Testing My Wings

With almost fifty stories submitted to Literotica over the past two years I've covered a few genres. Romance has been my favorite of them all and readers have responded favorably as my writing has improved. But I've delved into sci-fi and even into horror. So, what have I learned since my last submission to 'Reviews and Essays'?

First, this site is a good training ground. As an author you crave feedback from readers, it tells you things you could never discover about your writing and frankly, yourself. I have boundaries that are narrower than many readers. What to do? Be true to myself, or attempt to gather as large a readership as possible? The calculus was actually pretty straight forward in that respect. I chose to be true to myself and be satisfied with smaller numbers of readers that enjoyed my work when they found it.

Now, that doesn't mean I didn't experiment. I needed to test my boundaries and did so. It also tested those of my readers. Unexpectedly, it tested my boundaries as a reader too. Perhaps that doesn't make sense. I read a good many stories, particularly in the Romance and Erotic Couplings categories at first, and sampled a few others. Over time, I found fewer authors and stories that seemed worth spending time with and on. Now, I seldom now read any of them.

There are some very talented authors who contribute to this website, but there are far more that are not. Finding the good ones takes time, and the scores rewarded to stories by readers hardly tell the whole story. So, you have to ferret them out.

I found readers are more than willing to reward poorly written and structured stories better than a well-written one as long as it contains explicit, graphic sexual content. Not a surprise! That's what most come to the website to find. That's all they really want. So, as an author pushing the boundaries, where do you go?

Since my target audience has always been female, I tried to write a number of stories geared specifically to them. Female readers are very much in the minority it appears. Again, not a surprise, so I expected those stories would never go 'hot'. That thesis proved correct as not a single story written for that audience came close to going 'hot'. No problem, I expected that, women often see the world differently than men when it comes to human behavior.

So, to push my boundaries, I wrote several pieces that showed males in less than sterling fashion. The story 'Looking for Work' was specifically written to show how women are often treated and how one woman responded. It actually fared better than I expected, but barely.

In general, works that showed women seeking sexual pleasure as ardently as males had dismal scores. Most readers want their women to be beautiful, meek, and willing to perform when called. The story 'Two Wheel Tango' was meant to explore this dynamic. It went 'hot' off and on much to my surprise. Perhaps I'd gotten the balance right. The story 'Veronica's Spring Break' illustrates the reception most such stories received (below 4.0). Works that showed traditional male/female relationships and situations always fared better in terms of the scores awarded.

To push boundaries farther, I wrote a sci-fi short story that included hot button topics (at least a mention of them). The inclusion of politics, religion, sex, technology, and the future of humans and the Earth was a powerful combination. It was a story meant to stir emotion and provide fodder for engaging in deep thought. Heightened emotion and deep thinking are not a great combination on a website where escaping reality is one of the primary goals. I didn't go in blind by any means, but my curiosity needed to be satisfied. I paid a price as the number of followers dropped immediately after it was posted. If I were concerned with the number of followers I had, this story surely did not serve me well.

I hadn't read most of the comments I'd received on my stories again for years. When I went over them recently and compared them to comments I'd received on the same stories from an authors' website they compared favorably. A surprise frankly. The critical reviews on the author's site pointed out most of the flaws Lit readers found. Lit comments are few and far between, but nevertheless are helpful.

I've decided to limit myself to 50 posted stories on this website. The remaining decision regards how I go about it. I can keep all of the work I've posted and complete a few more works and call it a day, or, I can remove those stories that are not hot and replace them with new works that are better. The decision will not be an easy one, as once I've met my goal it will be time to leave the nest and not return.

There's a big wide world out there where readers are not as narrowly focused. As we grow and mature, we seek new challenges and establish new goals. I see that day on the horizon and know I'll spread my wings and fly. Where my wings will take me, I know not, but life they say is not so much a destination as a journey.