Poorly performing stories that you still love

[EmilyMiller]

I might add some of mine later, but I won’t start the thread with shameless self-promotion. That’s for you guys .

Pick between one and three of your own stories that have done poorly (by whatever yardstick you choose - rating, views, tone of comments). Tell us a little about each one and explain what you still like about it, despite the adverse opinions of others. Please include a link.

BTW anyone posting their crap story which is rated only 4.85 and was viewed by only 100,000 people will be subjected to sarcastic remarks by the OP, possibly while tied up.

Em

 

[Bramblethorn]

At the risk of being tied up and subjected to sarcasm...

Counting To Eleven was for a long time the most-read but lowest-rated of my stories. It eventually crawled up into "H" territory, because posting new stories tends to give older stories a little bit of a boost (people who like one's style will go check out the back catalogue, people who don't like it won't) but it's still the lowest score.

I think part of the problem there was a clickbaity blurb that drew in readers who weren't looking for the kind of thing it was. It's a bit short for readers who are looking for a fully developed story, it's a bit too slow for those who are looking for stroke. But it's a BDSM story where people are having fun and being a little bit silly, and where I got to show how "establishing consent" doesn't have to mean signing a formal contract, and I'm happy about that.

 

[EmilyMiller]

At the risk of being tied up and subjected to sarcasm...

Admit it, you want it really, don’t you ?

Em

 

[Altissimus]

How to Screw a Lawyer I submitted to Lit 14 years ago. My writing has improved a lot since then, but this one never did very well. There's probably various reasons for this, but I think in no small way this was because I wrote it as a bit of a challenge - it switches between present-time and memories every few paras, and all the memories are dialogue-only with no identifiers. It was down to the reader to establish who was speaking. Personally, I think it was quite clear, but it did depend on a couple of punctuation standards - such as a lack of closed speech marks means that it's a new paragraph with the same speaker. I think this confused most readers, but I may be entirely wrong and they just thought it was crap.

750 words was my first attempt at a... surprise surprise... 750-word story for the recent competition. I liked it, but it's my second-worst scoring story. I got some nice comments from it but was disappointed with the overall score. I still think it's cute; it builds tension and gets quite a lot done in not very many words.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Kayfabe, my lowest rated story. The thing I really love with my stories is when I can make someone see a different point of view. The genesis of it was me trying to understand cuck/bull/hotwife culture for a different story (that I *cough* still haven't written yet); I just didn't "get" it before, why anyone would want to do that. And I still don't "get" it in that it isn't a turn-on for me, and I don't see how it ever could be. But once I at least intellectually understood it, I wanted to write a sympathetic story about the culture; the fact that so many people commented with things like, "Oh! I get it now. I still don't like it, but I get it now," even some of the hardcore BTB folks, was immensely gratifying.

 

[Rustyoznail]

I can't remember why, but I set myself a challenge to create a story around a non playable video game character called Tess Everis. She owned a shop in the game "Destiny", and only spoke twenty five different lines in the whole game. The other main character, the Guardian, is mute...

So, here it is, Festival of the Lost. A Scifi story I knew was going to bomb but I'm proud that I managed to create a coherent story from those audio scraps. For the record 7.1k/3.75/20 over four years.

 

[SyleusSnow]

Well... I know Humor & Satire isn't a reader favorite, but I thought Kyle the Weremoose Gets Lucky deserved more love. It's a fun little Halloween romp with one of the most florid, over-described final sex scenes ever. And it has were-moose! I mean... what's not to like?

 

[Bramblethorn]

Admit it, you want it really, don’t you ?

Em

I was tempted to make that joke, but honestly, I'm mostly a top

 

[Priscilla_June]

May Rising Chapter 1 and subsequently the entire series is honestly close to my heart because I love the character. The sort of jaded protagonist is built a lot off of my own experiences in life and the sort of adventure I wanted to play up with this story I was excited about. It is one of those things where you see the readership really drop off in subsequent chapters and its quite discouraging for as much as I enjoyed it.

In the end I plan to sort of re-envision the character/story to be a part of my more multiverse of characters and reset the story in a different setting. Hopefully I can bring the true story of the character out there. But I am still really fond of the 3 chapters I did write.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Well... I know Humor & Satire isn't a reader favorite, but I thought Kyle the Weremoose Gets Lucky deserved more love. It's a fun little Halloween romp with one of the most florid, over-described final sex scenes ever. And it has were-moose! I mean... what's not to like?

I've got one like that over in Humor & Satire, too. It's not horribly low-rated at 4.07, but I thought it would do much better, especially since it's just a silly little 750 word story: The Hedonic Treadmill.

 

[YDB95]

1. After the Opera - The rating isn't too bad, but it only got three favorites and two comments, one of which is quite negative. BDSM isn't my usual thing, but I had a great time with this one just the same and it's one of the few of my stories that ended up just about exactly as I envisioned them when I first got the idea. All the characters are based on real women I worked with in the university library when I was in grad school. Still as much fun to re-read as it was to write!

2. Brand New Tennessee Waltz - I mean, how healthy can a relationship be if it begins with you stealing your best friend's sweetheart? Between the symbolism of the characters' names and the happy ending for those of them who deserved it, I figured this would be a smash. Again the rating isn't exactly bad, but it's not what I was hoping for.

3. And I'm Pulling Out of Here to Win - Lesson learned (quite literally): romances have happy endings, no exceptions! I still really like the final twist in this one, though, sad though it may be.

 

[AlinaX]

It's funny, really. I have on occasion been unhappy about ratings for particular stories, but I think it's all pretty fair in the end. It would make me happy to get more comments, though, and it would be nice if Sci-Fi got more views generally.

 

[AlinaX]

I've got one like that over in Humor & Satire, too. It's not horribly low-rated at 4.07, but I thought it would do much better, especially since it's just a silly little 750 word story: The Hedonic Treadmill.

The 750s are odd. Typically they lose a half star from what they probably deserve, but sometimes they do well.

 

[EmilyMiller]

I was tempted to make that joke, but honestly, I'm mostly a top

Ah! A challenge.

Em

 

[Lifestyle66]

I wrote a chapter in my swinger series which posted last June, "Lifestyle Ch. 11 - Demons Past". I posted it to Romance, because it doesn't involve their sharing activities, but just has sex between the husband and wife, who've been together for 30 years.

The 8.2K word story is about the wife's past when she was 21-years old, and she fell for a guy in the band at a nightclub, not realizing he was married. The story is about the things in her earlier life, with her mother suffering from PTSD and that weekend with the band guy, which made her the strong-willed woman she became. It's told from the husband's POV, but it's mostly about the wife reflecting on her past.

At one point in the story, she starts:
***********************
"Maybe I should find Ryan's wife sometime to thank her," Jan said pensively, looking back across the field toward her happy place so long ago in the loft of a barn.

"Why would you thank her?"

"If she hadn't married him or been there that second week when I returned, I wouldn't have seen him as the abusive asshole he is," she mused. "I would probably have done it again, and again, with his abuses probably getting worse. ..."
************************

I thought it was a good story about how people around us make us who we are (for better or worse). But it only got just over 2.5K views. It's rated at 4.53, but that's with only 19 people who rated it. I think it due to being a story about some abuse, and many readers can't bring themselves to like it OR even hate it, if they think it's poorly written.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Ah! A challenge.

Em

If I had a dollar for every schoolteacher who called me that, I'd have several dollars. Plus a few decades' worth of interest.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I might add some of mine later, but I won’t start the thread with shameless self-promotion. That’s for you guys .

Pick between one and three of your own stories that have done poorly (by whatever yardstick you choose - rating, views, tone of comments). Tell us a little about each one and explain what you still like about it, despite the adverse opinions of others. Please include a link.

BTW anyone posting their crap story which is rated only 4.85 and was viewed by only 100,000 people will be subjected to sarcastic remarks by the OP, possibly while tied up.

Em

Hah, like this whole thing isn't shameless promotion (on our part!). Okay, I'll bite. I've mentioned the four-part "Valerie in New York" series, which is a fictionalized account of real-life Valerie Solanas. It was intended to be additional scenes for the 1995 film I Shot Andy Warhol. (Now you know why she was notorious.) Not a lot of people voted and the scores were pretty low. Like Chapter 2 had one person voting for a score of 2.00.

The problems were: 1. This happened in 1967-68, so few people remember her. Plus, Robert Kennedy was assassinated three days after her attempt on Warhol, so that overshadowed it. 2. The few who did remember her are not fond of a celebrity-shooting, radical feminist lesbian part-time prostitute. (Warhol's friend, the late Lou Reed of "The Velvet Underground," obviously loathed her.)

Yet I reread the chapters again and, although it's not for everybody, I still think they hold up pretty well. Warhol, Solanas, and Reed all passed a while ago.

https://www.biography.com/artists/andy-warhol-valerie-solanas-shot

She did have a crazy look in her eyes.

 

[SimonDoom]

My lowest-rated story remains BTB, Incorporated, which is a "Burn the Bitch" spoof with a twist, narrated by a Mike Hammer-style private detective. I thought it was amusing, but the subject matter, and especially the twist at the end, guaranteed that it would be hammered by the BTB reader crowd. It has a score of 3.73. It received far nastier comments than any other story I've published, by far. But it's had over 80,000 views, and has its share of good comments and favorites, as well. It was one of my most enjoyable stories to write. I put pedal to the metal with the material and laughed as I wrote and didn't care what sort of reception I got.

One of my personal favorites that didn't score that poorly but has never had a red H is A Bikini With A Mind Of Its Own, about a woman who purchases a bikini online, takes it to the beach . . . and finds it keeps mysteriously falling off her and exposing her. It has a score of 4.44. The surprising thing is it has over 317,000 views and over 1700 votes. The story has some magical/whimsical elements, and I think they turned off some of the readers.

This is what I take away from scores, as they apply to my stories (disregarding how they compare with other people's scores): they have nothing to do with how good I think the story is or whether I like it. That's a big reason why, after six years of writing, I don't care much about scores. Some stories have good scores but don't get as many views. Some have lower scores and get many views and favorites. The notion that "My story has to have a high score or nobody will read it" is completely wrong, at least as applied to my 54 published stories.

In my experience, stories score lower because 1) they're only 750 words long (all my 750 word stories are under 4.5), 2) they prominently feature women who have sex outside of marriage and enjoy it, or 3) the stories contain whimsical or odd elements that conflict with the expectations readers have for stories of that category.

 

[djrip]

You know mine! But for the sake of completeness, An Eye For Love was my Valentine's Day entry, about a zombie. The putrefaction may have impacted the score. It's not my lowest score actually, but is my lowest viewed story by a fair margin.

 

[Bazzle]

My short story addicted freedom

It was written originally as 1000 word story for another site. I edited it a bit and tried to for it to make sense.

I based it on the "Book Thief" where the narrator in that is ultimately death.
But as I write smoking fetish stories, I wrote it from the point that the narrator is "addiction".

I entered it in nudist day competition seeing as the protagonist is a nudist.

But the readers hated it!

Hey ho

https://literotica.com/s/addicted-freedom

 

[gunhilltrain]

I've got one like that over in Humor & Satire, too. It's not horribly low-rated at 4.07, but I thought it would do much better, especially since it's just a silly little 750 word story: The Hedonic Treadmill.

Hah, this is exactly what Em warned about. 4.07 is not a horrible low rating, at least to me it isn't. 2.00 is. I've gotten quite a few between 3.00 and 3.99. I got a 2.5 recently because I accidentally put it in the wrong category, and it took six days (pretty fast, actually) for the site to fix it for me. I also see a 2.97 and a 2.6 on my record (not related to the series I mentioned).

 

[gunhilltrain]

My short story addicted freedom

It was written originally as 1000 word story for another site. I edited it a bit and tried to for it to make sense.

I based it on the "Book Thief" where the narrator in that is ultimately death.
But as I write smoking fetish stories, I wrote it from the point that the narrator is "addiction".

I entered it in nudist day competition seeing as the protagonist is a nudist.

But the readers hated it!

Hey ho

https://literotica.com/s/addicted-freedom

Yet it's about the only story you have that is below a 4.00. I wouldn't say the readers hated it (unless somebody specifically said so). It's sort of a middling score.

Maybe I'm not doing this "correctly" (I mean writing) or maybe people have different standards, but it seems a bit difficult to get above a 4.5. Not that I'm envious, but I am baffled.

 

[Rob_Royale]

My 750-word story from this past challenge, Getting Busy - Aunties. I think it's great but it's been stuck at 4.37 for a long time. No, it's not a bad rating, and ordinarily, I wouldn't complain, but I honestly thought I killed it. It's sexy as heck and it fits the category perfectly. It's a brief scene in a larger story but stands on its own quite well, being so brief, or at least I thought so. The comments were positive so no one said " I gave it a four because".

 

[Bazzle]

Yet it's about the only story you have that is below a 4.00. I wouldn't say the readers hated it (unless somebody specifically said so). It's sort of a middling score.

Maybe I'm not doing this "correctly" (I mean writing) or maybe people have different standards, but it seems a bit difficult to get above a 4.5. Not that I'm envious, but I am baffled.

I am happy with something between 4 and 4.5 as that means you've got a smattering of 3, 4, and 5's?

I deleted several of the disparaging comments! As they just depressed me.

Its difficult, but if you learn from the comments, the scores sometimes increase!

 

[EmilyMiller]

You know mine! But for the sake of completeness, An Eye For Love was my Valentine's Day entry, about a zombie. The putrefaction may have impacted the score. It's not my lowest score actually, but is my lowest viewed story by a fair margin.

It’s a good story, hun. Actually quite moving. It’s more Poe than King .

Em