The following is a special presentation of the Not Quite Right Podcast,
in which we discuss in detail entries to our ****** flash fiction competition,
the Not Quite Right Prize for Flesh Fiction.
This episode contains adult themes and is not appropriate for listeners under the
age of 18.
And mum, if you're still listening, that's on you.
Something doesn't seem quite right.
Hi, welcome to Not Quite Right.
My name's Ed and I'm Amanda.
Do you know what time it is?
Amanda?
What time is it, Ed?
It's time for the Grown Ups to have a bit of fun.
So lock the door, dim the lights, pour yourself a tall glass of wine,
make sure you have everything you need.
A bottle of Lube, your favourite toy, but make sure you have fresh batteries
because it's going to be a long one.
But if toys aren't your thing, we'll just have to get you off orally
because it's finally time for the very long awaited not quite right prize for
Flesh Fiction long list episode.
And we know we've been edging you like crazy, but don't worry,
the time has finally come.
I just have to say that it is wet and wild out there tonight.
Just nature coming to the party today.
I think so it is absolutely torrential.
So if you do hear some white noise in the background,
it might be the rain outside and the Thunder.
I don't know if we should take this as a sign from God or what what we need to do
here.
But one thing I do know is that NQWHQ right now is absolutely sopping wet.
I don't know if it's the competition or the high amount of moisture in this room,
but my glasses are fogging up and I can barely see.
But what do we have to look forward to?
I'm so excited.
We've been, we talk about teasing all this stuff.
We've been bloody teasing ourselves.
I'm too excited to find out who won and just to talk about all the juicy stuff
that we saw throughout the competition.
I know everybody's so excited to hear it.
So what do they have to look forward to in this episode?
So here's the plan.
This episode, which is the longest episode,
we'll be talking all about the comp.
We'll be sharing stats, sharing our own thoughts and what we
learned from the experience.
I learned a lot I don't know about you.
I learned a hell of a lot.
A lot about myself.
A lot about myself that I didn't wanna know.
Yeah, and you and I also wrote a story for the
comp.
We wrote one story, you wrote two stories.
Well, we'll talk.
We'll talk about that.
So yeah, we'll talk about that experience as well.
How do we do?
Did we make the longest and what did we learn?
But we've also got questions, feedback, messages, call outs,
all our favourite takes on the theme, favourite titles and lines.
There is a lot to talk about and we've got a couple of very special guests as
well.
Linda Atkins will be joining us.
She's a former Daredevil multiple time not quite right prize long Lister.
And as it turns out, gynaecologist.
So Linda will be helping us with some of our anatomy questions that have arisen as
a result of some of the entries to the competition,
some sort of interesting takes on the, let's be honest, the female body,
which remains a mystery to some.
So Linda is going to, I guess, demystify the female anatomy for us.
We'll also be chatting to Elise Scott, who was one of our guest judges as well
for Flesh fiction.
And what we wanted to talk to Elise about today is the idea of consent.
It was something that came up again and again in the competition.
And one of our rules was that all stories had to feature consenting adults.
And I guess there were some borderline stories and some borderline issues.
And much like the mystery of the female anatomy,
I think consent remains a mystery to some too.
So we'll be talking to Elise in detail about that.
And I'm, I'm really excited because Elise has a
really interesting perspective to share on that topic as well.
And then at the end of the episode, the whole point of the episode really is
that we'll be revealing the names of all the people who have made the long list
for the not quite right prize for flesh fiction.
So everyone on the long list is still in contention for a prize, you know,
that'll be at the end of the episode, but we'll be calling out other names and
other stories throughout the episode.
So if you do hear your story being called out,
that doesn't necessarily mean that you made the long list.
The long list will come later in the episode.
Yeah.
And I guess just a little bit of clarity around how we determine the long list.
It's essentially the top 10% of stories in each category.
So categories with fewer stories had fewer long listed stories.
So it's top 10%.
And then from that top 10%, we chose a podium for each category.
So top three stories, first, second and third for each category and
those will be winning some prizes.
And in fact, Speaking of the prizes, I did some maths which, you know,
that was a bigger a strong point.
Apparently not, but I did call Mathema chicken in and he
helped out.
And we figured out that we have actually, in addition to the $1000 of cash prizes
that we'll be taking out of our own pockets,
there is $6000 more worth of donated prizes,
both from not quite right and from our generous sponsors.
So $7000 prize pool for this comp, a free comp, like pretty cool.
So I'm quite proud of that.
I'm very grateful to our sponsors who we'll be talking about as well when we
mention the prizes.
And yeah, really excited to start dishing those
prizes out.
So all of that is going to happen on this episode of the podcast,
The longest episode, but there's a lot more to come because we
actually, you know what, this might be time to introduce the
Innuendo Jar.
I think it is Pay up the innuendo jar.
For those who are new, here is a jar that I made with my cricket,
right?
Because I'm a crafty ***** and it's kind of like a swear jar.
But it's for us.
When we make an innuendo or a lude joke or basically just when one of our minds
goes straight to the gutter as a result of what the other person has just said,
either intentionally or otherwise, we pay a dollar.
And as of now, as of that extra dollar you just chipped
in there, that's $92. 00 that we're sitting at now,
which you know, is kind of a lot, but also way less than it should be.
We don't put all of them on the podcast as well, because some of them are like,
too hot for radio.
Yeah, exactly.
But look, it's $92. 00 and we're gonna keep the jar open for
the duration of the long list episode and all of the other announcements that we
have to go for flesh fiction.
And at the end, at the very end, we will be giving away the contents of
the flesh fiction jar to 1 lucky winner.
I don't know if this is super redundant because we are gonna be talking about the
whole time.
Well, let's look when we're triggered to to pay
it.
I mean, it's just wide open.
It's ready to be filled.
Gaping.
It's gaping hole.
So yeah.
Do we need to come up with a safe word?
I feel like I've read a lot of stories where safe words were involved.
We might need one.
What?
Like I don't like what you just said.
I don't consent to what you just said.
We're going to push the line.
I feel like if I do that and you don't like it, I like it.
So that's a green on the traffic light.
Have you ever had Brazilian BBQ?
Yeah, you know how you have the little thing on
the table?
Oh, yeah, the red light, green light on the table.
We need one of those.
OK, well, I've got a green highlighter.
I've got a green highlighter and a pink highlighter.
Pink means too far.
OK, I know that's a bad choice, isn't it?
Pink means too far.
Green is like, it's fine.
And if you do both at the same time, it means too far.
Well, you're wearing all green today, so it's a green hey.
And oh, and pink and pink.
OK, I'm glad we got that sorted out.
We've got a highlighter system.
So again, everything that I've described is
happening on this episode, the longest episode.
But because the wait has been so long, we didn't want to hit you with just like
the longest episode and a shortlist episode and read out a couple of stories
and that's it.
That's kind of anticlimactic after a year of waiting.
Hmm.
So the idea here is that we release our longest episode.
Mm Hmm.
And then we will have a separate episode for each category.
Yeah.
But we will only be announcing the second and third place stories on each of those
podium episodes.
So we wanna keep that tantalising first place a little bit of a secret,
a little bit longer.
Not too much longer.
Hmm.
Because what we wanna do is one final episode in which we read the winning six
stories.
So the winning story from each category ending with the overall winner who will
be taking home $500 on top of a bunch of other non cash prizes.
So that episode is gonna be really exciting.
There'll be 6 stories to enjoy and some people still remaining in contention for
that number one spot.
But for each of those podium episodes, we will be reading the second place story
just as like a little teaser, I guess of what's to come.
And the second place stories are obviously fabulous as well.
So I'm really looking forward to that.
So a lot of stories to come.
I think it's 12 stories, you know.
And As for the third place stories, I mean,
our calendar's pretty packed at the moment,
but maybe that's something we can release a little bit later.
As a special bonus, we might be reading those third place
stories.
Yeah.
And the other thing that we'll be doing on those podium episodes is chatting with
some of our guest judges.
We had some help judging this competition, three guest judges across the six
categories, and so we'll be changing to them about
their experiences and also hearing their favourites and their call outs for each
category.
And they had different perspectives to share.
So I think that's makes it really interesting as well.
So yeah, we have the long list episode 6 category
episodes and the shortlist episodes, but we're not going to make you wait too
long.
We want to bang those out fairly quickly.
Oh, hello people.
Wham bam.
Thank you ma'am.
And look, I know we're continuing to tease you here,
but I think the build up will only make the climax that much more satisfying.
So before we get into it, we're finally getting around to starting
a Patreon.
It's been on the list for a long time on the To Do List,
and we'll be sharing that with you.
Once it's released, we'll send out an email.
So keep your eyes out for that email.
We have set up our bonus show, which is called The Niche.
MMM.
It may or may not get us cancelled, but yeah, that's always a a risk.
So all of the extras a little bit more unfiltered, which is a red flag.
Yeah, 'cause seriously trading a fine line,
I think.
But yeah, it's just a opportunity to talk about
other things as well, other subjects and give little bonus
insights and other things that we cut from the regular show.
We've got a couple of conversations that we've recorded in the past,
but haven't released the Vagenko conversation conversation to mine.
And we've got some other fun bonus things planned too.
So not just the niche content, but also some other things like we're
planning to do online Hangouts so we can have chat online and some other bits and
pieces too, discounts, freebies, all sorts of stuff.
So I'm really excited about that.
But yeah, we'll share more of that detail later on
when it launches, which hopefully should be very soon.
All right, with all that being said, let's get into the long list discussion.
So we'll start off with our stats.
And we've decided this year for our regular longest episodes to go a little
bit easier on the stats just to kind of streamline things.
But I think there are some really interesting ones,
especially for flesh fiction that we don't normally see.
So just start with the the number of entries we received.
We received 495 entries from 58 countries, including some very far flung places like
St.
Lucia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, where surely this kind of thing is not
permitted, Sierra Leone and the United States,
minor outlying islands, which I'd never heard of.
And we did get some feedback from some people in their brief explanations that,
you know, they felt that this was very liberating
for them.
So, you know, in Australian culture, it's not exactly taboo.
It's certainly something that people tend to keep relatively private,
although most people.
But, yeah, there are some cultures where this kind
kind of stuff is still not cool and not widely accepted and in fact,
punishable in some cases.
So for those people who were free to express themselves, congratulations.
Yeah.
Very privileged to provide that outlet for you.
Yeah.
So from 495 entries, we received stories totalling 483,
614 words, which is more than Atlas Shrugged by Ayn
Rand.
That's an interesting choice.
But if you prefer The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil,
which if you've read that you'll realise how many words that is,
that is a long *** book and only just slightly less than Warren piece by Leo
Tolstoy.
So I hope that goes some way to explaining why it has taken us so long to
get to this point.
Yeah, it's a lot of ratings.
We've said it before, we'll say it again.
Many of those words were read more than once.
We read several of those stories many times.
How many times?
One in particular, so some more stats, the ages of entrance,
we had just over half of them fit in between like the 18 to 45 range,
which is about consistent with our other comps,
but we had actually 71 entrance that were over 60 as well.
So lots of representation.
About 1/5 of entrance, as far as we could tell were previous not
quite right prize entrance.
And you say, as far as we can tell, because I know what some of you were
doing, you're setting up burner accounts to
enter this competition.
Don't think we don't know that.
But of course, I have no way of proving which ones you
wrote.
If you'd like to share in private, I would be fascinated to know.
We'll keep it on the download.
And so to the 4/5 of entrance who are new.
Welcome.
Yes, we hope that you do check got the regular
prize and the podcast.
Actually, we have a little question on that topic.
So this comes from Annie Lilly who asked since a lot of us entered because of you
guys rather than experience writing in the genre.
Was it obvious who had experience and who was less experienced strictly in terms of
writing the genre?
And I will say I don't know about you, Ed, but I did feel like sometimes I could
tell, yeah, that it was a not quite writer.
Sometimes I was a vibe for sure.
There was a vibe.
I mean, I sort of feel like many of the comedic
entries, the ones that were going really hard on a
funny concept, tended to stick out as not quite writers.
But there were also some really, like, intense, spicy stories,
which felt like people who had a lot of experience writing erotica.
Yeah, true.
And not so much someone who just enters a writing comp as we do in our sort of
community that we have built.
And certainly with Annie's question, was it obvious who had experience or not
writing in the genre?
I did feel like it stood out sometimes someone who had experience writing
erotica because it very much fit the genre of what you would expect.
And then I also felt like I could tell sometimes when someone was an experienced
compentrant and they had that vibe with their story and were really quite clever
with the structure and delivering like a satisfying piece of fiction.
But, you know, there was a huge mix.
I also felt, and I'm I'm sure you agree, Ed,
because it is something we sort of discussed privately,
that there was maybe some nervousness around some of that ****** aspect.
And a lot of people who are maybe pulling their punches still, you know,
we encouraged you all to really lay it on the line.
But I do feel like some people were pulling their punches and maybe not going
quite as hard into the ****** stuff as they could have.
Yeah, it is a hard thing to do as we'll talk
about.
You know, we wrote our own entries for the
competition.
And it's hard to put yourself out there, even if,
even if you don't think that it's going to get read or, you know,
even if you're writing under a pseudonym, it's still just putting your own very
exposing personal things on the page and whether or not it's things that you're
into as well, even if it's stuff that you're not really
into, but you're using words and, you know,
expressing things that you don't really normally do.
So that's challenging.
And I think for a lot of people, maybe they kind of pulled back a little
bit on that.
I mean, we had a lot of feedback from people
saying it was their first time writing in this kind of field, which is great.
And that was half the point of starting this comp is to get people comfortable
with writing this stuff and to have a go at it.
And I'm so stoked that people did that.
And I believe Annie's, it was Annie's first time,
which is why they bring it up.
But Annie did not shy away from the spice.
So I'm proud of you, Annie.
I'm proud of you for putting it on the line as we suggested.
And we don't have scientific stats about not quite right entrance versus non
entrance and kind of spice levels and that kind of thing.
I think the stats would all be false anyway because.
Yeah, because of all the sneaky, sneaky.
But I will say that the long list itself is diverse.
We, we have existing entrance.
We have new people in there.
Mm Hmm.
Yeah, a little bit of everything.
And as the cream, as it always does, rises to the top,
I love how the innuendo jar is just when the other person yeah,
actually has The Dirty mind.
So thanks Annie.
And Annie actually had a Part 2 to that question,
which we will get to a little bit later.
But for now, back to the stats and our gender stats,
which I think a bit more relevant here than normal.
So our normal not quite right prize gets about 70 to 75% female.
And this time around it was actually very different and and female is 54%.
So yeah, wow, just over half.
So a lot more men, non binary and others motivated to write
for this comp, which is it's interesting, but it's great.
I love to see that.
I love to see people being drawn to the comp and being able to express themselves.
And I think that was reflected in the diversity of the stories as well.
Yeah.
And it's interesting as well because ****** fiction is normally thought to be
like a women's genre, I guess.
Yeah.
You think it's expressed as if like, video **** is for men and that written
erotica is for women.
But obviously there's a little bit of overlap here.
Yeah.
At least in terms of writing.
Yeah.
They're they're actual writers.
Exactly.
And it's a little bit different, different.
But what about sexuality?
We did ask that question too, if people were comfortable to share with
us what their sexuality was, just again, out of interest.
So I'll just call out the actual number.
So heterosexual 53%, lesbian 3%, gay 3% by 19%, pansexual 7%,
asexual 3% other or prefer not to say 12%.
So you might say heterosexual is lower than you'd expect,
but when you include bi and pansexual, which is people who do have have an
opposite sex attraction, it is as you'd expect.
Right, right.
What that shows to me is just a lot more people are pen and buy maybe than than
you think.
Hmm.
And that might report elsewhere outside of an ****** fiction context.
I mean, I think as well, like something to bear in mind is that
this competition might be drawing people of a certain interest sampling by Yeah,
exactly.
But if we look at a ABS survey which was taken,
so that's the Australian Bureau of Statistics,
which is our big reporting entity, does our census and so on,
back in 2022 they did it and it was like a bit of an experimental survey.
I suppose it's not particularly scientific,
but it would be quite representative because it is the ABS.
They do all of our stats and they found that around 4.
5% of adults in Australia currently identify as LGBTQIA plus overall with
percentages up to 9. 5% among younger Australians.
So younger people are a bit more open, I suppose you might say, but only 4.5%,
which is very different to this.
Yeah, 50% merely that we're talking in the comp
entrance.
So that's a huge difference.
So I don't know if people are lying to the government and happy to be honest
with us.
And of course that's just Australia as well, but I'm surprised that like 4.
5% to me seems ridiculously low.
Yeah, I don't think that that's probably
reflective of reality.
Yeah.
And the gain lesbian numbers here, 3% each.
I think that's what I would have expected.
Somewhere in that ballpark for those.
So it's really, I think the outsize group there is like
the BI and the pansexual combined at about 25%, so quarter.
So definitely the ******** group, but I'll say that asexual at 3% is much
higher than I would have expected.
Yeah.
For an ****** fiction.
For an ****** fiction, which is like just proves to me that I
don't really understand asexuality that well.
So that's something that we will discuss a little bit further later on.
Yeah.
You were getting very confused, weren't you?
I am, I am confused.
I'm sure there's a lot of people out there rejecting, by the way,
the assertion that only the pansexual and bisexual people are super *****.
I didn't say that only they were.
I said that they were the ********.
Well, I don't know.
There was some pretty ***** housewives amongst our stories.
So yeah.
Oh yeah, there were a lot of domestic chore
related stories.
Sure.
I mean, it's on our minds.
So that's all for the stats.
But look, before we get into call outs and things,
we wanted to talk a little bit about the rules and the structure of this comp
basically.
So this was our first time running in ****** fiction comp and we have rules
that we put in place that obviously tried to make things safe and open and fun.
And I guess we wanted to talk about those rules and see whether they did what we
expected them to do and what we might change and what we've learnt from those
as well.
So the first one that we had was no real people.
And the motivation behind this was that we didn't,
we didn't wanna get stories about us.
Yeah, I guess we get some fun stories about us
in the regular not quite right prize.
And look, some of them are spicy too, so.
And that's all well and good, but I guess just out of respect for our
significant others and just for ourselves, that just wasn't the vibe that we wanted
to go with or this kind.
And we also didn't wanna get stories that were like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin
and all that kind of thing.
Especially our fear was that if we got a story that was really good and we wanted
it to win, but it was kind of problematic in that
way.
We didn't want to have like political.
We didn't wanna get sued, let's put it that way.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So there's that that context.
And and that's really where it came from.
And look, every 40 except 1, so 494 stories respected that rule.
Yeah.
And there was just one that could help themselves.
And look, it was borderline.
It was borderline.
It was a little story in which you and I did feature,
but we weren't involved in any sexual activity.
So it actually met the brief and was a good fun.
So thank you for that.
But I think that was a rule that was respected.
So that's and I think it was a good rule to have.
I think for our purposes it made sense.
And that's a rule that we'd keep if we were to ever do this again.
So another rule.
And this was wrapped up together.
So we said that all parties to any sexual activity needed to be consenting adults.
So just taking the adult part of that first.
So again, for our purposes, we didn't want to have any stories
featuring paedophilia.
That's just not something that we wanted to promote or be seen as OK in this
competition.
And there were a few stories that did feature teenage girls which were
disqualified on that basis.
So that's a bit of a shame.
They weren't particularly young.
I don't recall reading anything super problematic in that regard.
Just some borderline stuff that was fine for a fantasy,
but not so much fine for what we wanted to promote in the competition.
So I think that rule was mostly respected as well.
Now we welcomed all sorts of like inanimate object romance and like monster
sex and all that sort of stuff.
So these kinds of stories where it's a humanoid kind of character that has the
features of an animal or has the features of an alien creature,
but could otherwise be described as if they were an adult human,
that's fine to us.
That's not problematic.
That's not hurting anyone.
And that was all good fun.
So those stories flew through and that's all good.
But there were some issues around consent that we came across.
Yeah.
And it was a, it was something I learned a lot about
because there are various types of consent that I hadn't considered.
And really going into the comp, the reason for having consent be a rule
is because we didn't want to showcase anything involving paedophilia.
We didn't want to showcase anything involving like sexual assault or anything
in that case.
So I think that's a important rule to have and bestiality and bestiality, right.
So, so those are the big ones that we just
wanted to avoid.
But I think my, my views on that are not so clear cut,
generally speaking.
Like I think that literature and, and writing is a perfect place to kind of
express any fantasy you have because it is by its nature,
it doesn't hurt anyone else.
It's like your own fantasy.
If you've got whatever fantasy you have and if you wanted to write that down and
read that for your own thing, that's perfectly fine.
I I think I don't have a problem with that in general.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you on a level, and on another level I hesitate.
And that is that I do think people should be free to express themselves.
And I'm not here to censor anybody.
I think for the purposes of our comp, we wanted to censor certain things
because it's our comp and we don't want to be seen to be promoting sexual assault
and so on.
However that stuff exists on the Internet, that's fine if people want to express
that.
But you say it doesn't hurt anyone.
And I'm not sure that's 100% true.
If you're just writing it for yourself and it's a way of expressing yourself, OK.
If you're writing it and sharing it with people who would consensually act out
that scenario with you, also totally fine.
But I think there is a level at which it can become harmful that if we normalise
something, if we promote it in a way that sort of
makes it seem like it's OK, that it starts to break down some of
those stigmas that protect people, right?
A social stigma is protective because if you know that something is not acceptable,
if it's against the law for a start, and if it's just makes other people like
not want to spend time with you, then those things can help stop people
from doing in real life.
I guess the things that me personally, I think are wrong and that would include
hurting anybody.
So I do think there is the potential for these things to be harmful.
And I don't want to go too far down this path because I, like I said,
I do think it's OK for people to express themselves.
I just wouldn't necessarily say it doesn't harm anyone just because it's
fiction.
Look, I also don't want to get too deep into
this because it is kind of a broader conversation,
but I do want to just address a couple of points.
And I think we're both very clear from the point of view of this comp that we
are excluding those for various reasons that we've said.
And that's a whole different thing about what you showcase and what you put out
there and say this is good.
Yeah.
As opposed, promote and promote as opposed to what
you will accept other people doing for their own pleasure or whatever the case
may be, where to draw a bigger picture.
We do have all sorts of other, you know, thinking about like the novel Lolita,
for example, which is about a subject that we would
not allow in this comp, but is one of the great novels, let's say,
and deals with the subject that is very uncomfortable.
And writing about something is not necessarily an endorsement of that thing.
Right.
And your point about normalising that is well taken as well.
But I just want to draw the distinction of, like,
we allow stories in our regular comp about murder.
Yeah.
And other things that are also bad.
So writing about something is not necessarily an endorsement of that thing.
And I found that line hard to draw in some places,
like if someone is getting raped, if there's a child in the story, like, OK,
we're not going to allow that.
There are a couple of stories where some drugs were taken, for example,
and then there was sexual activity.
And there are questions around consent, right?
If this was a real situation, you might say, no, that's not consensual.
But if you're talking about a story and the lines are not entirely clear,
I struggle with, does this get disqualified just on the
basis of these questions?
Because I think with writing an artistic expression,
you do need to allow some range of ideas, right?
So it's really hard.
I found being cut and dried on this and it definitely wasn't.
I think there are a lot of instances that were borderline.
And I guess for those borderlines, we just went with our instincts.
Now, we're not big on disqualifications.
We don't love doing it.
Therefore, like if a story is not in contention
anyway, we don't need to disqualify it.
We don't need to even consider that it's, it is what it is.
It didn't make the long list.
It's fine.
Where this becomes more relevant is where we start to get to long list level and
awarding prizes.
And there were two stories, both of which missed out on the long list
as a result of what we discussed and and determined was a breach of this consent
rule.
And one of which missed out on potentially a pretty high placing because
it was a bloody great story.
I loved it.
It was fascinating but unfortunately broke our rule.
Now as a result of all of this and, and I maintain that I do not want to
promote any kind of sexual assault or any non consent,
but I think what I would do if we were to ever run this competition in the future
is to just discourage it rather than state it outright as a rule.
And the reason being is because there is this blurry line,
which in the case of a story, if the information is not fully provided,
you could interpret it as consent or you could interpret it as non consent.
It depends what else happened between the lines.
And we're not always given all of that information.
And some of these stories are just great stories anyway.
And like you say, it doesn't mean that they are promoting
sexual assault, for example.
It might be presenting it in a pretty dim light,
but nevertheless is a actually a really fascinating way of looking at a deeply
troubling subject as well, or just some fun stories that we know
were coming from a place of fun.
So the one in particular that I'm thinking of,
which missed out potentially on quite a high placing for me,
I knew where this was coming from.
I knew it was coming from a place of fun.
I knew it was coming from a place of this author looking at the theme and trying to
find the most unsexy thing they could find and then going hard with the story.
Yeah.
And they did such a good job of it.
It hurts no one.
It is funny.
It was sexy.
It was full on, but it broke the rule.
Yeah.
And it's such a shame for that author because I know they weren't coming from a
a problematic place.
They were coming from a place of embracing this comp.
And so it's very hard to disqualify them on that basis.
But we made the rule and so we had to kind of stick with it.
So yes, I think I'd probably be more flexible on
it in comp terms, but nevertheless would be completely not
shortlisting any story which did glorify sexual assault.
Yeah, look, I, I think I agree with you that it should
be a guideline more than a rule just because there is so much interpretation
there.
So on the topic of consent, let's speak to Elise Scott now.
Elise was one of our guest judges and we want to ask some questions about consent
because Elise really opened our eyes to, I guess a lot of those concepts and
there's a few other little questions that we have.
So thanks for joining us, Elise.
And Elise, you helped us judge 4 categories,
which was amazing.
Thanks so much for your help.
I feel like you really educated us on a lot of concepts that we have no idea
about.
So I wanted to thank you for that.
And did you wanna share a little bit about your background?
Sure.
I have been a ********** for a long, long time.
And I'm sort of like not practising right now 'cause I'm, I'm,
once I became a parent, I was sort of like, I don't,
I know some people figure out ways to make pink and parenthood work together,
but I'm a solo parent.
So it would be like having people come to my house or getting a babysitter and
going it.
I just didn't feel good about that.
So I just tabled it.
But before that I was a, not a professional ********** but just
kind of like a very engaged in the community amateur **********.
And I, I taught classes at a local kinks club
for a while and I mentored some younger doms.
The gender dynamics can get really complicated.
So sometimes the male doms want in perspective from a female identified Dom.
So that's quite a resume.
So look, we'll talk about kink a little bit later
as well on our episode on that category.
So I don't want to get too deep as it were into that,
but we wanted to talk to you as well about the topic of consent.
And we learn a lot from you in the comments.
You left really detailed comments on all the stories and there were areas of
consent and ways of consenting that I hadn't really thought about before we
went into the the competition.
Things like voyeuristic consent is the one that kind of jumps out at me.
Just like people around you have to consent to witnessing or potentially
witnessing maybe or potentially hearing even the sex act that's taking place.
I guess I wanted to ask like how much of that comes from your experience and what
are the some of the areas of consent that people should be aware of?
That's a really great question and a lot of it does come from my experience,
but in in two different ways.
So on the one hand, there's the whole like ********** thing,
the whole **** piece.
And because of the complexity of the dynamics in the **** world,
there's a lot of overt conversation about consent and its many layers.
But also, I myself am a survivor of sexual assault.
So from that perspective, I also did a lot of thinking about how
consent isn't necessarily just in a particular moment.
It can also be a lot of more complicated dynamics.
So I have like these two different perspectives that came together to help
me start becoming really interested in and thinking more deeply about consent
and how it works.
And specifically with the, because you mentioned the realistic piece,
that particular piece I first became aware of because I was on a online forum
that specifically is for thinking people to like meet each other either virtually
or in person.
And there was a fellow on there who was absolutely brand new to **** but had this
very specific scenario that he wanted to experience where he was essentially
forced by a ********** to go into a sex store and buy a sex toy and like describe
what he wants to the like salesperson and stuff.
And he posted about this desire and the group that he happened to be interacting
with absolutely lambasted him because of that idea that he had not allowing for
the salesperson to consent because they're forced to be there for their job.
And that's interesting that you bring that up because I have had conversations
with an owner of a sex shop talking about the people that come in and what they
bring with them when they come in.
I mean, in terms like emotionally, what they bring in with them when they
come in.
And this person, she's a businesswoman, that's what she's there for.
And obviously the products are all sexual.
They're all in that realm, but that doesn't mean that she's
consenting to everything that comes through the door.
And so I think that's a really valid point that they bring up.
I think that's very sensitive and and important.
Yeah.
It was also a really easy fix because all it really took was me going in the store
1st and saying this is what we'd like to do and this is your opportunity to say
how you feel about that.
And then the person was like, oh, that sounds fun.
So then we went ahead and did it.
Yeah, exactly.
That's awesome.
So I wanted to also just ask because we all understand the need for consent in
ongoing showing an enthusiastic consent in real life.
Well, we hope we all we I'm not sure that every
we we here probably do, but I'm just wondering what your view is
more generally speaking about the role of consent in literature.
You know, sexual consent.
Is it always necessary or is there some scope for artistic expression and some
grey area within that?
That's a great question.
And I think that it really depends on what you're trying to do with your
writing, because I generally, when you're talking about fiction,
I tend to prefer not to restrict what I think people should and shouldn't write
about.
South, if somebody wants to write non consent
into their story, there are a lot of ways that that could
be harmful and exploitive and not particularly a good writing choice.
But there are also a lot of ways that it could be powerful and meaningful and
drive the story forward or drive character development forward in ways
that are important to whatever that writer wants to do.
I myself, I don't know if I told you guys, but I also went to grad school and got
licenced as a trauma therapist.
So I have that frame informs my thinking on trauma a little bit too.
And from that perspective, and because I've known and worked with a
lot of trauma survivors, I myself am a really big fan of including
somewhere in the book a list of like content,
warnings or themes that might be troubling to readers so that they can opt
in or opt out.
So I do that, but I also know that different people
have different feelings about whether or not that's important.
And then the larger question of the role of consent or non consent in fiction,
I think a lot of it is about what you want to be saying with what's happening
on the page, how you frame it or how you set it up.
And actually there were a couple of stories that where the writer wanted to
write about something where consent may or may not be complex.
And so they created a scenario that frames that or set it up in the way that
they needed it to.
A really good example of that for me was a story called Break the Cycle,
which was about a virgin who no longer wants to be a virgin and therefore goes
to a virgin auction and sells herself.
I remember that one for the night.
Yeah.
And it had some excellent sex in it, too, by the way.
That was, there was really great negotiation of
consent around the dynamic because it did have a bit of a ***** dynamic,
and I appreciated that.
But the piece that really caught my attention on that story was that the
desire to write about a person losing their virginity,
that's like a thing people get really excited about writing about.
And it's often done poorly or done inaccurately and the power differential,
and it can be really complex.
And I felt like this person created a scenario where the question of consent
wasn't a concern, but they could still explore all the
pieces of losing your virginity that were compelling to them.
So I think a good writer can find a frame to look at what they want to look at
without accidentally stumbling into troubling territory.
Well, another topic that Ed and I sort of
discussed a little bit earlier on, but which I think is super relevant to
this comp and this conversation is this idea around drugging.
So we saw a bunch of stories where drugging was a feature,
but almost all of the time the result was that the person was really keen and into
it, right?
So it wasn't like they were drugged and then they hated it and then they woke up
and felt violated.
It was like they were keen.
But nevertheless, it started from a place of being drugged
or plied with alcohol or some other substance that made them vulnerable.
And I wondered on your thoughts on that as well.
So that's really interesting.
When I actually thought about that a lot, there was one story that I really loved
where there was a initial dosing of someone with a drug that they had no
opportunity to consent into, and then it tucked them on this journey
and they wanted more of that experience.
There are also, I think, were several stories where there was some
version of being in thralls, like, for instance, by a vampire.
And to me, that's a very similar kind of thing.
You can't really consent when you're not in your right mind.
Yeah.
And then in **** there's a thing called subspace where you kind of lose access to
your higher mental faculties because your endorphins are so high.
So it's also kind of like being drugged but without any substance, as in.
So I think in real life, I have a really big problem with with
that, you know, somebody giving somebody a substance or
putting them in a situation where they're not capable of actually consenting and
then saying, like, obviously you wanted it after the fact,
like that.
To me, that's very troubling.
Yeah.
But in the world of fiction, it's a little more complicated because
then you have to ask yourself that the author knows where they want to be and
how else are they going to get there, Right.
Yeah.
So I feel like I'm often willing to extend a little grace around the idea
that somebody isn't attempting to violate consent.
They just need to get and they had a limited number of words in which to
achieve this too, right?
They had, they had 1500 words.
It's not a whole lot of space to include a scene where the person is like,
you really need this in order to help you survive this moment.
I think this might be really beneficial to you.
I generally like the argument that including consent and making it sexy is
valid, but in some cases, it may not serve the story.
So that's a really complicated question.
It's hard to draw a clear line.
And one thing I was thinking of while you were speaking just now is I think in real
life, like there's the idea of enthusiastic
consent and repeated ongoing consent as well.
I think in literature, implied consent might be enough where
real life implied consent is problematic and maybe it's not the right standard.
But I think if you get an example of the story where someone has been drugged,
and I do recall the story that you're talking about there as well and is not
aware of what's going to happen once they receive the drug.
But once it happens, they love it and they do it again and
again and again, even when they're not drugged.
Yeah.
And and it's a first person perspective as well.
I think it's important that we get their perspective.
I guess it's impossible to shake the fact that it's problematic,
but it's not non consensual, I guess in in a way that matters for the
purposes of literature.
And I guess the line for me is it's not titillating off the fact that it's non
consent.
And I think if it was the case that the consent was ambiguous,
but it was clear that the fact that it wasn't given was like part of the
titillation, that's different to that case where it
wasn't given, but it's clear that it's fine.
I just wanted to add to that, that there were stories where I felt like
consent was overemphasised, possibly because people were trying to
make it very clear that they were meeting our brief and it harmed the story.
And I say this just as a reader, just with my own subjective opinion,
but that consent was overemphasised and became like central to the story in the
in a way that became distracting and way that became unsexy in a way.
Like, you know, we're, we're putting all our focus on the
concern instead of on the enjoyable aftermath of that.
So I agree with you.
There were stories where the consent was handled in a way that the story was meant
to be about something else and the consent was handled in a way that
distracted from it.
I think there were also some stories where the unsexy thing that the author
was attempting to make sexy specifically was consent or like requesting consent or
exploring consent.
And some of those were done than others, but there were a few of those that I
really loved because I felt like they went deeper into like, of course,
everyone should always be giving enthusiastic consent or getting
enthusiastic consent, but there are people for whom consent is
extra complicated.
And if an author took the time to give us a character for whom consent was
complicated and then make that issue and that consent the centre of the story,
sometimes the characters that rose out of that were really rich for me.
But I do think there were other times that it was just like, do you, yes,
you're right.
That does kind of like it's sort of like the equivalent of falling down the stairs.
It's not, you know, it's not a grand reading experience.
And I like what Ed said about whether the non consent or the dubious consent is
being like sensationalised or like fetishized in the reading experience,
because that certainly does take us into problematic territory.
But I also think the story that we were talking,
that we were all discussing with the drugging,
I don't think that story was actually about like,
I don't think even most people would register it as about consent.
So in that case, that's also to me, sort of different because I'm picking up
on something because of my particular perspective.
And it's an interesting thing to think about and discuss,
but it I don't think most readers are even gonna approach the story from that
perspective.
So Elise, there's one other thing that I wanted to
raise with you, and this was another thing that I guess
that you helped educate me on with your notes,
but it's something that I'm not that I don't fully understand.
And that's the concept of asexuality.
You know, I think in the popular culture we see
asexuality as being someone who is not at all interested in sex.
We have called out in our stats that quite a significant percentage of people
who entered the comp identified as asexual.
And I think a lot of the stories as well reflected that in a lot of the stories
were about the asexual experience.
So can you tell us what asexual means?
And does it mean that that person is not interested in sex and what are the some
of the misconceptions around that?
Sure.
So I identify as asexual.
I'm on the asexual spectrum and there are a lot of different ways that people can
experience asexuality.
So like so many things, it's a really broad spectrum.
So there's grey ace, which is like, I kind of might be asexual sort of,
or maybe sometimes there then there are pieces like there's bunches and bunches
of them.
But one of my, one of my favourite examples is
sapiosexual, which is like, I don't get sexually aroused by people
just every day like looking at them or whatever.
But if someone is really intelligent, then I get aroused.
And so there are people who can only get, they only experience sexual attraction or
arousal when they're interacting with someone who is not attracted to them.
There are a lot of different versions.
And then even if you just take people who are just identifying as straight up
asexual, there is also sex positive asexual.
And then there's like sex neutral asexual and there's sex negative asexual.
So myself, I'm ace.
I don't feel sexual attraction to people.
When somebody makes an innuendo joke, it tends to go over my head.
I have to like push myself to make jokes that have innuendo in them and like pay
close attention to look for those pieces.
But I think sex is lovely.
I think it's potentially delightful depending on who you're doing it with and
how it's going.
I love reading erotica.
My attention may be a little bit in a different place, but like,
I certainly can experience arousal.
Some people who are ace have a really high sex drive,
and it's not uncommon for asexual people to masturbate as frequently or more
frequently than like, people who don't identify as asexual.
There's a word for that.
Homosexual.
Yeah.
And then there's the romantic piece too, which is totally, it's a,
it's a similar spectrum, but it's about the romance part instead
of the sex part of the dynamics.
So you can be arrow ace, which means you're not really driven by
either the romance or the sex.
So it's interesting because you mentioned sapiosexual and by that definition,
I'm asexual as well because I've identified myself as a part of judging
this competition.
But also just in general, that sense of humour appeals to me.
I've never, for example, found Brad Pitt no attractive.
No offence to Brad Pitt, I'm sure he cares a lot about my opinion.
But no, just settle down the counterpoint.
But like I'm not just attracted to someone by their objective appearance or
what have you, that it comes down to something more like
personality and and clicking and whatever.
But I would never think of myself as asexual because I'm still attracted to
men and and certainly attracted to my husband,
and I would never think of myself as asexual.
So is sapiosexual, does that fall under the asexual spectrum?
Or is that just another, I guess, label that could come across a different
range of sexualities?
So the big answer is that you get to decide that for yourself.
And at least for me, Euphoria is a really good guide.
So when I land on a way of describing myself,
that makes me feel seen and validated, that gives me an idea that I'm heading in
the right direction, that I'm getting to know myself better
and getting to understand myself better.
And then oftentimes, if I connect with other people who
identify that way, it's really helpful and positive.
And I'm like, oh, I found my people.
And that's a really fun way to feel.
So if you think that you might be on the asexual spectrum,
then I would encourage you to explore.
But As for the question of, you know, you're attracted to a sense of humour,
you're attracted to someone's mind.
Does that mean you're saviosexual?
You can be attracted to whatever you want to be attracted to,
or whatever you just happened to be attracted to,
and that can mean what it means to you.
But one guideline that somebody offered me at one point that I found really
helpful was like, do you find yourself thinking about sex a
lot when you're just going about your daily business?
Do you fantasise a lot?
Do you want sex?
I myself don't think about sex much.
I don't need sex to be happy.
I need to write.
If I don't wait for a week, I feel completely out of sorts,
but I can go without having sex with somebody else and I can be fine.
But I think it's also worth noting, I don't want to speak for the whole ace
community because it's a big diverse community with a lot of different people
who identify a lot of different ways.
But there are some identities like grey asexual or grey ace where you sometimes
or kind of feel like you can describe yourself as asexual,
but other times maybe not so much.
Or in other circumstances or it might ebb and flow for you.
And there's an identity called demisexual, which is where you experience yourself as
asexual most of the time, except if you're in a partnered up
relationship that includes sex, then you do have that desire to have sex
with that person.
And then another thing that gets conflated a lot within the ace community
or when people are looking at it from outside is sex drive,
which is also not the same thing as whether you're allosexual or asexual.
So you can have a high sex drive and still be asexual and maybe you have sex
with people because your sex drive is pushing you in that direction or maybe
you don't and you masturbate a lot.
So it's a really nuanced how all of that can work.
I feel like I, I had it until you just said what you
said now, because for me, the clarifying statement for me was when
you said that it's how much you think about it and how much it's a need for you.
And that makes sense for me if it's not a need for you.
But you've just said that you can be asexual but have that sex drive and have
that desire.
And I find it hard to reconcile that.
What is asexual then about having a sex drive and wanting to act on it?
So a sex drive is like a physiological need.
Now, this is not my area of expertise because
I don't have a particularly high sex drive either,
but the way that it's been explained to me is that a sex drive is like a
physiological need, like being hungry for food,
but it's very different from the drive to have sex with others specifically.
Here's one way to frame it that may be a little helpful or maybe not.
I think that most allosexual people experience a significant difference
between the satisfaction that they get from ************ versus the satisfaction
that they get from having sex with somebody else.
And I don't think that that's all about the emotional connection piece,
although certainly that's probably part of it.
Because I'm not homosexual, I now am out of my depth and speaking
from a place of cluelessness.
But I surmise that that's true.
And so if you have a high sex drive, but you're asexual,
you might prefer ************ to having sex with others in most cases because
it's easier and you don't have to do all that social nonsense.
Or you might like the social nonsense and you might like having sex with other
people, but the drive to have sex with people
isn't a piece of the puzzle in that decision making process.
Does that make sense?
And was I, was I right before about the difference
between ************ and having sex with other people?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, there's a big difference in my mind.
Yeah.
Look, I think that makes, that makes more sense to me.
And it doesn't entirely make sense, but I mean,
nor should it necessarily when it's an experience that you're not familiar with
or that doesn't resonate with your own experience.
So I think you've helped shed a lot of light on the on the concept for me.
OK.
Well, thank you, Elise, so much for speaking with us and also for
judging.
Thank you for having me.
This has been grand.
And we'll speak with Elise again a few times as we cover each category
separately.
Yeah, in upcoming episodes.
But for now, let's move on to our next rule,
which was no AI.
Yeah.
So we had a little flag that we put into the judging portal.
We had several, and one of them was AI suspicion.
And so if any of the judges who read the story had a suspicion that AI might
generative AI might have been involved in the story, we ticked that little box.
Now, out of 495 stories, 73 stories ended up with an AI suspicion
flag on them.
So that's roughly 15% of the stories that we received.
And I'm going to go ahead and say that that's a conservative estimate because
there were many times when just a line or two struck me,
but which overall the story felt human generated.
Now, I'm going to come out and say very
clearly right now, I know a lot of people who entered this
comp used AI.
I know a lot of people used it a little bit.
I guess part of that is the consequence of being a free comp,
because there's no downside.
If you are a person who's not even a writer and just wants a roll the dice,
you're an opportunist.
Yeah, good on you.
Roll the dice, see what happens.
Just put the prompts into ChatGPT and copy and paste.
You're done 30 seconds work for you.
And there were quite a lot of stories I think that fell into that.
And there's no surefire way to detect Gen AI.
And certainly we can say with confidence that AI can't detect.
We've tried we've we've looked at the tools,
we've explored options for automating that,
but it's just not good and it's terrible.
But there are a lot of tells and there are don't wanna reveal what they are.
Let's not reveal.
We have some everyone knows about the M dashes, but there's other things as well.
There are some kind of give it away.
I feel like I'm becoming an expert, to be honest.
After this competition, there are certainly some easy tells.
Now I just wanna maybe go into a little bit of my experience.
You mentioned at the outset of the episode that I wrote two stories for this
competition.
Now, the reason for that is because I wrote
one story.
This story had been playing on my mind for months.
I was obsessed with the idea.
I thought it was hilarious, but I thought he's gonna know it's mine.
And I hated that.
I didn't want you to be able to guess.
And I was talking to some friends about that in the coven and saying, oh,
what do I do?
And they said, well, write 2, genius.
I'll write 2.
I'll write a decoy story and then I'll sneak my real story in there.
And that's what I did.
But unfortunately, I left it all to the last minute.
My real story was like scraping in at the last minute,
not as well written as I would have liked.
And I still wanted to do a decoy story.
So of course, knowing that I would be flagging it
anyway, I got AI to help me.
Now, I edited it heavily because I do know
what to look for, but most of that story was AI generated.
And I have to be honest with you, it scared the **** out of me.
Yeah, because it was pretty good.
I'm not saying it was Shakespeare by any means, but it was pretty good.
And that coloured then my perception of all the stories that came through.
I'm like, you know, it wasn't too long ago that we could
confidently say chat JPT would not be able to produce something that was of
inequality whatsoever.
And now just maybe a couple of months later,
I'm saying that story was actually really good.
And guess what made the long list with obviously me not revealing that
information about it until afterwards.
So and there was one other story as well that made it quite high before we
scrutinised it a little bit more and then went, hang on a second.
This one has a lot of tells that are that are hidden quite well.
It had all the red flags.
So yeah, I think with Jen AI, sometimes you can get lucky and it can
write a a good story and that's only gonna get better.
And so it is really hard for us to police again, the fact that it's a free comp,
there's a nothing to lose if you're an opportunist.
If you're a comp entrant and you pay money and you're doing it because you
want to write, then that philtres a lot of that out.
Like not 100%, no, but it does philtre a lot of that out.
I think there's a temptation though, even among comp entrants.
And I know plenty of comp entrants who are like overdoing it and entering every
comp under the sun and then feeling very much under the palm that there's a big
temptation to use AIA bit at least, if not a lot.
And we've we've had some concerns in the not quite right prize not too long ago
about AI being used in shortlisted stories.
And it just becomes very difficult.
And I think it's only going to get harder and harder, if you will,
to be able to tell I better, you better pay up.
Yeah, I guess just to state the reason for the
rule, it's because that's what this is all
about.
It's about becoming a better writer.
It's about challenging yourself to improve fun, Right?
Like, yeah, like do something for yourself,
use your brain in a fun way.
And that kind of undermines the whole thing.
You know, it's not about just winning the prize.
But look, the reality as you've said is it's
impossible for us to be definitive.
It's always kind of a probability.
And sometimes it gets to the point where like that probability now eyes 100%.
But sometimes like some are going going to slip through and there's literally
nothing we can do to confirm or deny.
But I will put out a warning that if you do use Gen AI to write your story or
write bits of this, your story, you run the risk of one of those tells
giving you away.
Yeah.
So I mean, it's interesting.
It's an evolving topic.
It's certainly one we've talked about a lot and and the conversation's not over.
I would urge everyone to our brains are dying anyway.
Do use your brain, challenge yourself.
You will feel so much more satisfaction if you know that that came from you.
And like we can feel the human, you know, the human element.
You might long list with something that tick the boxes, but we want your story,
we want it to come from you, we want your weirdness,
we want your sort of the broken bits, the bits that are a bit wrong.
And I think that that is what ultimately makes it compelling.
And that's what brings this human connection.
I agree.
So I think this rule is here to stay, but we'll see what the future holds.
Might be like pushing the stone uphill or stealing your finger in the ****.
Like, I beg your pardon?
Sorry.
You're gonna have to explain that one.
You know, the, the finger in the **** thing.
OK, so it's just all the hand gesture.
Second of all, that was very horizontal in a way that
I'm not.
One finger.
You know how I.
No.
At least for the full 4 fingers, There's an old Dutch story about like the
**** that is a barrier of water that prevents the whole area from flooding,
cracking the **** and someone puts their finger in the **** to stop it from
cracking further and flooding, and that holds it long enough for the
authorities to get there and repair the **** and stop it from flooding.
What I'm saying is that the kind of situation where like we're putting our
finger in the **** but is that going to like the proverbial finger?
We've got all of our fingers, all of our toes in the **** at some point,
it's just not going to be enough to stop the flooding and it will just gush.
All right?
How many dollars?
Like that's, that's more than a dollar.
I might put $3.
Three dollars, actually, 4 is where I like to go the most that
we'll go in at a time.
Oh my God.
I just want to also stress that we use the term **** there.
Oh yeah, like lovingly.
Now we use it in the Dutch way.
OK.
So the next rule that we had, or I guess like the structural element
was categories.
So we had 6 categories for the comp.
And I guess my question is, what did we learn from that?
Were the categories right or were they needed?
And we'll talk more about the categories of themselves in the category episodes
that we will release.
But just generally speaking, yeah, I guess the reason why we put categories
in place in the 1st place was because we felt that it would potentially be kind of
unfair for us to be judging categories together in one pile because we might
have a bias for or against A.
Particular type of story, but we did have biases, right?
Like there were things that I found more appealing,
stories that appealed to me more in maybe a way that was surprising to me that I
didn't necessarily think would be my favourite,
but ended up being my favourite, which may have been as a result of the
stories that we received, or may it be a result of my own personal
interests.
I mean, there's no way of ever really
meaningfully separating them out, but doing so in a way which we felt sort
of grouped similar stories together would allow us to judge more fairly.
And I do think that that was probably helpful.
And I think that that helps eliminate some of that personal bias up to a point.
Like, obviously we're always gonna have
personal bias when it comes to judging, but I suppose there's probably some
changes I would make if we were to ever run the comp again.
And 1 is probably to eliminate the other category that we had.
The other category was sort of a catch all.
Yeah.
I guess because of our inexperience here, we wanted to make sure we weren't missing
out on other stories that didn't fit cleanly into other categories.
And I think that's still valid because I think the stories we did receive didn't
necessarily fit cleanly into other categories,
but probably there was a place for them in other categories.
So probably what I would do next time is say, fantasy, supernatural,
and sci fi together in one would make sense to me.
We only received a small handful of sci fi stories in the other category,
which I think would have just as easily been judged in a fairway among the other
fantasy and supernatural stories because they have a similar kind of vibe to them.
It was also some that ended up in the other category,
I think just because people didn't know where else to put them, which makes sense.
Yeah.
But what I would describe as maybe like a dark romance.
So even though like people didn't feel comfortable putting them in the romance
category because there was no love, right?
It was it was dark, but which nevertheless were similar in
the themes.
You know, we're talking about relationships.
And while the relationships in this case were problematic maybe or red flaggy,
they nevertheless were.
It was about people and it was about their.
And I think romance and dark romance together again would make sense and I
think would be judged fairly together.
There were some other ones which just sort of were experimentational with style,
which I think would fit with literary.
And so I don't know about you, but I feel like what we could do next
time is maybe be more clear that sci fi can go with fantasy and supernatural,
dark romance could go with romance, and we could maybe just have one category
that's like literary slash other.
I guess the one outlier is probably ****** horror.
Yeah.
And we did receive a few horrors, which were great.
I love the horrors.
I'm not sure if they also fit fairly within sort of fantasy and supernatural.
I think in some cases they do, because in some cases they're kind of
still dealing with something supernatural, but not necessarily.
Yeah, I think the category is both useful and
problematic, and I think if we were to do it again,
we would need to change that a little bit.
One of the things that the categories did that I thought was a problem was that
when we were looking at the shortlist, like the podium kind of first,
second and third, we were looking at stories that were
representative of that category as well, right?
So if you had a story that was kind of a little bit funny but more filthy than
anything else, but you put it in the comedy category,
you know, how high does that go?
Because your category is comedy, so it has to fit kind of these
requirements of the category.
Romance was a big one, right?
Romance as a genre has certain elements and certain tropes that are associated
with it.
And so if your story is that kind of dark romance or if it's romantic at heart,
like it does that personal connection, but it's just a more literary story.
For example, you run into all these issues when you
try to judge strictly on categories.
Yeah.
And there would have been countless stories where the author sort of said,
listen, this could fit in romance or it could fit
in comedy.
I mean, we have heard of the term ROM com, right?
Yeah.
Or any combination of those categories, like this is fantasy and supernatural,
but it's also romance or whatever combo that it was that they're being forced to
choose.
And the other factor for people is thinking, well, OK,
we know romance is gonna be a popular category.
Should I just kind of sneak it into the other category because I know that
there's gonna be fewer people than I'm up against.
And then that's something to consider as well.
That is.
But also when judging other, we were looking at stories that did
represent an other about it.
So that wasn't necessarily a winning strategy.
Overall, I think the idea of categories there is a
little bit restrictive.
I guess in this comp we did want to have like a range of prizes and different
areas that we could award prizes to.
So it's not strictly like the usual six stories that we have in the shortlist.
We had more than that, so it has a benefit there.
But I think I would prefer if we were to do it again,
to go towards just having like an open, open category,
but you can specify genres as well as part of your story.
Yeah.
And I think we would aim for like a diverse shortlist and I'd diverse long
list.
Well, ultimately, I guess we picked the best story,
even if it's diverse, it's diverse.
But yeah, I agree.
I think keeping it open, but still allowing people to nominate it.
Yeah.
So we still can look at that and think, think about that.
But keeping it open would be useful.
And to be clear, when we were initially judging,
it was all a big mix.
Yeah.
So certainly for the guest judges, in some cases,
they had just one category to judge, so they weren't looking at a combo.
But for me, I just read the stories in order,
essentially.
Or sometimes I dip in and out of of various spots.
******* hell.
But ultimately, you know, I've distracted myself again.
I'm getting very easily distracted.
And look at that.
I agree with you.
And I think our bias will come through in the long list in the podium in terms of
we are typically judges of flash fiction.
Yeah.
And in fact, that actually leads us into a topic that
I want to talk about, right?
Because there are going to be a lot of disappointed people.
There are going to be people who have been waiting a year.
Yeah, to hear this, right.
And they put their story in a year ago and they loved it and they felt very
strongly about it and they thought it was a great piece of fiction.
And then they hear the long list and they hear the winners, and they go, what?
My story was way better than that.
And of course, that's a universal experience as a writer.
But I guess I wanted to just go into a few of the reasons why you might not have
made the long list or you might not have made the podium.
We will be revealing the long list at the end of this episode.
And if you do not make the long list, I want you to maybe consider some of
these because that's not a referendum on your writing style or your ability to
write.
You may be an excellent writer, but just have a think about these other
things.
And these might be the reasons why the other stories rose above.
So the first one I wanna bring up is the spice level.
For many stories, I feel like it was a hesitation to go all
the way with the spice that stood between them and the long list.
But I will say also that didn't necessarily need to be sexually explicit.
Yeah, in all cases.
Like there were stories that really emphasised like longing or being turned
on or whatever the case may be.
And the story was kind of infused with sexuality.
It was still ****** and ****** doesn't necessarily equal sex,
but it had to be something, right?
It had to be really either excellent and emotionally resonant and, and,
and drawing a scene in in a way that was in the ****** realm,
or it had to be really ******* hot.
And I guess look, the theme was also important.
Yeah.
Because especially when you get to the pointy end,
the question of did you start with something that was unsexy #1 and did you
make it irresistible slash sexy?
That was really important.
There were stories that started with something that was already pretty sexy.
And there were also stories that started with something was like gross,
but it didn't succeed in making it irresistible or,
And there were also stories that started with something funny or gross or like
unsexy, like good idea, but the unsexy thing didn't really
feature in the story.
It was kind of just a throwaway, get the start and then the thing didn't
become irresistible.
It was just like that thing was discussed and then there was a sex scene subsequent
that had nothing to do with that setup.
So in those cases, the theme was not really interest very
strongly.
So that's that's another factor that we considered.
But again, this isn't apples and apples.
It's not like we had sexy as #1 criteria theme as #2 criteria,
writing quality is #3 criteria.
It's all in the bag together.
It's all a mix.
And so you will find some stories that end up on the long list which were less
sexy or which weren't maybe as well written as others, but as a whole,
I guess rose above to us in in ways.
So we were waiting everything together in like a big combination.
So it's impossible to compare on one factor.
So I guess to be clear, like if you felt like your story was
really well written, for example, and then you see a story on the long list
that was not that well written, that's probably because it ticked some of
the other boxes in a way that made it rise above,
over and above its writing quality, for example.
So I guess you just have to keep that all in mind that it's all a bunch of things
being considered together.
So another thing I wanted to raise was just overall, was it a satisfying story?
And I guess this is where our bias as flash fiction judges comes in,
that it's not just about was it really hot?
It's also about was it a good story?
And so theme, yes, like did it address the theme
successfully and we've talked about that, but also was it more than just a clever
concept?
So there in particular maybe in the comedy category,
there were some really funny ideas that like blew me away.
I was really, really happy to see, but didn't sort of go on to create a
satisfying story.
As a result.
It kind of leaned a little bit too heavily on the idea without then
delivering like, really powerful characters or,
or some sort of satisfying sense of character change or conflict or all these
sorts of things that that are what make a satisfying story.
And the number one thing that makes a satisfying story and the satisfying
****** experience is the climax, Right.
And there were a lot of stories that never got there.
Yeah, I agree with that.
Yeah.
And so, you know, we talk about sticking the landing in the
not quite right prize for flash fiction.
And in flesh fiction, sticking the landing is almost all the
more important.
And there were so many stories that sort of did the fade to black.
It's all set up and then no climax.
I felt one common thing that was missing there in terms of climax is like,
you get the set up, you get the sex scene, but you don't get like the pay off.
I guess there's still like the emotional pay off that needs to happen.
And sometimes that just didn't come and you're left with a little bit of a hole.
OK, listen, you're already at least a couple of
dollars in at this point.
No?
And I agree.
And this leads me into my next point, I guess,
which is did your story deliver some sort of conflict or tension?
Yeah.
You know, there were a lot of stories I read that
were hot, but it was like, let's bang, OK, they just had sex.
Where's the build up?
Where's the tension?
Where's the conflict?
Where's the kind of will they won't they?
That makes a story satisfying.
I think for the straightforward erotica, like the actual pieces of erotica that we
got that were maybe from people who are coming to this comp,
who have experienced writing erotica, who don't have as much experience writing
in the flash fiction space, that's probably the number one thing that
might have let your story down.
If you feel like your story was really spicy and it didn't make the long list,
it may be because there was no conflict.
There was just sex.
Everyone was into it.
They had sex, the end.
And I guess we're looking for something a little bit more.
I don't know.
I'm going to say something really problematic right now, so I'm the same.
Your teeth in too.
I don't know, when you say conflict, it's not always like there's an argument
or something or the protagonists hate each other or something.
No, but it can't be easy, I guess.
Well, I need to be clear because there's a
difference between conflict from a writing point of view and conflict from
just a relational point of view.
So conflict in relationships is like you disagree on something.
Conflict in a writing sense, when we're talking about novel writing or
story writing, any type of fiction writing is a
roadblock.
So it does not have to be a disagreement between the two characters.
It is something getting in the way of them getting what they want.
Conflict can include it's difficult to get what you want.
So maybe for whatever reason, like society doesn't agree that you
should be together, or you've got some life circumstances
that get in the way of you being together.
All of these things can be classified as conflict,
even if the two main characters are all for it.
So I guess that's the distinction I want to make very clearly.
I'm not talking about an argument between 2 characters.
I'm talking about narrative conflict, a roadblock getting in the way of the
single, which may be more often than not, in this case, sex.
Yeah, I don't know necessarily if that is 100%
a requirement.
It can be.
But I think there are other elements of storytelling that you could use.
And I'm just thinking about stories that we rated highly that didn't necessarily
have like a roadblock or it was more just tension between them,
or it was it was even just a focus on the emotional state of the character and,
and what they really wanted.
And it was just that tension in the least aspect.
Or it could have been even like a high concept that played out in an interesting
way.
And so I think the lack of conflict is noticeable,
but I think there are other ways to approach it too.
But I definitely agree that it was missing in a lot of.
Yeah, I guess.
Look, you make a good point.
It's not It's not necessary.
And there are other ways to write a satisfying story.
Point just being that if you wrote something hot but it didn't get through,
Yeah.
One of the reasons might be that needs more.
It was a little bit too straight forward.
Everybody got what they wanted.
It was a little bit too simple.
And from a narrative point of view, we needed more twists and turns,
whatever those might have been.
Now, another point that might have led to a
story being more or less satisfying is character development.
And for us this is important.
It probably wasn't one of the core features of what we considered when we
were judging this comp in particular, but it was certainly something that
cropped up here and there.
And that is, you know, were your characters kind of more 2
dimensional?
Were they just sort of archetypal?
It was a man and a woman.
Or were they real feeling people with their own sort of inner worlds,
bit more complex, looking for something specific?
Or was it just man and woman bang, you know, like and look,
I'm not sure that this was probably one of the higher things in our realm of
consideration.
But if we're talking character voice, character development,
I will say that stories that delivered interesting deep characters rose above
ones that had a sort of a specific voice, the ones that felt very human.
We've talked about AI already.
These ones stood out a little bit more than the ones that were just a little bit
more generic.
And it's just a he and a he or a he and a he, whatever it might be,
where we don't get more than that.
Again, that's just less story and more
recounting of events and, and a little bit less engaging as a
result.
Yeah.
And that's really hard to do.
And that's what we talk about all the time.
The regular not quite right prize.
I think one of my major learnings from this is just how much ****** fiction is
fiction.
And that's that's primarily fiction and, and secondarily ******.
And you really only get that satisfying ****** impact if you have all of the
other elements there.
Because really, when we talk about these elements of
story and what they deliver to the reader, sometimes the emotion,
the single effect that they're going for is comedy.
Sometimes it's like sadness and whatever emotion you want the reader to feel in
****** fiction, you're making them feel ***** I guess.
Like, you know, there's an ****** payload there that
needs to be delivered, but the mechanism for that to be
delivered payload.
Thank you.
Is is the same.
The mechanism is the same, and I think those fundamentals are just
as important.
Otherwise it just isn't a satisfying reading experience.
Yeah, I agree.
And look, just on that, like the flip side of that,
I guess is some things that could have broken your story.
So things that might have broken your story.
Cringy dialogue.
Yeah, cringy terminology for anatomy.
And we know that that's something in and we'll talk about.
We will talk about that.
Also, as in other forms of fiction, you wanna be able to suspend your
disbelief.
If we were unable to do that anything which made your story kind of clang,
you know, in our minds, just like, oh, that's awkward might have been the thing
that kept you off the long list.
It might have been a factor of something that we felt deeply uncomfortable about
If it was bordering on some of those issues around consent or around some
problematic ideas that were expressly prohibited in the comp.
If that might have been a factor, certainly AI suspicion was a factor.
And finally, I guess the one thing that stories could
have done to improve their chances of being on the long list in which some did
is what we now regular discussions talk about as the element of surprise,
which is something that just takes the story a little bit out of the ordinary
and makes it feel special.
So again, remembering that you're in a writing
competition among other writers.
Everyone's writing.
We like writing, we know how to do it well,
and so you're up against other people who already do this thing pretty well.
And So what do you do to rise above a group of people who are already writing
pretty well?
Well, it's to make your story stand out.
For some reason, we call that the element of surprise.
Now, that doesn't mean like A twist in your
story, although it can be.
What it means is just something that makes your story stand out,
makes us remember it, makes it feel unique.
And look, there's no such thing as an original
concept in writing.
It's all been done before and we know that.
But what was your little twist on what's all been done before,
and how did you package your story in a way that made it feel like something
fresh?
This fresh is probably the word I'd use rather than unique or original fresh.
And so if you delivered a story which sort of ticked all the boxes and it was a
spicy and we had interesting characters, but it just felt really like something
we've seen before and and not particularly surprising in any way.
That could have been a factor as well.
So many of the stories that made the long list or higher had something else going
for them, whether that was unique character voice,
whether it was a really funny or clever concept,
whether that was like A twist on maybe expectations about gender roles or
characters who just came at it with the a different perspective.
Like there's a a million ways that you could create and what we call the element
of surprise, but that's probably one of the things
that would elevate otherwise similar quality stories.
And it's a tough one because that's not one thing.
And we can't say like, hey, this is the one thing you need to do to
make your story stand out more.
But hopefully, when we get to the shortlisted stories,
the winning stories, you will get a glimpse into what that
means because you'll see those stories that did rise above and perhaps see some
of those little surprises and little elements that stood out to us.
So with all that being said, let's move on now to voicemails and
questions.
And our first question via email comes from Chloe Page, who asks,
were there many stories that the judges disagreed with how the author ranked the
spice intensity level too high or too low for the content?
And there were.
There definitely were.
And we haven't spoken specifically about the spice ratings that we said,
but we had three spice ratings and they were demure, explicit and intense.
And we were, I guess, explicit in our wording of what those
ratings meant.
But there is also a lot of interpretation that goes with that and a lot of
objective, personal moral interpretations, I guess,
of what it means to be explicit and what it means to be demure.
And I think people earned on the side of caution when it came to categorising
their stories and if it had even kind of a hint of sex.
That it was explicit, even if it was fairly demure by kind of
the standards.
Yeah.
And I think there was definitely a cultural influence there when you looked
at where the authors were coming from, that there were particular regions of the
world where something might have been ranked as explicit or intense,
which from my perspective, at least as an Aussie, I was like,
there was nothing sexual really to be found.
It was more exploration of a relationship or an idea.
And I think that's really fascinating how differently we can interpret how intense
something might be and, and how confronting it might be to write
these things.
And it didn't really have an impact.
It didn't no judging.
We judged each story on its merits.
I guess what it did help clarify is the author's intentions.
Like, were they going for something to me or
were they trying to like push the boundaries?
So whether or not they did with the within the context of like the other
stories was up to us to judge, but it gave us a little bit of insight on
what they were going for.
So hopefully that answers your question, Chloe.
We had another question from Annie Lily, and we've spoken about her first question.
She's got a Part 2 of that around the balance of plot,
characterization and sex scenes.
Where is that sweet spot?
I have a feeling I missed it.
So don't comment on your story at this stage, Annie.
But yeah, that was a consideration.
Like in the regular flash fiction contest, we do judge all these elements already,
right?
We judge originality, prose style, voice structure, emotion, character.
All of these elements come together and we kind of try to pick the one that ticks
most of the boxes or ticks a couple of the boxes really well.
And with Flesh fiction, I think we've just added another element
to it.
So it's really not fundamentally different for us.
It's just balancing the sex and the Eroticism with all of those other
elements of story that we always talk about.
But for us in this comp, sex and Eroticism was a major part of it.
Yeah.
And so it was very important that that was at the forefront of the story.
Yeah.
It's a weighing up of multiple different things.
And in fact, became more challenging in this
competition because we were adding these extra elements.
But I think it's gonna be difficult for people who are approaching the long list,
potentially questioning why they didn't make it.
And it could be for a range of reasons, because there was not one rubric.
There wasn't one factor that we considered to be the primary or #1 factor.
It was all of these things altogether.
And while we might have considered spice to be one of the more important factors
if someone wrote a really compelling story, yeah,
but it wasn't particularly spicy.
It was a bit demure or, or a little bit dark and maybe not sexy,
but still ****** still sexual, then, you know,
it may still have risen to the top.
So there's not really any one way that you can compare all these stories.
We judged each one across a range of criteria on its own merits and,
and I guess that's how they either rose to the top or not.
But yeah, I think even outside the long list there
was obviously, as there always is, some really, really amazing stories.
Yeah, we'll definitely be contacting a whole
bunch of people who didn't make the long list to hopefully appear in our flesh
fiction collection with their particular take on the theme.
So yeah, let's maybe let's mention that now.
Yes, we do have the long list coming up in
this episode, so but you know, just to mention that we had a flag in the
judging portal which was publishing quality where we flagged a bunch of
stories that we thought regardless of the outcome,
this one deserves to be published.
And there were way more stories than made it into the long list.
And the long list is only 10% of stories.
So from 495, that's 49 stories, right?
So that's not many.
So we have a pool to draw from.
And we intend to publish several volumes if we can,
if we have authors permission and everything comes together.
So, yeah, you have that.
Look forward to even if you didn't make the long list,
that that might be an outcome, you might be published.
So thank you, Annie, for your questions.
And we've got some voicemails now.
And look, there's some characters I think that have
left voicemails.
It's not just our usual not quite right crowd voicemail.
So our first one comes from Pierce Judge.
Hi, this is Pierce Judge, first time caller, long time listener.
Now y'all never used to do ***** and now you run a a ***** contest.
So.
So my question is, were y'all always perverse?
There's this recent phenomena follow up question, when this is all over,
are you going to use the ChatGPT to find your nearest church or do you need me to
do that for you?
First of all, none of your business.
But second of all, yeah, no, not really.
I'm pretty vanilla to be honest.
But what about you?
You always been a perverted or Look, I don't think of myself as a pervert,
but like I I enjoy a little bit of erotica now and then.
So if that makes me a pervert, so be it.
And Part 2 of your question, will we find the nearest church when this
is all over?
Look, probably not.
But I will say there were some stories that we received that featured churches
and religious settings.
So I'll say that like, that's not necessarily going to go the
way that you think it is either.
Can I just say I'm involved in church as a result of my children's schooling?
I do occasionally attend church, and the last time I attended church,
I was reading flesh fiction stories while I was there.
So if I'm not smoked by God by the time this episode releases, then, you know,
God's cool with it.
OK.
Because I've really been pushing the boundaries.
So thanks, Piers, for your voicemail.
I'm, I'm not sure whether you're coming at it
from a point of, like, judging us or you're on our side.
His name is literally Judge.
That's true.
Yeah.
But thanks for your voicemail anyway.
Our next voicemail comes from Elio Dre.
Hi, this is Ayudre.
I'm the author behind the mode in Apt 3 BI.
Just wanted to give credit where it's due.
Because of flash fiction, I was able to create the origin story of
the mode for Elegant Literature, and I'm proud to say it was selected
contest winner for the charm and chain issue.
So thank you Ed and Amanda for giving me the space to create a story that truly
changed my life.
I'm incredibly grateful.
So, Elio, thanks for your message.
And so happy to hear that your story won Elegant Lit.
What an amazing achievement.
And we are so proud to have played a little part in that story.
So well done.
Yeah.
So if anybody wants to read that story, head over to Elegant Lit and look up the
Charmed and Chained edition.
So nice when you find a forever home for your story.
So congratulations.
So thanks everyone for leaving us a message and a question via email.
But now we'll move on to our feedback that we received through the comp.
Yeah, So I'm just gonna give a bit of a summary,
I guess, of some of the feedback that we received
because there was some recurring themes.
It's really cool the positive stuff that we hear back.
It does give us a boost as well.
It's a lot of work running this competition.
So to get these messages of support right at the end when we finally reveal the
names and so on, is is really rewarding for us.
So I'll just go through some of the comments that people had.
Overwhelmingly people said they had fun, which is good to know.
I'm glad that people had a lot of fun.
They said it was well organised, the competition.
A lot of people were saying they were riding outside their comfort zone and
often for the first time, which doesn't surprise me.
Like that was the whole challenge, right?
And of course, we were going to get people who were more
experienced, which is wonderful, but people finding out for the first time
that actually they can do erotica pretty well.
There were quite a few people who had written erotica before but were so
grateful for a place to submit it because, of course, you know,
most competitions you probably find would not maybe be accepting of that or
wouldn't be receptive to that being a winner.
Although I challenge everybody to challenge every competition or every lip
mag that you submit to go for it.
Like, see what they say.
You never know.
But yeah, they were grateful to have this this
opportunity.
So and we're very proud and privileged to be able to provide that opportunity.
So thank you.
A few people did indicate that they were keen for the ****** so keen for the
prizes.
And of course, we will be handing out some of those
prizes in the category specific episodes and of course in the final winner
announcement episode as well.
Quite a few people mentioned that they hope and wish that we will run this
competition again.
So Ed, will we be running this competition again?
So I had a a blast running this this competition.
I think it was amazing.
It was a lot of work.
The reading especially was a lot of work, and not to mention all of the recording
and the editing that goes into releasing this episode.
But I felt it was incredibly rewarding as well,
just to go into this whole different area that we're not used to.
And I would look, I would do it again, but I would also say next time around,
if we were to do it, it would probably be a paid comp.
Yeah.
And that's just because we want to remove maybe with some of the AI influence.
That's one of one factor.
And just to pay us for our effort, I guess.
Yeah.
And also the other judges, too.
We can't rely on the goodwill of guest judges doing this for free,
but we can't do it right away because we need to catch up to get this one out the
door, and then we need a little bit of a break,
I feel.
Yeah, because it's been quite a hectic few
months.
Absolutely.
So, you know, look, we're not ruling it out,
so stay tuned if you are interested, and I guess we'll let you know when the
opportunity arises again.
Now, a couple of people mentioned that they
felt that their spouse was grateful for the opportunity as well,
because maybe they wrote a story and it eventuated into some experimentation in
the bedroom.
So well done to those couples.
Very happy to hear that.
And you know, a couple in particular mentioned that
they wrote together, they each wrote their own story and well
done to you.
Love to hear it.
And I just want to give a shout out as well to those people who were maybe
submitting from other cultures where erotica is maybe a little bit more taboo
than it might be even in a culture like ours where it's still a little bit taboo,
but not so out there.
And I've just got one message from one author who said I'm happy to have found a
space where explorations and expressions of sexuality are not viewed through a
conformist moral lens, a space where DH Lawrence and Sadat
Hassan Manto exist in harmony and not hold up by the gatekeepers of public
morality.
Namaste.
And yeah, I agree, I feel like it's great to have a space to
express yourself if that's what you want to do.
So thank you for submitting.
And we had one author who said I've only entered because it's not quite right.
Thanks Ed and Amanda for giving us something else to challenge us all.
You've popped my ****** writing cherry.
Love it.
I've popped my own ****** writing cherry.
I mean, actually I have written a sex scene
before in my my YA half written.
Is this the Hanson one?
No.
Oh, in the.
Yeah, right.
The other, the other one.
You've read it And and you know, I'd probably approach it a little bit
differently now, I think.
But I think there were a lot of people here who were doing it for the first time.
So thank you.
One person said great fun.
Tried it out on a few friends.
They loved it.
Well, hello.
What exactly?
The writing or, you know, Well, good for you.
Sounds like details, please.
Yeah.
Great friends.
One person said thank you for putting on this competition.
My PhD supervisor introduced me to it.
I appreciate all the subcategories.
I hope I win a *****.
What?
You are that PhD supervisor listening to this episode?
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you.
And hi.
And, you know, that sounds pretty hot.
That actually does sound like a plot.
It does.
This is a plot that's ready and waiting to happen.
One writer said a smutty annual anthology would be amazing.
Please, yes.
And of course we do intend to publish a whole range of stories from this
competition, so stay tuned for that.
It's going to take a little while, so give us some time to get that going,
but it's going to be worth the wait.
And just to round it out, a lovely little message from our good
friend Holly Celeste Sadowski, who said my favourite parasocial friends.
As much as I'm aiming for that trophy, if I can make Amanda laugh so hard she
pees a little, that is a win for us all.
And I have to say, Holly and Ed will know this.
It does not take much for me to pee a little.
I have had two children.
The way you say Ed will know this is a little bit strange.
But I would know this because Amanda's always going to.
I, I am always busting, constantly busting.
And Holly, your story did make me lol.
So thank you for that.
Yeah, so great to hear all of that feedback.
Resoundingly positive.
And I'm, I'm very proud and humbled to have played
such a humble.
Oh, you hate that when people say, but like,
I do feel I am proud is the opposite of I'm humbled.
So just be actually, it's OK to be proud.
Be proud.
You don't.
You've done good, mate.
It's fine.
I'm proud and **** being humble.
So thanks everyone.
I'm glad that you enjoyed it.
I really love that.
Yeah.
And I enjoyed writing for it.
I enjoyed reading your story.
So.
So thank you.
So let's move on now to some, I guess, more general comments about judging
outside our sexuality fairness of two heterosexual judges judging AL GB TQIA
plus story.
So first question for me is how heterosexual are you 'cause we're all on
the spectrum.
I'm I'm quite heterosexual, let's say, OK, quite in the American sense,
not in the British sense.
I don't know what that means.
So you're gonna have to elaborate.
When Americans say quiet, it's a enhancer.
Like, this was quite good.
OK.
When British people say it diminishes, I like this is quite good.
Oh, OK Alright.
But you're willing to let that ambiguity just kind of sit there?
OK.
No, but.
But also you chose that word, which is interesting.
And I would say for myself, I am.
I don't know what percent you would give it, but like, super heterosexual.
Except with the glaring exception of the Matildas.
Yeah.
And the Matildas can hit up my DMS anytime.
As a straight Australian woman, that is normal behaviour and that is part
of being a straight Australian woman.
That just any Matilda national obligation, it is, you know, it's part of it.
And I'm happy to wave that flag.
And when it comes time when a Matilda, yeah ends up at your house,
which they will, obviously you will do your duty.
I will.
And I'm not sure how Andy will feel about it,
but I feel like he'll be somewhat OK with it.
He's a patriot.
So yeah.
What's it like to judge stories about non heterosexual relationships?
I feel like I was open to various genders and various kind of sexualities in the
scenes.
As long as there was like an emotional connection that I could connect with.
I wasn't reading these stories to like get myself off,
so the gay stories didn't like turn me on in that way.
But at the same time, like I did still feel kind of a
connection, still appreciated the story or whatever
spice level it had.
And I really don't think that was a problem.
If it was a specific kink that I wasn't into, but it was a heterosexual couple,
I found less connection with that than just like some scenario that I could
connect with.
But it was like 2 dudes.
Yeah.
I mean, I found the same thing.
I don't feel like it was relevant really to me at all.
Not in a way that was that I found conscious anyway.
Like, of course, we could maybe argue there's some
subconscious bias going on, but no.
And I mean, I would gladly watch any movie,
read any book about any relationship and be able to connect with it.
And we, we've been joking tonight about heated
rivalry.
Yeah.
But the number of heterosexual women who are enjoying heated rivalry,
this gives a little bit of insight, I suppose, into the fact that if it's hot,
it's hot.
Like, it doesn't matter.
And I think that was the case for me.
You know, I have a bit of bias.
What is what?
Sexuality.
Is that when you're heterosexual woman, but like,
also think gay dudes are pretty hot?
What's that?
Sexuality.
It's not surprising to me because a lot of heterosexual men are into gay.
Yeah, I mean, true.
Completely logical from my perspective.
Yeah, it's interesting.
But I think for me, you know, if we're talking bias and so on,
and we did have multiple heterosexual women judging guest judges as well,
that I didn't feel like that created a barrier.
And certainly some stories that did very well fall into the rainbow spectrum.
So I don't think that's anything that an author should be concerned about.
We're very open minded.
Of course.
It's not something that we were prudish about or anything like that.
Obviously we're running an ****** fiction competition,
relatively open minded in in all sorts of ways.
So yeah, no problem.
But I mean, to just to acknowledge that had we had,
for example, a gay man assisting with the judging,
we may have gotten some perspectives in the same way that we did with Elise on
some of the kinks stuff.
She provided some perspective, some insight on certain things.
There may have been things that we didn't pick up on just because of our experience
that may have like enhanced a story.
That's true.
But I do also think that if something spicy, it's spicy.
And yeah, it sort of doesn't matter to some extent.
I guess I was kind of more shocked than anything that it didn't matter to me and
that I wouldn't even necessarily be able to tell you for some stories who the
characters were.
You know, I'm remembering the themes and and kind
of the events and it becomes irrelevant to some degree for some stories.
So one of the things we did when we're reading the stories,
sometimes in the comments and sometimes just to ourselves,
was to guess the try to guess the gender of the author.
And it's funny because it is, you know, gender is complicated, obviously,
but it is apparent a lot of the time the gender of the writer.
Yeah.
And it's not always the gender of the protagonist, right,
Or the main character or the point of view character.
Sometimes these things come through anyway in the perspective.
And I just want to raise at this point how offended you were about our
experience writing for the competition.
And that was that I said this was very obviously written by a man.
Well, look, that wasn't an offensive comment,
but I did try to be empathetic, interesting in terms of, you know,
the experience.
But this is all just defensiveness on my part.
And it's fair enough.
It was written by a man.
So what do you want?
Yeah.
I mean, it's fine.
It's not an insult.
It's just a fact.
Yeah.
But it's interesting.
The male gays, the female gays, sometimes you can pick it.
And so we wanted to talk a little as well about some common expressions.
Yeah.
So I think there were just a couple of things for me that I saw again and again
and which became a little bit triggering in a way.
And it's, look, they're in a lot of stories.
So it's not to say that these stories didn't make the long list or what have
you, but for me became a little bit cliche.
So something to think about if you're gonna continue writing in the ******
fiction space.
One of those.
And this was particularly in the romance category.
The phrase or the expression close, the distance between them.
You know he's coming for the kiss or what have you and that's hot.
But like by the 12th time you're reading that it becomes cliche and it and it
feels like there must be another way of phrasing this.
I have to say though, in my own experience of writing for this
comp, there was 1 scene or the one element of
my story where I had to describe that happening and I did struggle to describe
that and it is hard.
This is the problem, though, with all cliche expressions,
is that they're a wonderful expression.
You know, they work and they resonate with people
and, and they feel incredibly true.
And that's why we come back to them time and time again.
I think as authors, we always have to challenge ourselves to
look beyond the cliches, even though they're so great,
and find another way of expressing it, which maybe is more specific to that
character or more specific to that setting or that authorial voice.
So it's a challenge.
And look, if you do want to stand out, you've got to be careful to avoid the
cliches.
And look, another one for me was hitched breaths or
caught breaths, like her breath caught in her throat kind
of thing.
And again, like that's a resonant kind of moment.
I understand that moment.
It's sensory, it's valid, you know, However,
one in 10 stories had a hitched breath or a caught breath and I'm not even talking.
I caught my breath like because I was running, I'm talking,
it caught in my throat, it hitched.
So again, like, can we find another way of expressing
that moment of desire that maybe feels a bit more original to our authorial voice?
Don't even get me started on caught glimpses or glances or sights.
Like I caught sight of this.
I caught sight of it.
I think that would be even more than one in 10.
And these are phrases which would come up time and again in just all sorts of
fiction as well.
So if we can find ways to express things that maybe haven't been expressed that
way before, that's always a challenge worth pursuing.
Yeah.
And one thing I found about writing a scene is that there are these beats and
there are these moments that do come up again and again.
And things like the hitched breath or the court glance,
they might just happen as a moment, but they happen again and again and again.
Because really, like when you boil it down, sex, go on,
I'm on the edge of my ******* seat.
Go on.
The act of intercourse, let's say, is pretty repeatable.
And I mean, you're not.
You're describing the same thing, right?
You're describing it regardless of the characters, regardless of the scenario.
There are different things you can do.
I'm not saying there's not.
But when it comes down to it, it is the same kinds of things that are
being described.
And so when you're writing a story and a scene and you're trying to go from one
thing to the next, it's inevitable that you're gonna hit
these beats.
I wanna get into it a little bit as well.
Cringe.
Yeah.
Words and phrases now, like, I'm being harsh here.
This isn't to say your story didn't make the long list.
If you included this stuff.
It's just a challenge, I guess.
These are, like, weird personal nitpicks.
Go ahead.
Do you want to share yours?
Yeah.
So personal bias for me was terms like mummy and Daddy and I don't know,
do we need to have it?
Like, do you need to lean back on the couch
right now and tell me what's?
But no, this is, I think this is like a cultural thing,
especially with Americans.
And oh, right, it's really, I don't know the whole daddy and but I
feel like in America, it's a bit more of a thing that you say.
I feel like I'm just speaking on behalf of all women,
which I feel very equipped and enabled to do without any blowback whatsoever is to
say the daddy thing, the zaddy thing, all of that is a little bit tongue in
cheek.
There is an element of sex appeal in older men, for example,
and there's certainly a well documented element of women with daddy issues
approaching problematic men.
OK, but not even getting into that space, getting into a a more healthy space where
it's kind of just a bit of a joke.
So a zaddy, you know, like basically a very sexy older man.
I'm picturing Jeff Goldblum.
He's a zaddy, OK?
I don't conflate that with my own father, OK?
It's just he's an older man.
He's sexy.
It's a bit of a joke.
That's what we call him.
He's a zaddy.
It's like a **** thing.
No, you know, like, I OK, I get that.
Yeah.
But when someone says I know daddy to you or to another character, for me,
that takes me out of the moment of being like what?
I mean, I think there's, I feel like there is a very big
demographic of people who are making a lot of money saying that to people.
Yeah, no, I agree.
Like once it starts to get into territory of that being a little bit real,
that's not appealing to me personally.
But yeah, we saw plenty of daddy stories, mommy stories,
and the closer it gets to a an actual parent child situation,
the grosser it is to me.
I'm gonna say it wasn't universal.
And there were some stories that kind of stood out that tackled this whole area
quite well and and were great stories.
I'm just saying as a general thing, when a woman in a story says hey,
Daddy or the man says hey, mommy, yeah, it's a bit of an ick for me.
OK, All right.
You're allowed to have your icks in terms of, I guess for me, cringy stuff,
like sometimes it's just the words that he used.
And famously, ****** fiction has some cringy words.
And I just want to recall that scene from 10 Things I Hate About You where the
principal of the school is talking about ****** fiction that she's writing and
she's trying to get inspiration for yet another euphemism for penis hot dog.
Yeah, the Bratwurst, I think it was, which is good fun and very funny.
Sometimes we try a little bit too hard to kind of window dress these expressions
that maybe we all have a common word for.
And I did find that a little bit cringy at times,
like a couple of words in particular that stood out to me.
And one of those is sex, but as a body part.
Yeah.
And specifically a female body part that her sex.
And this is not to shame all of those stories because you are more than
entitled to have a different opinion to me about how to describe that body part.
But just being very honest and open, it's not a way that I would ever describe
my own body ever in any context.
Yeah.
And I think that's where the line is for me.
And I'm just one person.
I'm more than willing to hear other people in their experience,
but what's real?
Like, how would you say that if you were
telling your friend, your bestie some wild sex story about
your life?
Is that how you would describe it?
And I'm pretty sure that for 99% of people,
that is never the word that you would choose.
And, and so if for me, it, it did not resonate as like a genuine
expression of that character's viewpoint.
And I know that you use that word your story.
So I know this is triggering for you.
And look, I know for some people it's like a way of
just trying to take a euphemistic look and, and rather, and look,
I'm not saying that ***** is a better choice because it may not be,
We don't need to necessarily get scientific about our terminology either.
And it becomes difficult.
We could have a whole list of what it could be instead and they could be
equally cringed.
I think it's contextual.
And you're right that you wouldn't say that in normal conversation, right?
But you wouldn't say a lot of things in normal conversation.
And sometimes it, I feel like sometimes it's the right word.
I know for my own story, sometimes I used the C word and sometimes
I used other words and it was more about the character's frame of mind in that
moment.
Like if the character is getting right down dirty at that moment,
then you might use the C word.
If if they're just kind of warming up, then you might use something more polite.
And that's how I kind of treated it.
And I think sex is a valid part of that spectrum.
I understand it's triggering for you.
One of the writing rules we talk about just kind of outside ****** fiction is
with respect to to dialogue tags and always use said.
And I wonder how much that kind of thing applies to ****** fiction.
Like always use ****.
Yeah, exactly.
So seriously, always use ****.
That's my feeling on the manner.
And what's your word for the other one?
It's a good point because it does depend.
It really does depend.
I don't even think you necessarily need a word all the time.
If it is feeling cringe, you can avoid the word word altogether
because it can be implied by the action.
I'm gonna call out a quote from the story ****** by Jane Slight in his comp.
And the quote is **** is such an ugly word and vagina sounds so medical,
so ***** it must be valid.
Thanks, Jane.
100% solved it for us.
You have 100%.
But look, ***** is also a little bit awkward.
Yeah.
And strange.
So actually, there really just isn't a good one.
I think **** is pretty much it.
Like it's the standard.
Yeah.
It still does have a weird connotation for me, but it's fine.
Mm Hmm.
But with the female side of things, I think it's various degrees of awkward.
Now might be the time for me to just touch on, if you will,
a couple of stories that really went there when it comes to the male anatomy.
OK, so we're talking euphemisms for penis and
for female anatomy.
I think we've got a range there.
But the creativity of these stories, I'm gonna go through it because I feel
like it better.
You have several pages that are just concerning.
This is it's one page.
Settle down.
All right, so first of all, I'm gonna start very simply with one
story, which was The Jiggle War Diaries by
Reginald John.
But in this story, it was a story about a gnome,
garden gnome.
Absolutely amazing take on the theme, but I just wanted to call out the
reference to gnome hood as opposed to manhood.
Yeah, right.
I really appreciated that.
So But the next two stories really went all in on the penis euphemisms.
So the first story I'm gonna call out is Rob Moore with the story Jeff Gets
Emptied.
And I'm just gonna share with you the various euphemisms for penis,
of which there were fourteen in 1500.
Word story.
Lucky Jeff.
So we had chicken, as in you might choke one salami.
Mm.
Hmm.
**** times 3.
That was used three times.
I mean, can't go past a ****.
Extendable love stick.
Come lolly.
I feel like we made a jump there.
Yeah, we've cocked to that escalated quickly.
It it escalated quickly.
We've got the fornicators.
Frankfurter.
Mm.
Hmm.
We have love pump sperm sausage **** pole bang pipe **** times 2 and listen,
if you're short of a **** * **** will do **** will do **** rocket.
The penis capitalised very important, the penis Wang and gear stick and that
makes 14.
So thank you Rob.
What an eclectic collection.
That's wonderful.
And I just feel that that just shows an appreciation.
A real connoisseur, a penis connoisseur and another penis
connoisseur.
A penis connoisseur who goes above and beyond with 19 different euphemisms for
penis in one story.
And they are **** times 2.
Because of course you can't go past a **** throbbing member penis,
which isn't really, but I'm going to allow it.
Erection, prick, hard on rod, ******* shaft, knob, phallus, meat, organ,
Shank, tool, prong, manhood, crank, and of course ****.
19 different ways of describing a penis.
So congratulations to Southeast Reynolds with Denny's dilemma on delivering the
most euphemisms for penis of any story.
That is quite an achievement.
I'm actually not sure how you did it.
And it bears mentioning that both of those stories very much for giving me
male gaze vibes.
I don't know if that comes across in the many, many,
many different names for penis, but definitely felt like it was being
written by a man.
So on this topic, I'd like to call out one not for its
quantity.
Yes, all the quality.
It's more the quality than the quantity.
And that is from the story Lady Prattleby's Paramore,
a parody by ***** Flutters, which the wonderful pen name,
amazing pen name.
And that's just because like this one gives me a little bit of nostalgia.
And these are these are the female anatomy and ***** Flutters bit of
nostalgia.
How how long ago are we talking from my from my, you know, early teen years.
Oh, and these are words you don't encounter
too often these days.
And they are **** and velvet purse.
Wow.
So I appreciate the throwback to these terms.
What do you mean throwback?
What are we talking?
I feel like it's the 90s thing.
Well, I feel like Garth Marenge would be proud.
Oh, OK, You know, alright of these terms.
So I appreciate you.
Thank you, ***** Flutters.
And look, while we're talking about ***** Flutters,
as you do, there were a few other pen names that we
received that were lots of fun and I let's name a few our favourite.
I would love to, but first I wanna say your pen name
actually made me **** myself.
And we can't say it on air, but if you wanna DM us,
we'll tell you what it is.
And you won't find it funny at all because it's a personal joke,
but it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard in my entire life.
Yeah.
So there you go.
Well done.
So take that, Holly.
I made her pay yourself.
Look, there are too many to list here, but I'll call out maybe some of my top
ones and you can fill in the gaps.
Amanda.
Oh, hello.
So the first one is Nicholas Sparks, and that's Nicholas without knickers.
Sparks it's a great pun.
I don't know, I feel like there was a missed
opportunity for Nicholas Banks there.
But anyway, maybe it's one step, one step too far.
OK, fair enough.
The next one I liked for its sheer absurdity and wasn't that spicy,
but like it got the job done and that was Ulysses S grunt.
Mm Hmm amazing.
I love this one for it's pure innocence and that is a Willie.
Wonderful.
Thank you A, Thank you A and Edna Ellen Crowe,
who wrote the story of the Telltale ****.
And of course, that is a play on Edgar Allen Poe.
Absolutely.
Now, listen, I've got a few more.
Yeah.
I just wanna call out all the ones that gave me a little giggle,
and that includes Doctor Juice.
Mm Hmm.
Ella Moorcock.
Can I just say apologies if this is your real name.
If this is your real name, well done on that.
And you need to continue writing ****** fiction.
So thank you.
Ella Moorcock.
Ernestina Debauchery.
Mm.
Hmm.
We've got Hester Prim.
A little bit of a call back to Hester Prynne.
We've got Juicy Fruit.
We have Miss Andrist.
Miss Andrist.
We have one night owl, One night stand night owl.
Throw it together.
You got one night owl.
We have Randy love and this is problematic potentially but I have been
re watching home improvement and I was a Jonathan Taylor Thomas girl as was every
single other girl my age and so Randy love really spoke to me.
We have Rick Longfellow, which is just a a nice classic there up
there with a Willy, I have to say.
We have Secret Admirer, which is a little bit special.
I'm not quite sure who that was, so thank you.
We've got 2 horn bags, so I guess that was a joint submission.
And I just want to mostly shout out all of those authors who wrote under their
real names.
So we'll be calling out some real names as things go ahead with the category
specific podiums and so on.
And well done 'cause that's no small fee.
Look, it does take a lot.
And I know there were some sneaky people that were submitting under sneaky throw
away Gmail accounts or what have you.
And then amongst that you guys were submitting under your real name.
So well done you indeed.
We do wanna do some more call outs, but before we get there,
a little bit more about our own experiences because we wrote for this,
as we've mentioned.
And that was one of the things that I was really looking forward to.
I guess the driver for this comp, The reason why we did this is because
****** fiction is something that people read and think I could do better,
or maybe they've read bad ****** fiction and think that they could write some
themselves.
They.
He's speaking in the third person.
But this is really very much a story about himself.
Yeah, go on.
And me.
And I've never written anything that is dedicated as ******.
And that's like its point.
So I wanted to chat, challenge myself, and we each submitted a story anonymously
for the comp and went into the general pool.
And part of it was that we wouldn't just force our story through work in any way.
Like we would rate it high enough that the other person would read it and we
would be vague enough in our comments to kind of put the onus on the other person
maybe to make the determination.
So we did that.
And look, we've been toying with the idea before we
go any further, we've been toying with the idea that as
we release these compilations of stories, and we will probably release more than
one, we might include our stories in there as
well under a pen name.
And we won't reveal which stories are ours,
but we'll put the call out to people to guess which ones were written by the fun.
I'm happy to be open, but it just feels like fun.
It's not a big secret, but it's just a little bit of extra fun.
See if our listeners can guess which stories were ours and see if you rate
them or not.
Yeah.
Like, obviously we were never going to be
eligible for prizes in our own competition.
That was never gonna be the thing.
But I know speaking for myself, that a big part of the appeal of this was
to be sneaky and to try and get you to love my story and not know that it was my
story.
And I mean, I've entered other competitions and of
course you care.
Like the result was I longlisted or not and all this sort of stuff.
But like, I care what you think and I wanted you to
like my story.
Same, same.
And we look, we went to the trouble of because
obviously it's judge blind.
And we figured if one of us did make or both of us did make the longlist or the
shortlist or higher, then we found out that it was our story,
then we would have to disqualify.
And then how would we fill the remaining spots?
So we for every level, we picked reserves basically.
So we we had reserve longlisters, reserve podium finishes, reserve winners,
which is very right up ourselves, but presumptuous.
Yeah, but you had to be careful.
Yeah.
We didn't wanna get into a situation where we had to choose someone who we
knew wrote the story.
We want to make sure it was blind.
So we did that.
And look, I, I'm proud to announce that we actually
both made the long list in our own competition, made our own long list,
which I'm very pleased with because, you know, there's no guarantees.
There's a lot of entries and a lot of great entries.
And of course, we are not in the long list because we
bumped ourselves.
We bumped ourselves out of there.
But it was a a little moral win.
It was lovely while it lasted.
Yeah.
But yeah, like just wanted to talk about our
experiences writing for the comp because I.
Found it challenging on many fronts and different to writing for flash fiction.
One of the reasons is just the, you know, the length of the story being longer than
what we normally write from flash comps.
There's 1500 words.
And I wanted to write close to the word count as well just to take advantage of
the space.
But yeah, like what are some of the, I guess, challenges,
thoughts that you had and I'll speak to talk about some of mine as well.
Yeah, I guess the biggest one is the one that
many people face, which is going out of my comfort zone and
writing something super sexy, which is not something that I normally do.
I have done it actually, in fact, not that long ago,
being prompted to write spicy things more recently for fun.
And it is fun.
It's great fun, but it is very exposing.
And, you know, when we were starting to receive the
submissions and we were talking about stories from early on,
and I guess I had the advantage of knowing that both of us maybe felt like a
lot of the stories were a little too demure and could have done with a little
bit more spice.
So I ramped everything up.
I turned all my dials to 11 for the spice factor and hoped that that would see my
story through.
But in doing so, I guess it's confronting.
It's not worth defending myself, I guess.
But like, the story that I wrote is not necessarily
something that I think is particularly appealing.
It's not the things that happened in my story are not things that I necessarily
want to happen to me or fantasise about or whatever,
but that I added to my story to kind of bump it up and make it more exciting and
more interesting.
I did share it with a couple of friends, including Dean as a beta reader.
So Dean has read my story and had some very valuable feedback,
a lot of which I ignored because it was the last minute and I had no time to
adopt any of it, but which I would adopt if I were to
maybe publish this story.
I might have another look at it and I did share it with my best friend as well who
now text me occasionally with like sort of PTSD episodes as a result of reading
my stories.
So what about you?
Yes, I did find it a challenge and it took me,
I think, about six weeks to write my story and not
24/7 or anything, you know, normally when you're writing it to
concentrate.
But I felt even more that I had to be in the right frame of mind and not have
distractions and especially like kids hanging around and walking into the room
kind of thing.
So I had to do it when I was undistracted.
So that was a limitation.
I think that was there more so than normal.
But yeah, the content of the writing, there was a couple of levels that I found
challenging.
One of the levels was the use of the body parts words and how to keep that
interesting and not too cringy and appropriate for the moment.
But also like the actions, because there's a risk when you're
talking about a sex scene that it becomes very mechanical and who's doing what at
what frequency situation.
It's too it's very much just the the motions of what's happening and without
an emotional connection.
So the challenge for me was then like how to build that emotional connection and
characters and like, what did they see in each other and what
were their motivations and the standard kind of things that go into a story,
but focused more towards like, I guess a different outcome because,
you know, it could write a scene where people have
sex, but that's not what makes it ******.
And for me, that was the challenges, how to transform it.
And I look, I don't know if I was particularly
successful.
I don't think I was 100% to my own standards,
but I found the process rewarding.
And I think I learned a lot in the process.
And one of the things I did struggle with is not having you as a beta reader as
well.
Because normally I'll send it to you and be like, what is wrong?
And you would have been like, this is so bell gaze and like cut this
and cut that.
But I couldn't this time around.
It's all right to be male gaze, by the way.
No, but it was more just like there are
things that could have been changed for me that one of the big things was just
avoiding stage directions, you know, when they're not needed.
And there is a fair amount of stage directions that need to happen,
taking a step forward or yeah, something like that.
Yeah, Need to be very intentional with with the
way that you phrase things.
So there's a lot of self critiquing happening.
Yeah, I think I did well in turning my the part
of my brain off that was telling me this is wrong.
I don't know.
And avoiding cringe is another one because sometimes I would write something
and then kind of cringe at it.
And then I think you have to embrace that and explore why that made you cringe was
the words.
But this is the thing, like, when you as the author cringe,
that might be a good thing because it means you're exposing yourself in a way
that's like, compelling, as opposed to the cringe that the reader
might feel on, in fact, the opposite, where you are censoring yourself and
using terminology or using a phrase that maybe feels less real.
And if you as an author are cringing when you're writing ****** fiction,
I think you're probably doing it right.
And I guess the last thing is something you've touched on about revealing
yourself is that thought of, will people think that this is something
I'm into?
Like, yeah, this is my thing.
But The thing is, you can't help but put things in there
that would appeal to you, I feel, but not necessarily everything.
Do we get together which thing you're writing to?
What you're writing, the scene?
Yeah.
For its own sake.
But there will inevitably be things in there that like for you.
And there will inevitably be things that are in there for the story, I guess.
But also, who cares?
Because if someone is reading it and curious,
that's their own fault if they find out what you're into.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
So one thing I want to share about writing my story was how many months I
spent thinking about my story.
But before I actually put key to board, I was thinking about it,
trying to make the logic work, trying to develop a plot in my head.
And as I do with just about everything in my life,
I think I overthought it a little bit because I was in love with my concept.
I thought it was so funny.
I thought it was really fun and I was like, look,
it's funny and that's my starting point and I'm just gonna go hard as I possibly
can on the erotica aspect and just hope for the best.
So that's how that was our experience and a lot of fun.
Very stressful because you know, I was just, I left it way too late.
I gave myself two months, but that wasn't enough.
Like I needed the whole year to kind of think about it and I'm to tell it was a
better.
It was a mission, but I'm glad I did it.
Yeah, me too.
I don't think I've learned that this is my calling.
I have to say this is another thing I struggle with as well is like, you know,
going back to this idea of like pretty much the same thing every time.
Isn't it like 1 ****** story?
OK, maybe couple you can come with some
scenarios, but I would struggle being an ******
author.
And it's all about the scenario.
It is about the scenario, isn't it?
Yeah, about the scene so much.
And the bill was thinking about new ways to describe that same kind of thing
happening in different permutations, the challenges.
I mean, we've got some inspiration now.
Don't.
We've read a bunch.
We have, Yes.
All right, so Next up, we're going to speak to Linda Atkins.
Linda is a recent daredevil.
She enlisted several times.
She's somewhere on the leaderboard there.
And we've met Linda in real life.
She's a local near where we live.
And it turns out she's a gynaecologist.
So she's here to answer all of our burning questions,
of which there are many.
Yeah, many questions about burning.
That's a whole different story.
But burning questions about female anatomy,
these are some of our burning questions, but I think there are also some of your
burning questions.
You out there who have entered this competition,
there may be some things that came up of which we want to clear the record.
And so let's do that now with someone who has authority on the subject.
Sounds good.
So thanks for joining us, Linda.
It's a pleasure.
So tell us a little bit about your background.
We understand you're a gynaecologist.
That's correct.
I'm actually a sub specialist where I work in prenatal diagnosis and fertility
testing.
So I'm working in the imaging field.
But to get to that field you have to do your full training as a gynaecologist
first before you sub specialised.
So it's sort of a I've gone all the way, pay the job,
we're gonna pay on your behalf.
Here we go.
Thank you.
That's another dollar in the jar.
All right.
But we had some specific questions.
Now, completely unsurprisingly to me and
probably to you, Linda as well, is that none of our anatomy questions are
about men.
They're all about women.
Apparently the female body continues to be a mystery to all.
And so I guess my first question to you is why as a doctor,
as I guess a scientist, do you have any insight into why the
female body is still such a mystery to men and women around the world?
I think for a very long period of time, there just wasn't much of an interest.
Female sexuality has gone largely under the radar.
And interestingly, sort of the research that's going on in
into female sexuality is not conducted by doctors who know that a significant
proportion can be a fairly prudish bunch of people.
Ohk, OK.
It's a very conservative profession.
Yeah, right.
And sexuality makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable.
And the nature of being a doctor is that the great majority of your work is in
clinical questions and very specific issues.
Medicine isn't particularly holistic.
And I think it's been up until very recent years,
a very male dominated profession.
And if you think about people that are giving grants and remember,
grants are hotly competed for in the research field.
And you've got 2 grant applicants and one says, well,
I want to study the coronary arteries and prevent heart attacks.
And the other one says, well, I want to understand what women do when
they orgasm.
You can appreciate.
Yeah.
The the money doesn't go for that.
And yet so much money goes into that field more generally.
Yes.
What we do socially is not quite the same.
No.
That's interesting to me.
And look, with our stories that we received and the
reason we'd like to speak to you today is because there were some questions of
anatomy that came up and some myths we want to dispel or some confusion we want
to erase.
And I think there's one big question that's praying on Ed's mind that he would
love to ask you.
So I'm just going to give him the floor.
I guess female *********** was the major question,
and it was handled differently by different people.
I guess we question the realism of some of it and we want to know what is it
exactly?
What's real and what's not real about what's commonly described as squirting.
What is the fluid?
What does it consist of?
Where does it come from?
I guess there are three phenomenons that you need to think about lubrication,
*********** and squirting.
And it's a very fortified thing.
You know, the, she's so turned on that she squirts all
over everything.
And it, it really is it.
And a lot of that is to do with the structure of **** and to be honest,
people sticking cameras around the place.
And then you get an idea that the more extreme something is,
the better it must be.
So we've, we've got that sort of background to it.
It let's just run through the one at a time.
The first thing to talk about is female ***********.
That's actually a pretty specific and poorly understood phenomenon because
again, trying to get Ethics Committee approval
to get two people to have sex in a lab while a team of researchers holds the
syringe there to suck it all up and see what it is, is difficult.
I mean, we we are run by ethics committees.
We have to actually prove that there's a benefit to any study that we do and it
won't harm people.
But what basically comes down to is that the the human body is quite it saves
effort, I guess you would say.
So male and female genitals, if you look at them as little embryos
have a very similar appearance.
And then depending on whether there's AY chromosome,
they develop one way or the other.
In males, you have a bladder.
Then the tube from the bladder to the tip of the penis is called the urethra and
the prostate sits around the area around the urethra and contributes fluid to
semen.
It's thought that female *********** comes from a series of glands called the
skeins glands, and they are tiny little nodular sorts of
glands.
And and speaking it from an ultrasound perspective,
they're incredibly difficult to see unless they're blocked with ultrasound
probes.
They're very, very small.
And the theory was that maybe they're what you might call the female prostate
because they produce small amounts of something called prostate specific
antigen, which is something that obviously we see
in male ***********.
The problem with that is, as I said, bodies are pretty conservative with what
they produce.
Like if you look at all the hormones, they've got a similar chemical structure.
You just add a bit here and or add a bit there to change hormonal structures.
So the fact that the skeins glands produce tiny little bits of PSA doesn't
actually mean that they're vestigial prostate,
but it is thought that they may produce some of the lubrication of the vagina
during female arousal.
And interestingly, the the prostate opens into the male
urinary tube, the urethra, but the skeins glands don't.
They open beside the urethra and not into it.
So there's some pretty critical anatomic differences.
The general feeling when you look at the studies, people say, oh,
they produce 1 to 50 mils of fluid in some women but not others.
And we don't know who produces it, but that's what they produce.
But the very rare studies that they've done have shown one to three mils have
been produced.
It's a tiny amount.
It's 1/5 of a teaspoon.
It's likely to assist in lubrication, but you're not going to see a gallon of
it coming out on the bed or someone needing to be hooked up to an IV after
sex because they lost so much fluid.
It's it's a tiny amount that differs a little bit from the stories that we all
yes, it definitely doesn't answer for the
volume of liquid that is in popular culture.
Well, that's the female ***********.
Then you've gotta talk about squirting, which is a different thing and and
something that you do.
I said see an awful lot of them **** and there's been a whole lot of argy bargy to
and fro with studies about squirting and, and basically it's urine.
This is the question I had because it's not something I have any experience with.
I'll just come out and say that, but I know my experience is just one.
And so I'm open to understanding and and learning about other people's experiences.
And I guess what you're saying is no, if you're getting a spray of something
more so than just lubrication, then it's urine.
Is that what you're saying?
That's correct.
But you know, orgasmic contractions involve quite a lot
of the pelvis and the ******** itself is a bigger organ than we originally thought
it was.
And it does run down the front wall of the vagina.
And it it's, it's a couple of centimetres long.
It's shaped like a wishbone.
It's actually quite large.
So the sort of theory is that orgasmic contractions can produce contractions of
the bladder and the urethra that are pleasurable and and in some women,
they actually produce more urine during having sex for some unknown mechanism,
but probably hormonal.
And so to the person who's squirting, it doesn't feel like they're just peeing
themselves.
It feels different.
I am told, again from my sample of not being of that
person.
Yes, I'm told it's very pleasurable.
But yeah, it is urine.
Yeah.
It's fascinating to me, though.
This is such mysterious knowledge.
Yeah.
Why don't we know this?
I feel like if this was the male body, it would be down to the like.
But you know what?
And my adventures on the Internet and on Tiktok exploring this subject,
there are women in particular who will argue up and down that no,
that's not what it is.
It's something else that's coming from somewhere else.
And the skeins gland, as you've said, is usually the culprit.
But I think based on what you're saying, it's too small just to account for that
volume of liquid.
So I think we can probably put that to bed that can we?
I mean, do we need to start a petition?
I feel like Ed is happy to be signatures one through 5000 in terms of like,
let's get this study going.
Ethical concerns aside, it's funny 'cause when you dive into some
of these subcultures, there's all this stuff about training
women to squirt, as if a woman doesn't squirt,
she's deficient.
And I just think she's probably got cleaner bedding.
Just to come back to the question of why and why it's so compelling.
I mean, we received it in stories.
And I think from a male perspective, it is a visible indication of arousal.
And I think for men, women are very mysterious,
and you never know what they're thinking.
And that is it's a revealing trade.
Is what you're saying undeniable?
And I think even for people who will not accept that squirting is just pee,
like there's a part of them that just wants to believe that.
No, no, she was really into it.
That is actually true.
Two things can be true at the same time.
It can be we, and it can be a sign that she's really
into it.
Yeah.
So that they're not literally incompatible.
Linda, it's really raining very hard.
And you're nearby, so I know it's probably raining where you
are.
I just heard some Thunder, and we've been wondering if maybe God is
against us all.
Oh, it's just gone.
Even hard.
Yeah, so it's probably a bit of white noise on
this recording.
Maybe he's really in favour of it.
In favour.
God is squirting.
Squirting.
That's awkward.
OK, so a lot of stories that we received, I guess if we're just talking volume of
fluid and again, this is fiction, so we're not talking real life.
But I just wanted to raise a couple of things,
which is 1 where I saw a lot of dripping down thighs, a lot like someone's aroused.
And this is pre sexual activity, but just based on like the sight of
someone or based on just their presence that they are dripping down their thighs.
And then similarly, well, that's in, in anticipation of sex,
but then as a result of, I guess, climax gushing.
Yeah, gushing.
So we're talking about squirting, gushing, whatever it might be.
But like this, the volume, just huge volumes of liquid with that
we're talking about.
And I guess I just wanted to understand how much of that is fiction and how much
is real.
So what could we realistically expect in terms of volume of liquid?
First of all, ****** fiction is fiction.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's, it's imaginary, it's extreme.
It, it's meant to be eternal.
So to a certain extent, sort of saying, oh,
it should be this much and not that much kind of almost defeats the purpose of,
of ****** fiction.
It's, it's just a nice way of saying, oh God, she's really hot for it.
And I'm, I'm down with that.
But in reality, women do not produce that much fluid.
There's a little bit from the skeins glands,
there's a little bit from a gland on either side of the inner lips of the
vagina down towards the back of the vagina called the Bartholins gland.
And the rest of it is caused because the arteries and veins in the pelvis become a
little engorged in women the same way they do in men.
And that causes some serum, some salty water as it were,
to philtre out through the walls of the vagina to lubricate the vagina.
But as a general rule, no, it wouldn't be running down thighs or
anything of that nature.
It's usually held within the vaginal area.
This is not an evolutionary point to it dripping down off your knees and beard.
Just a waste.
Oh, well, I mean, it's clearly not a waste in the minds of
these authors.
And look, this is not to disparage those stories
like obviously.
That's trying to emphasise how hot it is.
Now, just if we expand beyond the idea of wet
and wild thing in the bedroom, there were a few other things that
cropped up in the stories that I'd love to get your thoughts on.
Linda.
So one of those is around the quantity and closeness of orgasms.
So is it possible for women to have multiple orgasms with 0 recovery time?
For that one, I had to get a Reddit.
Women can be multi or grassmaker and they can have a very short,
what we call refractory.
So for a male, it's the time between *********** and
being able to have another erection.
And that varies from 5 minutes to 24 hours and tends to increase as a man gets
older.
The refractory.
For women, the refractory.
And Please note, when I say women, I'm referring to people with female
genitals because obviously, as I like to say to my medical students,
not everyone with female genitals is a woman,
and not every woman has this particular series of experiences and issues.
The refractory.
Can be quite short, OK, it can be a couple of minutes.
Most people seem to top out.
As far as I can tell, it's somewhere between 4:00 and 6:00.
All right, well, good for them.
But that answers my question, I guess, because we had in one story up to six,
like in a very, very short period of time.
And, and to me that seemed a lot.
But, you know, that's within the realms of possibility.
That's good to know.
And congratulations to those women.
And so just a few other questions around anatomy, I guess.
Can breasts swell as a result of sexual arousal?
Well, that's big No on that one.
But blood supply to the areola and ******* can increase and they can appear
to darken and the ******* can become erect.
Yes.
OK, all right.
But no swelling.
What a shame.
Can you imagine what it be like?
I can't even.
I just can't go.
What about can ***** become stiff as a result of sexual arousal?
Again, there tends to be that engorgement, the same engorgement that produces
lubrication, which can cause the labia to become more
prominent and to darken a little.
Doesn't happen in all women, but it certainly can happen.
Not stiffen per SE.
I mean the whole idea is flexibility.
But but yeah, I I wouldn't rule that one out.
What about can pause?
So as in the pause of your skin open as a result of sexual arousal?
And would you be able to notice if they did?
No, it can pause open anyway.
I mean, I feel like we get this mixed messaging
from ads that tell us, you know, you need to open your paws to clean them.
Is this just kind of a myth generated by the beauty industry or what are we
talking?
It's kind of out of my field, that one.
But no pause of pause.
I mean, they dilate a little when you sweat and
they shrink down a little when you're cold.
But not sexy times.
Big gaping pause.
No, that would be almost fetish time.
All right, so just back to engorgement.
Can the female abdomen become engorged as a result of sexual arousal?
So like feeling tight, like your clothes become tight because
you're aroused again, I know without further qualification, no,
it doesn't happen.
And so we had a story that talked about the hood of the **** and being able to,
like, pull it down.
Like almost, it's like you've got a hoodie and you're
kind of like pulling your hoodie down.
What are your thoughts on that?
I think with your email, that was the one that gave me the biggest
giggle.
Actually.
The ******** does have a hood.
Yes, 100% it does.
And in fact, when people get clitoral piercings,
they tend to get them through the hood of the ******** rather than the body itself.
And, and I suppose the hood would be the
equivalent of the foreskin in the male.
And it is quite sensitive tissue.
They're kind of connected to each other.
I mean, it, it's not like pulling the foreskin over
the head of a penis.
They're pretty strongly connected.
I mean, I suppose you could, but I don't think anyone would be able to
see it, No.
And you wouldn't be able to pull it far.
Realistically.
Clitoral hood pulling back **** is probably not gonna fly anatomically.
We also had some stories talking about the cervix and about sort of ramming up
against the cervix and going deep kind of thing.
And I guess I just wanted your thoughts on how pleasurable that might be for a
woman and just any thoughts around the cervix as a part of the body generally.
It's painful.
Often hitting the cervix hard causes pain during intercourse,
something we call dyspareunia.
In fact, some people have quite pronounced despair
unia and we have to advise them to have sex in particular positions to avoid that.
Because, you know, penile angling has a lot to do with
whether or not you hit the cervix as well as penile size.
Some people find pain pleasurable, some people enjoy the discomfort.
But it is one of those things where, again, I think it's more of a haha, I,
I hit a right up there, right, You know what I mean?
So hard.
I hit a cervix and I think it's definitely a male gaze thing rather than
a female gaze thing.
Yeah, most females would prefer their cervix
not to be banged around, but yeah, you can understand where the tropes about
it come, particularly the whole penis size thing
and touching the cervix with the tip of the penis.
I would like to say that I say all these things about yeses and noes, but,
you know, every rule has its exceptions.
MMM.
And every rule can be almost defined by its exceptions.
So I can say, look, this is not generally true,
but that doesn't mean it's untrue for absolutely everyone all the time.
Yeah, as you pointed out, this is ****** fiction and things are
emphasised, overemphasised.
And one of the things like for women is the the squirting and the liquids.
And for men, it's like the penis size and I can barely
get both hands around it kind of thing.
But like, for all of this, I guess there's variability.
And even with men and women and the amount of fluid they produce,
like some more than others.
So I think it's good to point out that wherever you fit on that range is normal.
Yeah.
And whether it's a little or a lot.
Yeah, exactly.
I think 1 lingering question for me around the female *********** thing is
that we had actually more than a couple of stories that talked about ejaculating
from the ****.
Now, my understanding as a woman is that the
**** is not an orifice.
It's not something that ejaculates any fluid.
However, my question is, I guess could feasibly a trans woman
whose genitals have been surgically changed to more resemble a female anatomy,
could they still ejaculate from I guess what is a constructed **** if you will?
You can't ejaculate from the ********.
OK is is the first thing it's it's all South of there is where you ejaculate.
But if you ejaculate from in terms of trans and gender affirming anatomy,
they do a tremendous job.
I must say trans women post gender affirming surgeries.
Their anatomy is is often quite difficult to distinguish from the anatomy of non
trans women, and the aim of producing a female anatomy
is to produce 1 which looks and functions like female anatomy.
So the urethra which has previously gone through the head of the penis,
which is then turned into a ********.
The urethra is sort of exteriorised, not from the clitoral tissue from,
if at all possible from beneath and as close to the position of the female
anatomy as possible.
But trans women are capable of orgasm, yes.
So what you're saying is if someone was to get gender affirming surgery and to go
from a male anatomy to a female anatomy, that they would potentially, and I mean,
I'm sure there's a great deal of variation if they were to have a clip
that that would come from penile tissue, but that the urethra would be separate to
that.
And I guess if we're talking urethra from originally a male anatomy,
that that is where semen comes from as well.
So I don't even know if a if a post surgical trans female is having an
*********** of semen or what is happening.
Not semen but but Seminole fluids.
Yes, because the prostate is generally left in
place because most of a pretty significant proportion,
let's say of sexual sensation nerves run through the prostate.
So you don't want to chop it out and it's not really doing any harm.
So the great majority of male ejaculate is produced from the prostate and the
associated glands.
So a trans woman can ejaculate from the urethra where a CIS male would ejaculate
from.
So orgasmic function is slightly different in trans women and the urethral
positioning is slightly different.
But in general, yeah, I, I think it's one of the great things
about gender affirming surgery that that sexual function can be really good.
But nevertheless, regardless of the origin story,
we can decisively say that no one's ejaculating from their ****.
There's no glance to produce lubrication in the ********.
No.
OK, great.
And so for those people who are submitting stories where that's a factor,
I would heartily encourage you to Google it because there's pictures online.
And if you want your treasure map, you will find a treasure map online
without too much trouble.
Linda, before we wrap up, like did you wanna spruke any of your
plays or you have going?
Do you wanna promote anything?
It's very sweet of you.
I'm in a playwrights project called the Parramatta Playwrights Project,
which is a lot of peace.
And it's a group of playwrights focusing on Parramatta as a centre for
barramatical culture and in a sort of hope to get Parramatta recognised as a
UNESCO City of Literature.
So if anyone is Western Sydney based and they see anything about it,
please support it.
It's a really great course.
We'll have an industry day on the 1st of April where we'll be reading the combined
work of the playwrights to industry professionals and then we'll see where it
goes from there.
But it's going to be Parramatta based and it is in conjunction with the traditional
custodians of the land on which we live.
And is there a website that people can find information about that?
Not at this stage because we'll be busy creating,
but I will keep you posted when information as to performances and such
like comes out.
We'd love to see be as many Not Quite writers as possible supporting this
project.
Absolutely.
And we really appreciate you sharing your time with us, Linda.
And we look forward to your next story submissions for the Not Quite Right Prize.
We always love reading your stories.
Oh, thank you.
And please don't give me a bazillion calls and emails saying yes.
But I do exceptions to find the rules sometimes.
Yeah, but I am speaking in general for all
those people who are listening to the podcast throwing things at their headsets.
This is general advice as opposed to specific advice for every person who's
ever had an orgasm.
Yeah.
Thank you, Linda, for dispelling some of those rumours and
myths and somewhat demystifying the female anatomy.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure.
And just remember, if it exists, someone's turned on by it.
Absolutely.
We've learnt that lesson for sure.
This was something that was praying on your mind.
Is that fair to say?
OK, look, I've I've done research into some of the
things that we have discussed.
Sometimes Google just doesn't cut it, you know?
Yeah, you need a real humour and and even
Reddit, like as if Reddit isn't very and you
think you've gone to the bottom of the rabbit hole and there's more hole at the
bottom.
OK to get into.
Alright.
I'm glad we we got some answers.
I'm glad we don't have to talk about rabbit holes anymore.
So let's move on now to some more call outs and we will start with our favourite
titles.
So I'm going to call out some titles, no particular order,
no particular category with these titles and with these lines.
I just want to stay up front.
There are too many to mention.
There were thousands of lines and hundreds of titles that were great.
So if you don't get a shout out and your title is great or your line was great,
we probably thought it was great, but there are just way too many to call.
I literally have binders here.
You've got binders, I've got binders.
We're not going to be able to read them all,
but I've got them all here and I appreciate every single one of you.
Okay, so rapid fire, I think a little bit.
Yeah.
So number one is Still Life by Oliver Broome.
And I like that title because it was about sex with a mannequin.
And I love the connotation there.
Mannequins.
My phobia.
You gotta break out of your comfort zone.
**** a mannequin.
Is that how I cure it?
Yeah.
Exposure therapy.
Literally, literally.
OK.
And there's not much to expose on a mannequin.
Yeah.
I mean, they're they've been exposed.
It's a bit of a Ken doll situation.
It's the bulge, isn't it?
What do you think about it?
The next one is Conclaves of the Literati.
So a little bit of a pun on literati, but it's litterati like ****** fiction.
And that was by Rana Campbell, so well done on that.
**** me like one of your city Gaze by Jay Hart, which I love.
OHH title.
OK as a just as title title.
What is a way of life?
A Wet Wednesday at the Pink School by Sabine McDonald.
Just because it's a little bit intriguing, does A Wet Wednesday at the Pink School
entail do tell?
Yeah, I feel like that is intentionally
suggestive.
I enjoyed A Wand of Much Magic by Julie Grayson which is about a Hitachi magic
wand and connoisseurs will know what I'm talking about.
Eyes like Gold Mouth like Sin by Mara de Lune,
which sounds very intense and I believe featured a monster from the **** me Like
One of Your City Gaze School thought is Paint Me Like One of Your Fence Girls by
Jack Lewis Edney, which is a story about painting.
Mm hmm, one of my faves.
Great title and we would be remiss if we didn't mention Fork Me Zaddy by none
other than Holly Sadowski from Kansas.
Not to be confused with the other Holly Sadowski, which is more problematic.
It's at this point I'm, I'm not sure, but well done on your title.
And listeners of the podcast may recall that I learned the term zaddy in episode
4 of the podcast.
Oh, did you?
OK For the love of Harvey episode, And you introduced me to that term.
That episode, Jimmy Stewart described Jimmy Stewart as
a zaddy.
Yeah, see it into my consciousness.
Simply the base by Ryan Fleming, which I enjoyed.
And that was about barbecuing.
So great title, **** AI by Scott Doherty, which was really captured how we were
feeling.
Yeah, when we were reading these stories when
there were quite a few that were obviously submitted via AI.
So was on Scott Love on the Landline by Ivy Craven.
Nice bit of alliteration and a lovely story as well.
So well done there Ivy.
And finally, That's the Ticket by Kirk van der Beek.
And this is one of those titles that recalls the story so memorable,
which was a hilarious story about several unsexy phrases,
one of them being That's the Ticket.
Yes, post or mid coitus.
Alright, well, I'm gonna share some of mine now,
so open up the binders.
I wanna start with Not Another Timeshare seminar by Neve M Timeshare seminar being
one of the least sexy things that you can possibly encounter.
So thank you for that, Neve.
We also had The Art of Subduction by Sam James.
And this is one of those occasions where I learn a new word.
It's not something I'm going to retain, but for the brief period in time where we
are talking about this story, I will retain it.
And I've looked it up.
So subduction is this sideways and downward movement of the edge of a plate
of the Earth's crust into the mantle beneath another plate.
And this was a story about a volcano erupting,
which is super hot when you you think about it.
Yeah.
So thank you, Sam, for that one.
And was it a billionaire volcano?
We can only assume, but subduction as opposed to seduction.
Love it.
Excellent.
Thank you, Sam.
We also had pre existing condition by Andrew Riddles.
Now, that title alone is probably not
particularly stand out, but it was a story about someone who had
like a a face mask kink.
Yeah, I remember this one.
Yeah.
I mean, we've all emerged now from the face mask
era.
I mean, there's still a thing and I hope they
continue to be a thing because they're very helpful.
But this was a fun story about a a kink resulting from that.
So that was great.
Thank you, Andrew.
I also enjoyed Unexpected Item in Bagging Area by Harry H which was a story about
like a self checkout, A ****** self checkout that materialises
in human form, which was fun.
One that has stayed with me is Dodgy Locks and the Three Beds with me too.
Yeah, and the story as well, but that was from Susan McLaughlin and
that was a fun title and A and a fun?
Problematic, challenging, totally appropriate for the competition
story.
I can't unread that.
We can't unread that story.
So thank you Susan.
I also enjoyed Wet the Touch by Juliet Rees,
which had one of my favourite it takes on the theme, which was watching paint dry,
which is so great.
So thank you Juliet for that one.
I also enjoyed sliding into the Boss's DM by Bobby Iverson and that had a bit of a
double entendre going on in terms of which DM was being slid into and I
thought that was funny and and certainly memorable and recalls the whole story.
So thank you for that, Bobby.
And finally, one of my favourite just punny titles,
which was Missionary Impossible from Claire Marsh.
And that's one that time and time again my eyes went back to as just a very,
very clever title for this competition, Missionary Impossible.
So thank you, Claire.
Let's move on to our favourite lines or lines that we want to call out from our
stories.
There were a little list here, and the first one I wanted to call out,
and I'll read the line 1st and then explain the story.
The back story here.
And the line was his hands roamed clumsy but eager,
mapping curves like cartographers with trembling pens.
Ohh.
And perhaps you recognise this nice line because it came from your decoy story.
You submitted a story mostly by AI.
And I had recorded this at line as as a memorable 1 to me.
So I just wanted to like put that here to note that it is difficult to tell and
that sometimes AI will spit out some good lines.
So that was 100% AI.
That was not me.
Yeah.
It's tricky and sad.
The next one on a nicer note from the story The Nymph by Laura Duvall and that.
Line was husband pretend I'm a ******** don't come looking for me,
which is a fun line to say to someone as a as a comeback line from the story Blood
Stained Hands by Stephanie Jacqueline and the line was this is so ******* wrong.
My **** cannot be throbbing with need at the thought of my boss's killer *******
me with fingers coated in my blood.
And I just want to call out that line for expressing such a crazy premise to story
like so out there from the story.
******* scary.
I hope by Cal and I know exactly the line you're gonna say as well.
Well, it's the opening line.
I'm gonna.
Oh, OK, And this one is for drawing me in and for
the premise of the story And the line is tonight is the night.
Tonight I will **** the boogeyman.
So main.
This is my best chance to hop on the Babadook's Beautiful Babadook and amazing.
So good.
Thank you.
This is, I think, my favourite line from the whole
competition.
Oh, wow, I'll be cool.
It comes from the story Eye Bangers by Nina Miller.
Oh my God.
And this is a story about an optometrist.
And you know when you go to the optometrist and they're like better one
or better two?
Comparing the two slides that they have, well, this one recontextualizes it better.
One, she felt him slide a finger deep within
her, unleashing a flow that she felt pulled
beneath her or better, too.
That was amazing.
I loved it.
And what a great story as well.
Oh my God.
I just want to call out some lines from Forever My given by Jessica Druke.
And this is just for the challenge of, I guess, writing about alien anatomy.
There's another story that I remember well,
and there are a few stories that kind of went there with alien beings and,
you know, mystical beings and monsters and things
that are.
And I think it's a specific challenge as well in ****** fiction is to make those
come to life.
And so the line is she unzipped her mini dress, freeing her four breasts.
As he tore off his clothes and unquilted the bed,
her underwear fell ooze wet and pungent.
And so just, I mean, you know, evoking different anatomy and without,
like you had me at 4 breasts is what you're trying to say.
I wanted to call out this line, which is actually quite innocuous,
and it is from The Big Spoon by Althea Paul.
And this is an opening line which would work well, I think,
in any flash fiction contest.
And that is there's a spoon in my silverware drawer.
And I'm not sure how it got there.
And this is a inanimate object situation with a spoon.
Nice.
But like, just that kind of intriguing opening line
that draws you in.
So well done on that.
This is a bit of an odd one.
It's from slaughter Slab of Raging lust by Spirit.
And the line is I pound into her softness vigorously,
willing to eviscerate her desire as the fusion of our private parts Make fluffy
music.
And there's something about that term fluffy music that resonated with me.
Oh, you make fluffy music.
I think it's something about that sound of being.
Now go on, I want to listen.
Go close your eyes, let it transport you.
You OK?
No, I got transported and I can't come back.
A little bit of an alliteration for old timer sake by PM Green and the lion is.
She raised her bottom as his pulsing penis pushed past her pouting portal,
probing deeply.
E So lots of lots of.
PS PPS Yeah, just an opening line that an attention
grabbing opening line, if you will.
And this is from Little Oblivion by hard G And the line is there's a face between
my legs.
There's some quite the predicament.
Yeah, I have to say I've read that fine the
first time.
And then the second time I read it, for whatever reason,
I don't know what was in my brain at this point,
but I pictured a scenario where there's like a face.
Yeah, like looking out from the groyne area.
But here's the thing, in this comp, like that could have been,
could have been like, there's no, there's no limits here.
So, yeah.
And the first time I wouldn't have been shocked either way.
So on a little bit of more serious note, a couple of lines from A Little Leprosy
by Adria Muller.
I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly, and I'm probably not,
but there are a lot of great lines in this story.
It's a very evocative story, very lovely prose.
I bury my face against the chords of your neck and see that sun,
so obscenely round and orange, about to burst from its rind,
setting and rising, rising and setting behind my eyelids.
And I love that image of the orange bout to burst from its rind.
So lovely phrase there.
And another one from the same story.
How I loved ******* you in the Chapel, finding you in your solitary prayers and
pressing down onto you, riding your gnarled knees in the back
pews, sucking your fingers in the confessional
booth, urging you to bend me over the altar
under the ecstatic Christ on his crucifix, eyes rolled skyward,
mouth slackened into a lascivious O.
So some beautiful phrasing there.
And that's a story that is about leprosy lovers who have leprosy,
which is a great take on the theme.
And some great phrases in that story.
Beautiful, beautiful phrasing.
I'd like to call out this line just for its attention to detail in terms of here
we go description, And this is from the story Camtron
Experiments by MGCN 2, which is magnesium cyanate.
On day 358 my wife offered the chair, her **** lying stark naked on her left
side.
Right leg slightly raised and bent at the knee,
left hand holding it in place at the thigh, right hand at the hip.
Dainty fingers of both hands demurely stretching the brown star to either side
to accommodate the blood engorged phallus of her lover to claim the virgin in
territory I had never ventured in and male gaze?
I just appreciate it.
I think the the attention to detail OK, not real, not shying away from it.
So well done.
That's a thank you.
You say thank you.
Thank you from paint me like one of your fence girls by Jack Lewis Edney the line.
It's actually not a garden.
I was looking for someone to do my interior, which is great.
Innuendo.
Painting your interior and another one with a slightly different tone.
Yes.
**** me, you filthy paint freak, she screamed.
Coat my cabin with your pink paintbrush.
Bit of a shift in tone.
Shift in tone.
An escalation, I guess, from Bloom Service by Nara Wilson Hall.
Several good lines.
I'm going to call out this one.
Reader.
I nearly climaxed, which is a great reference to Pride and
Prejudice.
There's a story about a sea cucumber.
It's called ***** Sea Cucumber, a nautical tale by Doctor Jeuss.
And the lion is I'm fertile and you put the come in cucumber.
That is very, very hard.
From a shift in perceptions by BK vines.
The man returned shortly afterward and set his purchase on the counter.
She rang up his order and her mind wandered as he fished out a credit card.
Wood stripper, Wood strip her.
And I like that little double entendre and this idea of kind of being at work
and just fantasising about other things.
Do you need to confess now?
If I can, I put up a, a, a dark wooden wall between us.
Are you gonna tell me what you do when you're at work or I'm like 2 metres away
from where you are when you're at work?
So that's true.
From Nothing Left to Measure by Hemi Croft,
Nora painted like she ****** alone in silence after a hot shower.
Little bit sad but Nice from the Games People Play by Darren Pittar.
His fingers trailed down her spine, over her buttocks and down her legs to
return to where her flesh divided.
And I just wanted to highlight that to where her flesh divided because I,
I just wanna mention the hand gesture you're doing when you don't even know
where that I'm doing that.
Thank you for bringing attention to that.
It's dividing that flesh from the love song of John Andrew Perflock.
Out Magazine, March 20.
And this is by Linda Adkins.
And this is quite a long quote.
He turned to leave after we came, bare chested,
all the ligaments of his groyne clasped like fists beneath downy fatless skin.
T-shirt tucked like a flat bag into his back pocket,
white club band round his wrist and his belly.
Like a contour map.
Like something Lazarus would have risen for, would have rolled away.
His tombstone wept to see ranked tawny hillux of ABS,
Then his back a gully of spine between crests of slabbed muscle.
And for a second, I just couldn't believe he trembled as he
thrust, coming hard down my throat while his
fingers gently stroked my hair.
Like blowing a myth.
And that's some great writing.
Wow.
And I love that, that lion.
Like blowing a myth.
Which myth would you blow if you had the chance?
Oh, hang on, Oedipus.
Just to give him something else to think about.
You know what I'm saying?
Guy's got he's got an issue.
Too much on his mind.
Something to think about.
Yeah.
Anyways, from Girl Indulged by Chilli von Blister,
which is not a pen name, apparently I'm not a pen name and who the
**** are you 'cause I need to know immediately and if you do not slide into
my DMS and tell me who you are, I'm going to be outraged.
Sinclair slid down the couch, her mind blurry on laughter.
And yeah, she couldn't lie that 12. 5% was hitting her after a dry month,
hitting her right in the ****.
Such a memorable line.
Oh, my God.
I Yes, Thank you.
That was hilarious.
And yeah, a lot going for that story.
Who the **** are you?
Yeah.
Messages.
Now I need to know.
Thank you.
Anyway, that was quite a lot.
But Amanda, I believe you have even more.
So many more.
All right, well, I want to start with some lines that I
guess a little bit deeper, a little bit more serious, Right,
So lines that I found moving, and I'm going to start with Even if It
Ruins Us by Alice Black.
He steps closer and takes my hands in his.
His skin is warm and it steadies me, sparking something familiar that lives
low in my gut, an ache I've carried across every mile to
get here.
So that was quite moving.
We had Ablation by Javier Bateman, Love abatement.
How am I meant to love less?
How am I meant to feel less deeply?
How is everyone else not needing to tip their head back,
feel the click of their jaw as it unhinges itself, disarticulated,
limp like a paper doll, and devour.
And as someone who like, I have a lot of feelings,
as that chicken Mean Girls would say, and this resonates with me,
this idea of needing to, like, dislocate your jaw to be able to
appreciate the world.
Anyways, and another line from that story.
He blinks.
It reminds me of a lizard flicking its tongue against its own eye to keep it
moist.
And to me, that was such great characterization.
Next from Unexpected Item in Bagging Area by Harry H.
It was female, the voice, but not quite natural, soft,
a little tinny, like a woman who'd been dipped in Chrome.
And I thought that was again another, another lovely little piece of
characterization.
Show, don't tell if you will.
From a Date to Bloody Die For by Crimson Hunter.
She smelled like spring flowers on the verge of decay,
and my lungs were filled with her.
From Cocky by Pat Saunders Inserting toys into her or her partner's lady parts was
not in any way a turn on.
Her **** shrivelled thinking about it, which is very moving,
but an interesting story as well about I don't know this is gonna be triggering
for you, Ed, but for some women, penises are like not it.
You don't wanna be saying I'm aware.
And this was a story where it was not it.
And yet making that unsexy thing irresistible may or may not have been a
factor for the story I by Alex Schweiger.
The app had a dumb name and she felt stupider for having used it,
but this guy had matched with her fair and square.
That felt very real as someone who hasn't had to rely on dating apps,
but I can imagine.
And then from tonight's mouth.
From Jacqueline Hogan.
Human body fluids are so salty.
Your little oceans all walking around bound by skin and hair.
That's nice, so true.
I am so salty, let's be real.
From Alice in Mulchland by Sunitha Menon.
By the time Anjali turned 52, she'd quietly accepted that her ****
ability had expired.
Not all at once, mind you.
It slipped away in small, slow pieces.
Entropy, apathy, a long unwinding of touch.
These days she was held only by memory, which in itself is devastatingly
beautiful.
But then another line and Jolly, still in her oil stained nighty,
felt her ******* stiffen, thighs warm as if the mulch itself was
flirting.
You've been dry too long, they've been whispered.
Come rot darling, for those of you who enjoy a bit of bin
action.
And then Next up we have from Who says attending your mum's work party Has to be
boring by Jordan Dove.
And that's a story that certainly wasn't boring.
And I'm gonna give you the line that shocked me.
I feel Mum's hand firm against the back of my neck, pushing me down.
I sink to my knees as she pulls out her hardening ****.
That one took a couple of rereads for me to to fully appreciate, I think,
and come to terms with.
It was some curveballs you might say from The Void and the Beast by Lily Luce.
At rest they were a massive tentacles and lipless fanged mouths.
Nightmares churned across their misty body in ever shifting fractals.
Their core was a black so deep and lightless at night and beat them.
Now that's a very compelling way to describe a void.
It's interesting like conflating this void with maybe a non binary kind of
character.
But I thought a very compelling description from The Accidental Guru by
Joe Riley.
His friends, bless their oblivious hearts, thought Liam was just a late bloomer,
perhaps a bit shy.
They'd regale him with tales of their conquest, their fumbling first times,
their awkward encounters.
Liam would nod sagely, a secret smile playing on his lips.
They knew nothing.
They hadn't trained with the precision of a surgeon,
the endurance of a marathon runner, or the artistic flair of a modern jazz
musician.
They hadn't suffered for their art or their pleasure,
as he had with the grapefruit and the deep heat sock.
This was a guy who had dedicated himself to ************ basically.
So very compelling line there, and some lines that I found amusing
because there were many, but from **** AI by Scott Doherty.
Cool, so helpful, Ellie thought to herself.
Christ, she could use a good ******* right now.
It had been far too long.
And Jess was more than just a roommate for Ellie.
She was funny, intelligent, curvy, smelled incredible,
and the way her ******* tented the little tank she liked to wear to bed was enough
to bring a tear to her thigh.
Oh my God, so funny.
Thank you, Scott.
And then, from Eros in the Wire by Elle Toren,
she placed the tangled cable in her mouth, biting one end and tugging the other.
Little by little, she brought her lover to its full length.
She worked out its kinks, and it explored hers,
tying her wrist to the Bronze Post that imprisoned her bed.
The idea of a ******* Ethernet cable.
Yeah, this is being.
This is a sexy thing.
How do you make an Ethernet cable sexy?
Congratulations.
You've done it so well done.
I'm not sure it will ever be done again.
But I also wanted to call out this other line,
which was Eros hooked its slack under her chin and forced her to stare at the
ceiling as it's near end wrapped itself around her neck, playfully choking her.
And it's far end found her five * ****.
So apart from 5G spot, I just picture it in my head.
The absolute classic cliche trophy scene in a romance where like it's the whole
I'm gonna come behind you and show you how to do golf or tennis or whatever.
I'm gonna wrap my arms around you and like help you.
And just the idea of this ******* sentient Ethernet cable wrapping itself
around this woman and, like, forcing her to look, I don't know,
the visual just gets me.
Anyway, moving on from Too Warm for Strawberries
and Cream by Gwen Bowie.
Wilde.
Lena, I would lick the sweat out of your ***
crack at any time of day.
And you know what?
That story was disgusting because sweat grosses me out,
but also really ******* hot.
So well done.
That's true, love.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Thank you, Gwen from Schlop Schlop by Marty Sinclair.
The character voice is amazing.
I'm not sure if it's a Scottish accent.
I read it in a Scottish accent.
But the one line I'm going to call out is would you bend me over the kitchen
counter and rattle me Fay behind I I'm scaring the consonants out of him.
I can't do it justice, but very good.
Thank you Marty from Silence, a story best read aloud by Sarah Power.
And my luscious **** peeping out over the corset.
They're fantastic.
Fantastic in fact.
Little bouncy puddings of bliss.
Also, if you could only see me black satin with
a lace work patina cossets my flanks like I'm a horse.
Good flanks this filly.
Good ******** flanks flank you very much.
My torso.
My horso in the corso, My God, it turns me on.
So I just want to say this is a prime example of a line that AI could never
write.
Let me give you another line AI could never write.
So noodle clad on or off?
Am IA ***** wearer or a ***** offer.
Does she offer her panties?
Are they on her or off her?
Does she offer her honour?
Does she honour her offer?
And how often are they off her or on her?
Thank you, sexy Doctor Seuss Sarah.
From with a slickness by Sienna Higgins, she glanced up at her lover and saw
desire in those intense brown eyes.
Perfect.
She was ready to put her phlegm to good use again.
And this just to me brought back sexy phlegm from friends.
It was a Phoebe.
Phoebe had a bit of a sexy phlegm thing going on.
And then from manual sex by see my booty and this was a lovely story where
erectile dysfunction just got a lot of airtime and I'm.
I'm here for it.
I'm really appreciated it.
So let me just share with you.
You're here for erectile dysfunction you know why not?
That's fine.
And in this story it was more than fine.
Let me help you with this.
Unless you want to keep all your bonus to yourself.
But if you could spare some bonus for the boneless,
I'd accept your generosity and then wait.
I gasped, ** **** twitching as she released the
pump.
We both stared, my flaccid phallus, my sullen Sabre,
my defectile erectile twitching.
It works.
Your ***** works.
She would have clapped in her usual way had my scrotum and pump not been in her
hand from making love out of nothing at all.
A passing fancy by Scott Finlay Devonshire.
This was a line that made me giggle.
His body tea made Simone want to quench her sensual first body.
T is very Gen Z, so this is like a space I'm not
comfortable in.
But thank you Scott.
And then from Little Oblivion by Hard G, This is like a story about a bit of a
disappointing man, but it was just so well expressed that I
have to share it all.
Let's go with Mike, shall we?
Not that Mike isn't trying, he's been down there a while.
In fact, he went down on me straight after we shed
our clothes and fell into bed.
I appreciate the attention, but his tongue has been circling the mark
like a plane waiting for clearance to land.
And later, Mike suddenly sticks the landing,
and I gasp in genuine pleasure.
Where's that been?
I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day.
It could almost be a different tongue, and I peer down with a vague notion that
Mike has tagged out.
It's still him, all right.
He surprises me again, eliciting another moan from my lips,
and my hips twist compulsively into his face.
There, I utter breathily.
But a broken clock is only right for a split second, and time moves ever onward.
Sorry, Mike.
And I believe it was Mark in the end.
Poor Mark missed the mark a little.
And then from Crowned in Snakes by Alchemy Dawn.
This is a pretty ***** protagonist, I have to say.
But I hate to break it to you, but an ancient snake woman isn't going to
want to **** some random ginger from the nearby village.
Mateo snickered, leaning over to playfully lick her temple.
This wasn't the first time Azura had gone out of her way to get **** down by a
monster or legend, nor would it be the last.
Now, Sarah, I feel like you've got a like some novels
awaiting to be written about you, but that's fun and from any pastory by AV
Lavender.
And this was a story where the unsexy thing was pastor,
which is a question mark 'cause I feel like pastor is sexy for many people,
but not maybe it's not commonly associated with sex.
Not maybe this sexy, at least, let's put it that way.
And the line is yes, put your thick noodle in me.
I cried.
That's that was a story that really went there.
It did.
It did, and I appreciate it.
I have to say from Occupied by Danny Dark, his penis catches on her hip and ****
like a turnstile gate at the train station.
I could just shut up.
That was just like very visual, very sensory.
Great description from Skin Deep by Crystal Lars.
Great pen name.
I've got a few here and we've got Handsome and then some.
His jaw was stunningly strong and chunkingly square,
which I could picture immediately, and he smiled.
Good choice, thought Maya.
George Clooney broad front teeth with Luke Evans canines,
the Clooney teeth said.
You can trust me, the Evans sharp sider said.
Or can you?
And finally, Maya's visits usually took this turn.
She'd thrash her way into the corridor if she needed medical assistance sometimes
still attached to her latest conquest.
From Golden Oldies by Rachel Warwick and I cackled out loud at this line.
Dorothy narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips.
My dear, the only way you could possibly make me
wet is by throwing my corpse into a lake.
Great line, thank you Rachel from Mistress Claws by
Sylvie Soul Being married to Kris Kringle was not all it was cracked up to be.
Sure, it was a comfortable life, elves to cater her every beck and call,
but immortality left a lot of time to contemplate one's own needs and desires.
And with Mr Claus busy making the kids of the world happy,
there was little time leftover for Mrs Claus Chimney to be properly cleaned.
And that was very also memorable story about Mrs Claus.
And you know, she needs some representation.
So I appreciated that from Let My Blood Haunt Your Veins by Tanya Bardsley.
He hovered so very, very close.
He was clean shaven, a face to slide on, which made me laugh.
But he's also, like, pretty great.
Great line.
Thank you, Tanya.
From Jeff Gets Emptied by Rob Moore.
Sperm bags.
You save your cream for my **** socket Mama needs love too,
which for shock value alone is pretty great.
From Orange Peach Banana by Quinn Cole.
Let's **** this cancer up the ****.
Wow.
Yeah.
But also, anyone who's been through a Cancer
journey agrees.
From A Stray's Tale by Michael T Shaper.
Who'd have thought that the stray she and her husband had adopted from the Lost
Dogs home would have turned out to be so fetching just those few nights every
month when the moon turns.
I'm sorry, but the fetching pun, you've got me.
Love it.
Thank you, Michael.
Totally inappropes, but appreciated and nonetheless.
And finally, from Lady Prebleby's Paramore,
a parody by Benny Flutters.
Do you live in there?
She managed to inquire, indicating the shed.
No, I'm on, this is where I took me chicken.
Very memorable and she can be Diane, but I appreciate the double entendre.
Thank you.
***** Flutters.
So those were our favourite lines and there were a lot of them.
There were a lot of them.
So let's move on to our favourite takes.
And these are again, not comprehensive.
There's there's too many tonight.
I've already just had to go through and scribble out a bunch just because I know
we can't sit here all night.
And I just wanna say as an overarching sentiment, holy ****.
Yeah, everybody delivered.
We had amazing titles, amazing lines, amazing takes on the theme,
so much enthusiasm for this competition.
It's very contagious.
We read all your stories, we saw all your amazing work,
and we can only call out a few, unfortunately.
So I'm just gonna say a few of my favourite takes in no particular order.
And the first one is from a story called Smoke Show by Nicholas Sparks,
The Person with no knickers.
And that's all about like, that's a cigarette perspective.
So a cigarette is being smoked and the cigarette is loving it basically a lot.
And there's some human sex happening in there as well, or implied, I guess,
in that story, sex is the foreplay to the cigarette
smoking, which is fun and yeah, perfect a response to the theme as well,
making the unsexy irresistible.
So well done to Nicholas from Michael Bowden.
The usual.
And this is 1 where sex is told in like an abstract way,
kind of like an instruction manual.
But it represents on a deeper level the way that an elderly couple might engage
and think about sex as being very much something that they've done so many times
that it becomes like inserting tab A into slot B.
So thank you.
I appreciated the hand gesture too.
Like, that picture is on the instruction manual
for sure.
From Reagan Westergard, the embrace of mycelium,
one of many mushroom stories that we received.
And mushrooms were a common response, an unsexy thing.
And especially in Australia, given recent history, a very unsexy,
you know, criminal thing from Rana Campbell,
conclaves of the litterati.
This one featured books basically engaging in ****** behaviour.
A lovely take.
Books are pretty sexy if you ask me.
But you do like to sniff a book.
I have to say I have to.
I love to open one up, penetrate it, just bury your face in it, it folds,
get lost, it's sent.
Do I need to?
There's a whole lot of books in here from Alethia Paul the Big Spoon,
and I may have already mentioned this one for other reasons,
but this is one in which a person has intimate relations with a spoon that's
hot, and who doesn't like to spoon?
You know what spooning leads to, don't you?
Spoon a little.
I know what I hope it leads to.
From Martin Tolton Liver Spots, which is about a widower who finds
himself sexually reawakened 1 morning with Liver spots being a detail he
notices.
And that one had a great voice and a stream of consciousness style and also
like highly relatable and great response.
From Zara Eloise Row Plant Daddy Dave where someone ***** a tree,
to put it quite bluntly while on hallucinogens.
Bluntly but also very accurately.
Yeah, quite sexy.
Unexpectedly sexy story and perfectly met.
The brief.
Mm Hmm.
The Unsexiest Font in the ******* World by Kai Double,
in which some fonts have sex and just a few random objects.
So Siraj Kumar, Centre Party and the story of the last
boring Thing.
And the unsexy item is a paper clip among other unsexy items.
So it's a few of those random household objects.
And Speaking of which, from Samantha Sinclair and their story
Chester, in which the unsexy object that is made
love to is a Chesterfield lounge by a woman, right?
Not a vice president.
No, not a not a vice president.
What?
Hello.
JD Vance famously ****** a lounge.
Hello Rock.
We've been like living under.
I don't want to know what JD Vance know either,
but that's he ****** the country of America first and foremost.
From Ella Moorcock.
Like a **** secret, The secret Hideaway in which the feature
is gargoyle sex.
I mean, I'm glad you read a whole bunch because I
got a whole bunch as well.
So one of my favourites, if not my favourite concept was from
Prejudice by Julia Baldorf, where the unsexy thing was the prejudice
about writing ****** fiction.
And it's like being excited by and having sexual feelings for that prejudice,
which is very meta.
And I'm totally for it.
Very Chuck Tingle.
Love it.
So thank you so much, Julia, for that.
Another very interesting and surprising take was from It's Not About Orgasms by
Romeo Derrimon, where the unsexy thing was sex.
Yeah, Now that's a big call.
Yeah.
Of all the unsexy things, like you've gone for the thing that is
sexy.
That is literally sex.
It is.
It is sex.
But in this story, for the characters who were asexual,
sex was something that was not appealing to them.
And so just exploring this idea of asexuality and sexuality within an
asexual relationship.
And this is something that we talked to Elise about as well and fascinating topic
and really, really interesting take on the theme.
So I appreciated that one from and absolute up their favourite title,
The Telltale **** by Edna Ellen Crowe.
The unsexy thing, I assume I'm led to assume that it's Poe,
Yes, Which I'm gonna take exception to, to be honest,
because who said Poe was unsexy?
Certainly not us.
Not us, that's for sure.
But in this story it went to a very dark and disturbing place.
So that was good fun.
So thank you, Edna.
And from D Day by Ernestina Debauchery, where the unsexy thing was war.
And very specifically D Day, which was used as a lovely double
entendre as well, which is good fun.
But what I loved about this one was how cancellable this concept was.
It was just really good fun.
We just the lines in it were just amazing.
There were of course many inanimate object yes, romance stories,
but one that stood out to me was from good clean Fun by Clara St.
George, where the unsexy item was a Roomba,
an automated vacuum.
And there were some other items in that story, if I recall correctly,
that some were also quite unsexy but turned out to be sexy.
Yes and another one that did not shy away from the spice.
Like if you're gonna have a Roomba, you gotta **** it.
But the last one that I wanted to call out was From Literature and Other
Eccentricities by Violet Devereaux.
And again, I'm inserting what I believe was the
unsexy thing here.
Insert away.
But I believe it was a baseball mascot, so a sporting mascot.
And I just picture the baseball mascot from The Simpsons.
You know, that guy in that's what I was picturing,
But I thought that was a really, really fun and funny take.
And in fact, I wish Violet had leaned into that even
more.
I mean, it was just sort of a small moment in the
story.
I would have loved the whole thing to be all baseball mascot yes,
but I am a very special and unique person.
But thank you so much everyone for your very very clever ideas.
I swear each story I opened I was just like Oh my God, this is so amazing.
Absolutely.
But now there's a fine line between the best takes or the most outstanding takes
and like the weirdest takes.
I feel like I covered some of those off there.
But what I know I know you've covered several like not to king shame.
This is not to say these are too weird, but these are ones that as I was reading,
I flagged saying, yes, that is weird.
Yeah, what you've given me is very weird.
That's what to say.
I didn't like it.
OK, so the first one comes from bitterly, the freshest bit.
And the sexual object there was object of sexual desire, was a head of lettuce.
You can picture it.
I can picture it.
I'm not sure I'm on board with the emotion.
You don't like a bit of head?
No comment from Jay Dixon, the doppelganger.
This is a standout scenario, I feel.
Where?
Listen, I do you remember this one?
Yes.
You're still traumatised.
Yes.
I'm very uncomfortable.
It's one of those ones I can't Unsee, which is great.
Thank you.
So a man and a woman have sex with each other,
but the twist is that they are exact doppelgangers of each other's parent.
Yeah, so Yikes.
Definitely falls into the category of weirdest fun twist, honestly.
Like it was shocking and hilarious.
It was a must read.
Absolutely.
And finally, from Jack Gemini, an open letter to the lovers I did
something gross in front of as, which delivers on its title.
It is all about burping and farting and making that sexy.
So those were some of the weirdest.
And like, there were weirder ones as well.
And some of the weirdest ones probably got disqualified, let's say that.
But look, we enjoyed them all.
We welcome all the weirdest takes and there's nothing like a super weird take
to just make you sit up and go, hmm, absolutely.
And we did issue the brief of make the unsexy irresistible.
So they've gone to the unsexiest place they can imagine and had fun with it.
And I am here for that.
I really, really appreciate that.
And as you say, it was wouldn't call it a palate cleanser.
As we were reading.
What?
What might you call it in a moose bouche, if you will,
as we were working through the stories that every now and then you'd get one
that was very surprising.
A what?
I thought there was an explanation for what's coming in a moose bouche.
A moose bouche?
Yeah.
Something to delight the mouth at the start of a fancy meal,
like maybe just a little shot glass, often kind of size of soup or something
like that to light the mouth, you say, OK, interesting.
I'll keep that one up by my sleeve when the time comes.
Good luck recalling that when you need it.
But no, there's no, I've got no chairs.
You're going to be in a fancy restaurant one day searching for those words and
you're going to come up with very different words.
The waiter was like us.
You are in the wrong establishment.
We, we are here to sell food.
What you're asking for it is it is against all the rules.
And then later he comes up and meets me in the bathroom in 5 minutes.
I will amuse your Bush.
I think I wrote my own little flesh fiction.
So, Amanda, we've been going on and on.
We've been talking **** we've been blabbing.
We have for a long time.
We're having a great time, but come on, we've waited long enough.
Let's do it.
Let's get to the long list.
Let's read out the 49 names that make up the long list for the Not Quite Right
Prize for Flesh Fiction, representing the top 10% of all
categories.
It's always tough.
There are many, many, many stories that didn't make this long
list that deserve recognition.
They were amazing.
And you know, it was so difficult to come up with this
long list.
There was a lot of toing and froing, a lot of stories that came very,
very close.
And I will say that even if your story didn't make the long list,
there's a really good chance that we might be reaching out to you to see if
you want to be published in our collection because, of course,
there were so many great stories that we want to feature there.
We'll be reaching out in the coming weeks, so stand by for that information.
And so certainly reach out if you have any questions,
but we will be emailing those authors who we would like to feature in our printed
published collection of Smart.
But with all that being said, we are very, very excited to share the names.
I know everybody's been waiting so long, these talented authors who've risen to
the top of a very, very strong pool of stories and who will
be eligible for the prizes.
And so here we are.
Without further ado, in no particular order,
the 49 names of the long list for the Not Quite Right Prize for Flesh Fiction.
Midnight by Bree Styles, Smoke Show by Nicholas Sparks.
Oblation by Javier Bateman.
Glory scheduled for Thursday morning by Kelly Jablonski.
Eros in the Wire by Elle Turin.
Biker Boots by Simon Clark.
Fantasmagoria by Aaron Tavoli with a slickness by Sienna Higgins.
The Dinner party Morning After by Aaron Hale.
Planning day gameplay by Juicy Fruit.
Daughter from California by Wellesley, Dylan.
Buy one, Get one free by Cassidy Blackthorne.
Praise song by Wes Roble.
Going Down by Verity Flame.
******* scary.
I Hope by Cal M Our friend Tommy by S Therese Laundry Day by Lauren Taylor,
Back The Things You can't fake by Sophie Sargent, The Shift by Renee Blackwood.
Love on the Landline by Ivy Craven, Magnets by Holly Havers.
Eye Bangers by Nina Miller.
Another Night Like This by Isabelle Emily who says attending your mum's work party
has to be boring by Jordan Dove Under the Weather by Rachel Howden getting piped by
Sia Morgan.
A little Leprosy by Drea Malla.
Paint Me Like one of Your fence Girls by Jack Lewis Edney.
The Succulent Garden of Lumisia by Julia Rajagopalin.
Whirligust by Sarah Royston.
Liver spots by Martin Tolton, Plant Daddy Dave by Zara Eloise Row,
The White Gloves by Nina Marine, The Tell Tale **** An Homage by Edna
Ellen Crowe.
Marwin's Marvellous Mix In My Seat by Joshua Carner.
Skin Deep by Crystal Vase, The Daily Grind by Carolyn Cullen.
Hidden Gems by JoJo Adams, The ***** sea Cucumber,
A Naughty cool Tail by Doctor Deuce, The Fine Gentleman of Bustin On Aside by
Ulysses S Grunt As They Like It by Hester Prim.
Nothing Left to Measure by Hemi Croft Carapace by JJ Robinson,
Fire Drill by Jasmine Simone, In Sickness and in Health by B Steward,
Even If It Ruins Us by Alice Black.
Good Clean Fun by Clara St.
George, Lady Prattlebees, Paramore, a Parody by ***** Flutters,
and finally the Love Song of John Andrew Perflock.
Out Magazine, March 20 by Linda Atkins So
congratulations to all of our long listers.
What a long time that's been coming.
Such a long wait.
And we appreciate your patience, really do.
And you know what, listening to some of those titles back,
it was just recalling the entire story in my mind in a way that doesn't always
happen with the long list.
So really good fun.
But I too, also just want to acknowledge while we're
appreciating these talented, talented authors who have risen to the
top out of 500 stories, making it to that top 10% is also,
of course, the many appointed authors who have
waited all this time only to discover that they have not made the long list.
And that's tough.
That is really tough.
I know everybody put their hearts, souls and booties into this challenge and
we appreciated it.
I want everybody to know that we read every story with joy and appreciation.
And of course, the way it goes, they can't all make the long list,
but they all found their way into our hearts.
And many, many stories that I will not be able to
Unsee or ever unthink about that didn't make the long list.
So thank you so, so much to every single person who shared
your talents and your enthusiasm.
And I hope you're having fun.
I hope this has been worthwhile.
And of course, we've got so much more fun to come as
well.
And if you didn't get named in the long list, so you may still get published,
as we mentioned.
So the Your Flesh fiction journey may not be over.
And for the people who did make the longest,
we'll also be sharing some badges, which we always do for the not quite
right price.
So if you go onto the website, you'll be able to see a whole bunch of
badges with your name and story that you can share on social media or print out
and stick them on your wall like a poster of your favourites.
Oh yeah, 90s rapper, as it were.
And caress that lovingly.
Mm, hmm.
Throughout.
Really get into those creases, you know what I'm saying?
Yeah, mm hmm.
Into that forbidden place, as it were.
Or you can share them on social media.
Just boast about your achievements.
And you're willing.
I mean, yeah, Some authors who are very, very secretive about their identities.
So whether they're willing to share it, I don't.
Yeah.
But, you know, maybe some of our entrants also have
changed their mind.
And maybe now that they've reached these heights, want to publicise that.
So if that's you, you bloody should.
But that's you.
And you're like, no, I don't wanna hide behind a pen name.
Like, tell everyone it's me.
It's me.
I want everyone to know about it.
Send us an email.
We'll make it all about you.
But not only that, we will also be dishing out some extra
badges for some different things that we wanted to acknowledge.
We will be putting out each judge's top pick.
So each of our guest judges had a top pick in the categories that they were
choosing.
And you and I picked a top pick across all six categories.
So as in one, our very one top favourite story.
And that did not always coincide with a story that made it all the way to the top
either.
So we'll be dishing those out.
We'll be awarding badges for our favourite lines,
our favourite titles and a whole bunch of other fun stuff.
So even if you didn't make the long list, there's a chance that you might have a
little bit of acknowledgement.
So check out the badges there.
And of course, as always, if there wasn't a badge for you,
there is still a badge for you.
We have a participation badge because of course,
everybody who participated has a place in our hearts.
So we hope you share that.
We hope you're proud of yourself.
And listen, we are just two people.
Our opinion, you know, and matters in the context of this comp.
But if you loved your story, that is what's really important.
And if you didn't get acknowledged today, we hope you still maybe seek out other
opportunities to publish and get your workout into the world.
And so that's not the end of Flesh Fiction.
We have plenty more to come and I'll talk about that in just a second.
But before we do, I want to take a moment just to reflect
back on the last 12 months and just just consider all of the work that our
entrants have put in.
So it's 500 odd stories, 1500 words.
Yeah, we're talking about thousands of litres
of fluid spilled, countless creatures of all varieties
being implicated and being penetrated in various in various fashions.
Human, non human, man, woman, any range of genders in between.
So thank you to everyone who has entered.
We really enjoyed reading all of your stories and it has been a long, long time.
And look, we wish it hadn't been.
I know it's a long wait and we hope it was worth it.
Even if you didn't long list that you will get something out of this experience.
And of course we have story readings to come.
So something to enjoy for everyone if nothing else.
My humiliation as I attempt to read these stories because what's to come?
Seven episodes.
So we're gonna lead off with our six category specific episodes,
our what we call our podium episodes where we'll be talking about the second
and third place stories in each category.
We'll be speaking with our guest judges.
But most importantly, we will be awkwardly reading the second
place story in each category very awkwardly.
You did really well.
I, I struggled.
Yes.
For Full disclosure, we have already read them.
We did a good job.
So I'm looking forward to getting, I hope it comes through in the edit.
That's all I'm gonna say.
And then following that, something we haven't yet recorded,
is the final episode in this series in which we'll read all six winners from all
six categories, including the overall winner,
the winner of the Not Quite right prize for flesh fiction, the trophy winner.
And it's gonna be a pointy trophy.
There's and what we did consider something more lewd.
But we want this to be something that people are proud to display on their
little mantelpieces on their bookshelf, wherever the case may be.
What an achievement.
The winner will have beat off 500 other contestants.
Beg your pardon?
So that's big.
Is that how this competition works?
Is that how you win?
It's one way to win.
No, Absolutely.
And I am very, very excited to announce the winner.
Of course we know who it is and it's very hard to keep it a secret,
but all in good time.
We will all find out soon.
So if your name was read out on that long list,
you are a contender for a spicy prize.
Go look on the website, get a little refresher for what's
available to you.
There's books, there's grinders, there's ****** there's all manner of
things in all shapes and sizes, There's wine.
And of course, our winner will win 5, $100 as well.
So that's not too shabby.
And of course, there are rewards for everyone who enters.
And hopefully by the time this episode drops,
you'll have already been notified of those.
We're giving away discounts for the Not Quite Right prize.
We're giving away memberships to the Romance Writers of Australia.
And so those are available to everyone who entered the Romance Writers of
Australia.
Obviously you have to be in Australia, but also one more exciting little
offering for people too.
So normally for our Not Quite Right prize for flash fiction and we offer something
called a Daredevil where we will read out your story on the podcast and critique it,
talk about how it made us feel and you know what, you could improve.
And we've decided to offer the same or the not quite right price for flesh
fiction and we are calling those bare devils.
I believe we have to credit Elise Scott for that actually.
So this is something that a few people have requested.
It is a big challenge, of course, if you're gonna put your story out there
to be critiqued.
We critique with love, but we also, so, you know,
we don't hold back if if we believe that there are things that could be improved.
I guess if nothing else, you guarantee that you're gonna make us
feel ******* awkward as we read your story.
So that's fun.
And spots are very limited for Bare Devils.
We're going to open it up to just a small number of people.
It'll be interesting to see because of course,
it's a little bit of a different genre.
I'm not sure how what people's comfort levels will be in sharing their art in
****** fiction.
Yeah, but I hope we get all six spaces filled.
That would be great.
Openings filled.
All six openings filled.
That would be very gratifying.
I'm just just counting the.
That's one of my things.
Hang on.
Just like 1234.
That's why I was going there, too.
I think there are 6.
There's more than six.
There's way more than six.
So I'm looking.
Don't look at me.
Don't count my openings.
Jesus.
Well, that about wraps it up.
It's been a long one.
It's been long and juicy, and hopefully it's been as good for you
as it was for us.
And we'll be back very soon with those six category podium episodes.
Very thrilled to be releasing those and giving you a little bit of a listen to
some of these sexy stories.
Yeah, after all this time, let's share them.
But until then, right on, right on.
Thank you for listening to Not Quite right.
If you'd like to reach us via email or follow us on social media,
you can find all the links on our website, notquiterightpodcast.com.
That's WRITE.
And if you enjoyed the show, we'd love it if you could leave.
It's a five star review on your favourite podcasting app.
Something doesn't seem quite right.
I'm moist to you right now.
I'm dripping.
I am butter puddle.
Butter puddle.
My **** is a puddle of sweat.
It's not hot.
I don't know how a puddle **** could be thought.
But guys will find anything.
I'm I'm guilty of finding quite a lot of things.
What if Weird niche things.
Weird niche things.
You've got weird niche things.
Like what?
Puddle ****.
I'll tell you later.
OK.
All right.
Fascinating.
Can't wait.