Story Shelf

Before you follow this page of story links, I want to make something crystal clear: Stories that are just about sex are ten a penny. The stories that I have found here are stories about love. They involve the growing emotions between young men. They are about the dawning realisation of sexuality, and of people whose outlook on life is different from the established norms.

These are young men who have found things sometimes hard to bear, and who have found love.

People often ask if they may submit work to me for the site. And the answer is that of course they may, if the stories are "right for the site" and if I happen to like them. The process is explained here.

It is quite hard, though, to handle questions like "how do I write a story?", which I get sometimes. So I've created a guide that works pretty well.

Additionally please read the Copyright, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy at the foot of each page. Stories once submitted remain on the site under a non cancellable publishing right. Copyright always remains with the copyright owner.

A good story has few typos in it. Dialogue can be idiosyncratic, but the grammar is good, the spelling is good. Words like 'loose' and 'lose' are never confused. Apostrophes happen in the right places. But not every author is a grammar and spelling genius. So we do have some volunteer editors with whom you can work before submitting a story. If someone offers their services, either by email to me or on the forum, then I add their names and email addresses to this short alphabetical list:

Once you are ready, simply submit your story by email. If you don't hear anything within a few days please remind me. I don't accept everything I am sent, but I do read everything, and I always reply, so if I haven't then either I'm away or the email has gone astray.

Our publishing scheme

We publish stories very much like a paper magazine does. We try very hard to run a finite number of serials at any one time, and strive to post all the chapters in one serial before starting on another one, regardless of which author it's by. We intersperse short stories and poetry in the gaps in serials. This is because we have, usually, more serials than we have short stories and poems.

Sometimes there are anomalies. Authors of serials often send us chapters of their serial before the entire work is finished, and that's fine. We work with the author to decide when to start. We start to publish them hoping, but not always expecting, that the remainder of the chapters will arrive before the publishing sequence finishes. And here's where the problem, if it is a problem, starts. When we run out of chapters we start another author's serial, and we try to run it to completion. This means that the author whose chapters have a production gap can feel neglected until we can restart their serial again. This is especially the case with very long continuing sagas. When we see it is about to be a real challenge we treat the unpublished chapters as a special case, but that can't always be immediate.

Our production queue is being managed actively to fluctuate around a base of two to three weeks.

The index of authors

There is no right way of doing this, so I have chosen the following scheme, just like your local lending library:

I reserve the right to get it wrong! But that scheme is my intention. If you find anything that seems out of order please feel free to email the webmaster. It's all to do with Afferbeck Lauder.