Forum: Author Hangout

I suspect it would reduce the number of people who are likely to 1 bomb a story

I thought the changes to voting made that no longer a 'thing'....

Well, the amount of people that can read those stories drops drastically. Whether that's a 'benefit' to the author of those stories is.... questionable...

When I've 'unpublished' my older books—those no longer reflecting my current writing standards—rather than deleting them entirely, I shift them to Premiere status, so my older stories are still available, but are hidden behind a paywall.

Your latest story isn't showing a score yet and it won't until it has at least 20 votes?

Those also, as well as my newest one. Do not forget, that as the author we can look at the stats without waiting for them to appear to everybody.

And so far my worst "bombed" story was actually "Stories Online Heaven". But that just shows me that many people did not get the joke, and that I was purposefully creating a really bad story.

So isn't a low score a compliment? After all, a high score for writing a bad story means you succeeded

Well, it is up for a Clitoride for best erotic humor story, so that tells me that at least some appreciate what I wrote.

Of course, I wrote the entire thing as a satire on all of the bad stories that have been posted here. We have all seen them, 6k stories with 50 story codes. I simply decided to try and write one with every story code in it, just to see what it might be like.

And it always amazes me when I see some 6 or 8k piece of drivel with 8+ scores, while those that write longer stories and put a lot of effort in them get a 6 point something for a 300k story.

I largely chuckle at the scores to be honest. Many times I purposefully write stories in a way for an effect, knowing it will get a bad score because it is not what people will expect ("Nightfall" was a case in point - the entire purpose there was to set up the ending). But I achieved what I was trying to get when I wrote it, so I'm happy.

I really make no attempt to hide that a lot of my stories are "Mind-Fuck" tales. Where I purposefully try to set up the reader thinking one thing, but threw in little breadcrumbs all through the narration and pull them together in a different way at the end. Nightfall, SOL Heaven, Fooled Again, even many of the Dark Tales anthology have that very purpose.

So many stories in here are almost rote, and as predictable as a current porn movie. I enjoy trying to scramble the brain of the reader. I even warn them I have taken them outside the box and shaken it up before I put them back in it.

I even got a lot of hate mail because I ran the first few chapters of Bohica in that way. Having all of the narration told by a "male character", even as they talked about sex acts they had experienced with a guy. I did that on purpose, and people got mad at me writing a "gay story" without gay codes. Completely missing the "transformation" code.

And of course the fun of writing 23 chapters in Country Boy, never having the penis of the male character enter the vagina of the female one. While still packing in as much sex as I could. A purposeful mindfuck, leaving people wondering when they would eventually do it.

Well I wouldn't call Ernest Bywater's 8KB story Fun Run drivel. With a score of 8.73 it's definitely worth reading.

I do not equate length with quality at all.

I am talking about the "I came home, my sister-brother-roommate-postman was horny, so we fucked" type of thing. I mean honestly, I think Ed Powers put more effort into some of his scripts than some of the stories I read here.

And it all kinda goes back to the old "Dead Tree" stories I was talking about earlier. So boilerplate and unbelievable that a bunch of these thrown onto paper would have fit right in.

Dark Tales anthology have that very purpose

You missed a trick there, if you write a dark story with an 'interesting' ending, you should really have called them "Dark Tails"... LOL

You missed a trick there, if you write a dark story with an 'interesting' ending, you should really have called them "Dark Tails"... LOL

Actually, that was the name early on. But I dropped it as it seemed too lighthearted for a series that was intending to be dark in tone.

People might have read that, and expected my usual soft, bouncy, fluffy, sometimes almost silly writing. Then opened it and found...

A guy that might have gotten HIV during an affair (and passed it to his pregnant wife), a gal that goes to prison after finding out the neighbor girl she seduced was 15 and not 19, a guy that unknowingly had sex with his daughter and might have gotten her pregnant, a guy who chokes his fiancée to death when she insists on erotic asphyxiation, a gal who in a moment of weakness looses her marriage and becomes a porn actress, a guy who in a drunken moment ruins his marriage after fucking his daughter's friend (in an incident the daughter staged), and then in the last one (set in 1958) where a girl who has been trying to keep her good girl reputation intact gives in while drunk in the backseat of a car.

Yea, not in keeping with my usual style of stories, or the almost playful double meaning of "tails". In fact, I am pretty much putting all of my darker stuff in there now, so people do not get the impression that writing about cheating wives, taking advantage of minors and those under the influence of alcohol, and the like are my norm.

However, now I have to wonder... tails, hmmmm.

Is there a fanbase in here if I decided to market a series of dark, brooding and almost tragic stories about furries? You know, like say Barbara Bunny can't find a carrot, so she goes up to Billy Beaver and Harry Hedgehog. And the two of them give it to her in more ways than one in exchange for theirs?

Only one way to find out, and that's by writing some and seeing how they go....LOL

while those that write longer stories and put a lot of effort in them

Length does not equal effort.

I have a flash fiction story on SOL called "Coming Home." It was written for a Writers Digest contest that limited me to 750 words. It was the hardest story I ever wrote. Agonizing over every word. Before I was even into it, I was over 1,000 words. It took more effort to tell the story in just 750 words than any other story I ever wrote.

Length does not equal effort.

It can in some ways. Flash fiction precludes world building, sub-plots, extensive character development etc. And more protracted works (should) require more sophisticated pacing techniques.

I'm not a fan of flash fiction but I've edited some for friends who wanted to enter competitions. Getting under the word limit is a hassle but in some ways it's easier when you're editing someone else's work because you can be ruthless towards their 'darlings' ;)

AJ

Flash fiction precludes world building, sub-plots, extensive character development etc.

So does a short story. Flash fiction is just a shorter short story.

It takes more time to write a longer story and do the things you're mentioning. But effort?

I've used the Mark Twain quote before. At the end of a letter to a friend he wrote, "I'm sorry this letter is so long. I didn't have the time to make it shorter."

It takes more time to write a longer story and do the things you're mentioning. But effort?

Unless you're writing literary fiction - in which nothing of import ever happens - when you're writing a longer story it becomes exponentially harder to keep the universe consistent and eliminate continuity errors.

I think there's a prior discussion on this forum about the point at which the author starts to need cast lists, and that sort of consideration extends to universe rules, geography, timeline etc.

I'm currently reading Tefler's 'Three Square Meals'. The planning that must have been involved in that story is mind-boggling, and I've noticed very few glitches so far.

AJ

Length does not equal effort.

WHich I am aware of. But a good story (flash or otherwise) is generally not boilerplate. In which you can go through the 50+ stories an author writes, and be unable to tell one apart from the other. "When I Fucked my Mother", "When I Fucked my Sister", and of course the climax to the tale, "When I Fucked my Mother and Sister (and her entire Girl Scout Troop)".

I have actually tried on several times to put out a flash style story, and know how difficult it is.

Far to many seem to read stories and if they find anything they do not like they blast it with bad votes.

Even dislike of the title can be enough to incentivise the 1-bombers :(

AJ

Authors, manage stories, then look at the bottom for each one.

I just pulled up 1. Mostly 8, then 9 and 10, a few 7. Nothing registered lower than 7.

Total ranking, around 7.4.

I honestly take them with a huge grain of salt. Even one of my most popular is almost all 8+, but ranks in the 7 range.

Nothing registered lower than 7.

You don't know that. The top and bottom 5% don't show.

If you have 10s showing, then you know there were more tens that were part of the top 5% that aren't showing.

But you don't know if the bottom 5% that don't show are all 7s (your lowest score shown) or votes less than 7.