If you want to see your story published on its first submission, here are some tips:
Please read our Story Submission Rules to make sure your story is compliant. This is very important. Certain scenarios and sexual practices are not allowed.
Please do not depend on spell check to edit your story. Read it carefully to check your spelling because spell check will allow misspellings that are words, often with hilarious results, e.g. I put my arms around her waste. As you see, they simply do not catch everything.
Please format your story into paragraphs of about four sentences or where the narrative should logically break. All dialogue should be formatted into separate paragraphs each time someone speaks. A mass of prose with few or no paragraph breaks will be returned to you.
Submissions should all be left-aligned. Please do not submit your stories justified, right-aligned, or centered. We appreciate uniformity in our layout and content presentation, plus it takes up a lot of time to manually change entries that aren't formatted as we'd like.
Please do not overuse exclamation marks. They lose their power if used in every other sentence.
Please check your verb tense throughout your story to be sure it is consistent. Many submissions have tense shifts from past to present and back again.
Please take a look at the proper form for punctuation, formatting, and capital/lower case letters for dialogue in published stories and follow that example in your story.
Please do not use text speak/emoticons in your story or short forms like &, or ok, or lbs. Use the entire words.
Please express all numbers in your story as words unless they refer to measurements or the time of day.
Your title should not be formatted in all caps and should not include text speak or emoticons. Your Title Should Look Like This. Do not repeat the title in the body of your story. Notes to the reader should be placed in the Author's Note
Please do not expect that you can spend an hour putting your thoughts in writing and that it will be published. The writers whose work is most admired here on Lush spend time editing and improving their stories before they are submitted and published. If you put in the time and effort, you will have the satisfaction of only minor edits being done by the mods and your story will be posted on its first submission.
Please do not resubmit your story as new with no changes after it has been returned to you for editing. This is a waste of the volunteer time of the mods as well as your time and risks a suspension from publishing if you continue to do this. Please do your edits within SBW so that the moderators can see previous editorial notes to you on your resubmitted story. We want to maintain a high quality of erotica by insisting that stories be literate before they are published. We are certain that you would not want that to change.
Walk away from your story for a few hours, or as long as a day. When you keep rereading your story, you see what should be there because you know what you have written. Time and distance will give you the perspective to see your mistakes. Often times reading it out loud allows you to hear what it actually says versus what you think it says.
Please take the time to read the resources available on all aspects of writing in the writers' forum. They will help you polish your work and allow it to be published more quickly.
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