CloverReef

@KassX You’re absolutely right. I’ve never heard someone ask for less, but I have wanted less too, and personally asked for less as a beta. You can definitely have too much, even in smut. I wonder if readers are just more forgiving of excess, or if they’re sooooo unforgiving of it that they won’t even dignify it with a comment, lol. @Desiderius Price That is absolutely my favourite amount of description. Just a sentence or two of relevant or distinct detail. If it were pages and pages, they’d definitely lose me. When I read, I just want to know what I need to know to visualize the scene without interrupting it with huge dumps.

Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I personally like a little bit of description to help me visualize, and in smut, visuals are kinda a priority, so you keep doing you. I tend to throw in little relevant details about character appearances throughout the story. I’d actually prefer to give more description of my main character, I just can never find the right moment. It was so much easier when my main character was a narcissist. Sigh. But yeah, I get readers asking for more description every now and then. Have you ever had a reader ask for less?

Absolutely! I love writing tips in general. I wish more writers would follow blogs and stuff. I just bristle when the writing tips explicitly state rules like they’re set in stone.

What?! No! Not as long as I have something to say about it! Okay… Content warning: I swear. I actually raged about epithets before. I don’t remember where. People just acted like it was just inane – like I just pulled a random, nonsensical pet peeve out of my ass. I get this reaction whenever I tell people that helper verbs are passive. Yes, I am still on a crusade against overuse of ING verbs. But one of my major pet peeves, and this I have developed recently, is something I see in a lot of writing tips articles. It never used to bother me, but I find I get pretty pissed off when I encounter it now. Professionals telling amateurs not to do something. The word lists apply to this. “Don’t use gimmicks”, “Don’t use intensifiers”, “Don’t put rape in there”, “Don’t chop your arm off and eat it” (I couldn’t remember any more...) Of course there are some things that are best avoided, but when you tell a budding, insecure writer not to do something, like BW said, they’ll twist themselves into a pretzel to avoid shit when maybe, just maybe, it would have been fine. There’s a time and a place for everything. To me, when I beta, it’s more important that you’re conscious of your word choice, and when you make iffy choices, like throwing in a ‘very’ (outside of dialogue) that you did it intentionally and well. Plus I really fucking hate it when someone tells me not to do something.

Makes sense. My job is very physical so I usually get a lot of ideas for progress in my fics while I’m neck deep in cat shit. Inopportune time to jot it down before I forget it tho… But still, it does help!

I think I would like to crack open all your skulls and steal your brains and smoosh them into mine. I’m working on one. ONE. One WIP. I can’t even wrap my head around working on a second at the same time. Soooo the obvious solution is brain thievery + bio-engineering? Hm, maybe I should think this through.

Yeah I was curious so I just tested it as well in originals. I get the same thing BigE just showed. And when I hit the little refresh captcha button, nothing changes.

Plus I have commitment issues

Oooo my masochisty senses are tingling… I try not to look at tags at all now, because I’ve become pretty gunshy. When I’m in the story and I like the chars, I don’t care: throw in: shit, talking bunny rabbits in top hats, golden showers. Anything, as long as the characters have chemistry and the plot is gripping, I’m all yours. But just seeing the words on their own, all lined up in a neat little line freaks me out. Then again, so does a comma splice in the first paragraph. So does a too-romantic summary… and a billion other things that technically don’t bother me in practice, but totally scare me off in theory. I approach reading stories the same way the uterus approaches sperm. I don’t know why that analogy seems the most apt to me at the moment, it just does. I have probably murdered a lot of gems. (By murder, I mean ‘not read’. Because they’re the same things, right?)

Absolutely. I admit, I’ve been scared off by a long list of tags. I guess I think the more tags there are, the less relatable plot there will be, even though, intellectually I know that’s not the case.

I just got an image of someone going around trying to catch rogue, impish tags.

If y’all inspire the powers that be to add more story codes while I’m working on my challenge, I’m going to cry. Then Laugh, like one of those really loud nervous breakdown laughs. Then compose a long, exasperated, but very Canadian letter that starts with “sorry” and ends with “eh”. Fear my scorn!

I actually know a woman who loooves to bang when she is menstruating. She went into great detail about how she loves how the blood stains in patterns on the white sheets when they're done. I can't really relate either, but from a writer's (and lover of all things debauched) standpoint it's an absolutely fascinating perspective.

I totally read this in a uber posh academia voice. I’m a writing-tips-ophile, and now I am completely disappointed/outraged that all the podcasts I follow don’t cover this shit!