Author exposition

I entirely agree with jimisim and cheery. Writing for the competitions can be fun, especially if you have to write to a specific number of words; it is a good discipline to be taken out of the comfort zone every now and again, but primarily I write to entertain myself, and if I entertain others in the process I am very pleased, but my feelings are that over analysing our writings is missing the point of this wonderful depository of spanking literature.

It is a fun place to visit and read, and we already have ample opportunity to comment on our authors' wonderful writings. If authors' felt that their work was being scrutinised and compared to others, as opposed to being viewed on its own merits alone, it may deter them from posting as Guy and Linda quite rightly pointed out.

I do not feel I am in competition with the authors who contribute to the library. Their excellent writings speak for themselves, and I would not feel particularly comfortable having my work compared, for better or for worse, to others who have taken hours of endless trouble to entertain us.

We all have our own unique style of writing, mine drummed into me while they still taught the three R's, and while I appreciate suggestions for plots etc, I'm too old to change my ways (text messaging is beyond me, with all the unintelligible abbreviations!), so any comparison with other authors would be pretty pointless, as this old codger is going to continue to write in a style that I feel comfortable with.

A few comments -

1) there seems to be a lot of continued negative commenting about the 'contest' and 'scoring' aspects of this idea. NO ONE wants a contest, not even kdpierre, the original poster, who said that was an unimportant part of his original idea.

2) There is a lot of debate over whether to include non-authors. It's virtually an irrelevant issue. I just checked back through a number of forum threads. There ar really only TWO non-authors who have made any significant number of comments - twisted, and Sebastian. I have no probably with either of them participating in a discussion. No matter what the venue is for the 'author's exposition" I don't see any significant non-author's ever participating, and certainly none who would ruin the high-minded author-ly thoughts we writers (like me!!!!) would bring to the table.

3) So, if we don't need an exclusive venue, and we don't need scoring, then we have absolutely no reason to need Februs to do a damned thing i the way of programming. If anybody REALLY WANTS to do this, then we have the tool we need to get started right here in the forum! (and please, no jokes about me being a 'tool').

4) as a matter of fact, someone - ME! - made a concrete suggestion about how to get started, one that everyone promptly ignored so they could further bash the idea of a contest and debate the trivial point of non-author participation. For those that missed it, here's my idea again:


NOW... I'm not saying this is the ONLY idea about how to do it, or the BEST one. If someone has a concrete suggestion on how to do it better, please make it. Otherwise, let's just forget the whole idea.

(There - I just had to get that off my chest)

I seem to have taken on the role of curmudgeon in this thread, so here I go again...

How is a chat room superior to the forum we already have? A chat room excludes everyone from the conversation except those who happen to be sitting in front of their computer at that particular moment. This is a world-wide forum, so we are all on different schedules.

Guy

Not necessarily.

I think that it is easier to conceptualize by expanding real life into a fictional form, and a large number of authors initially write from a "stream of consciousness" basis.

I rather fancy that for most adults, male hand on female bottom is by far the most prevalent method of spanking, and it therefore reflects in the number of stories submitted.

To establish what readers like to read would need a deeper analysis of the data currently available to us.

Simple counts do not help. With the large number of M/F hand stories around, they should amass more favs and comments than other styles.

Now, if 50% of stories are M/F hand, then one would expect very roughly 50% of favs and comments to be directed to that genre. If the actual is significantly higher or lower than 50%, we would have some indication if we are writing to our readers' taste, or writing simply what we find easiest to write about.

To work out reader's tastes, you need accurate analysis by percentage shares. And it would be very useful to parse the data by the demographics of the readers.

You've just described a 'forum post'

Yes, but with one difference - it's a lot of WORK to go ALL THE WAY to the forum, rather than having it just pop up ALL BY ITSELF. Why should authors go to ALL THAT TROUBLE simply because they want to have a group discussion about someone's story?