My first story, Ryan, is doing pretty good on SOL. Thanks, everybody! Apparently Jordyn McMaster is a hit. :-D
I'm working on a second story now. It's going slow, though. I tend to write only very late at night, to hide everything from my parents. Then I wind up tired all day the next day because of school and stuff.
But each day I go back to continue a story, I start from the beginning because I've usually forgotten where I was and what was going on. So I start over from paragraph one and just read along with what I have so far. As I go, I add, delete, change things. I enhance things. I tweak things. I correct typos. I pile on more description if it's needed.
When I finally get to the end (where I left off last night), I continued the story. Everything flows, because I'm already in the zone from all the tweaking and editing. Then I finally go to bed for the night and repeat the whole process over again the next day.
When the story is all done and I've finally come to the the end. I save it all and then do one last pass over it, reading, tweaking, correcting, enhancing. I try to fix every typo I can. And then I hand it in to the teacher at school (or upload it to SOL, whatever the case may be).
But it wasn't until I was reading it up on screen on SOL that I finally noticed all the most insidious typos. I'm looking at it through all of your eyes, and that's when the typos really pop, all the sneaky little buggers that I completely missed the first six time I read over the damn thing. Cringe!
So then I did one last, final, last, ultimate edit and reposted it. I guess some of you had already seen the original and gave me a lower score. Sorry. I tried my best.
For those of you that gave me a higher score, thanks! It was very sweet of you. I know it's not perfect, but I'm glad you liked it.
The next story is nearly done. I'm down to the last 5000 or so words. But I think I'm gonna wait a few days before posting it, and then do the last, final, ultimate edit before it's published live to the whole world. Maybe it will score even higher.
Anyway, thanks everyone! I'm glad you like it. I appreciate the emails too, though I don't like to reply much because guys can get all creepy with a young woman online. But I just wanted to know, I appreciate the kind words.
-Cass