New to Literotica, just wrote my first erotic story.

MayorReynolds

Appropriate Length
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Oct 16, 2012
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And by first I mean ever. Prior to this, I never wrote any erotica at all---not for Literotica or anywhere else.

My story's been sitting on my flash drive since I finished editing on December 4. I'm anxious and itchy to submit it, but I'm worried it's not perfect enough for publication. I tried contacting a few volunteer editors to help but received no response. I don't blame them though, what with the holidays here and everything.

Anyway, here's some specs about my story, and a few things I'm concerned about:

* The story's a "First Time" category tale. A frustrated college Junior, Leon, decides to go to a party after a potential hookup goes down the crapper. It's 2006, the night before Leon's supposed to leave campus for Christmas vacation. Outside, a snowstorm, rare for his part of the country (which isn't specified in the story) is falling and getting worse.

- A bitter Leon goes outside. His car's in the parking lot, and the off-campus house party is about a mile away. Leon decides to go to the party on foot instead of taking his car. When I wrote the story, I thought the image of walking through a snowstorm instead of driving would reflect inner turmoil, perhaps a bit of self loathing. But now I'm not sure if it's gonna work. It's what I call a potential "Logic Hole."

* The rest of the story is thus: at the party, Leon meets a girl (a year below him) named Summer Madison. They chat for a bit, then go back to his personal dorm room (it's in a suite he shares with three other guys) and have sex. Again, the journey back to the dorm is on foot through the snowstorm, which is getting heavier; Summer actually has on MORE weather-appropriate clothing than Leon does.

- My goal was to make Summer's past and background a little mysterious while trying to develop her as a character at the same time. I don't know if I pulled that off right. Also, there's a lot of buildup to the actual sex with a lot of reader teasing before the big event, though I did sorta throw in sex in a couple places before that by having Leon watch a porn DVD.

* I tried to establish humanity and characterization, and then attempted to make the sex HOT. I sent the draft to a few personal friends for feedback. One young woman friend of mine commented that she had to take breaks while reading it, because she was really tired at the time and had to resist urges to masturbate herself silly with her toys.

* Last word count (with Apache OpenOffice Writer): 9,811 words. That's much shorter than what I determined my limit to be, 17,500, the maximum for a novelette.

* The title is "Summer's Warmth: A Winter Encounter." I picked a title with several meanings at once as opposed to something like "Leon Fucks a Hot Blonde" or "Losing His Virginity." Prior to writing, I read as many writing guides as possible on the site.

* I guess my biggest problem is that I feel this will come as cliche. Some of the story contains some autobiographical elements, which makes it a lot more personal to me. There's also dreamlike qualities to it. But that doesn't change the fact that it's a story about a guy losing his virginity to a hot blonde Sophomore during a snowstorm before Christmas. It seems like it's... been done before. A lot.

Thoughts? Suggestions?
 
There are amateur writers of all calibers on Lit...

Submit the story and learn from the feedback.
 
I think that might be my best course of action.

I think I'll make some last-minute changes, then bite the bullet and submit it.
 
Sounds like your story will be just fine. Stop fretting about it being perfect - it really doesn't need to be. On the whole, readers here are a forgiving bunch (unless you dive into the murky waters of 'Loving Wives' ;)) because most know that you get what you pay for. :)

If your post here is anything to go by, you're good with punctuation and spelling and already know about the power of white space between paragraphs. Those things alone will put you head and shoulders above many submissions here. :cool:

Have fun with this - post the story you want to write and enjoy finding out whether other folks like it too! 9,800 words should yield around 3 Literotica pages - rough and ready guide is that you get around 3,500 words to a page.

Now get submitting!
 
Last edited:
Submitted!

Thanks for the encouragement, guys. I submitted "Summer's Warmth" last night as a .doc file and it's currently awaiting approval (fingers crossed.) Prior to this, I'd never written an erotic story; my genre was generally sci-fi/fantasy superhero stuff. Right now I've got another (non-erotic) novelette series project that I'm brainstorming, but the plan is to divide time between that and more erotica for Lit.

I think erotica will be a healthy outlet for exploring my own personal fantasies and "what if this actually happened between me and this girl instead" type scenarios. Meanwhile I gotta keep reading other people's erotica to tweak my own techniques.

I'm taking the plunge into the tight lubricated wormhole of sex stories! Wish me luck!
 
Congrats on submitting a story. Don't worry too much at this point about your ratings, etc... This is a first story and even if you've written in other genres erotica will require you to develop certain skills that will only get better as you continue to write. You will also learn to read your own work with a critical eye. It is important that you identify the places in the story where you get bogged down. Most comments will focus on the story as a whole. But the line by line criticism is something you will learn to do on your own. The idea is to be the best writer you can be.
 
Rejected, resubmitted.

I checked on my submission last night. On a whim, I clicked the "pending" link next to "awaiting approval" and found a message in bold saying the document was impossible to display and that I needed to download the file, convert, and re-upload. Lit never e-mailed me about it.

This time I didn't want to take any chances, so I copy/pasted the document text into a Notepad window, and then copy/pasted the text from Notepad into Lit's text form. Then I went through a lengthy process of going through and re-inserting italic HTML tags everywhere that they were originally supposed to be. This gave me the opportunity to eliminate a few lame mistakes.

Fingers crossed again!
 
I checked on my submission last night. On a whim, I clicked the "pending" link next to "awaiting approval" and found a message in bold saying the document was impossible to display and that I needed to download the file, convert, and re-upload. Lit never e-mailed me about it.

This time I didn't want to take any chances, so I copy/pasted the document text into a Notepad window, and then copy/pasted the text from Notepad into Lit's text form. Then I went through a lengthy process of going through and re-inserting italic HTML tags everywhere that they were originally supposed to be. This gave me the opportunity to eliminate a few lame mistakes.

Fingers crossed again!

There's no email sent for rejections, but it still said "pending" because Laurel hadn't reached it in the queue after only two days. From everything I've heard from other people lately, it's currently taking about 5 days for something to go through the queue.

Once Laurel saw the problem, it would have been marked "rejected" with the reason that it was unreadable. You just caught it earlier and saved yourself a few days.
 
Approved!

http://www.literotica.com/s/summers-warmth-a-winter-encounter

...And approved on Christmas Day too, which is awesome considering it's a Christmas-themed story.

So far voting has been generally positive, which surprises me since it's my first submission. I completely agree with the commenter who said the protagonist's actions at the end were stupid. Truthfully, the very end was the part I felt the most uncomfortable about even before my second submission attempt, but I didn't change anything. I view the whole thing as a learning experience, however - next time, if I feel uneasy about something I will definitely work on it before turning it in.

What do you guys think? Are there any other problem areas I need to work on before my next submission? I have a few ideas for more stories but I'm not sure which one I'm going with yet.
 
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