Myr

To edit your Member Title, do this. Go to your profile Click Edit Profile Change first box to title of your choice Scroll to bottom of page and hit Save The reputation level is not editable.

This is part of the reason we added "Reading History" and "Collections" as features here at Gay Authors. Of course, that only helps when you are logged in and make use of them. lol. Meh. Every little bit helps!

Nothing really. Unfortunately, Google has trained people to expect the answer they are looking for because Google's thousands of employees, billions of dollars and thousands of hours of work behind the scenes makes it so. For everyone else, we must rely on default software search hitting on a database with no processing skills beyond "this word OR that word" and "this word AND that word." Unlike Google, it doesn't do concepts or guesses or anything else. The only advice I can give is to focus on key west, as there are considerably less story chapters listed from that. OR go over to the story forum and post a description and ask your fellow members if they know what story you mean. With over 166,000,000 words posted in stories on the site, our poor database mostly just pukes on itself when you ask it to look at itself.

As we work through the logistics of keeping the article pipeline fed, and it's a hungry beast, I thought I'd open a dialog about choosing what we write. For example, when I started writing for the public, I went to the root of writing FanFiction. Those who immediately scoff, remember that some really prolific authors started out that way, including Mercedes Lackey and Stephanie Meyers. In fact, Mercedes Lackey publishes a yearly anthology. For at least 10 years now, she has short stories written by other authors in her world... you know, FanFictions. I was interested in Harry Potter. When I started, we were in the drought between books 4 and 5 of the Harry Potter series. There was quite the fertile ground of speculation and tropes that still continues to this day, 20 years later. I just finished a reread of my own unfinished Harry Potter FanFiction novel and restarted editing so I can finally finish it after 20 years. I don't want to turn into George R.R. Martin and never finish the book that's mostly done, after all. (Where are you, Winds of Winter?) Writing a FanFiction, especially a Harry Potter one, gives you a hungry audience ready to beat you over the skull for mistakes. They are driven to reply. If you thrive on interaction, that is a path. Of course, they can be brutal, too, so that's something to bear in mind. If you are inclined to follow markets, you can figure out what is popular and write something that scratches that itch. Paranormal Romance was huge some time ago, for example. (It might still be, but I'm not paying attention much to larger outside trends). Quirky teens getting laid seems to usually go over well with the Gay Authors' audience. Teens crossed with giants (at least 1 part) seem to be a regular favorite over at Nifty. You can give yourself a leg up on the audience by feeding the beast. The other path is more challenging but more rewarding. Write something so compelling that you set the trend. In other words, be you. Write a great story, and it'll get noticed. I am always going to write something other than contemporary. While I will complete my Harry Potter story, I don't plan on writing more in the FanFiction genre (and sharing it) going forward. I'm going to continue to wander off into the lands of speculative fiction, be it Science Fiction or Fantasy. That's me being me. How do you approach your writing? Has it changed since you started? Is feeding the audience more important? Or writing what you want?

🙈🙉🙊

I, myself, am familiar with that issue...

In my ongoing pursuit to bury myself in an avalanche of books, I picked up this gem. This is like a jack-of-all-trades toolbox. It has Character Traits, Character Names, plot ideas, action words, descriptive words, plot twist ideas, and a lot more. It is exactly the sort of thing you'd reach for when you're stuck and you want an idea. Or if you are horrible with names, picking a name from a list. Or maybe you want to spice something up. Or you want a prompt. I flagged a bunch of parts of the book and this will be on my reference shelf for when I need it. I definitely recommend it.

That one is still primarily intended for forums and not stories. But now if it's used on a story, it won't have a passive-aggressive connotation to it. Check it Out! is a stronger version of like it that case. The intended use case is if you are skimming through a lot of posts and think one's worth reading deeper in. Reactions are not searchable and unlikely to be given the system structure. I didn't like it either, but it was user suggested AND voted on to give it a try. Now we've moved on because of the unintended on the staff's part connotations. Not sure on the original suggester. Years blend together doing this coming up on 19 years.

Experimenting is ongoing.

These are the larger sizes: Oddly enough, those little things you see on the post are actually this size...

I fixed the default blown out look of the like icon, if you saw that early on. It now appears simply grayed out if you haven't reacted yet.

Pretty standard for 70's era Hollywood. Way better than the woke nonsense of 2020's, which the new 2019 didn't have. Thank God.

We are experimenting with new icons for reactions. The "I Read It" was replaced with "Check It Out!"