It's good to be back. After nearly 3 years of silence, partly due to writer's block but also because I've simply been too busy with real life, I suddenly had a compelling urge to write and publish.
The first result, a little story with the whimsical title Kærestekedelig hit SOL last week and feedback has been nice. The SOL ranking system is still a pile of shit, but at least I can compare the ranking to that of the only other story I posted after the new "normalization" system was brought in (Wipe Off the Lipstick), and they are about the same. Check.
The second result was the somewhat longer story Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace which started out as a short humours tale that grew longer and more serious along the way. It is one of my soap-box stories (see previous blog "Rainbow Families"), so not everyone agrees with me, but it has racked up 4000+ reads very quickly - and a near 10% voting rate, which is very nice.
Once more the voting is hard, nay impossible, to compare with my older stories (thanks for nothing, SOL), but looking at the graph of the votes casts puts it in the top-5 of my stories. (Incidentally, the voting made it the best rated new complete story on SOL for a few days!)
Besides, when it comes to feedback, votes are of little value to me compared to the letters and those have been encouraging. Thanks!
A common theme in those letters has been: What's next? That's a really good question!
As some of you will know, I have been working for quite some years now (on and off, of course), on a much longer story provisionally entitled Someone Your Own Size. I have for all practical purposes a complete first section (so complete that it has been circulated in preview), a very good outline of what shall happen next, an extensive draft of some of the middle chapters - and some rather more rough drafts of the later parts, including the dramatic conclusion.
But I have real doubts that I shall finish it; at least not in its present form.
Last month my fellow author Coaster2, whose epic tales I enjoy and admire, posted a blog entry in which he essentially confessed to infanticide: He had deleted a new story, nearly 300 pages of it, rather than publishing it because he had reached the inescapable conclusion that he had written that story before.
That got me thinking about why Someone Your Own Size has been caught in development hell for such a long time: The outline I have reads too much like, a generic mash-up of other WTSman stories. That hit me hard - I like that story (especially the characters in it), and I'd like to finish it.
Will Someone Your Own Size ever be completed? I honestly don't know. Until I find a unique and original twist, it may be my equivalent of an Unfinished Symphony - The One That Got Away.
Cheers
WTSman