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@skirtandtights

"Also, I agree and have noticed the same. Even 5-10 years ago I feel like I remember finding a lot of well-written, well thought out stories. Now if you look at the fiction section it seems to be overwhelmingly short stories, a lot of which feel like they have... a bit less thought put into them, I will say. And the short stories really do seem to get a lot of interaction, regardless of the writing quality. I don't want to pass judgement on those stories or those writers, clearly they have an audience so they must be doing something right! But I definitely prefer a story that feels more... fleshed out? has more thought put into it?"

I can understand how shorter stuff is more likely to be read and I say that as a person who tends to write long things. Like I said in my other post I simply don't have time to read all of the stories in the story section because otherwise I would get no writing of my own accomplished, but if I do look at one or more likely to read it if it's just a really brief one very tightly focused on a topic that I like otherwise I simply don't have the time and I have my own particular tastes which are fairly specific and I think with this fetish most people have very specific likes and dislikes and that most of the stories have to check certain boxes for the person to even consider reading it, which I fully understand so I'm not going to judge.


But I do agree I prefer stories that are fleshed out. Even in my relatively short stories I usually have the situation fleshed out other than just a person dancing around having to be. I usually do think of situations and where the desperation occurs but it's also within the confines of a situation that isn't exclusively about desperation, to me that's more natural because the normal situations where a person would get desperate are usually doing something else. For me unplanned desperation that takes place while you are out in a place and then you unexpectedly don't find a bathroom available is more realistic and creates more of a story.


And as far as I know I'm pretty much the only person who is writing a book length stories about desperation. As I've said numerous times you would think there's only so much you can do with a topic but you'd be surprised at how fast the stories can get fleshed out once you start writing them. But in every case the characters were in a situation beyond just exclusively the desperation. Like they were on a long bus ride or they were on a tour or they were in a day in the city or a day in the park or some other activity that was going on that is established before they end up getting desperate within the confines of that situation.


But again there are plenty of people who don't like that, there are plenty of people who like things short quick and to the point, but I'm definitely one of those people who likes things drawn out in fleshed out more, and my longest desperation novel is 67,000 words and that one basically had a sci-fi premise so there was lots of world building to do even just in a story about desperation like that.

"This is a really interesting thought. I've heard the same about books like Harry Potter, and I think it comes down to the fact that (especially with fiction) a writer's tendency to be too wordy can really bog things down and take away from the story. In fact I think it actually takes a lot more effort and skill to take a story with complex ideas and simplify the wording, so that it's easy to breeze through, while still conveying the complexity of the ideas."

This kind of reminds me on George Orwell's thoughts on writing that to make writing as accessible as possible is that you should make things as easy to understand to the broadest possible audience. I'll admit that I'm a person who doesn't do that maybe that's why I have not had much more success as a writer, I write long complicated science fiction stories with lots of complex ideas and I think that the average person reading them would probably find it goes over their head. I mean I tried to use language that's accessible to a large number of people but I think that you can tell that I am sort of a wordy person and that I am definitely a nerdy intellectual type. To a layperson reading my stuff I think they would be like okay I don't get this stuff at all I give up. When I am writing I realized that I am writing for an audience that I assume will be as intelligent or as literate as I am and I find it hard to sort of dumb myself down even if it would make my stories and books more accessible.


And Orwell also went into a lot about how political language was often use to kill thought as well and I think that that's why a lot of politicians who speak at the third grade level and aren't very literate or educated are the ones who seem to often have success. A lot of people find that a person who is very obviously intellectual they feel that they are elitist or distance from people and that they can't relate to people, and I can't and I am definitely an academic elitist, I think a person can tell right away from talking to me that I am sort of an educated nerdy type with lots of book learning but very few people skills you really can't make small talk at all.


Again it reminds me of that scene in Idiocracy where the guy wakes up in the world where everybody is stupid and he tries to explain things in normal terms but because everybody is stupid they all think he's a snob and elitist and they all hate him simply because he is speaking and articulate manner at least compared to the people in society I may see him as an arrogant know it all for not being mentally retarded like everybody else in society which I thought was excellent commentary and I think there is a lot of truth in that.

"In my academic writing I use a site called hemingwayapp.com which analyzes your text for complexity and grade reading level. A lot of famous authors (like Hemingway) wrote at an elementary reading level, but still managed to convey really complex ideas. I'm currently working on a story that I hope to post here at some point, and the Hemingway Editor told me it was a 3rd grade reading level. I don't think that means my writing is dumb, or that I'm uneducated, but it does tell me my text is accessible."

True sometimes being accessible means that you have to write down in a way, so that you can be accessible to people who are perhaps less educated than yourself. Writing at a third or fifth grade level to make it more accessible doesn't mean that you have the intellectual level of a third or a fifth-grader, but I think a lot of the public at large unfortunately does.


For what it's worth the word count is that I use every day is https://wordcounter.net/ and regardless of what I write it pretty always says that my writing is college student or college graduate level and on a rare occasion it says 12th grade level but I rarely see it go beyond that so I am definitely a wordy academic type of person. A lot of people have even said that just from talking to me for a few moments, they can tell that I'm very much an intellectual type and not a very accessible person in general. That's probably why I have zero social life. In fact I almost found a sexual partner one time but then she said that I'm sorry I just can't keep up with you I need to be around people who are dumber. I wasn't sure if I should take that as a compliment that they respected me as an intellectual, or a way of saying you're too much of a know it all for me to tolerate

"This is getting off topic, but I do agree with some of your fears about social media making everything shorter. I am in my early 20s (so elder gen Z). I was the last class in my elementary school to get cursive writing instruction, and one of the last classes to get a computer class. I greatly fear for the next generation, even those 5-10 years younger than me. Apparently, there are now children entering kindergarten who have severely underdeveloped hand muscles because they spent so much time pressing buttons on a pad rather than actually playing with real toys and developing fine motor skills."

The longest time I didn't want to use twitter because I felt that limiting words like that was a way of limiting thoughts in an Orwellian sense. Sort of like how in 1984 they eliminated more complicated words like bad by making them double plus ungood because the less language you use to express yourself but I think that that's why a lot of extremist and reactionary politics have thrived on social media where short little bites of information the don't really inspire much thinking has become the norm and I feel that it has had a detrimental effect on society in general.


And is definitely true that this new generation seems as though they are developmentally inhibited in some way by technology. I'm very pro-technology in general but I remember somebody was telling me about how they saw a child who was poking a book with their fingers like they didn't know how to use a nondigital book and I am like okay now society is very much in trouble.


I'm 38 so I came from that generation where computers weren't totally ubiquitous. Like growing up we had computers in school but most people didn't have computers in their homes and I was one of the last people I knew who had a home computer. I mean since I got a home computer the last 22 years I spent most of my waking time on the computer, but I didn't grow up in a world where everything was computerized and digital. And even now as much is I could use the extra space in my house so that it wouldn't be covered wall-to-wall with books, I just can't stand e-readers and I do not read books that way. I want the actual physical book where I just don't have the patience for it. I can use a touchscreen for the life of me as I just keep poking at an end poking at it and nothing happens.

@LifeIsStrange

"I always thought cursive was a stupid and pointless waste of time myself, I never saw the point of it. What does having fancier looking writing even accomplish?  I hated having it learn it in elementary school and I remember struggling to write it all the time. I was so happy once I got into fourth grade and I no longer had to do that shit anymore(this was in the 90s and in the 2000s most schools stopped teaching cursive so i'm very surprised that you got taught it)whenever you get things like doctor's notes they are seemingly always done in that chicken-scratch looking cursive that's damn near impossible to read, seriously why can't they just use print instead? It's not like writing notes in cursive is any quicker.

I'm just completely and utterly baffled as to why cursive even exists at all frankly, it feels like one of the most pointless and useless inventions in all of mankind.  I don't miss having to write in cursive one bit, if it goes away in schools entirely I say good riddance to bad rubbish."

I think the only reason why they teach cursive as it's about formality which I kind of detest personally so I agree with you on this. I have horrible handwriting and the only time I ever use cursive is if I have to sign something but even then my handwriting is almost unreadable. Like the funniest thing is in hospitals where you have to sign all of these consent forms that are digital and I just sort of make a squiggly line with my finger and that is excepted as a signature and I am thinking any single person could fake that LOL.


My dad is always telling me how can I go to college and have such incredibly poor handwriting but handwriting actually does reflect your personality and you can analyze personality through it so it has nothing to do with intelligence. It was actually funny because once in college one of my professors asked if I would like a handwriting job to write down notes for this student in class who was unable to do so and I am like has this person never seen my handwriting, and I thought weight no they haven't actually because every assignment is typed so they have no idea that my handwriting is practically illegible.


To be fair though my print handwriting and non-cursive handwriting is also pretty terrible. The tedious part of my day is when I have to go and type up my journals on my story ideas and have to try and read my handwriting and interpret it, particularly stuff that I write down while I am half awake which is almost always completely illegible by the time I wake up. It's like what the hell was I trying to say here?!

@Unbeknownst

"I personally consider a title clickbaity when either it doesn’t actually match the story / it pertains only to a small portion of the actual content or, more commonly, the title is written in an unnecessarily sensationalist manner such that it creates a false expectation of either content or tone."

I have to admit I do write a lot of story titles that are actually almost like a mini description of the plot and that are rather sensationalistic sounding. I'm not going to give any examples because that would risk making me nonanonymous, but if you ever read titles of bizarro literature I have a lot of titles like that. A title that you see and you are like is this person on drugs?! I don't really have that many weirder sensationalistic titles for most of my omorashi stories however, compared to the science fiction and bizarro literature I write under my own name my desperation stuff is relatively mundane by comparison and the titles fairly simple and to the point.

"Out of curiosity’s sake I put my most recent story, which I consider poorly written by my standards, through the Hemingway editor and got grade 8 due to my needlessly excessive use of complex sentences. It also says I use far too many adverbs but I’m really not willing to compromise in that regard. I find adverbs to most often be the best manner of succinctly and accurately conveying the actions depicted."

Going back to the word count or that I linked to above I have found that the lowest grade I ever got was like seventh or eighth grade level writing and that was writing a story that was overwhelmingly scatological and juvenile humor with a senile mentally retarded character who speaks in broken English that is pretty much all inarticulate slang and I somehow still got eighth-grade level from that. Like my character literally talks like this you done be stupids youz and I still managed to get seventh or eighth grade level with that level of inarticulate dribble.

"I’ll second @razel here. I always write my stories for my own enjoyment primarily and then share them so that others can enjoy them to. Basically, I find it much more fulfilling if I like what I write and I don’t have to worry about fulfilling any sort of expectations."

I was advised that I heard a writer give at one point I always thought it was good, the first person you have to pleases yourself, if you can't please yourself with your own writing you can't expect anybody else to enjoy it either. So yeah I write stories for myself and just hope that other people enjoy them. Why would anyone write stories that they themselves do not enjoy? Of course the problem is if you don't enjoy your own stories then you have nobody to blame but yourself.

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@LifeIsStrange

Sorry I failed to see this post the first time when I was reading it before I wrote my big response.


"I googled "TV Guide Jericho cancellation too smart" and nothing came up for me so it might've been in Entertainment Weekly or something like that.
This articles speculates it got cancelled because it had the misfortune of coming out right in the middle of the wars in the Middle East and because the network made the brilliant to split Jericho's seasons in half with it's hiatus of several months from November 2006 to February 2007 causing it to lose a bunch of viewers. Plus the Writers Strike happened right after season 2 got approved, so even if CBS wanted to there was no way they could get anymore episodes, and finally the first three episodes of season 2 got leaked online early and many speculated that to be the reason for the season 2 premiere getting the show's lowest ratings ever:https://www.looper.com/18870/real-reasons-jericho-canceled/"


Again I don't remember where specifically I heard that again I am talking 15 years ago and going off the top of my head. Yes there were a lot of reasons that Jericho got canceled and it was only after protested by sending bags of nuts to CBS they at least give it a couple of extra episodes to finish it with. But I personally was disappointed as why are so many fans because I feel that if they had been a better job with it it could have been a really popular series. The people who liked it tended to like it a real lot


"I'm fine with post-apocalyptic fiction that's more action-oriented like Mad Max and the dozens of films inspired by it(I.E. Interzone, World Gone Wild, Six String Samurai) but stuff like Jericho That focuses on realistic, disturbing and depressing drama as a result of it isn't really my thing."


I have to admit I like realism even in my fantastic literature. Other than mad Max I really am not even familiar with those other examples that you mentioned and I am a person who is very well-versed in post-apocalyptic stuff in general so that's really saying something.


To me things like Jericho, Threads and the Day after our very much more than my kind of thing. My novel is like a manifesto of human misery. I've been working on it for nearly 20 years now and much of it actually came true in the time in which I was writing it except for the nuclear war itself. But it was basically like a future history of the world showing the deterioration of society into fascism World War III in the aftermath in which a genocidal theocracy takes over. So yeah my novel has everything and every horrible imagine, rape, torture, ethnic cleansing, child soldiers in suicide bombers, concentration camps, collective farms, mass starvation, disease, mountains of corpses that are rotting and cannot be disposed of. So yeah I like realism including really depressing realism. Incidentally aside from post apocalyptic literature I also write a lot of stories set during World War II, the Holocaust and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you don't like depressing literature I am definitely not the writer for you. Not everything that I write is depressing, my omorashi literature has nothing to do with a lot of the more serious stuff I write, but the stuff I write under my own name it's dystopian, apocalyptic and depressing as hell with a very heavy-handed satirical theme it generally.


In fact I remember that when The Day after premiered so many people were actually terrified by it that they thought that it actually scared Ronald Reagan into changing some of his views and I am thinking that's the kind of novel I want to write, something that scares people and gets them to change their ways to try to avert the horror to come.


But yeah when I was younger I basically did believe and still do to a large extent now that I might see the collapse of civilization during my lifetime and that I might die in some type of apocalyptic event. It was something that I always expected when I was younger, now I don't see it from sort of a prophetic standpoint but I look at climate change, the energy crisis, political unrest, violence, overpopulation inequality and all of these other things and think that the world probably doesn't have a very bright future. I just don't see us getting out of this century unscathed.


"As someone who has plenty of faith in humanity Jericho is pretty much the polar opposite of my viewpoint so that explains why it does not appeal to me.  Interesting that you're writing a novel about that sort of thing and i'm sure you'd do a good job, though it's definitely one I won't personally be reading as I read enough depressing stuff everyday without needing to read it in fiction as well."


Fair enough. I'm definitely not an escapist literature kind of person although I write plenty of things there comedies or upbeat my longest and most serious stuff is definitely grim and depressing and doesn't really have a positive view of human nature. There are some who see the glass as half-full, some who see it as half empty, I see it as a glassful of cyanide with somebody putting a gun to your head and saying drink up motherfucker! So yeah my attitude towards the human race is pretty cynical. Maybe it's just because of the current political situation or because of the fact that I have read a tremendous amount of things about history such as the Holocaust, Hiroshima etc. but I kind of tend to think that human beings are killing machines and that the default setting for human beings is psychotic. I wish I could believe otherwise, it does get depressing, I would like to have more faith in humanity, but I simply don't. When I think of the future I would like it to be more like Star Trek but I think it's probably going to be more like 1984 and that we're already pretty much halfway there. The way I see it we are already living in the dystopian world that so many people had predicted and it will probably get a lot worse before it even starts to improve minimally.


"To keep this on topic, post-apocalyptic fiction is something I also don't think lends itself very well to omo as if the world has already ended nobody is going to care if you piss in public or not and people are going to be much less shy about doing so in a world where most everything is destroyed, so that eliminates a lot of the stuff about omo fiction that appeals to me. So for that reason post-apocalyptic omo fiction typically does not grab me(unless it's based off a fictional property i'm interested in like Borderlands)"


True there isn't really that much omorashi scenes in any of my post-apocalyptic fiction and I have yet to write an omorashi story incorporating post-apocalyptic themes. I've written ones with vampires, robots and plenty of speculative situations, but you are 100% correct when you say that omorashi is probably not something that going to be widely prevaling in the aftermath of an apocalyptic event.


In fact a lot of my omorashi literature focuses on the fact that holding it in is part of a societal expectation, if society has collapsed people will just be pissing and shitting all over the place. In fact a lot of my post apocalyptic literature I do have characters who are just peeing and shitting all over the place because after the apocalypse sewer systems are probably going to be nonfunctional and it's going to be a very dirty messy and filthy place in the postapocalypse.


That was one criticism that some fans of Jericho brought up, that the character still all looked like they had good hygiene for the most part when after a nuclear attack like that people are going to be living like a Third World nation swarming with disease and filthy.


Holding it in is something that is a luxury of living in an intact society, but in an anarchic free-for-all in the aftermath people aren't going to really care about society or its expectations because society will have ceased to exist.

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@DesperateJill  I certainly don't believe all human beings are killing machines, I certainly have no desire to kill myself unless I'm given no other choice. I don't believe we are living in a dystopia yet but we could end up there if things don't change.  That was another issue I had with Jericho, how none of the people on that show looked like they'd been through a tragedy and looked like they were all ready to model for GQ or whoever.  That's one thing I will give the Walking Dead show, I have similar issues with it to Jericho(plus it got way too slow for its own good at times especially in the farmhouse)but at least the characters on that show look like they've actually been through hell.

My printing actually looks pretty good, I was always impressed at how much better my printed handwriting looked next to my own classmates. If I tried to sign things like receipts in cursive i'd be there all day and people in line would be getting impatient LOL.

I'm definitely not someone who can do overly wordy stories, there's one guy who writes articles on pop culture who loves being insanely wordy and blathering on and on about utter nonsense to the point where it feels like he's more concerned with showing off his writing then the actual topic of the article. He suffers from what I like to call "word vomit" where you write a lot without really saying much of anything at all. I've come across plenty of fiction stories like that where there's a lot written but it does not really say much of anything at all(Literotica especially has quite a few of those kinds of stories) and I find myself just skimming through those to get to the good bits.

The closest thing to the kind of realistic fiction you mentioned that I actually enjoy is the Metro video game series which does take place after nukes go off but despite how dark it gets there is some hope at least(And the third game has a twist where the future isn't as bleak as you've been led to believe in the first two which I liked)that's about as far as i'm willing to go for that sort of thing(i'm probably never going to watch Chernobyl for that reason).

I tried that Hemingway tool myself and I was surprised that my writing was at a post-graduate level as I never saw my own writing as that complex, but I guess i'm better than I thought. I use a lot of adverbs myself because if I don't I feel like my writing sounds too repetitive.
 

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@LifeIsStrange

"I certainly don't believe all human beings are killing machines, I certainly have no desire to kill myself unless I'm given no other choice."

Maybe I exaggerate a little but human history doesn't show us in a positive light most of the time. It reminds me of a sci-fi story I wrote or was planning to write, can't even remember if I wrote it already now LOL, where aliens return who genetically engineered the human race as a predatory species to wipe out other species on the planet and then to coming back thousands of years later and finding that we actually formed a functioning civilization they are kind of shocked and horrified and feeling that we will probably be a threat to the greater universe.

"I don't believe we are living in a dystopia yet but we could end up there if things don't change."

To be fair I think that human history has been a dystopia from the very start so the problems we have now are just compounded by technology. But I can't really look at a point in human history where things were overly good or positive, and I am not just talking about that in regard to women's bathroom access like I often am! But when I read lots of old science fiction predicting about how the world of the future is going to be a terrible place I am like, yeah they pretty much nailed it.

"That was another issue I had with Jericho, how none of the people on that show looked like they'd been through a tragedy and looked like they were all ready to model for GQ or whoever.  That's one thing I will give the Walking Dead show, I have similar issues with it to Jericho(plus it got way too slow for its own good at times especially in the farmhouse)but at least the characters on that show look like they've actually been through hell."

Yes, one thing that The Walking Dead definitely got right is that the characters do look disheveled and run down and looking like they live in a Third World apocalyptic living hell which made it more realistic and they do pretty good makeup work and special effects on that show. I have to admit I gave up on it after a while because it went from slow-paced to what I felt was glacial. Also after they supposedly killed Glenn only for him to be alive and then killed him for real I am like are you fucking getting me I'm done!


In my own post apocalyptic stories I tried to emphasize the fact that it's going to be a terrible rundown world. In fact one of the things I want to emphasize in my novel is that just walking down the street you would see lots of people missing limbs and eyes and with horrible disfiguring scars and wearing disheveled clothing and looking sickly because that's how people would look at society broke down in the aftermath of a nuclear Holocaust. It would look like one of those infomercials trying to raise money for starving children in Africa except that that's the entire planet now.


Although to be fair in Jericho it wasn't actually a full-scale nuclear war, it was more like an incident of massive nuclear terrorism. There were 23 nuclear bombs that went off in 23 cities which is a catastrophe to be sure, but still 95% of the American population would have survived that and there wouldn't be nuclear winter or widespread fallout. As bad as the situation was in Jericho it was relatively tame as far as post apocalyptic scenarios go. What I think the focus was is what happens in the aftermath of chaos and I think that that is what they got right pretty well, about the jostling for power among the survivors and how the nation broke apart in the aftermath. That is what I think made it really compelling. After the first season it really wasn't even about the nuclear attacks anymore it was about the social and political aftermath of the attacks.

"My printing actually looks pretty good, I was always impressed at how much better my printed handwriting looked next to my own classmates. If I tried to sign things like receipts in cursive i'd be there all day and people in line would be getting impatient LOL."

It's actually funny because my mom said that she always used to get compliments on her handwriting and everyone would constantly say how beautiful her handwriting was and how she had such excellent handwriting and she is like why don't you have handwriting like me, mine is by comparison like chicken scratches. Like I have really hard time reading my own handwriting in all honesty as well as most other people's handwriting. That's why I like the Internet, everything is typed! When you are reading people's handwriting everybody's handwriting is different and has to be interpreted, on the Internet although you can change your font and color sizes essentially it's all still easily readable to virtually everybody.

"I'm definitely not someone who can do overly wordy stories, there's one guy who writes articles on pop culture who loves being insanely wordy and blathering on and on about utter nonsense to the point where it feels like he's more concerned with showing off his writing then the actual topic of the article. He suffers from what I like to call "word vomit" where you write a lot without really saying much of anything at all. I've come across plenty of fiction stories like that where there's a lot written but it does not really say much of anything at all(Literotica especially has quite a few of those kinds of stories) and I find myself just skimming through those to get to the good bits."

I am definitely guilty of that as a couple of people have even said your stuff is just too long and wordy for me. I can definitely go on and on as anybody who has read my posts here can attest to. The fact that I have speech recognition software that allows me to belt out a paragraph in a single breath certainly allows me to get carried away.


I think I'm actually better at getting my point across in a fictional story though. Like when I was in high school and college when we had to write essays I would always kind of struggle with that. I mean I still got good grades and everything but I didn't really enjoy that kind of writing as I always found it hard to write nonfiction. Like there are some authors that can write both but most authors tend to prefer one over the other and I definitely think that I am better with fiction than with nonfiction.


Like when I am trying to get my point across about something I can blather on and on paragraph after paragraph just trying to get some clarity on what I want to say. But when I get that point across in the form of a story with people acting out the scenario I think that it works a lot better. When I read back my own stuff I am always more satisfied with my actual stories that I am with just my personal postings and writings and journals. People will listen to your point more if it is framed through an entertaining story. It's why fiction is more popular than academic texts.

"The closest thing to the kind of realistic fiction you mentioned that I actually enjoy is the Metro video game series which does take place after nukes go off but despite how dark it gets there is some hope at least(And the third game has a twist where the future isn't as bleak as you've been led to believe in the first two which I liked)that's about as far as i'm willing to go for that sort of thing(i'm probably never going to watch Chernobyl for that reason)."

Chernobyl is an excellent series but yeah it's pretty damn depressing. I actually watched at like the very beginning of the pandemic and I just gave making the connection about how incompetent bureaucracy was responsible for a lot of the Chernobyl problems and I just kept thinking about the same is true of Covid, so the entire time I was watching it I just kept making all of these connections to Covid.

"I tried that Hemingway tool myself and I was surprised that my writing was at a post-graduate level as I never saw my own writing as that complex, but I guess i'm better than I thought. I use a lot of adverbs myself because if I don't I feel like my writing sounds too repetitive."

Personally I always kind of like to see that my writing is up to the standards of the fact that I went to college, otherwise what was the point? Although the irony is if I wrote a third grade level I would probably be more popular in all honesty if everything I have read on the matter is true. The fact my erotica and my gross crazy stuff is more popular than my serious stuff probably also reflects that. People don't always want something that's going to make them think or engage in mental effort.

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@DesperateJill Other pieces of post-apoclyptic fiction i'm fine are those where the cause of the end isn't nukes but something else like zombies(for Walking Dead I definitely prefer the video games over the TV show)so I can get into stuff like World War Z, The Division, Days Gone and Last of Us(part 2 happens to be my favorite game of all time, so i'm certainly not incapable of loving post-apocalyptic scenarios). Plus those settings I find lend themselves better to omo stories as while society isn't functional it's not destroyed by radiation either, so it's easy to see scenarios where women still insist on carrying themselves with some level of dignity by not constantly peeing outdoors in front of everyone.

Edited by LifeIsStrange (see edit history)
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@LifeIsStrange

"Other pieces of post-apoclyptic fiction i'm fine are those where the cause of the end isn't nukes but something else like zombies(for Walking Dead I definitely prefer the video games over the TV show)so I can get into stuff like World War Z, The Division, Days Gone and Last of Us(part 2 happens to be my favorite game of all time, so i'm certainly not incapable of loving post-apocalyptic scenarios). Plus those settings I find lend themselves better to omo stories as while society isn't functional it's not destroyed by radiation either, so it's easy to see scenarios where women still insist on carrying themselves with some level of dignity by not constantly peeing outdoors in front of everyone."

I like all variety of post-apocalyptic fiction as the three Stephen King length volumes of stories I have attest to that, to say nothing of numerous individual novellas and novels about all different apocalyptic events. I still think nuclear war is my favorite because it's the most grim and realistic. But I have also written plenty of post apocalyptic stories through other means including asteroids, climate change, pandemics (both before and after we were actually living through one), robots, aliens, supernatural phenomenon, zombies, there's plenty of variety when it comes to post apocalyptic fiction and everybody has their own favorites.


I have actually written more about zombies than probably any other post apocalyptic topic but a lot of my zombie stories I have to admit are more in the humorous and satirical side. Something about zombies makes it hard to take them seriously. Most of those other apocalyptic events you could actually see happening or actually are already in the process of happening, zombies not so much. But in the genre I still think zombies are the most popular, The Walking Dead, however you feel about it, deserves credit for the zombie fiction Renaissance just like Twilight brought attention to vampires.


But you are right a zombie apocalypse does have the potential for bathrooms still remaining intact. I can't say much about it because I don't want to give away my real identity but I wrote a humorous zombie apocalypse novel involving a woman constantly needing a bathroom, but it wasn't fetish oriented, it was just scatological and kind of really really gross!

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@DesperateJill
"Every night when I count up my word count I copy and paste everything into this word count your website and it also tells you the educational level of the person who wrote it. It always says that I was at least a college student or a college graduate depending on what I wrote. But after reading that article I am like do I need to make my writing a lot more stupid if I want to get popular?"

Depends on your audience. I and my dad have both used a readability checker when writing to tailor work to an audience. The more advanced the writing level, the more calculations your brain needs to make to process the text. An educated and experienced reader may find college-level works effortless, but someone who reads mostly only when they have to may find a simpler work more demanding.

When writing for this website I tend to drop my natural writing level by a couple of grades or so for readability. It gets a little grating after a while, because it usually means I need more words to say the same things.

Probably wouldn't hurt to produce content (omo or otherwise) at your preferred writing grade at least once in a while just for the fun of it. And to entertain anyone that might be bored with lower grades.

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Turn-offs for me in fiction, in approximate order:

  • Messing
  • Omutsu
  • Furries/Animals/etc. (not my style; same for the last two as well)
  • Fan fic for a story I don't recognize (too hard to get up to speed)
  • Female characters I really respect (I don't read Hermione stories, for instance; I don't like seeing strong female characters degraded)
  • Age (I don't do high schoolers, let alone younger)
  • Male Only (a little male is okay if it's wrapped up in plenty of female)
  • Low-level writing -- I guess I'm a bit of a snob!

 

I don't try to make my writing impossible to read, but I'm writing for myself here, and I do want character development, some non-omo stuff, etc.

Incidentally, @DesperateJill, I've written some book-length desperation fiction here. Not much lately, I've been burned out on computers during the pandemic, but I hope to get back to it. I've had a series or three on here, and they generally come to (short) book length. 

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52 minutes ago, Weasel said:

Turn-offs for me in fiction, in approximate order:

  • Messing
  • Omutsu
  • Furries/Animals/etc. (not my style; same for the last two as well)
  • Fan fic for a story I don't recognize (too hard to get up to speed)
  • Female characters I really respect (I don't read Hermione stories, for instance; I don't like seeing strong female characters degraded)
  • Age (I don't do high schoolers, let alone younger)
  • Male Only (a little male is okay if it's wrapped up in plenty of female)
  • Low-level writing -- I guess I'm a bit of a snob!

 

I don't try to make my writing impossible to read, but I'm writing for myself here, and I do want character development, some non-omo stuff, etc.

Incidentally, @DesperateJill, I've written some book-length desperation fiction here. Not much lately, I've been burned out on computers during the pandemic, but I hope to get back to it. I've had a series or three on here, and they generally come to (short) book length. 

I respect Hermione as well, but to me that makes omo fanfiction about her even hotter.  I like seeing strong female characters getting put through awkwardness with being desperate to pee.  I'm fine with omo stories featuring younger characters being desperate (i've even written some for other fiction sites) but I get why others are put off by it.

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On 7/19/2022 at 9:18 AM, Weather said:

I do love the fiction section lol

Before clicking on something, first I want to know that there's no diapers or messing.  Nothing against those who like them, but instant turnoffs to me personally.

Stories that are "cute" stand out to me more.  Ones where a person is denying themself while desperate are fun, such as in the case of "she was squirming, but when I offered the restroom, she said she was fine, and then she just kept squirming while we talked."  Also, holding for someone else kinda falls in under "cute."

In the case of male desperation, I prefer the male be shy and submissive to some degree, with the partner being whatever gender.  Way more broad with female desperation, but in general, I like it most if she acts like there's nothing to worry about even though she's desperate.

With fiction, two areas in which I'm absolutely down to suspend disbelief:  capacity and duration, particularly with women.  Here's one such story I really enjoyed:  

Stuff that will make me stop reading:  For one, I'll skip over backstories if they're far too long with zero omo.  Describing the size of a woman's breasts as "ample" or "c-cup" are an immediate no from me because 1:  I don't care about breast size regardless, and 2:  "she sexilly sexed while sexing" types of details are dumb lol.  And abuse can have a role in the story, but particularly with my background, there's a point at which it changes from helpful context to mood killer.

Hey, thanks for the rec! Very kind of you. 

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@Wrakkar

"Depends on your audience. I and my dad have both used a readability checker when writing to tailor work to an audience. The more advanced the writing level, the more calculations your brain needs to make to process the text. An educated and experienced reader may find college-level works effortless, but someone who reads mostly only when they have to may find a simpler work more demanding.

When writing for this website I tend to drop my natural writing level by a couple of grades or so for readability. It gets a little grating after a while, because it usually means I need more words to say the same things.

Probably wouldn't hurt to produce content (omo or otherwise) at your preferred writing grade at least once in a while just for the fun of it. And to entertain anyone that might be bored with lower grades."

You know if I even could write down  as I just have a natural way of writing. I can't help the fact that I am a very academic person and I guess I just sort of assumed that most people who read would be reading at a fairly high level. I spent pretty much the first half of my day doing nothing but reading and watching stuff and then the second half of my day writing stuff for hours on end. So basically every waking second I am somehow either reading or writing text of some kind. I guess I sort of fit the profile of ivory tower academic elitist pretty much to a T, I don't think I would be able to change that even if I tried. Again probably why I lack much of a social life, I have no one on my level around me really and my main interests are solitary (reading, writing) and I really prefer books to people.

@Weasel

"Incidentally, @DesperateJill, I've written some book-length desperation fiction here. Not much lately, I've been burned out on computers during the pandemic, but I hope to get back to it. I've had a series or three on here, and they generally come to (short) book length."

I haven't really written much in the way of series, I am very much a standalone kind of person. A lot of my desperation and omorashi stuff though has gotten to be some of my longer things though most of them are novella length. I really like the novella length because I can sometimes write one in a day or two or three maybe. They are ones that I can write really fast and rapidly in very large numbers.

@LifeIsStrange

"I respect Hermione as well, but to me that makes omo fanfiction about her even hotter.  I like seeing strong female characters getting put through awkwardness with being desperate to pee.  I'm fine with omo stories featuring younger characters being desperate (i've even written some for other fiction sites) but I get why others are put off by it."

To me nothing says strong female character like being able to stoically and even heroically manage to function with a painfully full bladder!


I have no problem with younger desperation stories along as it's not children as children and old people are kind of offputting to me when they are desperate. But I don't have a problem with teens, seeing as teenage years are when most people discover the fetish and a lot of my own experiences I can trace back to high school.

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Messing, torture, unrealistically/unhealthy long hold times (Unless its due to paruresis, a subject often explored in @secretomoact's works. Even then I find it less hot and more "Aw you poor thing! I wish I could hug you, Kenneth."), vicious and mean spirited humiliation (I prefer someone to feel embarrassed for themselves without being viciously mocked by everyone around them, and maybe even being comforted by their friend or partner), and a huge one for me is underage stuff. I don't vibe with that at all. Like say I'm looking for some Dragon Maid sfuff, I'll read a story about Kobayashi, but not Kanna or Shouta. 

Oh and I don't really like the "one gender gets to pee while the other has to hold it" scenario at all. Be it mild (A bus stop where men can very easily pee but women just don't have the 'ability' to even though they really do it's just some bs taboo) or some dystopian society that restricts a woman's or a man's right to pee. 

I do love sexual stuff, romance, stuff that messes with gender boundaries or outright smashes them (crossdressing, body swap, gender swap, genital swap, women standing to pee, futanari, trans people and non-binary people in general, tomboys, femboys, you name it), I Also love the premise of a fictional country where sex nudity and urination are completely legal and socially acceptable. I do have a bunch of other premises I'd like to see, but I'd rather not list ALL of them and take up this entire thread. I've probably listed my turn-ons and turn-offs in other threads before. 

Edited by Ms. Tito (see edit history)
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Sorry if this is too long, I pretty much answered all the questions. Just a long time fic reader with lots of opinions.

 

On 7/18/2022 at 8:44 PM, skirtandtights said:

What criteria do you use to decide which story to read or which title to click?

I don't really look at titles, I look at tags. First I check if its male, then I check the tags for things like *wetting*, *accidental*, *humiliation*, *leaking*, etc. If it contains many things I like, I click and hope for the best.

 

On 7/18/2022 at 8:44 PM, skirtandtights said:

Once you've opened a thread, what makes you decide to keep reading? What causes you to look for something else? Is there anything that is an immediate "nope" for you, that causes you to close a thread you were otherwise enjoying? How long will you give a story a chance when it starts out rather dry (literally and metaphorically?)

If a story is clearly well written or I like the personality of the victim, I keep reading. If I don't find either of those, I leave. I have a lot of immediate "nope*'s though, making it difficult to find a fic that suits my taste. If I see abdl, messing, or anything I'm not into (that wasn't tagged), I run. If I see phrases like "I can hold it! I'm nOt a cHiLd!!1!", or the victim very uncharacteristically crying after their accident, I immediately click away.

I have no problem with a lot of exposition. It leaves me at the edge of my seat wondering when its going to get to the good part, but I can only take so much before I lose interest. I've once read a omo fic that was three chapters long, thousands and thousands of words, with the omo really only appearing at the end. You'd expect me to hate it, but the omo at the end was executed so freaking well I had to give it pass and now it's a part of my fairly empty shelf of bookmarks.

 

On 7/18/2022 at 8:44 PM, skirtandtights said:

Is there a topic or niche you'd like to see more of in fiction on here, that doesn't usually get a lot of focus? Is there a topic or cliche that gets a lot of focus that you'd like to see less of?

I guess I don't see a lot of good male omorashi fics. Don't get me wrong, I love female omo, but it just doesn't hit as well. One cliche that I don't like much is when the character accompanying the victim starts getting turned on about the whole situation. I guess I just like raw situations where the side character doesn't fucking nut whilst the other pisses themself.

 

On 7/18/2022 at 8:44 PM, skirtandtights said:

Are you opposed to reading stories that have explicit sexual content? What about stories that have a heavy plot, with omo/wetting content dispersed throughout?

Not a fan of reading explicit sexual content, and only a fan of heavy plots when it's relevant. If it's just some story with random omo everywhere instead of building up to it, count me out.

 

On 7/18/2022 at 8:44 PM, skirtandtights said:

How long do you like stories to be? Does the length at all determine whether you'll start a story?

I really don't mind the length of the stories I read. But I'm usually sure I won't like a story if it's very, very short. That usually means they just jump in head first into the omorashi with little context. That's not really my thing.

 

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