The Official Authors' Hangout Valentine's Day 2019 Support Thread

[ChloeTzang]

Well, very much OK, then. That sweep on my stories was massive (which shows how massive the attack on them was). Before the last sweep (last evening), they ranged between 4.16 and 4.58. As of now they range between 4.71 and 5.00. Some older stories were brought back up to hot too.

I saw that 5.00 - it doesn't get much better than that LOL - it was pretty high before the sweeps started, but that was good.

 

[KeithD]

I saw that 5.00 - it doesn't get much better than that LOL - it was pretty high before the sweeps started, but that was good.

It just dropped below the threshold, though, so everyone else is safe. The sweeping continues.

 

[RejectReality]

Not in the contest, but my latest went up .03 on about 10 votes swept.

 

[ChloeTzang]

It just dropped below the threshold, though, so everyone else is safe. The sweeping continues.

Does it ever. Holy moley, been watching a few scores moving around.

 

[KeithD]

Congrats to the winners and all who entered the contest.

All three of mine in this name ended up in the 4.70s, after a massive sweep. My co-authored one with Sabb, under the name Shabbu, ended up at 5.00, but two votes shy of qualifying.

 

[NotWise]

Congratulations to ChloeTzang, SolarRay, carrteun, and the rest of the contestants -- especially those that put themselves out there for the first time.

 

[oggbashan]

Congratulations

* 2019 Valentines Day Contest Winners *

First Place ($150 Cash Prize Winner):
Tales from Old Shanghai 01
by ChloeTzang

Second Place ($100 Cash Prize Winner):
You Don't Know Me But We Are Lovers
by SolarRay

Third Place ($75 Cash Prize Winner):
Elevator Valentines
by carrteun

Congratulations to the above and to all those who took part.

 

[TxRad]

* 2019 Valentines Day Contest Winners *

First Place ($150 Cash Prize Winner):
Tales from Old Shanghai 01
by ChloeTzang

Second Place ($100 Cash Prize Winner):
You Don't Know Me But We Are Lovers
by SolarRay

Third Place ($75 Cash Prize Winner):
Elevator Valentines
by carrteun

Congratulations to the above and to all those who took part.

Congrats to one and all.

 

[SolarRay]

Yow, how 'bout that! Congrats to ChloeTzang, carrteun, and to everyone who entered!

 

[ChloeTzang]

Thanks guys, she says modestly. Actually, I cried when I saw that, I really did. "Never Ending Love" was one of those things that just poured out non-stop and it really was something that grew as I wrote and I lived Chuntao for a month while I wrote it. It was supposed to be a short story and it just took on a life of its own and turned into a novel.

Anyhow, what I really wanted to say was congrats to everyone else who placed and to KeithD/shabbu for that AMAZING 5.0 - what can you say, you deserved a few more votes on that one, Pilot - and congratulations to everyone else who entered, especially everyone whose first story it was or who entered a Literotica competition for the first time.

I remember the trepidation of my first time (the competitions. get your minds out of the gutter....) and it's a big step to commit yourself, but hey, you've done it! Welcome and see you in the next one. I hope you all enjoyed yourself and it's everyone putting their stories in that makes these competitions and story events so much fun. So do it again! The next one's coming soon.

And for all of you that are in these competitions time after time, writing away, well, hope you had as much fun as I did

 

[gordo12]

* 2019 Valentines Day Contest Winners *

First Place ($150 Cash Prize Winner):
Tales from Old Shanghai 01
by ChloeTzang

Second Place ($100 Cash Prize Winner):
You Don't Know Me But We Are Lovers
by SolarRay

Third Place ($75 Cash Prize Winner):
Elevator Valentines
by carrteun

Congratulations to the above and to all those who took part.

Congrats to all.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Yow, how 'bout that! Congrats to ChloeTzang, carrteun, and to everyone who entered!

Yowza! Congrats to you to. You were coming up so fast behind I had my butt to the wall!

(actually, you and carrteun and oggbashan were ahead of me right up to those last day sweeps and after those last day sweeps started, I thought shabbu had it nailed...)

 

[SimonDoom]

Congratulations to the winners! Great job.

 

[SandraMustard]

I wish to add my congratulations to the winners. There were some very good stories in this contest. Every entrant should take pride in their effort.

The final sweep jumped my story to 4.83 which is quite good but I knew there were half a dozen stories running better than mine and the differences were not overcome. I still won something: new followers and a few off-site ebook sales. Every participant gained by testing their talent.

 

[SolarRay]

Yowza! Congrats to you to. You were coming up so fast behind I had my butt to the wall!

Ha, I mostly refrained from checking other scores for this but I remained hopeful. This one felt extra satisfying to write but wow, that's so great to hear about how you arrived at "Never Ending Love". Kudos to you on nailing it!!

I'm just getting a chuckle out of the fact that my two biggest successes on this site have been in Lesbian Sex. I've really enjoyed writing there on occasion but if you'd told me when I first joined Lit that I'd win anything there I'd not have believed you. What a wonderful and supportive audience one can find there.

 

[Voboy]

Yay, everyone! Nice work to all, and congrats to the winnahs.

 

[gordo12]

LOL Laurel just announced you all as the winners of the 2018 Winter Contest.

 

[KeithD]

Please, don't take this as back-stabbing, but do you have any ideas how Sabbu, one of the previous contest-winners (wasn't that also Valentine's Day?) didn't even get enough votes to quality this year?

It’s Shabbu (combination of the coauthor’s names: sr7plt/keithd as habu—my market name—and Sabb, both members here). Yes, Shabbu won first place in last year’s Romance contest with “The Forever Man.” The views/votes for all of Shabbu’s and keithd’s entries were significantly lower this year than last. It might be a question whether everyone regularly in these contests experienced low turnout this year. Nonstroke GM stories don’t generally get the views/votes that other categories do, so my GM stories don’t usually rack up high view/vote counts (I did place, as sr71plt, in another contest, though—the first April Fool’s Day contest with a GM story).

Last year’s story had added readers, I think, because it had an attention-getting Australia setting. Also, it was in contention from the beginning. “I Met a Man” this year was kept down around 4.50 until yesterday when the sweeping shot it up. That’s the real effect of the zap voting. There are people who will only open/read the high-scoring stories, so if you can artificially make a story not high scoring until the end in the contest, you lower the readership. Literotica used to do a sweep early to counter this; it doesn’t anymore.

We try to give a little extra jolt to our Shabbu stories. Last year’s story combined an Australian legend (the Sydney sidewalk chalker) and an American legend (the gifts left for decades at the Poe grave), and the readership and voting were relatively high from the beginning of the contest in terms of the stories Sabb and I write. This year’s “jolt” didn’t come until the end of “I Met a Man,” where an authors’ note provides another dimension to the story—that the setting actually exists and is where Lawrence Durrell lived and wrote and also where I (habu) have lived and wrote novels there too. That adds a literary dimension, and I surmise that anyone who made it that far in the read boosted up their vote so that all serious votes (in Literotica’s sweeper view) were 5s. Actually, there’s even another dimension to this story that wasn’t given. It’s part of a series of novellas with the same setting, written Alexandria Quartet (Durrell) style, where different writers occupy the same villa over the years, their lives cross, they are affected by the same house “ghosts,” and they are subjected to the same siren call—as I was when I wrote in that villa.

I can’t be upset that, save for two votes, Shabbu would have run away with the contest win with a minimum vote count. I can’t consider a story with a low read/vote count to be on equal footing in comparable ratings with a story with a high read/vote count. The “jolt” for me in this one, though, was that earlier this morning the story was rating at 5.00 with 29 votes, enough to win. This is the first time I’ve seen 5s shaved off my stories by the sweep, let alone 6 of them right at the end of the sweep. I’m more accustomed to experiencing the erroneous low-voting.

 

[ChloeTzang]

.....The views/votes for all of Shabbu’s and keithd’s entries were significantly lower this year than last. It might be a question whether everyone regularly in these contests experienced low turnout this year. .....

Well, speaking for myself, my story was submitted in First Time, which along with IR is where I mostly submit, and it's my lowest viewed story ever - which might have something to do with the length too. Fingerprints, which won one of the competitions a couple of years ago and which was also in First Time, had exponentially higher views and votes. But then, Fingerprints got into the sex pretty quickly, with "Never Ending Love" it was slow and lengthy start...

 

[yukonnights]

Just wanted to add my congratulations to the winning authors!

My own two entries finally made it back up to a more expected (and appreciated) reception. And I've found several new stories to read and hopefully learn something from. It's a true pleasure to be able to participate in something like this with so many talented writers!!!

 

[gordo12]

It might be a question whether everyone regularly in these contests experienced low turnout this year.

I can only speak for having done three event/contests but for a LW story (which HDK assured me an LW story would never win a contest) it racked up almost 21k views and just under 900 votes coming in @ 4.27. The sweep took out something like 120 votes but the score only rose .09 for losing all those haters. That was a shitload of 3,4 & 5 votes.

The killer was it getting published on Friday night and Sunday night they published all the 750 word stories and there were so many in the LW category they knocked all the contest entries right out. So it, and all the other LW entries got two days in the sun. Everything I had above, I had already after two days. There was little progress after. Lesson learned. I'll check before posting. I would have expected 3-5 days normally.

For me and only a third story here I'm stoked by the results.

 

[BuckyDuckman]

Couldn't participate, but I still wanted to pass along my congratulations to the winners:

First Place
Tales from Old Shanghai 01 by ChloeTzang

Second Place
You Don't Know Me But We Are Lovers by SolarRay

Third Place
Elevator Valentines by carrteun

Hope everyone else got lots of extra reads and new followers. Be well!

 

[ChloeTzang]

Couldn't participate, but I still wanted to pass along my congratulations to the winners:

Thx Bucky

Just wanted to add my congratulations to the winning authors!..... It's a true pleasure to be able to participate in something like this with so many talented writers!!!

Thx and it is, isn't it. I'm so grateful to be here writing with you guys - and also for all the encouragement and help (and raps on the knuckles anc corrections) since I started writing here

Congratulations to the above and to all those who took part.

And to you too, Ogg. Your "The Last Card" did really well.

 

[SolarRay]

This year’s “jolt” didn’t come until the end of “I Met a Man,” where an authors’ note provides another dimension to the story—that the setting actually exists and is where Lawrence Durrell lived and wrote and also where I (habu) have lived and wrote novels there too. That adds a literary dimension, and I surmise that anyone who made it that far in the read boosted up their vote so that all serious votes (in Literotica’s sweeper view) were 5s. Actually, there’s even another dimension to this story that wasn’t given. It’s part of a series of novellas with the same setting, written Alexandria Quartet (Durrell) style, where different writers occupy the same villa over the years, their lives cross, they are affected by the same house “ghosts,” and they are subjected to the same siren call—as I was when I wrote in that villa.

We've talked about your Alexandria Quartet connection before. I still find it completely thrilling that you use that as an inspiration for your writing style. Sorry that you ended up falling just shy of the cutoff on this one...

For those that follow the numbers, I *think* I was just shy of 300 votes and in the mid-4.80s by contest end. At the start of the final sweeps I'm pretty sure I had some 5s removed at little to no cost (I have one theory on why many stories have a few hard-earned 5s trimmed at the end, but I won't speculate here). Then the last (bigger) sweep landed me at 4.89. In the sweet spot at the right time, I guess.

Thanks yukonnights-- likewise, so much talent and support here!

 

[ChloeTzang]

We've talked about your Alexandria Quartet connection before. I still find it completely thrilling that you use that as an inspiration for your writing style. Sorry that you ended up falling just shy of the cutoff on this one...

Likewise. (the Alexandria Quartet AND the falling shy).

For those that follow the numbers, I *think* I was just shy of 300 votes and in the mid-4.80s by contest end. At the start of the final sweeps I'm pretty sure I had some 5s removed at little to no cost (I have one theory on why many stories have a few hard-earned 5s trimmed at the end, but I won't speculate here). Then the last (bigger) sweep landed me at 4.89....

You were pretty settled at 4.83 for the last few days and those final sweeps in the last couple of hours jumped you to 4.89 (I have a few days off work, I was tracking).

Now me, I got one starred out of the gate and then got taken down below 4.5 a couple of times early on but crept back up to 4.78 by the end of Monday, picked up to 4.81 on Tuesday am, thought I'd end up somewhere in the top half dozen but the sweeps purged the trolls well and truly.

If anybody else is interested, I have my spreadsheet and you can PM me. I'm not going to talk about anyone else's scores here