What's your best story?

[MelissaBaby]

For the record, since I linked to my story in this thread, I have gotten 21 new views and ticked up one notch on the rating...

Oh, and it was favorited by djrip!

 

[NuclearFairy]

I still can't figure out which is my best story, but I think my favorite might be The Moon's Daughter.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Oh, and it was favorited by djrip!

twinsies

 

[AwkwardlySet]

For the record, since I linked to my story in this thread, I have gotten 21 new views and ticked up one notch on the rating...

Proving my point completely.

 

[lovecraft68]

Proving my point completely.

I'm always amazed that people keep track of their views.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I'm always amazed that people keep track of their views.

I assume she tracked those exact numbers as an experiment, since she linked the story after the warning about linking and bombing. It would be weird if people kept such precise tracking in normal circumstances.

 

[MelissaBaby]

I assume she tracked those exact numbers as an experiment, since she linked the story after the warning about linking and bombing. It would be weird if people kept such precise tracking in normal circumstances.

Yes. I wanted to see what the effect would be.

 

[lovecraft68]

I assume she tracked those exact numbers as an experiment, since she linked the story after the warning about linking and bombing. It would be weird if people kept such precise tracking in normal circumstances.

I've seen people posting graphs and all manner of ways they track them.

I could see votes or comments (we know comments are sadly easy to keep track of) but views seems a bit much, especially because some of those views aren't real but bots and their own clicks on their story.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

And one second clicks in and out.

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

I would probably say that my Valentine’s Day story, https://www.literotica.com/s/their-first-valentines-day, is my strongest work. It was a story that is unique and I liked that I was able to work the actual St. Valentine into a story for that contest. It’s also not my usual stuff, but I really enjoyed writing it and it’s one of the few I managed to get my SO to read.

 

[joy_of_cooking]

the technical details that I tried really hard to get right

Does this mean there are actually places that forward their internal instant messages to an external party in real time to have alt text added to the photos? If that, that might be a Tiffany Problem. I hit that part and instantly experienced an un-suspension of my disbelief.

 

[PennyThompson]

Does this mean there are actually places that forward their internal instant messages to an external party in real time to have alt text added to the photos? If that, that might be a Tiffany Problem. I hit that part and instantly experienced an un-suspension of my disbelief.

Interesting feedback, thank you

There are accessibility compliance companies that help other orgs make their web content accessible, and provide services like document remediation and closed captioning and alt-text for images. That much is true!

But to my knowledge none of them contract for live-alt-texting of internal private messages... that very specific use case is a conceit I invented to put the PoV character into the middle of two strangers' sexting conversation

Is it more or less plausible than most situations that happen in the Exhibitionism & Voyeurism genre? I'll let the reader be the judge of that!

 

[joy_of_cooking]

That makes much more sense.

I don't think anyone does this live, but many places have HR or legal review internal communications for inappropriate content, usually based on the presence of keywords. Presumably there are now also ML tools to flag messages for human review. Sentiment analysis if not full on LLMs. So that would have been another way for your narrator to have gotten stuck reading his coworkers' sexts.

Unfortunately, it wouldn't have worked for your ending which I quite liked.

 

[TheLobster]

If that, that might be a Tiffany Problem. I hit that part and instantly experienced an un-suspension of my disbelief.

It's one of those cases that divides the audience into three groups and alienates the middle one.

If you know next to nothing about the topic, in this case web accessibility, you're likely to just take everything the writer presents in a compelling manner at face value. There's always some benefit of the doubt that readers give authors, and if the latter doesn't venture wildly beyond common sense then it's all good, and there is probably not even a conscious act of suspending reader's disbelief.

I happen to be on the opposite side of the spectrum, where I'm actually quite well-versed in the topic. So I instantly knew that Penny was making up the part about real-time a11y curation of chat messages; but it was also quite obvious that this is her equivalent of the violent sandstorm on Mars, which was the one departure from realism that Andy Weir permitted himself when writing The Martian. Since the entire premise hinges upon this element, it has to be present or there is simply no story. Knowing this, I could suspend my disbelief just fine, albeit consciously.

The problem is always with the audience group in the middle: those who know something about the subject but are far from experts. That's the group who's most likely to conclude that reality is unrealistic; or that this one single conceit which the author needs to put in for the sake getting the story off the ground is a sign they're just making stuff up willy-nilly. The readers who fall into this group are stuck in the uncanny valley when it comes to suspension of disbelief, since they can do it neither consciously nor unconsciously.

I don't think you can really do much about it, other that writing 100% completely realistic plotlines. But besides the fact that doing so is exceedingly hard, stories that imitate life so closely don't strike me as good escapist entertainment.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

It's one of those cases that divides the audience into three groups and alienates the middle one.

If you know next to nothing about the topic, in this case web accessibility, you're likely to just take everything the writer presents in a compelling manner at face value. There's always some benefit of the doubt that readers give authors, and if the latter doesn't venture wildly beyond common sense then it's all good, and there is probably not even a conscious act of suspending reader's disbelief.

I happen to be on the opposite side of the spectrum, where I'm actually quite well-versed in the topic. So I instantly knew that Penny was making up the part about real-time a11y curation of chat messages; but it was also quite obvious that this is her equivalent of the violent sandstorm on Mars, which was the one departure from realism that Andy Weir permitted himself when writing The Martian. Since the entire premise hinges upon this element, it has to be present or there is simply no story. Knowing this, I could suspend my disbelief just fine, albeit consciously.

The problem is always with the audience group in the middle: those who know something about the subject but are far from experts. That's the group who's most likely to conclude that reality is unrealistic; or that this one single conceit which the author needs to put in for the sake getting the story off the ground is a sign they're just making stuff up willy-nilly. The readers who fall into this group are stuck in the uncanny valley when it comes to suspension of disbelief, since they can do it neither consciously nor unconsciously.

I don't think you can really do much about it, other that writing 100% completely realistic plotlines. But besides the fact that doing so is exceedingly hard, stories that imitate life so closely don't strike me as good escapist entertainment.

I'd put myself in the group of knowing something about the topic, but not being an expert.

Which is why I concluded that the company had asked MC's company to alt-text :'everything', not realising this would include internal messaging. Cock-up rather than conspiracy. Admittedly I work somewhere where instead of the usual 'we reserve the right to look at your messages', the warning is 'We do check your messages and emails to ensure compliance with policy',

I agree that without this it wouldn't have been a story. Similar to a story I read where a relay assistant for a deaf woman receiving a phone call ends up transcribing dirty talk (that part is real) then interfering by providing more romantic content to get the couple together into a relationship (would get the relay op sacked rapidly, also set at a time before the tech existed for the op to both hear and speak and type all at the same time). You had to accept the premise to make the story work at all.

Personally I find many Lit stories implausible - almost all the incest ones, most of the 'first time, age 18), and don't get me started on BDSM...

 

[FrancesScott]

I regret not being able to read this right away in one sitting, but so far (33% of the way through), this is a beautiful piece of work!

I hesitate to ask, but did you ever find the time to finish my story?

 

[PennyThompson]

I'd put myself in the group of knowing something about the topic, but not being an expert.

Which is why I concluded that the company had asked MC's company to alt-text :'everything', not realising this would include internal messaging. Cock-up rather than conspiracy. Admittedly I work somewhere where instead of the usual 'we reserve the right to look at your messages', the warning is 'We do check your messages and emails to ensure compliance with policy',

In retrospect that's a pretty good, tidy solution and I wish I had thought of it

"Wait, this is an internal private message, not a public-facing image... Why am I seeing this?"

But in the end I'm just not that worried about it. One of my favorite types of comments are the ones that go something like, "great story, but you set this period piece in West Virginia in June of 1977, and that was an uncommonly cool year in WV and that young woman would probably not have been comfortable wearing daisy dukes and a bikini top that June..."

If someone is so engaged with the story, and so specifically knowledgeable about the setting or details being covered, I would LOVE to hear their viewpoint

 

[iwatchus]

But in the end I'm just not that worried about it. One of my favorite types of comments are the ones that go something like, "great story, but you set this period piece in West Virginia in June of 1977, and that was an uncommonly cool year in WV and that young woman would probably not have been comfortable wearing daisy dukes and a bikini top that year..."

This is why I generally leave some ambiguity in their setting. Most of them are baed on a place, but with changes that means it's not there. My current work is almost Ann Arbor. But some things are definitely not Ann Arbor. But if the reader thinks Ann Arbor, they have the right image, but can't complain that I got something wrong. I did set one story in St John USVI, so I had to be more careful about the setting there. It takes place this coming Labor Day, so I just have to hope that things aren't wiped out by a hurricane between now and then.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

I never include identifiable details.

From the bikinis and other skimpy wear, it's obviously some time warm, but could be a single month or two almost anywhere on the globe.

 

[NuclearFairy]

That's why I prefer to put my stories in an alternate reality or at some unspecified point in the future.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

I had either 10 or 11 Red Hs a few days ago. At one point recently I had 12 out of 30 stories.


Now I have 7.


The only thing different is posting here about them.

Did I say 6?

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

But in the end I'm just not that worried about it. One of my favorite types of comments are the ones that go something like, "great story, but you set this period piece in West Virginia in June of 1977, and that was an uncommonly cool year in WV and that young woman would probably not have been comfortable wearing daisy dukes and a bikini top that June..."

And this is why I am constantly googling weather reports for areas I'm writing about on specific past dates. I think I've got the Vegas weather diary for 1983 permanently burned into my browser. I'm constantly double-checking sunrise and sunset dates, weather and temperature, hell - I think I even checked high tides at one point for something I was working on.

The biggest pain in the ass one I ever did was calculating what time local sunrise was going to be for a ship transiting around the Cape of Good Hope route on a specific date last March for the sea story I wrote for the On the Job event. That was a massive pain in the ass, although there's probably an easy way of doing this I didn't figure out, lol.

Does anybody notice? Unlikely. But there are times when I throw in little details like this - I just threw in a movie reference to National Lampoon's Vacation, which came out the week one of my story chapters took place - so that if somebody does decide to look it up, they'll be pleasantly surprised to find it's accurate.

One of my buddies likes to build models, and he's always sending me pictures of airplanes he's done where he's painted intricate details that end up getting covered up as soon as he puts the model together completely. I've given up asking him why he does this - spends so much time on tiny details that nobody is ever going to see, because he always says the same thing: "I'll know."

 

[Rob_Royale]

I think my best story is among my least read. It's a fantasy story called A Ruckus in Rivers Bend. It's a 'stranger comes to town' story and I think it works very well. Ensemble cast, a good hero, a sexy wife, and a town in peril. What more do you need?

 

[iwatchus]

I just threw in a movie reference to National Lampoon's Vacation, which came out the week one of my story chapters took place - so that if somebody does decide to look it up, they'll be pleasantly surprised to find it's accurate.

I realized watching MASH would make a good plot point for my Nude Day entry that takes place spring of 83. I looked to check whether it was still on the air and realized that the finale was happening the next week in my story timeline. I think that serendipity worked well for the story.

OTOH, no one called me on them celebrating nude day in 1983. I was afraid someone would.

 

[NoCa]

I hesitate to ask, but did you ever find the time to finish my story?

I did! I even sent you private feedback, which apparently does not work because nobody ever answered those^^. Let me reassure you, I found it absolutely delightful. The prose and registry alone were able to captivate me the whole way through. I also really liked the main character, sympathetic but also quite believable. I liked the mum, she was fun. Jordan herself was positively adorable. My only complaint is that there was not more of it!

I am sure a lot of people will have lamented the prose. There is an innate silliness in complaining about something being "too good".

5/5 stars.

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