I haven’t done one of these in awhile…..

“Oh, he made my blood just burn
I flipped so far, I thought that I would not return”
~”Get him back”, Fiona Apple

 

I sat here yesterday typing out the beginning half to an erotica story but I just haven’t been able to finish it. I have a post about the TLC series “Strange Sex” nearly done, but haven’t finished it. This rant? Feels soooo good and is just flying off my fingertips. In fact the keyboard would yell “ow!” if it could. It might just have there a second or two ago. Sorry, keyboard.

 

In order to get back into the erotica groove, I joined Lushstories.com recently. I went back to some of my earlier work here on the blog to post over there. I chose the Taxi Cab Confessional posts, and at first tried to submit them in two parts. Part 1 was soundly Rejected with a litany of sins, mainly it lacked content and was “far too short”. Ok, fine. So I put the two parts together, separated the one occurrence of two words lacking a space between, corrected my lack of conversation “”” and re-submitted. A day later it was accepted. It garnered some pretty nice, high praise from the members/other writers there.

Now, before I go any further….I must say this about Lushstories. Not quite a year ago I’d seen the site because someone had tried to submit their story from there to e[lust] and I wouldn’t allow it. I glanced around the banner-ad-laden site and saw stories that made me long for Literotica. Bad, bad erotica. Trite plots, bad euphemisms and a metric fuckton of incest stories. Not my thing, sorry. Not only was a lot of the erotica not my taste but it was painfully long. Perhaps others enjoy painfully long erotica, I don’t have the attention span for it.

Today I tried to submit a piece that was always one of my favorites, “Fucking for Art“. If you’ve not read it, or are no longer familiar with that piece, I encourage you to give it a quick glance to further understand the moderator’s responses to me.

This personal note was sent to me with the standard “Your story has been rejected” email:

I am both a photographer and a model. This is impossible: “I made them hold poses for 5-10 minutes, sometimes difficult poses, until I got the angle of light and the angle of the shot “just so”. Try holding still for thirty seconds, never mind a minute, never mind up to ten, and especially for difficult poses. A real photographer does not demand that the models wait until she gets the framing and light right, at the cost of the models holding a pose. This is also rather short in length. In addition, use a comma before reported speech, not this – : Also use a comma before the final quotation marks, as in this: “Carrrrieeee” I taunted. Thank you.

Wow. Me:

Seriously, my story is being removed for plausibility?? I’ve had this posted in two sites and no one has ever cared about such a detail.

I’m sorry but given some other stories I’ve read on here that present situations both unlikely and impossible, I’m confused as to why mine got singled out. Also, with regards to length, there is no posted word minimum but yet I seem to keep submitting things that are too short?

I can appreciate the story moderation but it feels like the reasons for mine getting rejected do not apply to every story submitted, as I have most certainly seen stories short or with a misplaced comma or misspelled word.

My story was about 8000 characters, theirs doesn’t do word count. As Rayne pointed out to me: What about models who sit for painting and drawing classes? They hold poses for 5-10 minutes! And in fact that angle was my inspiration for the story. My inspiration story was similar, but the artist in question was photographing for his paintings he’d do later.

Her rude response made me fume:

You had the good luck or misfortune to come across a photographer. Go ahead and stay still for an entire minute, never mind five or ten, and get back to me on it. If you put the detail in and it isn’t believeable {Note: I’m copy/pasting, that misspelling there is hers, ironic no?}, then one day someone is going to get back to you on it. In this case, it was me. Good writing depends on the details holding together.

I also verified a story of yours the other day and extensively corrected it, which I do not have to do. You are welcome, by the way.

Yes, your stories are short and lack structure, but they have been verified anyway, with effort on your part and good will on ours.

I pointed out Rayne’s comment to her in a single-sentence reply of “what about models for painters/drawing classes?” but ironically she never responded.

What a self-righteous cuntwad. Fuck off, to the whole site. Seriously. I’ve pulled my profile and my stories. Crap like “love poems” of which I wrote better emo-crap in highschool than that; erotica that makes the Fabio-covered-burning-loins seem tolerable….and I get yanked because this cunt says my plot basis is unrealistic???? Geezus they even have a fuckin “Supernatural” category! I was reallllly tempted there to link to the drivel I was referring to but I just couldn’t do it to the authors. I’ll take out my anger against the Moderator-Bitch-From-Hell but not innocent writers, no matter how much I want to say “look at this crap!”

Anyways.

Moving on.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

*deep breath*

Today on Twitter I ran across this tweet:

I (as Toyswap) replied:

@Epiphora and @FemeDeliciosa jumped in as well, and to us (the sex toy reviewers on TSN in general) the term sanitize/sterilize means the same thing. No, I do NOT mean that they’re 110% professional-grade germ-free but they ARE the very definition of sanitized. This derision and PR idiocy is coming from a company that makes such winning products (can you hear my sarcasm?) as Clone-A-Willy (ew, rubber); a “Tongue Vibe” which is basically a tiny cheap bullet you strap on to your tongue; Clone-A-Pussy (also, ew, rubber) and dodgy “libido stimulators and supplements” that you ingest. Go ahead and call me a sex toy snob right now if you want but if I ever owned my own sex toy store, products like these would never be sold.

Both Epiphora and I attempted to tell the person behind the account what ToySwap actually IS.

I said: “you do realize that TSN is a private network of educated sex toy review bloggers who trade safe items amongst ourselves?”

E said: “We all have a LOT of toys that we never use. It’s nice to be able to give them a good home. Plz quit the butthurt responses.”

Their responses:

No…come on. They’re playin with me. Surely they’re not THAT thick-headed????

Yes. they are.

I replied: “oh, really? You can provide a Lelo toy? A whipspider toy? A tantus silicone dildo? For free?”

SHOCKINGLY, I received no reply to that one.


7 Responses

  1. Epiphora says:

    This isn’t the first time I’ve seen people bitching about how “gross” the network is. I understand it’s a visceral response to the name Toy Swap, but dude, get your facts straight and LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE WHO KNOW MORE THAN YOU ABOUT IT. Empire Labs’ Twitter person could’ve responded more cordially when we explained what the network is, but instead decided to act all sanctimonious. Which slays me, of course, because as you mention, they are the makers of the CLONE A WILLY.

  2. Private says:

    Hah. I used to work in an office owned by EmpireLabs (not for them, just subleased).

  3. Nadia West says:

    I really enjoyed this post, Lilly. And it’s funny because at the start of it I was thinking how much I enjoy your writing and admire how good you are at it, and that it’s what got me to read your blog in the first place… to find the first part of the post was about someone thinking your writing was terrible. Oy.

  4. FD says:

    Fucking A! Whomever they have tweeting for them really must have their head up their ass [foot in their mouth]. Why try and slam something that they don’t know a damn thing about? I love that they shut their trap, when they realized that they’re unable to provide “new toys” of a high quality. [Lelo, Tantus, etc.]
    Which is exactly why we swap our toys. Why discard of a toy that can be sanitized/sterilized? I’d much rather swap it with someone who is interested in it.
    And my last question is… why keep producing toys that can’t be boiled and bleached EmpireLabs??? Isn’t this the time to go green?

  5. Cooper says:

    I find the comment about the “we’ll just send the bloggers a new one” especially amusing as I (as the webmaster of a pretty successful blog) was really talked down to in an email from them when I requested some of their product. To the point where I was told ” I
    don’t have the time/budget to work with bloggers at this time. Heck, I don’t even have time for syndicates right now. Often Babeland or sometimes Castle will sponsor bloggers – the big, big distributors won’t do it, but sometimes they’ll let you open a wholesale account.”

    ie…buy it yourself, but promote us!

  6. Soren says:

    I’d sound off against that bitch, but you seemed to cover it very effectively with “cuntwad.” Your erotic writings were the inspiration for many of my own, and I always admired how you could make them all so damn sexy with so few words.

    They’re not long, they’re not short, they’re exactly the length they need to be.

    ~Soren

  7. hubman says:

    I love when you go off on a rant :-)