The official Authors' Hangout Summer Lovin' 2019 Support Thread

[BelleCanzuto]

But I guess some people here really are dedicated to reading stories they don't like and letting others know, over and over and over again, that they don't approve. I don't get it, but there it is.

I think we can all agree that that ^^ might be the weirdest erotica yet.
{or not, ymmv}

 

[Javahead]

And with another 1600 words written tonight, my story is finally done. Well, the first draft at least. Got just past 7k words, which was slightly more than I expected, but still very manageable. I'll give it a final round of edits tomorrow, then send it off for some proofreading. Should be able to post it soon, hopefully

Don't know if I'll make it or not. I know I could (with time left over for a quick self-edit, and eyes-on for any interested 1st readers) except that we've got visiting family from now until Tuesday.

I couldn't take time off from work to spend with them (deadline this Friday) so my 2-3 hour writing block every evening has been preempted for socialization. Not all bad - I could take another couple of weeks for polish, and break it up into chapters rather than a single novel-sized lump - but I'd really wanted to get it out as part of the contest. And even if I crank out the needed 10-15K additional words before the deadline, without editing or feedback it'll be rougher than it should be.

It'll be published. But if I can't get it out by the contest deadline I may take a couple of extra weeks to clean it up before pulling the trigger.

 

[ThisNameIsntTakenYet]

Question: I know you're supposed to include the contest text in the note field during submission to enter, but can you still enter a regular message to Laurel alongside that? Or wouldn't that get picked up by the system? As I'm assuming it (or she) is searching for that phrase specifically on all new stories to give contest submission priority.

The reason I want to add a note is that my story is getting really close to 7.5k words, the average size for 2 lit-pages, and I'd rather not want to have just one or two paragraphs on a third page, if it happened to be formatted like that. Not sure if Laurel can control that or not to begin with, but I thought I'd ask at least.

So yeah, would this be possible or would my story no longer get picked up for the contest if I added more than just the specified phrase in the notes field?

 

[ChloeTzang]

Question: I know you're supposed to include the contest text in the note field during submission to enter, but can you still enter a regular message to Laurel alongside that? Or wouldn't that get picked up by the system? As I'm assuming it (or she) is searching for that phrase specifically on all new stories to give contest submission priority.

The reason I want to add a note is that my story is getting really close to 7.5k words, the average size for 2 lit-pages, and I'd rather not want to have just one or two paragraphs on a third page, if it happened to be formatted like that. Not sure if Laurel can control that or not to begin with, but I thought I'd ask at least.

So yeah, would this be possible or would my story no longer get picked up for the contest if I added more than just the specified phrase in the notes field?

You can add an additional note in as well, I’ve done that. Just keep it separated by a blank line from the competition text. I don’t think Laurel has any control over the page break formatting tho.

 

[ThisNameIsntTakenYet]

You can add an additional note in as well, I’ve done that. Just keep it separated by a blank line from the competition text. I don’t think Laurel has any control over the page break formatting tho.

Thanks, will do. And I'm not sure if she can either, but it's worth a try I guess. My story is 7450 words, so it really is up to formatting if it fits in two pages or not. Three wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would be kind of disappointing to finish reading page two and then think you'll get another chunk of story only to find just two short paragraphs on the third page.

 

[oggbashan]

Thanks, will do. And I'm not sure if she can either, but it's worth a try I guess. My story is 7450 words, so it really is up to formatting if it fits in two pages or not. Three wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would be kind of disappointing to finish reading page two and then think you'll get another chunk of story only to find just two short paragraphs on the third page.

I have found it difficult to avoid that. If a story is slightly over a page break I have had to remove far more than the few extra words to avoid an overrun.

I think the last time I succeeded I was originally about 30 words over but had to remove several hundred.

 

[KeithD]

I don't bother to obsess with this issue. The end of a story is going to hit wherever it does. If there is a reader who hyperventilates over this sort of thing, I don't have a real need to have them as a reader. I don't write for the anal retentive. The story is the way I want it when I write it. I don't mess with content to meet some technical presentation issue.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

I have found it difficult to avoid that. If a story is slightly over a page break I have had to remove far more than the few extra words to avoid an overrun.

I think the last time I succeeded I was originally about 30 words over but had to remove several hundred.

Is there anyway to preview or test that?

A couple of paragraphs on a last page is no bother, imho. But I did read one story here where the last page consisted of a single sentence. That was a little jarring...

 

[MichaelGH]

Hey do you think it would be cool to post like the first three parts of a story for a contest? Like each part would have its own ending so to speak. It’s just that there will be the assumption that this story will continue.

Working on my sex demon story. Is it odd that I think it may be the most romantic thing I’ve ever written?

 

[KeithD]

Is there anyway to preview or test that?

A couple of paragraphs on a last page is no bother, imho. But I did read one story here where the last page consisted of a single sentence. That was a little jarring...

You could with the old system author's page. You can't with the new one as far as I can see.

 

[KeithD]

Hey do you think it would be cool to post like the first three parts of a story for a contest? Like each part would have its own ending so to speak. It’s just that there will be the assumption that this story will continue.

Working on my sex demon story. Is it odd that I think it may be the most romantic thing I’ve ever written?

I did something similar to that in the 2008 Winter contest in my sr71plt account. Five connected and mega plot advancing, but standalone stories, were entered separately in the contest ("Second Chance," "Second Christmas Tree," "Second Honeymoon," "Second Sight," and "Second Sister"). They've done well in the ratings. They later were released to the marketplace as chapters of one complete novella.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Is there anyway to preview or test that?

A couple of paragraphs on a last page is no bother, imho. But I did read one story here where the last page consisted of a single sentence. That was a little jarring...

Possibly one of mine. It pissed me off at the time - I cut a couple of hundred words and submitted an edit, with a note, but it made no difference, the damn sentence still rolled to a page of its own.

The only solution i can see is keep several hundreds of words away from the 3750 increments and/or don't bother about it - it's obviously a system constraint, so what can you do?

Like 99% of things people futz with, it's in the "mildly annoying for five minutes" category of privileged first world problems.

 

[ThisNameIsntTakenYet]

Hey do you think it would be cool to post like the first three parts of a story for a contest? Like each part would have its own ending so to speak. It’s just that there will be the assumption that this story will continue.

Working on my sex demon story. Is it odd that I think it may be the most romantic thing I’ve ever written?

The way I understand it, every contest submission needs to stand on its own. As long as you can read the submission from start to finish without needing any background information from other stories, you should be fine. And of course they need to be self-contained stories, but can be part of a larger narrative.

But as long as you manage that you can do basically whatever you want. You can reuse characters, locations, entire worlds... Each story could be a smaller arc of a larger story, like TV show episodes for example. As long as you either explain details in the story itself so someone who only read that story knows what's going on or it's not important to understand those details to enjoy the story it should be fine.

 

[TxRad]

Possibly one of mine. It pissed me off at the time - I cut a couple of hundred words and submitted an edit, with a note, but it made no difference, the damn sentence still rolled to a page of its own.

The only solution i can see is keep several hundreds of words away from the 3750 increments and/or don't bother about it - it's obviously a system constraint, so what can you do?

Like 99% of things people futz with, it's in the "mildly annoying for five minutes" category of privileged first world problems.

We use the 3750 words as a rough guide but the pages are actually set by characters. One of our members of old had the average number of characters but I haven't seen him around in a while. Weird Harold was his name.

 

[NotWise]

We use the 3750 words as a rough guide but the pages are actually set by characters. One of our members of old had the average number of characters but I haven't seen him around in a while. Weird Harold was his name.

I have a whole series of stories that I wrote to a formula. Part of the formula is "two lit pages." I found the length of two pages varied quite a bit. Two of them broke to page three before 7400 words (3700 words/page) and some went over 7500 words (3750 words/page) in two pages. As a result, I've been using 3700 words as the page length.

I doubt that words or characters are the actual parameter for breaking the page. It might be the page length in inches, cm, or pixels. Someone who's good at reading the style sheets might be able to decipher exactly what the criteria is.

It might be adjustable. I had one story that broke awkwardly, leaving just an epitaph on the last page. I asked Laurel if that could be changed, and I think she managed to move the break to put another paragraph on the last page.

 

[ElectricBlue]

We use the 3750 words as a rough guide but the pages are actually set by characters. One of our members of old had the average number of characters but I haven't seen him around in a while. Weird Harold was his name.

Agree. I reckon it's a character limit - it being a database, after all.

I started posting recently on a new start-up site (still in beta). Their field length for written content is 10k characters exactly. Which is a stupid short prick of a length, about 1700 - 1800 words (about half a Lit page). Based on that evidence alone, I'd put money on a Lit page being 20,000 characters long, with an absolute upper limit and an adjustable bin size - as NotWise suggests, simple enough to force text onto the next page.

For my story, I should have written a hundred more words to force more text over the page break; whereas I tried to shorten it. Which also suggests to me, once a page count is established and a story is published, it's difficult to remove a page. Probably something to do with sequential database ID requirements. Damned computers and their digits!

We need one of our boffiny measuring types to go away and count digits - for me, 3,750 is near enough for what I do, page count estimating wise.

 

[MichaelGH]

The way I understand it, every contest submission needs to stand on its own. As long as you can read the submission from start to finish without needing any background information from other stories, you should be fine. And of course they need to be self-contained stories, but can be part of a larger narrative.

But as long as you manage that you can do basically whatever you want. You can reuse characters, locations, entire worlds... Each story could be a smaller arc of a larger story, like TV show episodes for example. As long as you either explain details in the story itself so someone who only read that story knows what's going on or it's not important to understand those details to enjoy the story it should be fine.

Yeah like I’d put the first 2-3 parts as my contest from the beginning and then post the last parts later.

There would be something akin to a conclusion too, just one I can pick up later.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Yeah like I’d put the first 2-3 parts as my contest from the beginning and then post the last parts later.

There would be something akin to a conclusion too, just one I can pick up later.

You'll be fine doing that. It's when folk were submitting Part 23 to contests and rolling in massive fan bases to vote, that Laurel introduced the "stand alone story" rule.

Just don't badge it Chapter 1. Wait until Chapter 2 to do that - and make sure the contest story at least has the semblance of an ending.

 

[LupusDei]

Agree. I reckon it's a character limit - it being a database, after all.

I started posting recently on a new start-up site (still in beta). Their field length for written content is 10k characters exactly. Which is a stupid short prick of a length, about 1700 - 1800 words (about half a Lit page). Based on that evidence alone, I'd put money on a Lit page being 20,000 characters long, with an absolute upper limit and an adjustable bin size - as NotWise suggests, simple enough to force text onto the next page.

For my story, I should have written a hundred more words to force more text over the page break; whereas I tried to shorten it. Which also suggests to me, once a page count is established and a story is published, it's difficult to remove a page. Probably something to do with sequential database ID requirements. Damned computers and their digits!

We need one of our boffiny measuring types to go away and count digits - for me, 3,750 is near enough for what I do, page count estimating wise.

Okay, I went and took a quick look at source of a few pages, and it's a close enough guess.

I bet the actual limit is 20kb of source text, with is 20480 bytes, with is at most 20480 characters provided none take more than one byte to code (characters outside the standard set and some specials will do). I suppose, HTML formating provided by the author will count into that as well, eating further in the number of visible characters.

The actual text block with HTML formating as it is in the browser was 20.1kb-20.4kb, but only in one occasion slightly more than 20kb after the numerous <BR> were removed. I didn't research that case further; and I assume it might possibly have been result of a later edit and the database is actually capable of holding more than a 20KB blurb per page.

What makes most sense code wise, would be to break the page on the last paragraph break within 20kb, but what we know, it could as well be closest paragraph break to the 20kb mark, or anything.

I very much doubt edits would move initially set page borders unless, probably, being massive, or specifically tailored manually (cropping/pasting parts of text from one database field to another, or some such).

 

[BelleCanzuto]

Possibly one of mine. It pissed me off at the time - I cut a couple of hundred words and submitted an edit, with a note, but it made no difference, the damn sentence still rolled to a page of its own.

The only solution i can see is keep several hundreds of words away from the 3750 increments and/or don't bother about it - it's obviously a system constraint, so what can you do?

Like 99% of things people futz with, it's in the "mildly annoying for five minutes" category of privileged first world problems.

I'm sure it wasn't one of yours. It was when I'd wandered back to reading here, long before I set up an account or considered submitting anything. i.e. before I knew you existed, EB

And yes, it's fer sher a first world problem that didn't even exactly annoy me. However! it's fair to say it was memorable, in that i don't remember anything else about the story, except that there was that one hanging sentence.

 

[ThisNameIsntTakenYet]

I doubt that words or characters are the actual parameter for breaking the page. It might be the page length in inches, cm, or pixels. Someone who's good at reading the style sheets might be able to decipher exactly what the criteria is.

I was actually talking to another writer about this recently, who thought the average words per page of 3750 was on the high side. Turns out, they use a lot of single lines of dialogue back and forth and such, which increases the amount of whitespace on the page. I don't think it's a physical length in cm or inches or anything that cuts off the page, as that would be a hard thing to calculate. At last harder than some of the alternatives.

Having a look at the HTML source of one of their stories, each line seems to have two <br> tags following it for a new line, which makes me suspect that the file size limit LupusDei proposed is very plausible. After all compared to stories like mine that generally have longer paragraphs, that's quite a lot more <br> tags, so that would be a larger file size to show less actual text.

 

[MichaelGH]

Wondering the differences between nonhuman, sci fi & fantasy and erotic horror. My Halloween story has moments of horror but they’re pretty contained from from the actual sex acts. The main character has sexual relations with a demon but also with actual humans. So I’m thinking Sci fi & fantasy, thoughts?

 

[NotWise]

Wondering the differences between nonhuman, sci fi & fantasy and erotic horror. My Halloween story has moments of horror but they’re pretty contained from from the actual sex acts. The main character has sexual relations with a demon but also with actual humans. So I’m thinking Sci fi & fantasy, thoughts?

SciFi & Fantasy readers are open to a lot of variations. It doesn't seem to be a real well-read category, but I don't think either of your other options are, either.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Wondering the differences between nonhuman, sci fi & fantasy and erotic horror. My Halloween story has moments of horror but they’re pretty contained from from the actual sex acts. The main character has sexual relations with a demon but also with actual humans. So I’m thinking Sci fi & fantasy, thoughts?

Demons from hell and anything dark = Erotic Horror. Including bad humans, or humans being led astray. If it's blood, black, and evil, put it here.

Unicorns, werewolves, and fairies in the meadow = Non-human. If it's rainbows, white light and happy endings, go here.

Robots, sex-bots and space ships, obviously sci-fi.

Steampunk and dieselpunk = sci-fi and fantasy.

Swords and sorcerers = sci-fi and fantasy.

As always, go with your primary theme as your first port of call. Yours sounds like Erotic Horror - it depends how dark you go, I reckon.

 

[MichaelGH]

SciFi & Fantasy readers are open to a lot of variations. It doesn't seem to be a real well-read category, but I don't think either of your other options are, either.

It's for the Halloween story contest though so I'm pretty sure a lot of them are going to be dealing with the supernatural though.

And look at how well erotic couplings turned out for me. I still got only those 4 votes on my Summer Lovin' story

Demons from hell and anything dark = Erotic Horror. Including bad humans, or humans being led astray. If it's blood, black, and evil, put it here.

As always, go with your primary theme as your first port of call. Yours sounds like Erotic Horror - it depends how dark you go, I reckon.

I don't know, that encounter with the demon gets really romantic and sweet by the end.

It is about a man wading through dark forces of evil in hopes of sharing the knowledge of how to defeat them and the sex he has along the way. I don't know if it's particularly scary but it is a trip down the nefarious end of things.