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Rustyoznail

Rustyoznail

Aussie smartarse
Joined
Apr 14, 2019
Posts
5,559
Hi all

I've decided to dump all the ideas that's been rattling around in my head for years onto faux paper. I've asked for help editing one story, but there's a couple of questions I want to ask.
1. My short story idea blew out to about 10k words and is split into 9 chapters. Should I post it as one large story or as separate chapters?
2. I've written a parody song. It's about 1000 words. Where should I post it?

Thanks

Rustyoznail
 
Rustyoznail said:
Hi all

I've decided to dump all the ideas that's been rattling around in my head for years onto faux paper. I've asked for help editing one story, but there's a couple of questions I want to ask.
1. My short story idea blew out to about 10k words and is split into 9 chapters. Should I post it as one large story or as separate chapters?
2. I've written a parody song. It's about 1000 words. Where should I post it?

Thanks

Rustyoznail
Click to expand...
A single story. 10k words is just under three Lit pages, which isn't a long story by Lit standards. Just put your chapter headings in bold font.

Parody song - Satire and Humor. Be prepared for half the world not to share/understand your sense of humour.
 
Rustyoznail said:
1. My short story idea blew out to about 10k words and is split into 9 chapters. Should I post it as one large story or as separate chapters?
Click to expand...
As EB said, 10k is in no way a long piece here. A LIT page in a browser is nominally 3750 words or so. 10k words barely make a seperate chapter here. I've a number of two-LIT-page submissions with a half-dozen or more 'chapters' embedded within. I've edited a contest-winning single submission of 77k words, that's 20 LIT pages, internally divided into 10 'chapters' but all a one-piece novella. I structure mine with sections delimited like:

************
03 -- Fall 1999
************

or

***** 05: Paula *****

2. I've written a parody song. It's about 1000 words. Where should I post it?
Click to expand...
LIT's minimum non-poetry submission length is 750 words and oy, readers don't like pieces that short! I submitted (and removed) songs shorter than 750 words in the Poetry category where they were seen by maybe a couple dozen readers. The Humor category gains few views too.

Does the song stand on its own or can it be wrapped into a longer work? My one-page story Make Me Scream! grew from a 57-word verse (included in Comments). And I've used songs as frameworks of stories. Jenny Be Fair enhances that folksong. Substitute Pussy builds on a variant of The Who's SUBSTITUTE. Suggestion: Write a sexy tale where one or more characters sing your parody song and other rude verses and dirty jokes.
 
Thanks for that. I’ve contacted a couple of editors about the story, but wasn’t sure about the song. You’re right about humour. Australian/ British comedy tends to be looked at strangely by the rest of the world. I’ll have a think about fitting it in to a bigger work.

Russ
 
Rustyoznail said:
My short story idea blew out to about 10k words and is split into 9 chapters. Should I post it as one large story or as separate chapters?
Click to expand...

BiBi and Will is my highest rated story at 4.80 and is 11,000 words. I originally posted it as five short chapters three days apart and the best chapter score achieved was 4.00. I think that answers your question.
 
Thanks. I’ll remove the chapter headings and make sure the paragraphs break correctly. How does the site break the story across pages? Does it look for paragraphs or just dumps everything onto the next page when it reaches the bottom?

Also, I’ve read Tx tall tales how to on categories. I assume I’ll get belted if my uncle/ aunt /niece story is tagged incest.

Russ
 
Rustyoznail said:
Thanks. I’ll remove the chapter headings and make sure the paragraphs break correctly. How does the site break the story across pages? Does it look for paragraphs or just dumps everything onto the next page when it reaches the bottom?

Also, I’ve read Tx tall tales how to on categories. I assume I’ll get belted if my uncle/ aunt /niece story is tagged incest.

Russ
Click to expand...
You have no say when the Lit page breaks, so don't worry about that. It always breaks on a paragraph, not in the middle of a paragraph.

Keep your chapter headings if you need them - treat them just as a very short paragraph and use html to bold them <b> chapter heading </b> that should work OK.

It's ultimately down to Laurel which category it goes into. You could ask for it to be categorised Incest, but put a note to the editor saying it's uncle/aunt/niece - and ask her to decide. She generally places stories in the category where she thinks it will run best.
 
electricblue66 said:
You have no say when the Lit page breaks, so don't worry about that. It always breaks on a paragraph, not in the middle of a paragraph.
Click to expand...
True, but a final short paragraph may land alone on the last page with only comments below. That's the uncomfortable way to stretch a one-pager. I try to set the word count to rather more or less than a multiple of 3700.

Keep your chapter headings if you need them - treat them just as a very short paragraph and use html to bold them <b> chapter heading </b> that should work OK.
Click to expand...
A large number of LIT readers use the Android app which ignores all HTML tags. No bolds, italics, or underlines. As I showed above, a heading delimited by asterisks or equals fits all platforms:

=====
Sunday
=====

It's ultimately down to Laurel which category it goes into. You could ask for it to be categorised Incest, but put a note to the editor saying it's uncle/aunt/niece - and ask her to decide. She generally places stories in the category where she thinks it will run best.
Click to expand...
And Laurel is sometimes inconstant there. Fucking a cousin MIGHT might be incest; Frenching a sibling might not. If a blood cousin, aunt, uncle, or step-kin is fucked in my stories, I'll include a sibling, child, or parent, too, just to make sure it's INCEST!

I've written group incest, no problem. I've also posted stories in Group with streaks of incest, M/M, inter-racial, and non-con, with no complaints from Laurel or readers, but those were not main themes. And sisters 69ing are welcome almost everywhere. :devil:
 
Hypoxia said:
True, but a final short paragraph may land alone on the last page with only comments below. That's the uncomfortable way to stretch a one-pager. I try to set the word count to rather more or less than a multiple of 3700.

A large number of LIT readers use the Android app which ignores all HTML tags. No bolds, italics, or underlines. As I showed above, a heading delimited by asterisks or equals fits all platforms:

=====
Sunday
=====
Click to expand...
Good point re App readers - I forgot about them coz I never read anything on a phone, I couldn't think of anything worse.

Yes, I've been caught by the single sentence roll-over. I went back to lose a hundred words, hoping to bring it back to the previous page. That didn't work, so I figure, once the page partition is made in the database, that's it. Now I don't worry about it at all - the story's going to be as long as it is, no more, no less.
 
Lol... I wrote this for myself. It was a lot easier than thinking about publishing.

I'll look at the 3700 word break point, and I'll use an intro to adjust the length if needed.

Thanks for the tips.

Russ
 
Rustyoznail said:
Thanks for that. I’ve contacted a couple of editors about the story, but wasn’t sure about the song. You’re right about humour. Australian/ British comedy tends to be looked at strangely by the rest of the world. I’ll have a think about fitting it in to a bigger work.

Russ
Click to expand...

I love the literary, intellectual, historical, play on idiosyncratic English-as-a-language-isms, so common in English comedy.

From the late great Benny Hill, "Don't you even know the Queen's English."

"Well I always assumed that she was."

Love and Kisses

Lisa Ann (just a girl from Texas)
 
Hypoxia said:
And Laurel is sometimes inconstant there. Fucking a cousin MIGHT might be incest; Frenching a sibling might not. If a blood cousin, aunt, uncle, or step-kin is fucked in my stories, I'll include a sibling, child, or parent, too, just to make sure it's INCEST!

I've written group incest, no problem. I've also posted stories in Group with streaks of incest, M/M, inter-racial, and non-con, with no complaints from Laurel or readers, but those were not main themes. And sisters 69ing are welcome almost everywhere. :devil:
Click to expand...

At the same daughter prancing naked in front of the father may invoke at least Editor Note about incest content if not a category move, even if both are declared nudists and there's next to zero sexual interest between them.

I want to write an voyeur story where there's significant incestuous tension between brother and sister, but nothing happens, except she is one of several girls watched sunbathing nude, and I want it to be in E&V not in Incest. I may include and fuck a cousin to make it somewhat more appealing to incest crowd, but it still would be a voyeur story, a story I look for in E&V category and found lacking. And no, there's no way to keep sister out of that particular story.
 
LupusDei said:
At the same daughter prancing naked in front of the father may invoke at least Editor Note about incest content if not a category move, even if both are declared nudists and there's next to zero sexual interest between them.

I want to write an voyeur story where there's significant incestuous tension between brother and sister, but nothing happens, except she is one of several girls watched sunbathing nude, and I want it to be in E&V not in Incest. I may include and fuck a cousin to make it somewhat more appealing to incest crowd, but it still would be a voyeur story, a story I look for in E&V category and found lacking. And no, there's no way to keep sister out of that particular story.
Click to expand...

This looks like another one for that note to Laurel. Just make the same point you made here, which seems to imply no incest between brother/sister. She's accommodated my wishes on category in the past.
 
Rustyoznail said:
I'll look at the 3700 word break point, and I'll use an intro to adjust the length if needed.
Click to expand...

Keep in mind that on the technical side it is likely not words that are being counted, but bytes. The break inserting algorithm might be something alike this: check if story text is longer than X bytes; if so, find last paragraph break before byte X; insert a page break. Byte count includes white space, html formatting, may or not be increased by special characters. The X is not known by me at the present time, but could rather easily be back engineered by statistical analysis of lit page length in bytes.
 
LupusDei said:
Keep in mind that on the technical side it is likely not words that are being counted, but bytes. The break inserting algorithm might be something alike this: check if story text is longer than X bytes; if so, find last paragraph break before byte X; insert a page break. Byte count includes white space, html formatting, may or not be increased by special characters. The X is not known by me at the present time, but could rather easily be back engineered by statistical analysis of lit page length in bytes.
Click to expand...

Weird Harold had the answer to that but i haven't seen him around in a while. Ten thousand and something sticks in the mind but I might not even be close.
 
Well, thanks to everyone for their comments and to those who’s put up “how to’s...” My first story is now up in the incest/taboo area. I’d marked it to go into “first time” and had a note about maybe it could be considered incest. Go figure.... The story is here. It fits nicely on 3 pages.

https://www.literotica.com/s/bec-and-sammy-that-was-a-slip-up

Just a point with trying to figure page breaks. I submitted my story in a word doc, and you can’t review line spacing etc. so it was really just suck it and see.

Anyway, I’ve got 3 followers so I guess I’ll have to think of something to follow up.

Russ
 
Rustyoznail said:
Well, thanks to everyone for their comments and to those who’s put up “how to’s...” My first story is now up in the incest/taboo area. I’d marked it to go into “first time” and had a note about maybe it could be considered incest. Go figure.... The story is here. It fits nicely on 3 pages.

https://www.literotica.com/s/bec-and-sammy-that-was-a-slip-up

Just a point with trying to figure page breaks. I submitted my story in a word doc, and you can’t review line spacing etc. so it was really just suck it and see.

Anyway, I’ve got 3 followers so I guess I’ll have to think of something to follow up.

Russ
Click to expand...

How’d you end up handling the satirical song?

I ask because there’s an AudioPhiles thread in the Playground. Record the song and post it there. They’ll love it.
 
I’m still thinking about the song. As for me singing it, there’s a reason I learnt to play the saxamaphone...

Russ
 
10k, as other have said, would be best in one submission. I've had a similar issue in a coming submission, which is ten chapters in 24,000 words. I'm doubling chapters for submission.

Song lyrics would fit as a poetry submission.
 
KeithD said:
10k, as other have said, would be best in one submission. I've had a similar issue in a coming submission, which is ten chapters in 24,000 words. I'm doubling chapters for submission.
Click to expand...
What about a single long submission? 24k isn't huge for Lit, whereas five chapters would be about a Lit page and a half each, which is quite short. You'd get a good idea of your read-to-the-end numbers, though.
 
electricblue66 said:
What about a single long submission? 24k isn't huge for Lit, whereas five chapters would be about a Lit page and a half each, which is quite short. You'd get a good idea of your read-to-the-end numbers, though.
Click to expand...

This.

I used to worry about how many words I “should” post, but now? Nah.

Most of my stories go around 24-29k. I think of 35k as “long.”
 
electricblue66 said:
What about a single long submission? 24k isn't huge for Lit, whereas five chapters would be about a Lit page and a half each, which is quite short. You'd get a good idea of your read-to-the-end numbers, though.
Click to expand...

I suspect the read-to-the-end number for a 24k story would be higher if it were submitted as a single piece. That's speculation, since I don't think there's any way to know. It's just that there are too many possible distractions to expect a higher number of people to follow through five separate parts submitted over a period of time.

I usually divide my longer stories (my longest only being a little over 30k) internally into numbered chapters to make it easier for readers to stop, and then pick up again where they left off.
 
NotWise said:
I suspect the read-to-the-end number for a 24k story would be higher if it were submitted as a single piece.
Click to expand...
Somebody's analysis showed that single stories of 9 to 11 LIT pages (31k-41k words) gain the highest scores. I know a contest-winning 19-page (71k word) story with a 4.87 score on 375k views. Those who stay till the end tend to vote high.
 
Umm, I didn’t really write my story for the world, but people seem to like it. In two days it’s got 14k views, 24 likes, 1 comment and 6 follows.

What does that mean???

Russ
 
Rustyoznail said:
Umm, I didn’t really write my story for the world, but people seem to like it. In two days it’s got 14k views, 24 likes, 1 comment and 6 follows.

What does that mean???

Russ
Click to expand...

It means you are off to a good start. Incest/Taboo, along with Loving Wives, gets the highest number of readers of any category. 4.57 is a very good score for a story after only 24 hours. It is likely that your story has received some one-bombs just because there are people who regularly do that after a story is first posted. As time goes by some bad votes will be swept away and the score will rise. But you are in solid red H territory already, and that will attract more readers to your story and get you more followers.

Keep in mind you shouldn't take any of the numbers TOO seriously. Comparisons are hard and somewhat silly. But if you publish more stories in the same category you can track how they do compared to this one. That may or may not provide you with useful information.

Your view: favorite ratio is good. It means that people like your story well enough to make it a favorite.
 
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