After a couple days of not writing, for various reasons, the tenth chapter is starting to come together. It may be late, but then again it might not. We'll see.
I thought, though, it might be fun to talk about what makes a story interesting. Interesting for me, that is, and given I'm the writer that's all that is important. For the current story, The Bells of Tanah (available here and at ASSTR for your reading pleasure), my main motivation was to put my characters in a place with limited resources. I did not give them a whole shopping center, or a large Walmart style department store. No, they're in a supermarket... and a rather small one at that. Part of this naturally is due to my experience as a teen working at just such a place, but also because making the characters work around problems is more interesting then having them instantly solved.
To be honest, it was a reaction to two stories I've read here. One had a bunch of college kids lured to a frat party at a mall/condo development, only to end up on another planet with access to hundreds of stores to satisfy any need. The other had a guy sent by aliens to the distant past with, in theory, only a limited amount of supplies. Very quickly, though, the guy is having the aliens ship dozens of shipping containers full of stuff to prehistoric times, and the caves he lives in are magically transformed into 100 bedroom residences with private baths.
In both cases, while there were other problems that at least limited my enjoyment, a major problem was a lack of followthrough with the premiss. The second story is the worst offender, as in the first we do find that some groups never find access to the mall and thus are limited in their supplies. Why even bother setting up limitations, if you then have your character (through "smart thinking") get around all of them? Hmm, maybe we should call these "straw man plots", as they only exist for the main character to easily defeat them.
With regards to Bells of Tanah, I've already run into quite a number of plot problems that I've had lots of fun trying to overcome. I'm constantly having them start to do something, only to realize they just can't. Now, to be fair, they're currently in a different situation, but I'm trying to keep limits in place. The realization, for example, that zero g cooking would be an issue didn't raise its head until I'd already put them in space and gone through how the hell you'd make the store work in that environment. The next chapter sets the rules on how the ship travels between suns, more limits I'm sure I'll be banging my head against soon.
Fun!
SciFi Nut got chapter 8 yesterday, but has been unable to get to it until today. As such, it's possible I won't be able to post it until Wednesday but don't be surprised if you see it tonight. The wait won't kill anyone. I'm going to try and get chapter 9 done before the weekend, but as always I promise nothing.
Edit- looks like you do git it today after all! All praise to SciFi Nut!
Just a quick thanks to all those who are enjoying the current story. The fact a thousand of you got together in a single day to read it is a record for me, probably, with the total for chapter 7 up to 1400 and probably heading for the 1600+ chapter 6 got. Score wise it's getting a touch better then The Waifs did, but lower then some of the Taylor and Ai stories. All in all, I'm happy, so won't kill everyone for at least two chapters.
Schedule wise, things are going on this weekend, so you're more likely to get one chapter in the middle of the week then two chapters as you did this time. I am open to bribes, naturally.
Well, the new chapter has been reposted a soon as I saw it made it up. I've never been one to play with formatting tags in my stories, mostly as I don't want to have to strip them out for the other versions posted to ASSTR. Plus, I'm lazy. However, four lines of song lyrics appear in this chapter, and I wanted them to be somewhat readable as such. My first attempt, using
tags to try and get rid of the double spacing for them, failed. So, I've reposted and with luck they'll show up as italics. My apologies if you read the bad version, but early adopters take the risks.
Chapter 7 has just been uploaded, so it's in the hands (or feet) of the moderators. As I was going through the process, I noticed a code that obviously fit the story, but which had escaped me before: hairy. With luck, this won't draw in the wrong type of readers....