Editing one's own Story should be made easier.

[rockybal]

H

 

[StillStunned]

Lit has been the world's foremost erotica site for more than 25 years. The owners seem to know what they're doing, and presumably a lot of that came from trial and error.

The issue with letting authors edit their stories without review is that it opens the whole system up to abuse. They might as well not review any stories in the first place. Even a minor change or two can put an entire story out of line with the site's rules.

As for your typos: they happen. I'm a professional copyeditor and proofreader with nearly 30 years' experience, and I still see them in my published stories. I use the Read Aloud function in Word as the final check, and that catches most of the mistakes. I can't say whether it will help with your dyslexia, but you might want to give it a try.

But all things considered, a few typos aren't worth getting worked up about. There are plenty of typos in mainstream books published by large, established publishing houses. There are plenty of typos in some of the world's leading news websites. Nobody's going to care about a few typos in a sex story that's written by an amateur and published for free online.

 

[MarieWriter]

As a dyslexic, I am sure you understand the issues with reading/writing and editing more than most of us, but you'd have to ensure the author was the only one who could use that kind of an edit function for starters. You could always try the volunteer editor system. And quiet honestly, when you look at the number of new stories showing up almost everyday, it appears the site has decent participation without the hassle of trying to set up something like that edit system once the story has been posted.

 

[Todger65]

The reason why you cannot edit a story directly once published is quite simple. As @StillStunned said you could introduce text that would break the rules, therefore edited text has to be resubmitted to be checked again for compliance.

If you require an edit, the best suggestion is to have it looked over by someone else. If you try and edit your own, Dyslexic or not, you tend to read what you think you have written, not the actual text. I have several writers I have edited for, do exactly that and can’t believe that they didn’t see, sometimes very obvious, text that is incorrect.

As @MarieWriter said, try using a volunteer editor from the site who should be able to suggest changes that improve the readability of the story, without changing the content.

 

[rockybal]

Thanks for the Feedback.

 

[Tigersman]

I have edited for writers without any problems, one with autism and one who is dyslexic. I'm not as fast editing as I used to be, but I try hard to make sure I return the story as clean as possible. I edit for plot and character development, consistency, grammar and spelling. I also do some sentence restructuring to improve flow. When I return the story, the author can accept all changes or select the ones they agree with.

 

[OhDave1]

I am a proofreader for several authors here on Lit, one of which is dyslexic, but each one says I find a large number of their small mistakes. I make one careful pass through and then I make another using Grammarly. Grammarly finds 3 or 4 times as many more "issues" than I do, but some of mine were missed by Grammarly. I skip past some of its issues (knowing what each author likes) and Apply others and mine with Change Tracking in MS Word. That way the author can Apply or Reject them individually.

I recommend that you try Grammarly, just to do proofreading. You will find negative comments on here about it, but often they are about AI-written text detected by the Lit story filters. So don't ask it to do the writing for you. Some time ago I downloaded a version that installs as a Word Add-in that can be turned on or off. I think even the current version can be restricted to "basic issues" or even further.

[Above text from Wednesday; On a Friday edit I added...] I forgot to mention that I use the free version of Grammarly to do as I described above. It is the 'Premium' or 'Pro' version that does the rewriting of whole sentences. The free version focuses on grammar errors: adding or deleting commas or other punctuation, adding missing words or verbs, fixing verbs (-ed, -ing), fixing misspelled words (that form another word e.g. by for my, an for and), and suggesting some phrases are 'wordy' and giving a shorter alternative.

 

[SkyBubble]

Lit has been the world's foremost erotica site for more than 25 years. The owners seem to know what they're doing, and presumably a lot of that came from trial and error.

The issue with letting authors edit their stories without review is that it opens the whole system up to abuse. They might as well not review any stories in the first place. Even a minor change or two can put an entire story out of line with the site's rules.

As for your typos: they happen. I'm a professional copyeditor and proofreader with nearly 30 years' experience, and I still see them in my published stories. I use the Read Aloud function in Word as the final check, and that catches most of the mistakes. I can't say whether it will help with your dyslexia, but you might want to give it a try.

But all things considered, a few typos aren't worth getting worked up about. There are plenty of typos in mainstream books published by large, established publishing houses. There are plenty of typos in some of the world's leading news websites. Nobody's going to care about a few typos in a sex story that's written by an amateur and published for free online.

The site considers this an acceptable use of AI. If you run your story through Grammarly or one of its competitors to catch typos and grammatical errors, that's considered OK.

 

[SkyBubble]

Hi, as a dyslexic and having written twice now on here everytime i look at one of my works i see errors of Spelling or Grammar, now i know many will say get an editor but writing is a personnel experience for some.

The only way to correct this is go through the ordeal of submitting an edit which takes days ( i waited three weeks once), my point is surely once a person has posted at least one story they should be trusted to edit their own story themselves, for instance if i make an error writing this i have the "edit option" button below, so why not allow some trust with a user to creep in? It might even increase site participation.

The short of it is i will not be writing another story on this site unless an easier solution to edit is found i just don't have the time or inclination to feel like an illiterate fool for weeks on end, i had enough of that at school.

The editing process isn't hard; I have a couple of stories I'm editing now. One just has to be patient.

Also, it's been my experience that if you have more than one story lined up for approval at a time, all of them take longer to approve. What might take a few days can take weeks.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Also, it's been my experience that if you have more than one story lined up for approval at a time, all of them take longer to approve. What might take a few days can take weeks.

Not sure about that. Any story submitted is in the queue, and there's no correlation between Story A and Story B - neither one knows about the other. It's a conveyor belt, submissions shuffle along at the same rate until they reach Laurel, then she might stagger publication so there's a steady flow into every category.

It's more likely that, being pulled up for suspected AI on one story as you have, the next one gets flagged.

I submitted seventeen chapters of a novel, one after the other, over a timeframe of maybe fifteen minutes, with a note to Laurel saying what was going on. She reviewed them as a job lot, then scheduled the chapter release one every 24 hours.

 

[SkyBubble]

As I said, that's been my experience. Others may not have had that same experience, though I suspect some have.

 

[Writer61]

My cousin, a high-achieving student at a prestigious university, has just been diagnosed with dyslexia. We were all surprised by how it had escaped detection until now. The explanation seems to be that spell-checking masked her condition.

My advice is to not write directly on the site. Use Word/similar and tools such as Grammarly as much as possible. Then upload the text when you are satisfied.

 

[ronde]

Hi, as a dyslexic and having written twice now on here everytime i look at one of my works i see errors of Spelling or Grammar, now i know many will say get an editor but writing is a personnel experience for some.

The only way to correct this is go through the ordeal of submitting an edit which takes days ( i waited three weeks once), my point is surely once a person has posted at least one story they should be trusted to edit their own story themselves, for instance if i make an error writing this i have the "edit option" button below, so why not allow some trust with a user to creep in? It might even increase site participation.

The short of it is i will not be writing another story on this site unless an easier solution to edit is found i just don't have the time or inclination to feel like an illiterate fool for weeks on end, i had enough of that at school.

You are trusted to edit your story yourself, but before submitting it for publication. As others have said, allowing edits to published stories without a review by the site is an open invitation for some people don't agree with the site rules to flaunt them.

If you can see your errors once the story is published, you can probably catch most of them if you write the story, let it sit for at least a week, and then read it again before submitting it for publication. Some authors here use a program that converts text to speech, and that might help as well. That's no different than waiting for the story to be published and then reading it. It just shortcuts the time between the original publishing and the subsequent publishing of an edit to correct what you see. I've never edited one of my stories after publication to correct errors, but there have been posts on this forum that indicate edited versions of already published works go to the very bottom of the stack and may be further lowered in priority by new submissions.

One thing that might shorten the time for republishing an edited story is a note in the submission form explaining why you're submitting the edit. In my experience, those notes go a long way toward prompt review and publishing. I have edited a few stories that were rejected for some reason. When I corrected the story and resubmitted along with a note explaining the edit, those stories were published within a week, but then, those stories hadn't been published prior to my edit.

You always have the option to seek out a volunteer editor to review your story before you submit it, though it may take a while. Most of us who volunteer to edit have other things to do, like writing our own stories.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

writing is a personnel experience for some

So is sharing your writing with others.

Sharing it before publication doesn't change anything in that regard, but can help with catching things that you mentioned as concerns for you.

 

[ElectricBlue]

As far as i can see there is only one site rule ..NO KIDS other than that i see everything else on the site r pe, scat, incest etc of which i avoid, and the one i mentioned is be dealt with by the law not moderation.

You can write about children, but not with sexual content around them or involving them.

 

[Steadfast421]

You can write about children, but not with sexual content around them or involving them.

Not necessarily true. I submitted an edit to my published non erotic story that features a fifteen year old girl. There’s no sex, no innuendo, no double entendres, nor are her physical features described. The edit was rejected. The reason given me was that the story violated Literotica rules concerning minors. The story didn’t contain sex at all.

I won’t modify my writing. I pulled the edit.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Not necessarily true. I submitted an edit to my published non erotic story that features a fifteen year old girl. There’s no sex, no innuendo, no double entendres, nor are her physical features described. The edit was rejected. The reason given me was that the story violated Literotica rules concerning minors. The story didn’t contain sex at all.

I won’t modify my writing. I pulled the edit.

It depends how you write the kids, and the phrases used to describe them.

I've got stories with babies being born, a pre-menarche girl, a toddler in a pram. None of them remotely near sexual context, and none of them problematic. No stories rejected, no edits needed.

The blanket statement that you can't have children in Lit stories isn't true.

 

[Steadfast421]

It depends how you write the kids, and the phrases used to describe them.

I've got stories with babies being born, a pre-menarche girl, a toddler in a pram. None of them remotely near sexual context, and none of them problematic. No stories rejected, no edits needed.

The blanket statement that you can't have children in Lit stories isn't true.

I didn’t make a blanket statement. I only related my own experience submitting a non erotic story that included a minor.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Counterpoint: editing now is already way too easy.

 

[Sams_Island]

One thing I do for my own stories and recommend for those I edit who have a minor in the story in a non-sexual way is to consider that the first red flag isn't likely going to come from a human, but an algorithm with little nuance. When I say anything about a child near but not involved in sex, I include a note with the submission pointing out that, "A child is mentioned, but clearly not involved in sex," so that if a red flag is raised, the human overseer can see that I'm aware of the rule and am not trying to run around it. She can then override the red flag.
I learned this from my first rejected story where I realized that one could interpret my words differently than I intended. I did a minor tweak on the wording and it passed. Now I think of that ahead of time and when I see a touchy bit that I don't want to change, I give the publisher a heads up. Take a look at your own rejected story with a broader view and see if a tightly-programmed algorithm might make a more twisted interpretation than you ever thought of.

The one thing I would like to see in the rejection process is the inclusion of the offending phrase in the notification so I can more easily find it myself in the story. If the censor program can be triggered by a certain phrasing, it should be able to copy that phrasing into your rejection message.

 

[Writer61]

The one thing I would like to see in the rejection process is the inclusion of the offending phrase in the notification so I can more easily find it myself in the story. If the censor program can be triggered by a certain phrasing, it should be able to copy that phrasing into your rejection message.

Absolutely.