I use to think that the forum and story site over on XN was great.  Lots of freedom, no stinkin’ rules to get in the way of creativity.  Not like all the other pieces of shit story sites out there, enforcing ‘morality’ issues on a porn site.  How full of yourself can you get?  But now, however, I’m beginning to agree with Michael C. Laney:  to post on XN is born of desperation to get your shit read, at any cost.  You KNOW your story is going to get trolled to death, you KNOW your story is going to get voted into oblivion by the slew of sock accounts created by jealous writers.  But that’s not what makes you desperate to get read.  What smacks of desperation for that site is that by posting on the site you do NOT know if you are going to have yourself banned and your story yanked because you hurt the delicate sensibilities of some of the Morality Police on the site or piss off one of the god-mods who seem to take some sort of demented delight in removing stories that have not broken any “rule” but merely a “guideline” that was handed down by another mod but not “affirmed” by those who actually run the site.  So to post on there a story that you find perfectly innocent can end up going the way of the do-do bird.

I don’t like Lush and Lit.  In reality, I hate them with a passion because of their draconian rules and admins and mods who are so full of their shit and self-importance that they make the lives of everyone else on the site miserable, slowly driving away traffic.  I see the same thing happening over on XN.  It’s suicide of the lowest form.  While Lit and Lush is suicide due to self-appointed self-importance, XN is killing itself over indifference.  Whatever.  I will give Lit and Lush this, though.  At least with them, I KNOW my shit will get pulled, or not even posted, if I break one of the many, many, MANY rules that they impose on writers.  It’s why I don’t write for them.  Until they start paying me to host my lude creations, I will not jump through hoops for them. 

The general sense of creative freedom is the reason why I chose XN over all the “other” sites out there.  But now XN is drying up like a creek bed in the middle of a drought.  The mods are too full of themselves to realize it, the Morality Police are too full of shit to realize it, and the admins are too wrapped up in other money-making ventures to give two shits.  So the few decent writers have left, taking their hordes of readers with them.  Sure, there are still “writers” on their churning out the same crap stories over and over again, but I am not one of those writers who are willing to jump through a hoop to get read.  It’s why I went indie author on the publishing houses’ asses.  I not only want that creative freedom, not just deserve it, but as an author who  lives in the land of the free, I DEMAND it.  Will I get it?  Well, it depends.  I like the way Michael put things:  I am not a slave to any site.  I write my own shit, I host my own shit, I publish my own shit, and my own shit makes me money.  I give my ideas and creativity to those who enjoy it, to those who want to read it.

And in the end, that is all that matters:  getting read.  Not having a “politically” correct version of my story read, but the raw, crude, and sometimes brilliantly written storyline that I intended.  If that means that I may have to strike out on my own, then so be it.  I will not bow down to anyone’s ideas of what is right and wrong.  Not even to get a few thousand more reads.  Because when you are independent, it means you reject the norm, the regular reality, the rules, and insert your own.  And last time I checked, that’s what “creativity” was all about.