I thought some more thoughts about comments on the New Year's Competition might be relevant. This also is relevant to comments on any story, regardless of whether the story is an entry in the contest or not.

Ms Chambers pointed me to the murder of this beautiful girl. As usual, i had to research it. I strongly suggest everyone read this from beginning to end even if one doesn't live in England. There is a whole lot of what is right and a lot of what is wrong with everyday aspects and the legals involved for transgender.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Brianna_Ghey
Knowledge is strength. Understanding comes from knowledge. Thank you Gillian

I am going to take a short break and therefore give me time to read all the excellent submissions for the current contest.

I seem to have lost my editor due to a conflict of interest. Would anyone be interested in giving a contest story (or three) of mine a review? They won't be ready for about a week as I am busy reading the current avalanche of entries. Perhaps if you would be willing, you could drop me a DM with your email? Thank you in advance. :DD TAF

A story of mine has finally reached 200 kudos! And it was not the story I would have expected, possibly a year ago. My top three stories have inched up kudo by kudo, but "The Bridge" (third place at one time) began inching up a little faster than the others.

I am so thrilled — there are still almost four hours of New Year’s Day where I am, and we already have thirteen wonderful entries in the contest!

Happy New Year!

I added an entry to the contest. It's a crazy idea but I had a lot of fun writing it. I hope everyone likes it.

I couldn't remember how to mark it as solo. Admin, please mark it as solo for me. Thanks!

- Terry

Preaching to the choir here... Women in western culture can basically wear anything that is not too revealing. On the other hand men who wear women's clothes, it's not good.

I really like stockings and garter belts (Suspender belts in the UK), and I have several variations of them. Anytime I wear them it must be in secret or heavily concealed.

THIS PISSES ME OFF !!!

My entry in the New Year's contest is up.

I know it's not great, but be gentle with the comments . . .

So i'll start by sending you all the relevant greetings to mark the passing of another year!

Now that I have been Press-Ganged by Emma and Jill into making the ultimate comment on Comments, it's probably reasonable to give you all some very rough hints as to how I will go about it. The two kind ladies have given me total discretion and I will try to use it benevolently.

The first criterion is that a comment MUST relate to a competition entry. That should be obvious.

It doesn't matter if the story to which it relates is not one of the winners. I am judging the comment, not the story.

Know if WolfJess7 is re posting her DeathDealers saga Book 1 as an e-Book or is it staying as a paperback?

I'm semi-retired and drive school bus. That means I'm right there with the school kids counting down the days till the breaks, like Christmas break. Then when it's here I relish the wonderful feeling of freedom that it gives.

Yet this Christmas, the call went out for a contest and being the masochist that I am I decided to enter. The length limit meant the the story was quickly knocked out. I've been sitting on this completed story for a few weeks now. Long enough to let it settle so I'm confident that self-editing will catch all the errors (well at least most).

I just finished my third draft of my New Year’s contest story. I am so rusty, but I like it. Just need to do a final check for technical stuff like commas, etc.

There is a wanted poster for me in the Library of Congress for the wanton abuse of the comma, lol.

I will be ready to post on day 1.

Kristine

I have an entry written, peer reviewed, all ready to go.

Now do I publish day 1 and hope no one betters it, or revises theirs to compete, do I wait for the end and hope to trump the others, or slide it out in the middle, hoping to impress the judges but go under the other entrants radar....

Decisions decisions....

Somehow, in a fit of enthusiasm punctuated by lots of exclamation points, I volunteered to be a judge for our 2024 New Year’s Writing Contest, even though this site alone is full of better and more accomplished writers. You know what they say about fools rushing in. Choirs of angels are undoubtedly waving cheerfully from their LazyBoy recliners and calling out, like Jamie Lee Curtis, “Make good choices!”

Trans people playing Chess at the top level.

I watched Love Actually on Netflix. Yes I'd seen it before but it's back at No.8 in the top10 Australian shows, and my memories of it were a bit fuzzy. It is, after all, 20 years old.

What a lovely movie it is, fantastic cast, heartwarming stuff for the season, and some good songs in the soundtrack. Also some poignancy for me, like Alan Rickman, who died fairly recently, playing one of his rare nice roles.

Well worth another watch.

I was sitting on the couch in my living room this evening, just catching up on my e-Mail from the last several days, while my wife watched TV. We had been watching the news, and when it went off the show ET came on. It was a special broadcast about Celine Dion, so she left it there even though she usually doesn’t watch that show.

Judging fiction is subjective. . .based on personal feelings and opinions.

I have helped judge several Big Closet contests in the past. In those instances, I picked the top three or five stories.

For the current writing contest (entries to commence 1/1), I’ve been asked to assign a number between one and one hundred for each story. Emma Anne Tate will also assign a number between one and one hundred. We will not consult or know what each other has assigned for a “score.” The total of our scores will be the score for the story. Highest score wins.

I've been trying to figure out what is the optimum time to post a story in BCTS. So I decided to use the time that BCTS uses, and post my stuff at 8 PM or thereabouts. But then I realized I didn't know what time zone BCTS uses.

First allow me to say this, Merry Christmas to y'all. This year has been a amazing, yes there were dark periods, periods of self doubt, periods when I felt like it was time to give up and retire and retreat into the darkness of the internet never to be seen nor heard from again. There were also times when I felt like I was on fire and the world of fiction was my oyster. Rambling aside, I want to thank every member of this site.

Hope everyone got in their orders for a bucket of KFC...

https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/92055/kfc-christmas

Melanie

My wife and I had a nice dinner out this evening - December 25th is my youngest son’s fiancés birthday, so we all got together and surprised her with a dinner for her birthday at a nice local brew pub, Hank Hudson’s. We finally got to meet her parents (a very, very nice couple), and had a truly wonderful time. After, the two of us stopped and got a coffee, and then took a nice ride to look at all of the Christmas decorations - an annual tradition for us.

Without meaning to brag, the people at our house did a really spectacular job, lol.

It's already December 23 over here, so I wish all you adherents to Big Closet a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and, of course special thanks to Erin and our Admin staff.

I'm sure you will all join me in a huge round of appreciation for all their hard work in making sure that this site is the best place on the internet for folks like us. It's what they do behind the scenes that counts. Thankyou. May you enjoy next year as much as I think we, the audience,will.

Joanne

I wonder if he reads the stuff here?

A trans man won the non-binary division of the NY Marathon Link: Check out this video on Lansing State Journal: https://www.usatoday.com/videos/sports/sportskind/2023/12/05...

Yep - a Christmas bonus!

I need to apologise to anybody who got worried about my last post.

First a bit of an explanation. due to some passive-aggressive stuff by me, I ended up owing extra on my cable/internet bill, and could not pay it off this month.

I ended up rage-quitting with my provider, and then panicked that if I suddenly wasn't on for a while, people would worry about me.

instead, because all my manic energy turned into self-hate, my post was more likely to worry people.

I was already in the process of finding a new provider, so if there is a gap, it shouldn't be long.

I'm looking for a story that I probably read on this site.

Mankind has just started to get time travel reliably working. A university professors team goes back to France then England to do some research on an English war, maybe around the 17th or 18th century. One of the university techs pulls a stupid prank and has the professor, who will pose as the wife, materialize with HUGE breasts.

As this is likely my last chance to post this side of the various religous festivals!

New Shadowsblade up and this time the twins find out the sad truth

Have fun reading and Merry X-mas!

Looking at the story menu tonight, I am surprised at my own reaction to it. Referring to someone as a sissy is particularly off putting for me but talking about someone being feminized or even forcibly feminized is not. Odd that. This is in no way a criticism of others but simply refers to my own reaction to the word.

Hi folks

I spent an hour doing a post earlier, hit the upload and now its gone. I can't be a@$d to try to recreate it

So the short is
i did stuff, theres stuff for you to read and i'll be doing more stuff.

ttfn

I don't want to scare anybody, but I might just have a hope of being able to enter the new year's contest.

I have 400 words done, so I need to come up with another 2,100 words to qualify, so I might not make it.

But I figured I would warn you all anyway.

I re-read Butterscotch on Kindle and loved it. Perhaps I read it the first time on BCTS years ago? It was quite entertaining and winsome. Things do not often turn out so well for folk like us but a bit of fantasy is quite welcome. I'd recommend this to anyone.

I never did find a way to leave a review on Amazon.

Gwen

Hi Everyone I am Wondering if there is an Auther on here by the name of Aimée Ménard & if there is Can u have them pm me please????

Instead of blogging this for attention it would be great if there was a failure icon to leave the data or glitch we have run into. Let's get to the crux of what is probably my problem and no one else.
Try to link on messages and I receive.

Access denied
You are not authorized to access this page.

This happens occasionally and it isn't that big of a deal. Sometimes it's because I have timed out and no longer logged in. So I tried to check if I was logged in and again received the same

Access denied
You are not authorized to access this page.

I read this book this week and thoroughly enjoyed it, it's only been published a week or two and it is up to date with Covid and the campaign against transwomen, including the note at the end of the book. It has excitement, some plausible characters and some very interesting elements about gender dysphoria.

I was reviewing the Cynthia Chronicles, in particular, the readers' comments. Apparently, The Wizard's treatment of some of the adversaries bothered some of the readers. Anyway, my creative juices may have returned in a small quantity. We'll have to see.

Portia

Someone thinks I should try writing a story, and thank you JoanneBarbarella, I am flattered. I know this is in conjunction with the recent blog about trying to get new authors involved here, and I truly am stunned that anyone would approach me.

Follow the adventures of Reggie and her sister from another world...

Any World Collected

Suddenly there seems to be very strong pressure on the Internet to use my real name. It seems that almost no one on BCTS does that. Suddenly, about 2 hours ago Facebook is wanting me to make a new password. Not sure what is going on. Is there some sort of danger in my starting to use my real name on BCTS? I don't mind.

Gwen

I've encountered a bit of writers block with How I Spent My Summer Vacaction: I became a Girl!. So in order to break that writers block I've decided to try something, something all writers did when I was starting out. Well writers in the Harvest Moon Community that is. Anyway, since Emily favorite gaming series is 'Star Dew Valley' a series of anime inspired farming simulator games that have some elements of JRPG's thrown in to spice things up, like upgrading your farming tools and building releationships with the locals, and an 'life bar'.

While scratching away, vainly trying to write something intelligent, compelling and interesting, it comes to me that as far as TG, GID and all that, it feels like I've "Been there and done that". This is no reflection at all on the experience of anyone else. I've had over 70 years to think about, theorize and experience the whole of it, and as soon as I could took the plunge trying to make it all real. In some ways I had great success and in others it was disastrous. I'm sure that my suffering is typical of the usual T person, so I won't further traumatize you.

I finally have something new up, but I don't think people are gonna like it.

https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/100410/end-girly-girl...