Happy International Lesbian Day! What's your favourite lesbian story or scene on Lit?

[FrancesScott]

your recent and well-deserved visit to the top ten

You left out ‘fleeting.’

Actually my score tanking seemed to be contemporaneous with this thread, after I’d been happily in the top ten for a week without offending anyone. Perhaps a coincidence. Definitely another mystery about the place.

What you’re saying - and others don’t - is what the person giving me advice had said. I’ll have to think about it some more.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

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Now that I feel called out for not shouting out another author I’d be remiss for not mentioning @Candy_Kane54 and, in particular, her story “Your Silver Nights and Golden Days” for its moving premise of a military officer navigating her, well, life, in a time when being gay in the military was strictly forbidden.

 

[plainplane]

I have a question for people on this thread. Does me writing stories other than lesbian ones put any would be readers off? I had someone suggest to me that the path to success is to pick a category and write that exclusively, which is the total opposite of my current approach.

I'm not a writer, so I can't see analytics (or don't know where to find them).

I look for good writers, and tend to binge read them. For those, I will read virtually anything, but I will try everything they offer.

Obviously, I do have my preferences, but I've read and enjoyed stories in every category. A few I still can't believe I actually liked. I won't go searching randomly in 11 of the 33 categories offered on Lit. But I've enjoyed stories from all of them. Yes, I even ran one through a translator.

 

[EmilyMiller]

I'll join in the chorus of people saying that the only reader who matters is you. Write what you like.

However, I will say two things:

1. As was pointed out on this thread many readers won't cross category boundaries. (I'm one: there are some categories I just won't read. I've loved your lesbian stories, but I probably won't read your others.) The thread I linked to suggests I'm not alone. So it depends what you want. The top list of Lesbian Sex is dominated by writers who pretty much exclusively write lesbian content (yes @onehitwanda used to write IT and Romance but she hasn't published in those for years). So, if your recent and well-deserved visit to the top ten has left you wanting a permanent, troll-proof slot, then specialising seems to be the way to go. I don't know why that is, but it's definitely the trend (seems to be in other categories too).

2. Shit... now I can't remember what the second thing was!

But the most important thing is to write what you like. You don't owe anyone anything.

I kinda feel that sometimes from the other side of the fence. I fully appreciate this is going to sound whiny. But whether it’s my forum profile, or the range of categories I write in, or being bisexual, or just a facet of being a less good writer than I aspire to be, but it does feel a little as if there is a barrier when it comes to lesbian sex stories. It’s maybe not quite ‘gold star syndrome’ but the most popular lesbian writers do seem to write only in lesbian.

You could argue that some of my lesbian stories are kinda male gaze. Instead I’d say they are playful lesbian fantasies. But I’ve written very grounded, woman centric lesbian stories too. I do think that some readers are looking for a hard focus on the type of stories they want to read and thus gravitate to authors who most frequently meet their expectations.

I get it, after writing arguably my best women loving women story - Twelve Months - my next substantive story was about Indiana Jones’s kid sister and a Lara Croftesque figure. While they were lesbian partners, I guess the Minotaur sex might have been a bridge too far for some.

To put it more succinctly, @Devinter once told me that he never knew what to expect when he opened one of my stories. He intended it as a compliment, and I took it as one, but there is a definite downside to that.