I applied to the After Dark category. I got my turquoise participation badge, which is now on the front cover of Ancilla.

Some screenshots:

It looks like I did not even make the first cut. I'm a little peeved about that (I think I'm a damn good writer) but I'm not surprised. From what I've heard, Wattpad is really focusing on short content, regular serial uploads, something called "vertical lines" (whatever the hell that is), and other things that give the popularity algorithms warm fuzzies. 

Stuff that's guaranteed money in the bank.

A metaphysical bildungsroman that interweaves literary erotica (most of it BDSM, including some stuff that counts as edge play anywhere other than Seattle, Atlanta, or Tokyo), Kabbalistic meditations, Thelema, medieval/vulgate Latin, Wagnerian opera, and tabletop RPG comic relief subplots, with a very non-alpha, low-budget male dom as the primary love interest, and prose that's probably wordier than Herman Melville's (note to self: look up the word count of Moby Dick) is not money in the bank. I can guarantee that. 

I've applied to be part of Wattpad After Dark's BDSM team. I don't think I'll get any farther with that than I did with my contest submission, but who knows. 

UPDATE (4/19/2024) - Yeah, after the brouhaha of the past two weeks, including the way all the tech ambassadors were let go and then replaced by a new crew of techies whose job it is to train artificial intelligence to create content, there is absolutely no way I want anything with this monetized dumpster fire. And for the record, I DO NOT CONSENT TO HAVING MY WORK USED TO TRAIN AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. For all my protest is worth (probably nothing).

UPDATE (6/5/2024) - Finally found out that the reason Ancilla wasn't even accepted was that as a finished novel, Ancilla needed to be published on Wattpad BEFORE the end of 2023. So, try again next year, if I want to participate. I'm debating myself about that. I want the exposure, and if the categories have as ridiculously low participation next year as they did this year, I actually stand a good chance of at least placing, possibly winning; however, I'm still afraid my work will be used to train a Wattbot to write monetized smut if I'm accepted as a contestant. I dunno. 

Some good news: As of 5/10/2024, Ancilla has been listed in Wattpad After Dark's BDSM booklist! And it does seem to have had an impact on the number of views I've been getting. I'm over 2,700 now, and several hundred of those views happened after the listing.