Workshop Improvements

I used to have certain sub-forums set to notify me (Flash and Horror) because they're what I mostly write and where I thought I could critique most effectively. When I was a mod I also made a point of following everything in Erotica just to make sure it was in bounds, but that's a different matter. Now it seems I'll need to manually check the Workshop regularly to see what's new in "my areas," which doesn't seem like an improvement.

 

Maybe it would be useful to have more explicit (and enduring and prominent) guidance about what constitutes "explicit." When John Fowles in 1965 was famously the first author (four years before Philip Roth) to put 'explicit' sex into 'highbrow' literary fiction in The Magus, many readers reportedly did not realize that some of the descriptions they'd read described couple m*******tion and solo same. One famous scene chest-deep in the ocean used coy conversation referring to a 'slippery eel' and the like. (See, I don't even know what words can be used here without triggering fear of parental activism against the site.)

I still don't know by the standards of this site whether I actually needed to put the Hunter's Moon Party chapter into Erotica or not. It refers to ti*s (truncated with a dash for a contextual reason), shared or***m, la petite mort, afterglow, 'lying in my sheets' afterward, 'the first round', 'more . . . healing reconsummation', and that's all I recall offhand. Very bland, generic, common stuff -- most or all of it is 'implicit sex' rather than explicit. But people get highly reactive around the subject, and have wildly different notions of 'explicit.' Yet as someone mentioned somewhere above, actual necrophilia went unremarked in another genre forum here, so that I feel pretty damn foolish now for having worried about such rules restricting my content. I'm not sure I've recently read any literary novel written in the last 20 years that wasn't more 'explicit' than these examples from my chapter. No regular participants in Erotica have commented, and why would they? It could hardly be farther from erotica. Every critique it has received has been the direct result of pimping it elsewhere on the site. It would clearly never have received even a single read, not to mention any comments, by a member whose normal fare is general or literary fiction or whose interests might reasonably extend to such a chapter. It would have become a rather large waste of effort to post it here.

On the other, much larger, site I've mentioned, nobody raises an eyebrow about such content touching on sex as a component of everyday real life. Click the checkbox, erring on the side of caution if one wishes, and it goes together with all the other submissions of its genre. Very many mainstream literary submissions use the checkbox.

 

Okay, great -- I'd appreciate if you'd move it, then. Thereafter I'll tweak the title and the intro text to remove the elements implying it's in the Erotica workshop.

 

Thanks, I'm happy enough under General -- certainly for now. We're still hashing out what "literary' is in a thread of @Xoic's. He and @evild4ve have posted some fine resources.

 

No necrophilia or bestiality? Yikes...there just went my awesome idea for undead lizard people erotica...

 

I expect there's a reddit for that.

 

Nothing illegal about hot lizard-on-lizard. But when a human gets their kit off and jumps on the bed to join in, expect the ban-hammer.

 

What about a stuffed lizard who is normally a bookend but now having to double up as a marital aid for a robot that goes sex-mad whenever its human brain is removed?

I thought they had sewed everything up after putting the sawdust in, but Mecha-Raymond-2000's lithe Teflon casing and bubbly formaldehyde re-awakened my pre-taxidermic longing. Its telescopic marital feature was soon rattling my ribcage with every thrust, like a cloacal xylophone.

 

I was just being obtuse. I write sex scenes in my WIPs but I don't write erotica per se, no disrespect to those who do, its just not my forte...as for undead lizard people liaisons...I don't know where I would start...sounds messy lol

 

Are edits to existing posts supposed to count against credits? Because that just happened to me...

 

Oh — ouch! I just noticed after reading this that I've gone from 12 to 8 since yesterday, simply by making an explanatory reply (not sure whether that counted against anything) about my thread having been moved (which I noticed immediately afterward had taken me from 12 to 10) from Erotica to General, removed some metatext referring to the reason it was in Erotica, and made a couple of few-word content edits. Some of the change in my credit total might be simple correction of the original calculation, which I haven't checked, and thus unrelated to these events. But some of it might be from one or more of them.

To directly answer your question, though, I understood from something yesterday or the day before that even posting an updated version (in the same thread) of an original post should not count against credits, not to mention simple edits. So it sounds like transitional stuff.

 

It's kind of funny because I noticed that I was no longer a "New Member," celebrated by making some changes to my last post, and now there's a minor grammatical error that I forgot to fix and it's driving me NUTS! I'll just have to go critique some more

 

You're too sweet but I literally did just go leave a critique in order to get the one point I was missing. Motivation, that's what it is.

 

Hopefully, @NWOPD will fix this soon so I can reply to my critiquers!

 

Ack... You also need points to comment on your own threads? If so, I didn't notice that either.

 

I don't think you're supposed to need them but that's what @Also is reporting.

 

I would call it speculating.

But I'm sure it's getting figured out and straightened out. I try not to think too much about software nowadays.

 

I have a question, spurred by that new guy who posted about how annoyed they were they needed credits to post.

What happens when you try to post a workshop entry without having enough credits? It sounds like some sort of error message pops up saying you don’t have enough credits?

I’m concerned that guy thought that “credits” were something you had to buy. I see Moose explained to them that they aren’t, and you get credits by critiquing others.

But if it’s not already— could you add to the error message and say “you need two credits to post here. You receive credits by critiquing other workshop entries”?

just a random suggestion (assuming that’s not what it already says). Don’t want to confuse newbies.

 

I see in this thread that folks are checking to see what their credit/debit scores are. Maybe I'm being a dunce, but where can I check to see what my scores are? I have poked around to many places and can't find it.