smoothly.

She puts me to the shame the amount of work she does around the sites!

A huge thank you to MollyDoll for all her hard work and effort in making both communities a better place to be.

I'll be in touch about your $100 prize Molly!

Quote by dronette56

Quote by nicola

This relatively new member of the story moderating team has been quietly plugging away at the story queue, processing close to 70 stories a month, for several months now.

Really? That many? I wish you could hear me laughing because I sneak in a lot of reviewing time when I'm stuck in boring remote meetings, which apparently were more boring and more often than I had thought.

Thanks for the kind words and EVERYBODY KEEP WRITING!

--Genny

You're so sneaky. I love it!

https://www.google.com/search?q=bisexual+logo&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjX8uzn7eP1AhWKi1wKHYsGAa4Q_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1920&bih=947&dpr=1

None of those 3 shout "bisexual" to me.

Is the first one a bow tie? Kind of looks religious.

They all look sterile.

This relatively new member of the story moderating team has been quietly plugging away at the story queue, processing close to 70 stories a month, for several months now.

She's been giving her all around the site, and doing a brilliant job.

Please give your thanks to the lovely dronette56!

I'll be in touch regarding your $100 prize.

Thank you!

Nicola xx

P.S. Apologies for the delay in announcing this one. Technical difficulties (with my memory!).

What a deliciously naughty set of stories we were treated to in this competition.

The judges have voted as follows:

Old Acquaintance by Saucymh
https://www.lushstories.com/stories/oral-sex/old-acquaintance

Jess and Mike's Six Eves of Christmas by Jaymal

https://www.lushstories.com/stories/love-stories/jess-and-mikes-six-eves-of-christmas

Of Milk and Honey by VioletVixen

https://www.lushstories.com/stories/lesbian/of-milk-and-honey-1

Sara’s Secret Santa: the Minnesota Minx by CuriousAnnie
https://www.lushstories.com/stories/teen/saras-secret-santa-the-minnesota-minx

The Christmas Gift That Keeps On Giving by Tantricspirit

https://www.lushstories.com/stories/first-time/the-christmas-gift-that-keeps-on-giving

Scarlet Tarts by dronette56

https://www.lushstories.com/stories/office-sex/scarlet-tarts

Happy New Year, Hayley by deviantsusie

https://www.lushstories.com/stories/quickie-sex/happy-new-year-hayley

Ever Fucked A Trophy Wife? by CarltonStJames

https://www.lushstories.com/stories/hardcore/ever-fucked-a-trophy-wife

Tinsel and MistletoeDarkSide by DarkSide

https://www.lushstories.com/stories/cheating/tinsel-and-mistletoe

Coming To Get Her by JamesLlewellyn
https://www.lushstories.com/stories/love-stories/come-to-get-her

Congratulations to Mags, Jake and VioletVixen for taking out the top places. I'll be in touch regarding your prizes

These 3 stories were singled out as deserving an honourable mention, just missing the cut:

“Finding My Christmas Spirit” by AlaskanDevil
“The Big Mistake” by Just_A_Guy_You_Know
“Snowy Night Virgin” by LuceDevlin

A big thank you to everyone who entered, to those who read, voted and commented on the stories, and in particular to our short lister and panel of judges.

A new competition will be announced soon!

Cheers,

Nicola

I'll be announcing the winners today.

Apologies for being a day late. I've been unwell.

Likes!

Quote by Icarus4

She fell in love with a diver but he had no depth

Reminds me of the great Interpol song:



She fell in love with a baker because he kneaded her.

This will get lost in the forum games section so I'll give it some legs here first before moving it over.

You have to finish this sentence with something witty:

"She fell in love with ... "

Examples:

She fell in love with a pilot but he took off.

She fell in love with an author and enjoyed lots of happy endings.

She fell in love with a salesman and paid the price.

Quote by DonnaCupcake

Quote by Coco
In addition, if you use a song title in any work please give proper credit.

To quote song lyrics is okay, provided you quote only a snippet for illustration. But you may not use the entire song

Unfortunately there's no "fair use" when it comes to song lyrics.

So you can't even use a snippet / single line without getting the permission from the artist!

https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-legally-quote-song-lyrics-in-your-stories-books-and-articles-b0e62510ed55

"In general, copyright protection for works created after January 1, 1978, are for the life of the author plus 70 years.

Song lyrics are copyrighted. As copyrighted material you will need to acquire permission to use them in your writing. While acquiring rights are simple in principle, the execution is problematic. We’ll go into this a little later, because if you’re thinking the way I did, you’re thinking you can skirt around the copyright issue by invoking fair use. Not so fast my fellow writer, let’s examine that first.

Fair Use

There are no specific laws regarding how much of someone’s material you can use under the fair use doctrine. For the music industry, the prevailing wisdom is that you need permission for as little as one lyric line.

Attributing the lyric and copyright to the artist, in your story, does not exonerate you from copyright infringement. Attribution is not a substitute for permission.

So answering the question, can you use a single lyric line if you attribute the line to the artists? The answer is no. You still need to acquire permission from the publisher for a single line."

I feel old ...

We are pleased to announce our new festive season story competition, "Coming Together".

Coming Together

Christmas. A time for giving and receiving. A time to meet up and celebrate with family, co-workers, and friends. To make the most of togetherness.

Gatherings, parties, wine and high spirits are the perfect opportunity for human connections to form and sparks of desire to ignite.

Theme

For this competition, we are looking for hot stories that take place at gatherings during the festive season.

Maybe a naughty secret Santa exchange at work leads to a frenzied fumble in the copier room? Or the CEO and her PA seduce the new intern at the office party and are caught by the head of HR, who joins in? How about getting away from it all and spending the holidays with friends down under in the summer heat, where even the pool can't douse the flames of lust? Perhaps a chance encounter leads to a sexy seduction at a New Year's Eve party?

These sizzling stories must take place at an end-of-year celebration, and will remind people of the joy of meeting up with others, friends, or new lovers to be.

As an added challenge, we are limiting the maximum word count to 3,500 words. Your imagination is the only other limit.

Prizes:

1st Place: $150
2nd Place: $100
3rd Place: $50

Full details along with dates can be found here: https://www.lushstories.com/competitions/coming-together

Psst bar flies, there's a new competition up. You heard it here first!

Coming Together | Lush Stories / https://www.lushstories.com/competitions/coming-together

Bump as we've had a recent instance of this!

Quote by StarBelliedBoy

Ooh! Congratulation to the top three, all well deserved! But extra special congratulations to Kimmi for you first podium spot! Woohoo! Also well done to the other top ten, there are two there I haven't even got to so I'll have rectify that soon.

Edit: also, I fixed the links in the original post.

Thank you! I couldn't figure out how to.

Your story was excellent but we felt it didn't fit the brief unfortunately.

What an excellent competition this turned out to be. There were some truly amazing entries.

Our panel of judges have voted and here are the results:

1st Place: A Hunter's Widow, by tams_back_yay.

2nd Place: The Five-Year Silence, by WannabeWordsmith.

3rd Place: Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, by KimmiBeGood.

Rounding up the rest of the Top 10:

Washerwoman, by deviantsusie.

Not A Normal Sunday, by DarkSide.

Jennifer's Gift, by Stormdog.

Once In A Career, by Hedone.

The Blitz and My Balladier, by LilCoffeeluvr111.

A Cure For Boredom, by Just_A_Guy_You_Know.

The Table, by ScarlettElizabeth.

I'll be in touch with the winners over the next few days to sort out prizes.

Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to think up and write the stories, those who commented and voted on them, and our shortlister and judges who had the difficult task of ranking them all.

Cheers,

Nicki xx

"Which Magazine" found this to be very true in a lot of cases:

All these Black Friday deals - I have exactly ...

Quote by CallmeJayne

This is a very thoughtful idea, Nicola. As far as I know, formatting, editing and cover design are all made simple on KDP. https://selfpublishing.com/kdp/ Good luck.

It looks like they've realized it's a technical pain in the proverbial to format a book for Kindle and have come up with "Kindle Create" which I wasn't aware of.

Thank you too!

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

If it's automation you're after, gimme a shout. I have a few tools available to take content, brand it and format it for ebooks.

If the dev team here have an API I can hook into, even better for getting hold of content and reformatting it. If not, worst case approach is to scrape it and pull out the required bits.

If the page metadata is set up with decent social graph tags, some of the content can be dragged out that way. Incidentally, this would be an excellent plus-point for having the portrait cover image format available, since it'll import directly into other systems. But if the intention is to make new covers or only make a single cover for an anthology, then it's of no consequence.

Either way, drop me a line with your thoughts on what you want to achieve here and I can dust off my thinking cap to see if there's a way to grab what you you need and format it as pain-free as possible.

Brilliant, thank you!

This really works!

Thanks Mr. Lee!

On top of the time it was taking us for very little reward, that's why we gave up publishing on there in the first place. They were literally rejecting everything we tried to publish.

But as a way to get in front of a different audience to your typical search engine surfer, it does provide a cheap opportunity to market the site in another way, to a different audience.

I am not fussed about the venture not earning us anything. It would be set up to help writers here and they would get all royalties from their own publications.

We are mulling over if it's worth the time to set it up again or not. If the eBook generation to comply with their formatting requirements was automated, so too the cover design, then that would take a lot of the pain away. The eBooks would simply need proofreading / a little editing, then writers here could publish them themselves to get more exposure. It would benefit all parties.

Quote by CallmeJayne

Katsuro moaned as a bulge formed beneath the material of his kimono, a bulge that Miyuki seized, kneaded, massaged, squashed and crushed. With the fondling, Katsuro’s penis and testicles became one single mound that rolled around beneath the grip of her hand. Miyuki felt as though she was manipulating a small monkey that was curling up its paws.”

The Office Of Garden And Ponds - Didier Decoin

OMG that is hilarious!