The Official Authors' Hangout Winter Holidays 2025 Support Thread

[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.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

@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.

She PM’d me just a while ago. Thanks for following up.

 

[old_prof]

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.

Your story is now second on my list to read (hopefully tomorrow.)

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Your story is now second on my list to read (hopefully tomorrow.)

Get tissue paper. I just reread it, I do that when my stories go live, and I teared up.

 

[old_prof]

Get tissue paper. I just reread it, I do that when my stories go live, and I teared up.

I want a heavy emotional content in my stories. I'm really excited for it now!

 

[ChloeTzang]

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

They're messagable - got a reply from Laurel this morning on the winter holidays story duplication - I suspect just really really busy because I haven't had a reply on the pending stories or AI rejection issues

 

[ChloeTzang]

LOL the theme song for my Winter Holidays Story....

 

[RoyalAuthor]

Thanks for helping get that mix-up taken care of, Chloe.

My story is doing pretty well; it was at 4.9 with close to a hundred votes for a while before two one-bombs brought it to 4.85, but that's still great. Only 2500 views though, I have a feeling that despite the winter contest being the biggest, this one is going to underperform my usual entries because of the mostly missed first day of release.

 

[old_prof]

I got a pair of ones right around 2:35 (US EST) I see TA also saw a pair today. Did others see it too?

 

[Ian_Snow]

Good luck to everyone. Looking forward to settling in and catching up on the stories.

 

[RoyalAuthor]

I don't know what it says about my ego that I'm checking enough to notice, but it's so obvious when I get one-bombed. I'll check, then two votes come in and it's dropped by .05. The math to figure out how many stars were missed isn't difficult lol. I just wish I trusted the sweeps to actually pull those.

 

[old_prof]

I don't know what it says about my ego that I'm checking enough to notice, but it's so obvious when I get one-bombed. I'll check, then two votes come in and it's dropped by .05. The math to figure out how many stars were missed isn't difficult lol. I just wish I trusted the sweeps to actually pull those.

What time did this happen to you? I happened to catch it when the first one happened. They checked a minute later to see fi I had seen it right and the second present had arrived.

 

[SamanthaBehgs]

I think I earned my poor rating that got me dropped - it's a 4 and not a 1 bomb there.

And hopefully I'll have enough time alone tomorrow to record my second song (I did one today but I'm not certain how well I did. It's my first ever audio). Let's see how bad my voice is, lol.

 

[RoyalAuthor]

I don't know exactly. Maybe around noonish ET today? Another one by itself this afternoon. I mostly shrug, it is what it is. My stories tend to do really well here, so I'm not overly upset about it, but I do wonder how high I could score with some of them if not for the bombers, because I don't trust the sweeps anymore.

I actually have a story, one chapter of a serial, not even the most recent chapter, that somebody tried to knock down a peg last week. It peaked at 4.9, and then four of the most recent five reviews knocked it down to a 4.77, all in the span of two days, all more than a month after release. Sure, those are legit.

 

[Voboy]

I don't know what it says about my ego that I'm checking enough to notice, but it's so obvious when I get one-bombed. I'll check, then two votes come in and it's dropped by .05. The math to figure out how many stars were missed isn't difficult lol. I just wish I trusted the sweeps to actually pull those.

TRULY, it's not worth obsessing over.

Even when the sweeps are "working properly," the swings on the last day can be very dramatic... enough so, that worrying about individual votes is really not going to give you a good indication of where anyone "stands."

 

[RoyalAuthor]

TRULY, it's not worth obsessing over.

Even when the sweeps are "working properly," the swings on the last day can be very dramatic... enough so, that worrying about individual votes is really not going to give you a good indication of where anyone "stands."

Oh, don't worry, I don't just do this for contests lol.

 

[EmilyMiller]

I got a pair of ones right around 2:35 (US EST) I see TA also saw a pair today. Did others see it too?

Back to back ones with no accompanying uptick in views is the signature of a sophisticated troll who knows how Literotica works and how to avoid its limited anti-troll measures (aka sweeps). I’m sorry the infection is spreading. That’s the thing: people may not care when it happens to others, then the plague begins to affect more and more people.