Mushroom: Blog

OK, Book III is now fully up.

For anybody that was current prior to my splitting the story, you can pick up at Chapter 44, which has now been posted.

As I have been discussing in the comments at the end of the story, I decided to break up Part II into Part II and Part III.

The end of Part II is now when Pete has the accident, and everything after is in Part III. At this time, that means 43 chapters that were previously in Part II have been moved into Part III. So once you see Chapter 44 posted, that will be new content.

And there was an issue with some of the chapters I posted, so am now reposting them one at a time. So please be patent as I upload them one at a time manually, but I promise that as soon as they are up I will post 44 and shorty 45 so there is new content.

I was bored the other day, and decided to try something I had not done before. I had tried doing voice narration of my own stories years ago, and once even did the first chapter of one of my stories before I realized I would have to do it over a dozen more times, and gave it up.

But the other day I decided to try it again, but used one of the computer generated programs to do it. And the result was, interesting. I admit when I take long road trips, I often use my e-book reader on my phone to narrate stories as I drive. Even my own, as it can help me catch things I did not find when editing them.

I then decided to pop it in and try to incorporate some stills, but after about 30 minutes decided to return to my story in progress, and simply upload what I had done.

Has anybody else done this, and what did you use? Myself, I used a program called Balaboka to convert the text to MP3, and then VSDC to add in some images and save it as a video file. Both are free to use, but if you have never used a video editing program before it may take you some time to get the hand of it.

Does anybody know of a place we can send things like this? And has anybody else done it, and what were your results?

This is the one I did, it is Chapter 1 of Valley Girl, but only the first 3 or 4 minutes have any images. If I continue it, I figure I will also add some video clips.

https://xhamster.com/videos/valley-girl-erotic-story-test-xhHCS2b

And yes, I know the audio is a little out of sync with the images. I think it is either my slow computer, or something to do with the video output I used.

In "Country Boy, City Girl" I have been talking about a lot of ideas and concepts that predate what people know and are familiar with today. Much is very archaic, and incredibly obsolete. But this is also being done to keep the story based firmly in the era it is being written in.

The BBS was a huge precursor to "The Internet" being available to the masses. At this time, if you had a modem (if you even had one, almost nobody did), you were limited to a service like CompuServe, The Source, or America On-Line, which actually charged you from around $2-25 per hour to use their services. Or you used Prodigy, which was more flat rate, but tons and tons of ads and limitations.

So most of us called a local Bulletin Board System (BBS). That would be a person like me, who put a phone in their house onto a computer, so other people could call it. We would have local chat rooms (the "Bulletin Board" part), download files like the Castle Wolfenstein demo, or text files, images scanned from Playboy, MIDI files, and things like this. Almost all a few hundred K in size, because storage was incredibly expensive.

They also had "door games", where you could basically play a few games which were turn based and others could participate in. Not really "real time", but it was getting there.

If the BBS was really advanced, they might install a FOSSIL driver, and use an ECHO service like FIDONet. A BBS would host a bunch of groups on various topics, and a couple of times a day we would call out to our main node and download a packet of updates, s well as the messages from our system going out. They then would repeat this process to the next higher step. It would take 2-5 days foe a message posted to be available across the entire network, and to get a response.

But hell, in this era 5 days of message lag was just accepted, it was faster than using the mail.

I posted a story that I first saw on a local BBS in around 1990. I even hosted it on my own BBS, but many here are trying to dig through places like ASSTR to locate the "author". Well, you will not find it there, I saw it before the ASS or ASSM Usenet groups even existed. So all that could be found is some other schmuck that just posted it there years later and did not write it themselves.

It really is from a time before The Internet existed. And it is obvious that many simply can not comprehend of people exchanging files before such a time.

After knocking out around 30 chapters in the last month, I am taking a quick break, and letting my fingers recover a bit.

It was a fun groove, but I could only keep up that kind of pace for so long. Quite literally, in 1 month I covered well over 2 years, starting when Pete was still on leave, and ending right as he gets out. And of course 4 chapters of Linda's story, as well as a few others I have posted here and there.

But I am not stopping, I am still writing. But I am slowing up a bit, has been a good month.