Story Submission Guidelines

Story submissions do not appear instantly in the Library. First they must be reviewed and evaluated for form and content. Those that are approved get posted. So you should review the following guidelines before uploading a story.

Subject Matter

This site is about people inflating. Any submitted stories must be about people inflating. Pretty simple. But for the sake of clarity, I feel the need to provide a couple of definitions.

People

Your story should be about humans inflating. So furries, Pokémon, robots, airplanes, and the like are right out.

There is a certain amount of flexibility depending on how human your inflatee appears. We get the occasional alien and demon in inflation stories, and that’s fine. Just understand that the farther your characters are from being human, the more likely it is that the story will be rejected.

Inflating

The dictionary definition of inflation is “to swell or distend with air or gas”. I extend that to include liquids, e.g., water, soda, blueberry juice. My rule of thumb is that if you can use it fill a balloon, then it counts as inflation. Beyond that you wind up in questionable territory.

There’s a category for Stuffing but it’s easy to wander from there into Weight Gain, which isn’t permitted. You would do well to check out what’s already been accepted if you want to go this route.

Readability

If your story is so difficult to read that I can’t be bothered to complete it, then it won’t get posted. Here are the most common issues that will get your submission tossed into the circular file.

Spelling

At the very least, use a spell checker. That won't catch everything (e.g., its versus it's) but it will help a lot.

Capitalization

The word “I”, proper nouns, and the beginnings of sentences and quotations should be capitalized.

Punctuation

Sentences should end in a period, question mark, or exclamation point and should be of a reasonable length. Someone once submitted a 500-word story that consisted of two sentences. That is not a reasonable length.

Dialog Punctuation

Technically this falls under punctuation, but it’s a big enough issue to deserve its own section. Here are some tutorials for punctuating dialog:

Punctuating Dialogue

Punctuation in Dialogue

Paragraphs

Wall-of-text submissions will be rejected. Break your story up into paragraphs.

Stories that violate the the guidelines will not be posted.

Keep in mind, I will not be enforcing these standards retroactively. There are stories currently in The Library that would not be accepted if they were submitted today. So while it can be helpful to use existing stories as a guideline for what is and isn't acceptable, this becomes less reliable the farther back in time you go.