How'd you like to beta-read?

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

Is anyone up for some beta reading? This is for a standalone story, currently under 2k words, and I think I don’t have enough distance to judge whether it’s worthwhile. I don’t want to describe it much, lest a reader pre-judge, but it involves two modern-day, unattached humans, in consensual activity that’s in the immediate vicinity of vanilla. You can PM me if you’re interested and willing. I’d send a RTF file as an e-mail attachment.

https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=5116173&page=submissions

 

[tomlitilia]

You'll have more luck in the Editor's forum:
https://forum.literotica.com/forumdisplay.php?f=9

 

[Handley_Page]

Is anyone up for some beta reading? This is for a standalone story, currently under 2k words, and I think I don’t have enough distance to judge whether it’s worthwhile. I don’t want to describe it much, lest a reader pre-judge, but it involves two modern-day, unattached humans, in consensual activity that’s in the immediate vicinity of vanilla. You can PM me if you’re interested and willing. I’d send a RTF file as an e-mail attachment.

https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=5116173&page=submissions

2K ?
That's not even one Lit page, is it!
Expand it, to about 20K and you'll probably have a better result.

 

[tomlitilia]

2K ?
That's not even one Lit page, is it!
Expand it, to about 20K and you'll probably have a better result.

That's pretty odd advice, I think. There is no one-size-fits-all for the length of a story. If the story describes a single isolated (and vanilla) sexual episode, 2k words can be plenty.

 

[Rustyoznail]

Is anyone up for some beta reading? This is for a standalone story, currently under 2k words, and I think I don’t have enough distance to judge whether it’s worthwhile. I don’t want to describe it much, lest a reader pre-judge, but it involves two modern-day, unattached humans, in consensual activity that’s in the immediate vicinity of vanilla. You can PM me if you’re interested and willing. I’d send a RTF file as an e-mail attachment.

https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=5116173&page=submissions

I can have a look, but it depends on the vanilla. Are we talking home made vanilla ice cream or vanilla low-fat imitation soy mochaccinos?

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

Send it my way if you like. I'll take a look

 

[Haulover]

That's pretty odd advice, I think. There is no one-size-fits-all for the length of a story. If the story describes a single isolated (and vanilla) sexual episode, 2k words can be plenty.

Yes there is. He started this thread!

JuanSeiszFitzHall​

 

[8letters]

That's pretty odd advice, I think. There is no one-size-fits-all for the length of a story. If the story describes a single isolated (and vanilla) sexual episode, 2k words can be plenty.

I did a statistical analysis of stand-alone stories and found that each additional page results in better story statistics, plateauing around 6 pages. You can see the numbers here

 

[SimonDoom]

That's pretty odd advice, I think. There is no one-size-fits-all for the length of a story. If the story describes a single isolated (and vanilla) sexual episode, 2k words can be plenty.

As a purely artistic matter, you are right. But 8Letters is right, too. If you care about reader response (you don't have to) then it makes sense to write a story that's longer than 2000 words. It probably should be close to 3 Literotica pages (10,000+ words) or more. If you want to win a contest, you probably should make it at least six pages (20,000+ words).

There have been some really fun, creative stories submitted as part of the 750-word story events. Almost all the stories get trashed in voting and comments. If you scan the stories you'll see that, despite the introduction informing the reader that the story was bound by this word limit because of the event rules, readers will knock the story for being too short.

 

[SimonDoom]

It makes no sense to me tell a 2,000 word story in 20,000 words. So, in that sense, it seems like bad advice to me, to expand a story only for the sake of length.

I'm not advising anyone to do that. My advice is to write mindfully and knowledgeably. Know what you are doing and why, and know what the consequences likely will be.

Some authors want to follow their own personal artistic muse, and damn the rest. Others want their stories to get high views and scores. There's no right way, but it's helpful for people to at least know what the response likely will be.

 

[KeithD]

That's pretty odd advice, I think. There is no one-size-fits-all for the length of a story. If the story describes a single isolated (and vanilla) sexual episode, 2k words can be plenty.

As this thread shows, yes there is a bias here for the length of stories. Literotica is the land of verbosity in search of a red H "validation."

 

[tomlitilia]

I did a statistical analysis of stand-alone stories and found that each additional page results in better story statistics, plateauing around 6 pages. You can see the numbers here

Stats is great, but beyond the obvious issue that causality ≠ correlation, failure bias and heteroskedasticity make it challenging to draw conclusions from the numbers.

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

I can have a look, but it depends on the vanilla. Are we talking home made vanilla ice cream or vanilla low-fat imitation soy mochaccinos?

Cunnilingus and male masturbation. Do those fit within or near most people's boundary, these days, of vanilla?

If someone beta-reading this story urges that, for these characters and what they do, there ought to be more content to justify their interaction and make the conclusion more effective, I'll consider that. But, as dreamed up, this is a slice of life. In my view, there's only so much verbiage a reader will tolerate about these two people and their time together.

I have no reason to question 8letters' analysis, except that every story is in the sample only once. There's no way to know if a four-page story would have a lower rating than the same story at six pages. Also, while I won't claim that ratings don't matter to me, I'm more interested in getting the story right and showing it in that form to readers.

As I mentioned during an earlier whine, I've had reason to conclude that readers generally don't stay with me past about 10k words, regardless of what I write. And that's with stories that I believed needed to be more than 10k. That may mean that I should be a better writer, but I Yam What I Yam.

Dang it, Haulover, you've outed me as a pun!

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I keep asking my readers who tell me to get a proof reader if they would like to do the proof reading as they were the ones that complained. As of today I have had zero(0) volunteers.