Forum: Author Hangout

I'm working on my 2nd story here. The first one was fairly simple because right from the start it was a sort of "stroke" story. Decent background, but each chapter had some kind of pretty hot scenarios.

This time around, I have an idea of what kind of story it will be, the kind of actions that will be involved, and when I published the first chapter I used all of the tags that the story will have in it eventually. In my mind, that made sense because I hate to get invested in a story only to find out later that it takes a sharp turn that totally turns me off. I want the reader to know what they can expect so they dont get attached to my characters and then I throw in something 4 chapters down the line that ruins it for them, ya know?

The problem is, Im done with chapter 2 of this new story and there is basically ZERO sexual anything. One semi-masturbation scene that is quickly over, but it accounts for less than a paragraph. All of the rest of the chapter is background and getting to know more about the personalities and motivations for the two main characters.

Im worried about how this will be received. I did use the "slow" tag from the start, but im just curious as to what you all think. Have I been doing it wrong? Should I only add tags when posting new chapters that have new "tag material" in them? Or should I be treating each chapter as separate, taking away the tags that dont have anything to do with that specific chapter?

I like to think of the chapters as a single book, and the book is eventually gonna have all those tags in it...so...

you see what i mean?

Thoughts?

I'm a reader, not an author.
There a lot of stories that have something like this in the description: "Not much sex in the first few chapters but ... later". You already used the slow code which indicates this too. Now set the correct level of sex you expect in the total story (stroke,much,some, etc) and you're done.
How it will be received is always an unknown, maybe a different (sub-)set of readers as you had for your first story but is that really a problem?

I appreciate it that you give all the codes right from the start, it's exactly like you said: most readers hate to invest in a story that they eventually will abandon because of some squick code that suddenly appears.

I, too, am a reader, not an author. I do not rely on codes because the codes are unreliable. Too many authors have different understandings of what the codes SHOULD be to make them uniform. I choose stories to read based on the description - and even many of those are sorely lacking. I've seen descriptions that say something like "my latest offering" or "the next in the series." I had always assumed that the description was the place for the author to describe the story. But what do I know? I'm not smart enough to be an author.

You did use the 'slow' tag. That should clue readers in that there's not likely to be any sexual content in the first several chapters...
But yes. Always code for the entire story. People who don't like [cheat/rape/MM/scat/beast/incest/pedo/whatever] generally get upset and abusive when a story suddenly turns that direction.

You do realize a story doesn't need to have sex in it.