One of the conditions that Valerie’s husband demanded before they were married was an “honesty” trigger. He took her to a hypnotist, and under trance she was told that when she was told to do something “honestly”, she must do it in accordance with what she genuinely believed to be the truth, no matter how embarrassing.
He used the trigger regularly to ask her who she had fucked recently, what her sexual fantasies were, what mistakes she had made that he didn’t know about. But none of these were as embarrassing as the night she was dressing to attend her 10 year school reunion.
“What should I wear?” she asked him.
“Well, school reunions are about finding out what became of everyone from your class. You should dress in a way that best represents what kind of person you are.” And then he smiled evilly, and said, “Honestly.”
She started to cry almost at once, because she knew what kind of person she was. Her cunt was already moistening to remind her. But she couldn’t resist her trigger, so she went to her cupboard and began to pick out the outfit that would best demonstrate that the kind of person she was was an empty-headed fucktoy whore…
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This sucks.
These short ones usually do, but this is just a whole lot of nothing.
I publish 365 stories a year here; it’s an enormous volume of content and it would honestly be shocking if every one was a winner.
Especially given that this was written seven years ago as the caption to an image on Tumblr.
But also what you meant to say was, “This particular story didn’t work for me personally,” which is fine. But the objective metrics (views, engagements, clickthroughs) continue to suggest that these microfics have a strong audience and are important in driving traffic.
hi,
i’m a big fan of your writing (and a little bit of a “customer”), but, lets be honest here:
1. you get traffic to these “one timer” posts, because everyone clicks them in the hope of being a long’ish story.
put the word-count in the title and see who still clicks on them.
2. quality over quantity. “we” are here for stories, not short captions for pictures (that even aren’t included in the post).
cheers.
Look, I appreciate all feedback. And I deeply appreciate your patronage, j.boschmann, and if you ever have feedback on my *paid* content that would encourage you to buy more of it, you should absolutely hit me up by email at all.these.roadworks@gmail.com, which is the best way to give that kind of commentary.
But in terms of what you’re saying, I think you have a few fundamental misunderstandings about the stories I publish here, and why I publish them.
First of all you’re mistaking your personal preference for a universal preference. It is 100% okay that you don’t like the shorter stories, and you’re not alone, and many readers don’t, and they tell me so. But it’s also the case that many readers *do* like them, and they tell me so too. I get enthusiastic feedback about shorter stories. I get people specifically contacting me to say how much they liked them, and asking for more. For some people, this style – where I offer a short erotic idea and let them play out the consequences in their head – is what works for them. Stories of this sort get engagement on BDSMLR, where you can see the whole story at once, and they get engagement on Imaglr, and in fact they often work *better* on those platforms because of their format. I suppose I could *not* publish them here, and make you go to BDSMLR if you want to read them, but I don’t see whose convenience that serves.
Secondly, you’re mistaking my model, and what I’m offering. I’m not writing these stories *instead of* some long story. They’re *in addition to*. My work schedule is two substantive serial chapters per week, each of at least 2000 words. That’s the content. I could, possibly, publish *only* those chapters, and still be writing faster and more consistently than the majority of the erotica market. That’s the work I commit to. Those chapters always, always go up, and they go up on the same days of the week, every week: Monday and Thursday for paid members, and Sunday and Thursday for free readers. That’s Australian time, so shift the weekdays back by one for the US.
Those chapters – as with all my stories – are made available completely free. I love my free readers, I want to make them happy, but it is worth noting that they are getting something *for free*.
In addition to those serial chapters, I publish stories on the remaining five days of the week. On three of those days it’s a reblog of an older story, often from Tumblr. Some of those stories, originating from Tumblr, are very short. This is one of those stories. It cost me no effort to write or publish it, because it already existed.
On the other two days you get a new one-shot story. Typically new one-shot stories are between 400 and 1500 words, although very occasionally they’re longer. They’re short because they’re not serial chapters. If they were longer, you’d be getting them *instead of* a new serial chapter. They’re just ideas that come to mind. If I were a visual artist instead of a writer, you might think of them as doodles and sketches offered up for free between substantive works. Sometimes one-shot stories are great. Sometimes they’re not. If you don’t like them, hang around, because there’ll be something new tomorrow – and every single day of the year.
Very occasionally, if I’m on a roll, I produce more than two serial chapters in a week, and therefore replace one of that week’s one-shots with an additional serial chapter. It’s nice when that happens, but it’s not my regular workload expectation.
Thirdly, almost no one is “clicking through” to these stories without understanding what they are. There is no place outside this site that links to the microfic stories, other than the emails you get from subscribing to my page, and those emails give you the full story right there in the email. In any case, there are less than 100 people on that email list. (If you’re not on the email list and would like to be, scroll to the bottom of the main page at alltheseroadworks.com and subscribe!) I’m assuming you therefore mean “clicking through” from the main page. If so… I don’t think that’s a great impost on anyone’s time or attention.
I am open to tagging microfic stories as microfic in some way, but I don’t immediately see a good process for that. The Story Index already does include the word count for older stories. I suppose I could put it in the “preview” field for the story (the little bit of text under the banner for each story on the main page) but it’s not time or cost effective to retroactively do this for older stories. I’ll consider adding “microfic” somewhere in that area for future stories under 400 words, but you won’t see any such change take effect for about a month because of the way I queue stories in advance.
(Just finally, on pictures: I tend to go light on pictures on this site to make sure I stay within WordPress’ policies. WordPress are very permissive of text, providing that it’s otherwise legal and not hate speech. They’re more restrictive of images. Theoretically sexualised nudity is fine so long as it doesn’t depict “sex acts” – penetration, ejaculation, masturbation – but images aren’t my core business and I don’t want to take risks that I don’t have to.)
Unlike the other rather uncharitable comments… I think these microfics are great ways of getting ideas out there that could be used into a much larger piece later.
If you don’t find “She started to cry almost at once” hot as hell after a single phrase that turns her own brain against her, I don’t know how you could be an ATR fan 🙂