A question for all you accomplished authors out there

I opened up the City of Scum as a shared universe, not entirely like a chain story but not entirely unlike it either. Writers are free to seize on any plot points or characters and take them forward.

I should really finish a few more stories in that setting.
Yeah, a shared universe is a very different thing in my opinion.

To me a chain story is very similar to round robin storytelling around a campfire. All one story told in chunks
 
Putting a story in a category I haven't already done just for the box-checking exercise, or writing a story just to fit in a category I haven't hit yet, doesn't seem interesting to me and probably wouldn't be to most others either.

But on the other hand, I'm currently at 4 and contemplating 8. If I found myself at 15 or 20 without trying, maybe I'd feel differently about checking off the remaining boxes.
Great answer! RT
 
To date I have stories in each of:

  1. Anal (7)
  2. BDSM (11)
  3. Celebrities & FanFic [my FanFic seems to have been put in Celebrities 🤷‍♀️] (3)
  4. Erotic Couplings (7)
  5. Erotic Horror (2)
  6. Exhibitionist & Voyeur (10)
  7. Fetish (13)
  8. First Time (2)
  9. Gay Male (1) *
  10. Group Sex (4)
  11. Humor & Satire (3)
  12. Incest / Taboo (3)
  13. Interracial (1) *
  14. Lesbian Sex (11)
  15. Loving Wives (3)
  16. Mature (2)
  17. Mind Control (1) *
  18. Non-erotic (2) *
  19. Non-consent / Reluctance [satire] (2)
  20. Non-human (2) *
  21. Novels & Novellas (1)
  22. Reviews & Essays (12)
  23. Romance (8)
  24. SciFi & Fantasy (13)
  25. Toys & Masturbation (4)
  26. Transsexual & Cross-dressing (2) *
* = 750 word story only

The ones I haven’t written in are:

  1. Chain stories
  2. Cross dressing [since it was split out]
  3. How to
  4. Illustrated [which is now dead, right?]
  5. Letters & Transcripts
  6. Non-English
I doubt I’ll be doing any of the above any time soon.
Wow, you six categories with double-digit entries! You're quite prolific. RT
 
My first twenty two stories were across three categories (EC, GS and mostly E&V). Which category depended on whether a major sex scene was limited to two and whether showing off was a major component or not. Finished the series was a natural breaking point and I felt like I wanted to branch out a little bit. I had grown up reading heavily in SF&F. so that was a natural area to dabble in (and dabbling it was, because all of my SF&F stories until my WIP were popcorn stories). Although almost every story in my series was pretty sex-laden, they started to be more and more about the characters and their emotional state than about the sexuality per se. My LW story was written intended as a more emotional SF&F, but ended up making sense as LW. Interesting experience, but not one I will intentionally repeat anytime soon.

So I tried the categories that seemed more emotionally fulfilling (and interested me). So I wrote some stories for Romance and LS. And one made more sense in First Time, I now have a WIP for Mature. Those four categories have very overlapping feels to me, with obvious differences. I expect most my writing will stay there.

My other categories are just happenstance more than planned incursions. My upcoming Crime and Punishment Story is humor, arising from a joke in the coffee house. I have a How To currently pending, because I thought it needed to be written.
 
Goddamn it!

(It's fine. Both of mine for the original joint category seem to have gone in transgender although that's arguable for each of them. It probably won't be too long before I end up with another cross-dressing story coming to me naturally.)
When the T & C categories were split the stories were put into one or the other via some kind of automated process, not by Laurel reviewing each one. So you can and should submit a category edit if you think they would be better in crossdressing!
 
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