Author:
I was once working with a team that was hiring new members. We put out ads in all the right places and contacted a bunch of recruiters and over a week or so we got a few dozen resumes for people who wanted the position. Daunted with the prospect of going through each of the resumes to try and find the best candidate one of the managers proposed that we simply throw half of them away. We were all aghast at this proposal. But he persisted.
"Look." He said. "We don't want candidates that are not lucky. What better way to find the lucky ones than to throw away half of these resumes?"
There are lots and lots of stories here. I've spent lots and lots of time reading. Lots and lots of time enjoying them. lots and lots of time loving them and learning to appreciate many of the writers who publish here. Unfortunately I don't have time to read every story. I need some way to pick the lucky ones. The ones that are lucky enough for me to open and at least start to read.
I hear you. I hear you saying, "Why do I care about your idea of luck?" To that I have to answer. "I suspect that you don't care about my ideas of luck. I'm just telling you a story." I agree with you, Having me read your story is dubious luck indeed. Still writers write and readers read. But writers also read. Even when readers don't write. You write, and publish, at least in part for your readers.
I want to be one of your readers. I want to be lucky and have the chance to read your story. So I'm telling you how I divide the pile. Yes it's an arbitrary technique. Yes it's silly. Yes it leaves out lots of otherwise good stories that I would enjoyed if I would just expand my criteria a tiny bit. But here it is. I read stories that are marked with the "crossdressing" genera. That's it. That's how I filter stories.
Yes it's arbitrary. Yes it's silly. Yes it leaves out lots of otherwise good stories that I'd probably love. But there it is. This one little insignificant reader, in this little corner of the vast interwebs uses one key word to divide the extensive and ever growing collection of wonderful stories here on BC into the ones I might read and the ones I'm not likely to consider. It's arbitrary It's silly and it leads me to miss many stories that I probably would love. But I don't have enough time to read them all. I need some way to pick the lucky ones. I use that one word. That one word ,"crossdressing", to pick the lucky stories. I told you it was arbitrary. I'm sorry if it bothers you. I'm going to do it anyway.
I'm not saying that it is the only way I filter but it is the first and most automatic way.
Oh. Regarding that position we were hiring for? Eventually we picked someone from the lucky pile. The person we hired left after only six months. Apparently they won the lottery.
Comments
Thinking v. Method
This is an example of bizarre thinking leading to a reasonable conclusion. Get rid of the talk about "luck" and instead talk about getting someone who can do the job at hand. Then discard half (maybe even more -- three-fourths or four-fifths) and you still have a high chance of finding a good person.
If we talk about a lucky candidate, it's the candidate's luck, not the company's.
Do you want practice doing end-of-chapter problems? Perhaps carefully analyze each problem to see its optimal educating effect, or instead roll a die at each problem, and do it if a six comes up.
Limiting your stories to ones marked "crossdressing"? That's using a standard, not choosing at random. (If it's known, authors just might put "crossdressing" in their stories anyway. Better keep it a secret.) You want a random selection? How about picking authors with a "u" in their surname? How about an "x"?
-- Daphne Xu (a page of contents)
Authors with an "x" or a "u" in their surname? Why not both?
Snerk.
Why not?
Of course it could also be interpreted as XOR
Tough luck for Daphne in that case :)
Any system is good as long as you feel comfortable with it. However, it's well wort trying something outside your normal fare once in a while. You just might discover something you really like.
Having experienced (from both sides) some very good and some truly awful hiring processes I'd say that while true random hiring is below average it's not THAT much below. Sometimes the criteria used actively disqualified the best candidates and promoted candidates that were obviously not suited for the specific position.
Dumb recruitment processes.
I experienced that a good few times. At one major employer, I was expected to take an aptitude test to 'show that I was suited to working as a programmer'. The results were no surprise to me. I was deemed unsuitable. This was despite my employment record of almost 20 years writing software and designing hardware. They ignored that as well as the two software related patents that I held. I knew why I failed the test. My brain works differently to most people. There are many here that have the same trait.
Three months later, I returned to that employer as a contractor. My manager laughed at my previous encounter with the company HR droids.
I stayed there for fifteen months. HR were not amused to find that I'd failed their test but was still employed. They couldn't really get rid of me that easily as the bit of software that we were using was designed and built by yours truly at my previous company. There was no one in the world that knew as much as I did about it.
HR === Hardly relevant.
Samantha
Seriously giggling now.
"Eventually we picked someone from the lucky pile. The person we hired left after only six months. Apparently they won the lottery."
Thanks for the post.
BTW, the first thing I look for is for authors that I enjoy the most. Next, I look for the tags transgender (or male to female) and high school age. I do this because the stories I tend to enjoy the most involve male to female teenagers. While I enjoy stories tagged "caught with consequences" I tend to tire of them after a bit and I don't tend to re-read them.
There are a massive amount of military and spy stories here that I absolutely adore here and re-read regularly. Stories by Alicia Snowfall, T. D. Aldoennetti, WolfJess7, Shiraz and others. I also love Tanya Allan's stories.
But, yes, there are so many wonderful stories here that I have not yet read. My BCTS to-read-eventually list of stories is huge. Mostly, I look at new stories, stories by authors I remember and like, and stories from my ever growing list.
Hiring
I've hired hundreds of people.
In retrospect, it seems my best efforts led to picking the people who were the best at lying.
I thought I had a great set of criteria until a friend pointed out to me that my employees were all incredibly beautiful or devastatingly handsome. It came as a complete surprise to me.
After that I read an article about the strict correlation between a man's height and his salary. The taller, the more money he makes.
Corporations now have elaborate HR departments but I'll bet nothing has really changed.
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
I understand
I understand about the need to be selective. As for luck??? No I don't think luck has anything to do with my method. What gets me to choose a story is the lack of cautions. I won't read anything that cautions "sex", "extreme sex", "violence", "suicide" or "forced".
I lean toward "sweet and sentimental". But most of all, I want to see a tease that catches my interest. Then of course if the author has a proven track record of writing stories that I've liked, that's an extra weight on the scale getting me to choose their story.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
Challenge accepted!
You are wasting your time
Um, I hate to point this out to you, but the whole site is dedicated to people who either want to or end up wearing the clothes of the other lot.
It is kind of the point of why we're here in the first place.
It is also the reason why many of us don't bother with the crossdressing tag: it is kind of superfluous. Taken as read.
I think that you are doing both yourself and the authors you discard a great disservice by selecting in that way.
Oh, and as for luck? Lucky for whom, exactly?
Penny
A winning strategy, I'd say
I think this blog entry was a cute bit of sharing. It addresses a real problem, which is the unmanageable number of stories on this site.
Crash has found a way of finding stories they enjoy.
Sounds like a winning strategy to me.
- io
Luck is not what we think it is.
Thanks for sharing your thoughs. I hope that you are taking my little blog posting in the spirit or whimsy that I intended. I'm taking yours in the same spirit. Indeed almost any single dimensional selection criteria that we might employ will leave some chaff with the wheat. There is not enough time in the universe. There never will be. We all get only a little if it to spend and not as much of it as we might want to spend in the way that we want. I wish I could say more but I'm running out of time.
I did want to say something about luck. What was it. Oh yeah. Now I remember. Luck is not what we think it is. For me at least, luck is finding the guts to take advantage of the opportunities that life shows us. In some ways I'm quite lucky. In others maybe not so much. I hope that you are lucky too.
Peace
Your friend
Crash
Selection under Time Constraints
Hi Crash,
I know you read my stuff, so thanks for that.
As to your recruitment method, the problem for me is that I am unlucky. I am very good at my job, but to give you an example I had the best contract of my life arranged about a week before the pandemic and then poof - gone.
Sometimes the unlucky people have just the skills you need.
But that is not what your inquiry is about. Because of the sheer volume of TG fiction out there, you need filters so that your time is not wasted.
First I think that you need to know that some sights have a lot of trash, and others (like BCTS) not.
Second, yes, find authors that you like. Some repeat formulas but if it floats your boat, maybe the slight variation will to.
Third, I look at story length. I write short stories and that is what I read too. Short and stimulating rather than long and absorbing. If you have time limitations short is best.
Fourth, if you go for long chapter stories, I suggest that you pick a chapter in the middle and read some to see whether that is what you want, before starting at the beginning. I often go straight to the end before I start.
Fifth, well ... categories - themes, elements, ages, keywords. I think that these can be helpful, but I have to admit that for me they are a problem. People who read me know that I almost always tick "Caught with Consequences" and "Hormones". Many of my stories just don't fit the categories of any site I post on. But then I like to do something different, so how can I complain? But when searching for a read I find it easier to exclude: I make a policy of doing is to avoid stories that contain elements that I am not interested in: Magic, fantasy, age regression, diapers (?), BDSM or any kind of violence, F2M, bizarre body modifications, and alternative universes.
Finally, the teasers. I don't find these useful, but sometimes an interesting teaser can lure me in.
Was this what you were looking for?
Maryanne
Huge Cosmic Power! itty bitty search engine
Thanks Maryanne,
I've been keeping up with your work here and elsewhere. As always you do great work, thanks. I know that I've not been commenting and reviewing as much as I would like. I'm sorry for that.
Your friend
Crash
Apparently a Noted Games Theorist...
...in the late 1970s or 1980s determined that a person or organization is more likely to choose a winner if they throw out half of a large group and more closely examine the other half than they would by putting half as much effort into examining each person/item in the entire group. (A baseball team reportedly once chose to draft only college players and ignore all high school players chiefly because they read that.) Apparently the original report said that it didn't matter how arbitrary the grouping was; if your time was finite, you were better off using it to sift more thoroughly through about half as many applicants.
My own reading choices rely on author names -- in both directions; there are authors here from whom I'll read just about anything, and others whose stories I won't touch even if the teaser and categories look interesting. There are categories I stay away from: stories marked "Erotica" or with major sex warnings are one; violence tends to be another, though I'm less absolute on that one. Humiliation, Forced Fem and Dominance/Submission are another set I won't read. And there are a lot of universes or series that I just don't want to get involved with -- in some cases (e.g, Anmar) simply because having made that decision years ago, there's too much I'd need to catch up on if I changed my mind now. Similarly, there are others (Bike, Whateley) I signed off from long ago for one reason or another. Many fanfic-type stories relate to things I'm not familiar with, so I don't want to spend time there.
Not sure whether it's odd of me or not, but things like CD/TG and character ages don't really influence my decision. I tend to put non-TG stories lower on my list, but stories where the TG aspect is incidental (some of Casey Blake's come to mind, where the sex change kickstarts the plot but doesn't affect it much after that) aren't really a problem for me.
More space than that subject really deserves, though I suppose some authors may find it useful if they want to avoid my PMs on spelling or grammar. I certainly don't claim to be a typical reader here.
Eric
Selecting for luck
In Larry Niven's Ringworld series, there was a story line in which the Earth's population was so large that population growth was at least partially controlled via a lottery system for determining who could reproduce. This lottery was in place for multiple generations. At a later time in the story, it became part of the plot that the ones who organized that system were esentially breeding for luck, because luck improved the chance of being able to reproduce. I have to wonder if that manager who proposed randomly throwing out half of the resumes had ever read Ringworld.
Teela Brown
That was my immediate thought too!
Picking up on Daphne's initial comment, one aspect of Teela's luck in Ringworld was that what might be an extremely lucky break for her would frequently involve extremely BAD luck for everyone else involved.
Categories
I tend not to list categories for my stories, or if I do, keep said list as short as I can. I also don't write "crossdressing" stories, so that's me off your list, then!
My stories are almost always set as firmly in the real world as I can manage, and the focus is on the person, rather than their clothes. I have said before that the priority is not about wearing particular clothes, but making the transition to a state where wearing those clothes is a normal part of everyday life.
I started out writing stories whose entire focus was on the transition of the central character (except for Sweat and Tears, but that is an unusual one for me), and then one of my habits of economy took over. I find it hard to write throwaway people, so many of my minor characters end up with a back story of some detail, and then they start tugging at the hem of my skirt and demanding their time on stage be extended.
As a result, in several of my books the focus is not on the narrator but on what initially appears to be a secondary person. I have also moved on to several tales where the transgender aspect, while remaining a core aspect of the plot, is not the central focus. In 'A Longer War', for example, while a central character is trans, along with a peripheral one, the real story is a a sort of retelling of 'Job', in which a decent human being is hit with a series of unpleasantnesses (euphemism, indeed) that challenge him to the core.
In the related set of stories 'Sisters', 'The Job' and 'Dancing to a New Beat', the focus is on the trials of cis women; the first is a lesbian romance, the latter pair a cis woman rape survivor who encounters a whole world of other abused women, several of whom are trans.
In the end, I write what are usually love stories, which pass through the storms that the real world insists on throwing at people who are 'different', but usually manage, with the help of family, friends and common human decency, to arrive at a safer harbour.
A bit of a ramble there, so my apologies.
As for my own reading here, it tends to follow similar tastes. While I remain a fan of SF and fantasy (I have two SF/Horror tales here), both of those are traps for authors in that they offer the illusory simplicity of removing the restrictions of reality while imposing a set of new rules that have to be consistent for the story to work. That is a LOT harder than aspiring writers often realise, so while SF/F is common here, much of it doesn't capture my interest. As an example, Penny Lane (see comment above) has constructed an entire world, which is a challenge, while simultaneously succeeding in writing a story that catches the interest as well as being in decent prose*. That is a very difficult act to pull off, which is why I rarely read SF/F tales here. I am also not into 'Comix', so the superhero stuff doesn't engage me the way it does others.
I DON'T do 'forced fem'. End of discussion. I also have no interest in 'erotica'.
Finally, tying into your comment about crossdressing and thinking back to a comment from Andrea some years ago about rats and pink tutus, there are a number of styles where a young boy is dressed up, and immediately becomes utterly gorgeous (cue long description of clothing, make-up, jewellery, shoes, etc), attracted to other boys and irresistible to them. Where's the logic? Where are the rationale, the backstory, the reasons for it happening in the first place?
Personal taste, of course. Others differ, and that's fine by me.
*Penny, you know the drill. A cheque to the usual address, in the usual sum.
I, on the other hand....
seem to have gotten stuck on writing NEUROTICA...
Love, Andrea Lena
Comments
As you can see, I still remember and quote your comment about rats and pink/blue stuff. It summed up so many bits of poor writing for me.
Selecting for Luck
Han Solo: I call it luck.
Obiwan Kenobi: In my experience, there's no such thing as luck.
They were both flat-out wrong in that particular scene.
1024 players each flip a coin honestly ten times. On average, one will get ten heads:
(The same, of course, applies to tails. I'll just call the ones with all heads the lucky ones.)
Obviously, the lucky ones had nothing to do with their results, other than entering the game in the first place. Equally obvious, their victory here predicts nothing about further results. I've seen the fallacy under various names: "The [Texas] sharpshooter fallacy", "The survivorship bias". The sharpshooter fallacy involves shooting at a blank target and drawing a bulls-eye around the bullet hole.
It seems to me that if one chooses or selects for luck, one is selecting in favor of someone manipulating the odds in his favor. So the employer who searches for a lucky candidate because somehow, it will affect his performance, really is searching for someone who can manipulate the odds in his favor. Or someone for whom the universe manipulates the odds.
Specifically, the manipulated odds make it more likely than not, that his resume is in the right stack. Sounds like a cheater to me. Do we really want that kind of guy?
Ahah! I just jotted down another idea for a story.
-- Daphne Xu (a page of contents)