The Official Authors' Hangout Winter Holidays 2025 Support Thread

[RoyalAuthor]

View attachment 2577029

Glad I could be of service.

 

[DEFCOM5]

All right, giving you my update. It is probably totally uninteresting to you but it keeps me motivated to find the time to write.

I am 13.2K words in the story and still not sex. Wait, this is a porn site?

Probably another 1000 before the lone, relatively short scene (or may be two. My MMC is 61 and FMC in her 40s, so they are not rabbits) and ending.

I hope that romance reader care more about the love part than the sex part.

All joking aside, I hope it is a story that generates emotions for the reader. It does for me when I write.

Sorry for high jacking the thread.

 

[Lord_Libido]

I am starting this thread now so that writers have no excuse for not starting a story in plenty of time. The Halloween contest is still running but the Winter Holidays contest follows a short time afterwards - just over a month from this post. The Literotica Annual Winter Holidays Contest is the last of the annual Lit contests of 2025. The contests challenge writers to create compelling, fun tales on a theme. This time, the theme is seasonal holidays and winter-related events.

Winter Holidays (all holidays/events/activities from November through January)
themes: winter holiday traditions (dreidels, gift giving, etc.), cold weather (snow), holiday mythology (Santa, elves), etc.
starts: November 11
closes: December 5
winners announced: December 12

This thread is to SUPPORT and ENCOURAGE authors to enter stories in the 2025 Winter Holidays Contest. Get your characters cold and snowy, celebrating Christmas, giving and receiving presents and being bad for Santa.

And now, a few rules:

• All submissions must be stand-alone stories created for this contest theme. We will not accept individual chapters of a larger work submitted separately. If you have a multi-chaptered contest-themed submission, please submit all chapters together as one story submission
• A story has to accrue only a minimum of 25 votes to be eligible for a prize - not a high bar to surmount - and on the very odd occassion, a story with just over 25 votes HAS won

The following guidelines also apply:

• Author must copy and paste the phrase "WINTER HOLIDAY 2025" to the "Notes to Admin" field of the submission (quotes are not needed).
• Again -- PLEASE do not forget to put the EXACT phrase "WINTER HOLIDAY 2025" IN THE "Notes to Admin" FIELD - NOT the description field or anywhere else. In fact, we recommend that you copy and paste to avoid typos. If it is not in the NOTES field – or if it's typoed - we cannot easily find your story and it may not be approved in a timely manner to be entered into the contest!!
• Submissions must have a Winter Holiday theme: i.e. holiday celebrations, winter weather (will be different in north and south hemispheres!), winter events and superstitions, all things Wintery. Be creative! Please don't just submit a normal story in which everyone is wearing a Santa hat. That would not be in the spirit of the contest, and readers (aka voters) will likely punish you for your trickiness.

There is an advantage to entering stories in one of Literotica's themed contests, apart from the possibility of winning, and that is that your story gets far more exposure and attention than it would normally do.

Some of that attention might be unwelcome of course, some abusive (we have trolls to entertain too), but some could be appreciative and helpful.

Important Note: Once your story is submitted, it may take over 72 hours for it to be posted, or may be sent back to you for clarification/mending. We strongly suggest that you do not wait till the last day of the contest to submit your story. The sooner you submit, the better chance your story has of accruing the votes necessary to be eligible.

Good luck, and have fun!

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I'm doing a Santa boss battle in my story. With interspecies lovemaking to follow of course.
My Stories

 

[ChloeTzang]

Based on @RoyalAuthor and @ShelbyDawn57 's Freaky Friday-esque switcharoo, I feel like I should mention a weird thing that happened with my previous contest story...

My story was published, yes, but the published version wasn't the exact version I'd clicked submit on. In other words, the published version was some intermediate draft that I'd clicked Save Draft on at some point in the middle of my editing process.

Now I'm wary of clicking Save Draft so many times before I click Submit for Publication. I dunno, I might go straight from New Story button to Preview to Submit, and bypass the Save Draft button altogether.

I'd be curious if this has happened to anyone else.

Open a bug report for Manu

 

[ChloeTzang]

I've PM'd Laurel and asked her to fix it. I added a second message letting her know the story is yours.
I'm going to have resubmitted as an edit with the correct text.

I have alsoi PM's Laurel and Manu about this

 

[BryanRichardson]

My story https://literotica.com/s/dear-santa-11 appears to have been published 4 hours ago. It shows on my list of works, on the Letters and Transcripts page, and on the story page.

98 people have touched it, 6 have voted, and I’ve gotten two comments. That is a huge success already in that category…

 

[ChloeTzang]

That's mine. The Velvet Ribbon, also published. This is fucked up.

Chloe or Duleigh, or whoever has the site's ear, can you say something?

I lost most of the highest exposure day and now I'm competing against my own words. Wild stuff.

I've PM'd Laurel and Manu

 

[Duleigh]

This makes me almost happy that a story I worked very hard on had been stuck in pending

 

[ChloeTzang]

More stories up this morning

 

[old_prof]

For all the problems (and we did at least get several more stories on the list this morning), My story has gotten way more attention than my only other contest entry did, from Nude Day earlier this year. I've gotten 13 new followers, which is immense to me. It has the second most views of any of the eleven stories I have posted since the end of June and will probably be number one in a few hours. It's about to be the most votes I have had on a story since my Nude Day story, and is already well ahead of the total that had at the end of the contest. Most of the votes and views on that came after I got the W.

So, it's been personally a great experience (not withstanding the 1-bombs).

 

[ChloeTzang]

@ShelbyDawn57 @RoyalAuthor Copying @Duleigh

Guys, the glitch with your story has been corrected - Laurel replied to me overnight that it's been fixed and when I checked it is now two different stories!!!!! Yaaaaaay. You should be good now.

 

[ChloeTzang]

For all the problems (and we did at least get several more stories on the list this morning), My story has gotten way more attention than my only other contest entry did, from Nude Day earlier this year. I've gotten 13 new followers, which is immense to me. It has the second most views of any of the eleven stories I have posted since the end of June and will probably be number one in a few hours. It's about to be the most votes I have had on a story since my Nude Day story, and is already well ahead of the total that had at the end of the contest. Most of the votes and views on that came after I got the W.

So, it's been personally a great experience (not withstanding the 1-bombs).

Wow, congrats! It rwally is worth entering stories in these competitions - and when the link is on the front page of LIT, as the Winter holidays links is, the views seem to really pick up with the enhanced visibility.

Good one!

I better stop futzing around and finish my own story!!!!!!

 

[MelissaBaby]

For all the problems (and we did at least get several more stories on the list this morning), My story has gotten way more attention than my only other contest entry did, from Nude Day earlier this year. I've gotten 13 new followers, which is immense to me. It has the second most views of any of the eleven stories I have posted since the end of June and will probably be number one in a few hours. It's about to be the most votes I have had on a story since my Nude Day story, and is already well ahead of the total that had at the end of the contest. Most of the votes and views on that came after I got the W.

So, it's been personally a great experience (not withstanding the 1-bombs).

It's just my impression, but I think the Winter Holidays contest draws more reader attention than any of the others.

 

[old_prof]

It's just my impression, but I think the Winter Holidays contest draws more reader attention than any of the others.

From my grand experience of two contests, I have to say that this has been night and day from my experience with the Nude Day contest. I was underwhelmed, to say the least, about my experience during the Nude Day contest. I think I only got three new followers the entire first week that time, which was fewer than I had gotten the week before.

 

[TheLobster]

From my grand experience of two contests, I have to say that this has been night and day from my experience with the Nude Day contest. I was underwhelmed, to say the least, about my experience during the Nude Day contest. I think I only got three new followers the entire first week that time, which was fewer than I had gotten the week before.

Nude Day is made of mothballs and tumbleweed, relatively speaking. I've been told that Christmas one in the most popular, followed alternately by Halloween or Valentine's Day.

 

[Actingup]

For all the problems (and we did at least get several more stories on the list this morning), My story has gotten way more attention than my only other contest entry did, from Nude Day earlier this year. I've gotten 13 new followers, which is immense to me. It has the second most views of any of the eleven stories I have posted since the end of June and will probably be number one in a few hours. It's about to be the most votes I have had on a story since my Nude Day story, and is already well ahead of the total that had at the end of the contest. Most of the votes and views on that came after I got the W.

So, it's been personally a great experience (not withstanding the 1-bombs).

That's great, and nice to see it scoring so well. I hope that everybody has a really good experience with this comp after all the dramas.

@PennyThompson and I are working together on a story concept that cannot possibly win anything if it goes in its intended category (LW), but will hopefully be a solid (and positive, Christmasy) story.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Nude Day is made of mothballs and tumbleweed, relatively speaking. I've been told that Christmas one in the most popular, followed alternately by Halloween or Valentine's Day.

Wait until you see what happens if you win it...

 

[Duleigh]

I have to say that this has been night and day from my experience with the Nude Day contest.

This is TOTALLY wrong. Even in the depths of breakdown the Summer Fun contest ran smoothly. Halloween... mostly smoothly. This one - two days in and it's sitting on the side of the road with the hood up and steam coming off the engine.

Nude Day is made of mothballs and tumbleweed, relatively speaking. I've been told that Christmas one in the most popular, followed alternately by Halloween or Valentine's Day.

That's true. I've entered once and got no bump, but that was my first contest and I kind of liked my entry. If this site was working properly I'd clean it up and toss it to my editor
Winter Holiday is the premier contest. Some of my entries morphed into huge series and eventually grew into 9 (count 'em - 9!) novels.
This is where we make mockery of Hallmark movies! There should be twice as many entries on the page on Day 2.

Oh well, Keep Writing! My #1 is going to my editor today, #2 is going to be a Christmas gift to fans of my We're a Wonderful Wife series. It needs a lot of exposition to make sense to other readers.

 

[TheLobster]

I got two sentences in on mine, so clearly I'm ahead

 

[ChloeTzang]

Wait until you see what happens if you win it...

rotflmao - yes indeedy - that's when the fun REALLY starts LOL

I snorted my coffee over that one

 

[EmilyMiller]

the DM says it can't locate those people.

What? Are @Laurel and @Manu no longer messagable, or did I misunderstand you?

My Winter Holidays short novella was published today and is on the comp page, I guess I’m lucky.

A Belated Christmas Gift

It’s suffering from my own personal troll’s obsession, plus the usual Comp shenanigans. But what’s new? It’s like the opening scene of Terminator here.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Halloween... mostly smoothly.

I’d disagree with this.

• There was the ongoing submission issue
• There were stories that weren’t published until after midday rather than midnight
• There were multiple stories that didn’t initially make it to the comp page (one from memory which never did)
• The final comp sweep was both just one pass - rather than multiple - and the least effective I can recall. It was like an intern was running it
• And the degree of one bombing across the comp works was higher than normal (based on feedback from multiple authors)

Other than that, it was perfect.

 

[dreams_in_words]

I better stop futzing around and finish my own story!!!!!!

Same. Long day at work should give me some time to work on it.

 

[PennyThompson]

That's great, and nice to see it scoring so well. I hope that everybody has a really good experience with this comp after all the dramas.

@PennyThompson and I are working together on a story concept that cannot possibly win anything if it goes in its intended category (LW), but will hopefully be a solid (and positive, Christmasy) story.

At this point I suspect that your kink is convincing me to write in categories I swore i would never write in

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

As usual, Laurel was right on top of the issue. My story, Going Home for the Holidays is live now and @RoyalAuthor’s is safe from having to compete against itself.