The official Authors' Hangout Winter Holiday 2022 contest Support Thread

[Trionyx]

I submitted a story about two hours ago, and it's been approved

When I submit a story, I see the ‘pending’ tag on my stories. How does one know it has been approved and the anticipated publication date?

 

[Kumquatqueen]

When I submit a story, I see the ‘pending’ tag on my stories. How does one know it has been approved and the anticipated publication date?

If you look at submitted stories, they say Pending in a grey box, but once accepted it'll say New in a yellow box, with the next day's date - they go live at 7am GMT which is midnight in Lit Land.

 

[oggbashan]

I have just hit submit on my first (of an intended two) story for this contest.

Frequent medical appointments have delayed progress.

Maybe, just maybe, I will finish the other tomorrow but I'm not hopeful. I am only about an eighth of the way on.

 

[OldFloridaGuy]

A few weeks ago I had high hopes of getting a quick story done for the contest. I was thinking 5 - 6000 words would be a good goal. I also was thinking that a short deadline would help me determine if this writing thing is something I can do.

It was November 7 when I put pencil to paper to start an outline of a Holiday story to submit. This was three days after my first ever Lit story was published. I was optimistic about being able to dash something out before Turkey Day.

The concept of short and quick got lost in the shuffle.

I've already gone back and pulled scenes that would need more narrative than I have time to develop.

@Duleigh wrote, "Be careful, if you tweak the story long enough you'll fall in love with the characters and build a world around them". I fear this is already taking place. That new world will only expand if I don't get this done before deadline, and then continue to work on it in hopes of submitting it next year.

The cast of characters has apparently begun to invite friends along for the ride. I've managed to shuffle some of them over into the 'plot bunnies' folder along with scenes I've excised from the current tale, but still I have too many bumping into each other.

The word count is now 9,200 (actually not that long when I look at other stories, but for me, it is approaching three times the count of my previous story). I'm not sure I'll be able to crank out enough additional text, quickly enough, to tie up the too many loose ends that have made a home and are still floating around unanchored.

I need to sneak over to AH Coffee Shop to see if TxRad has any leftover semi-fresh coffee available, then get back into the snow scene of my holiday story.

Kudos to all of you who have gotten yours done and published, and big cheers to those who are only now approaching the point of being able to submit it.

 

[TxRad]

And another person figures out why it is call writing and not publishing. The good news is that it does seem to get easier with practice.

 

[oggbashan]

My second one was just submitted but I have two others that won't be done.

 

[MegaTank]

There we go. Once again, I have allowed the expedient of last-minute panic to push my ass across the finish line.

Merry Christmas to all.

 

[TxRad]

Welcome to the madhouse, MT.

 

[Seadog777]

Looks like I will not be getting a story done before the deadline.
I just couldn't figure out an ending that made sense to me.
Well, hopefully , I'll live long enough to put it in next year's contest.

 

[RejectReality]

Got an offer for some proofing and feedback on my stuff, so maybe mine will contain less than a half dozen cross-pollinated name substitutions going forward.

That's the danger of having multiple works and even more plot bunnies hopping around in your head at the same time. Crossing my fingers that it turns out to be as good of a working relationship as I had with Roust, who proofed and offered another perspective to me for years.

My contest story has broken 800 votes, which is more where I wanted it to land than the bar of 650 I use for standard releases. Contest stories get a lot more exposure, and only creeping up to the standard bar was actually substandard. The tail has seemed a lot longer on all my recent releases. The first couple of days are slower than expected, and the rest of the first week more active than in the past. Perhaps people taking advantage of the bookmarking feature? Seems like a logical hypothesis.

 

[TxRad]

A bump to the top as we near the end.

 

[RejectReality]

Going by the current scores ( which could be shaken up by the sweeps, of course ) it looks as if Romance and GM are going to run away with this one. Some others could pop in there with sweeps, but with half a dozen in those two categories already scoring high before the sweeps, they're likely to take the lion's share of places.

I'm going to guess that mine will end up somewhere around 4.79-4.81 once the Hoover runs through. I'm rooting for it to creep over 900 votes before the sweeps Then I'm going to put an edit in to fix the multiple name replacements. How I missed at least 4 of them... Geesh...

 

[maryanek]

How the final votes are counted?
Does last-day-one-stars also counted into the final decision about who wins and who loses?

Because I noticed some of my favorite stories had pretty high and stable votes, slowly raising up and having wonderful comments - and suddenly boom! Big drops all over sometimes even 0,5 points, which is huge.

Can someone tell me the harsher of the harshest truth? The reality, not the bull...
Who has the biggest chances in such contest?

If everybody is bombed with 1stars at the end, who will survive? These authors who have simply the biggest number of votes and are able to "survive" the final 1-star bombing?
Or somebody actually check if the 1-star bombing by competitors/fans - even had place?

 

[KeithD]

Don't sweat it until after the final vote sweep by Literotica, done on a formula Lit. won't share but that pretty generally sweeps out low votes and brings the final rating up. The harsh truth, though, is that the voting is so much of a sieve here and it's being gamed so hard (or why would there need to be sweeps at all?) that you shouldn't put too much faith in the integrity of the highest-quality stories winning. What you're mostly getting is higher exposure for your stories.

 

[Bazzle]

Those with low numbers of votes are directly effected by the 1 bomb voters.
I've got 30 odd votes. So my vote score is often skewed down, until that final swipe, where it climbs a bit.
Last time I lost 5 votes and made my story not in the game!

 

[ElectricBlue]

Or somebody actually check if the 1-star bombing by competitors/fans - even had place?

The site runs a series of sweeps through all votes towards the end of a contest, to strip out dodgy votes. Every story (not only the contest stories) get swept, so To answer your question, the winners are those stories with the highest scores at the final bell, provided they meet the vote count criteria (25 votes, minimum, I think).

 

[GrantBricksly]

Well, I look forward to the results. I will not be winning, that is for sure. Mine are not nearly high enough. I have one that is hovering around 4 with just under 200 votes. and one at 4.4 with only 46 votes. That one I think would have done better had I published in a different category. I wasn't thinking and put it in Sci-fi/Fantasy so It has not done well...very low views. I'm still quite proud of it though.

Either way, I had fun. And I already have one I've begun for next years contest.

 

[RejectReality]

Watching a fascinating cross-site thing play out with mine. Here and on another site, Stuffed & Basted is heavily outperforming Curl & Figure. That is what I expected. I consider S&B the better story, ( despite the editing faux pas ) plus it has the contest exposure here. It's also Milf vs. Dilf, and Milf almost always wins that match-up. C&F also has an Appalachian narrative voice, which I'm sure makes some people run for the hills.

Then on the third site, C&F has garnered 4x the votes and a higher score than S&B. It just exploded there, and I haven't the foggiest idea why.

Anyway, S&B crept over that 900 vote bar for me. Sitting at 911 now, and has most of the day, so I think the tail has finally petered out. Between it having run its course and the lag time for edits, I think I'm safe to put the edit in the queue to fix those embarrassing name substitutions without affecting the contest results. I doubt it will go live before the announcement, but even if it does by some strange miracle, the votes are already in.

 

[maryanek]

The site runs a series of sweeps through all votes towards the end of a contest, to strip out dodgy votes. Every story (not only the contest stories) get swept, so To answer your question, the winners are those stories with the highest scores at the final bell, provided they meet the vote count criteria (25 votes, minimum, I think).

I doubt if they analyze that. If I wanted to give someone (from the contest) one star, just because I don't want him to win, who can stop me and tell me that's not my genuine opinion?

I'm pretty sure they can throw away the fake 5's that people give themselves from anonymous browser mode, but they will leave the one stars intact.
So the effect is:
- No malicious one stars removed
-All shady 5* removed, that author give himself to counteract the one star.

It's a lose-lose situation for authors.

That's why I dare to say only authors with massive fan base can survive when the jealous authors will start one-star-bombing their competitors at the last day.

And I know what I say because I observed a couple of stories (during various contests) that had slowly rising, natural high rate and they were all downvoted one day. Shitty situation, but that's what to be expected if money are the reward.

 

[TxRad]

No one but the web site knows what algorithms are used in the sweeps and the owners have asked us not to discuss or speculate on it. Why have a burglar alarm and put the wiring diagram on the front of the main box. But yes, a lot of one bombs are wiped as well as fives that the system find fraudulent. I've been here a long time and I've seen it at work. And no, large fan bases are not a requirement to win. New writers with less than a dozen followers have won many times.

 

[TxRad]

Well, the sweeps went through this morning so the announcement can't be far behind.

I gained .28 worth of score on one story.

 

[Rustyoznail]

I got a 0.02...

Mary, I picked up a third a couple of years ago and I had less than 100 followers at that time.

Miracles can happen.

 

[Emotional]

I didn't realize sweeps are site wide. I saw several of my stories lose votes even though they aren't in the context

 

[TxRad]

The sweeps dig everywhere. Big broom for the whole site.

 

[RejectReality]

I've lost 9 votes that I know of for sure. Maybe 1 or 2 more that happened while I was sleeping. Went up .03 from the last known score.