Zen Master: Blog

...and I will start posting Part Two next Monday, April 29. Again, the story is complete and all chapters will be queued to post automatically at 8AM (US Eastern Time) every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday until all chapters have been posted.
Unfortunately, I won't be available most of the time to listen to people who notice mistakes. Please send me an email and I will read them when I can.

-ZM

I am about to go off-line for a few weeks. I do this fairly often, but this is the first time I've done it in the middle of posting one of my longer stories. I have set up all of the remaining chapters of "Part One" to be automatically posted every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8AM (Eastern Time), or as soon after that as the site's moderators get to it. The last chapter, #35, should go up on April 24th.
If I'm back online by then, "Part Two" will go up on the same schedule. If not, it will go up as soon as I get back to civilization. It is complete and returned from the proofreaders, but I keep messing with it.

-ZM

(If something goes wrong with a post while I am away from my desk, please contact Nuke Danger 3rd Eye who knows how to reach me. It will still probably have to wait until I return to civilization to fix it, but at least I'll know there's a problem and can be thinking about it.)

It's common to use the asterisk '*' to mean multiplication. If you need to square a number, maybe '50', you say '50*50'.

If there's more, you keep doing that, maybe to multiply what you got by Pi, you would add '*3.14' to your formula to get the area in square units of some circle.

This doesn't work, here on SOL. If you want something in bold you surround it by those same asterisks again....

So, instead of my formula looking like '50 times 50 times Pi' what got shown on the screen was '50503.14' which makes no sense to anyone unless you know what happened. I have re-posted Chapter 16 using 'x' instead of '*'.

Oh, and I fixed a minor continuity error I saw. I think I'm paying my proofreaders too much.

-ZM

This website has recently added an internal email system. It works great for conversations. Feedback to the authors from a story get sent as new emails. Authors can reply, and those get sent back as emails to whoever sent the original comment.
I keep getting emails from 'CoullPert' with issues he (she?) has found in my latest story "Jason's Tale". Many are valid and I fix them in my original 'master' copy. Others I explain in my replies. However, the website's email system shows that CoullPert has not yet read any of my replies. What's the point of replying if he isn't going to read them?

-ZM

A reader just pointed out that Chapter 2 of "The Return Home" seems incomplete. Huh? I checked. Yeah, THAT's not right. The original files from when I posted the story back in 2012, more than six years ago now, well, they are fine, so I have submitted Chapter 2 for re-posting. Hopefully that takes care of it.
For those who are interested, back in the mid-80's I got involved with a married woman. It turned out that she was involved with quite a few men, and when it all came out I ended up with her. I had a wonderful couple of years taking her from sluttery to slavery, and "The Return Home" is a thinly fictionalized autobiography of that time.
I still occasionally do some work on its sequel "Scenes From The Road". If I ever finish it, the teaser will be:
"Much of the Mike & Shirley stuff is autobiographical and mostly true. However, THIS one is pure fantasy. It's completely made up. I never kidnapped anyone, I never drove halfway across the country with a naked woman tied up beside me, and I have no idea how my uncle met his girlfriend."

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. :)

-ZM