Lubrican: Blog

In my previous blog entry I said I wasn't going to post any new stories soon. Then Andy sent me back the story he'd been working on.

That story, called The Summer of '42 "begins" in December, or at least the diary that plays a central role in the story begins in December, so it just seemed like this was an apropos time to post it. I admit I'm rushing it, a little, so it may not be as polished as I like things to be.

But I've never been patient, once something is "finished" and ready to be posted.

It's ten chapters, so a one week posting schedule is in order. For those who are impatient, like me, I'll publish the whole thing at Bookapy.

That may take another day or so.

Happy Holidays to all, and thanks for reading.
Bob

Alas, the present is not a new story, though I have one with Michelle for proofreading, and another one with Andy for editing. So those will get posted after the new year.

No, the present is a 25% reduction in the price of all my books at Smashwords.com between 18 Dec 20 and New Year's day. Anything you put in your cart between those dates will automatically be discounted 25%.

I want to thank everybody for their support, and for supporting Lazeez so you can read my material here at SOL.

And, of course, thanks for reading.
Bob

I'm not known for flash stories. In fact, I'm pretty sure this is the first one I've ever posted. But this one has been banging around in my mind for years, now, so I decided to finally write it. I was going to save it for a contest, but none ever came up.

My apologies to those people who get bent out of shape if a code is left out, particularly an important one. But I had to leave that code out because it would have been a clear spoiler. I did give you some clues in the other codes. You can let me know if they helped figure it out. If it did, I'll remove those codes, too.

The surprise is critical to the meaning of the story.

Thanks for reading.
Bob

Oh. Almost forgot. It's called A Difficult Problem Resolved.

I'll get right to it. I'm starting the posting of a new book called Dancing For Daddy. It is 28 chapters long and I wrote it specifically to address a common complaint - that I end my stories too quickly. The Foreword talks about that.

It will take about two weeks to post and, for the impatient ones, it will be available on Bookapy in complete form.

A note about that. If you buy one of my new books on Bookapy, remember to re-download it a month later. This is because, while Michelle and Andy do great work cleaning up my mistakes, the final review I do while posting inevitably leads to me "tweaking" things. I add and subtract things and errors slip back in. That means that, if I publish the book on Bookapy when I start posting it at SOL, those errors will be in that version of the book, too.

Nice readers often write to me and point things out, which then get fixed. Once I'm pretty sure everything got caught and fixed, I re-publish the book.

Okay, lastly, I don't get much room to write a teaser when posting a story at SOL. It's something like 400 characters. Publishing platforms often give you a "long version" of the teaser, so I'll print the long version of the teaser for this book in this blog entry. That is what follows:

Bob was a Marine, and his repeated deployments made his wife crazy. In her case, it was literally crazy. She thought divorcing him and taking their daughter with her would solve the problem and, to keep him from finding them, she even got the judge to let her change their last name. When he got back from his latest deployment, it was to an empty house. There was nothing he could do about it. The only clue he found were pamphlets from NGOs that typically worked in Africa, digging wells, or distributing aid. Had his wife gone there? Had she taken their daughter with her? He got out of the Corps and tried to move on with his life, but it was empty without his little girl. Then, one night, he took his visiting boss to the only strip club in town. His boss got drunk and was waving a fistful of money at a dancer dressed as the rodeo queen. Bob went to stop him from climbing up on stage and the rodeo queen looked him in the eye. His life changed forever when she said, "Daddy?!"

Thanks for reading.
Bob

Okay. This might seem like an odd blog entry, but what the heck.

Back in the 2004 -2008 time frame, I wrote a whole raft of short stroke stories. They were how I got started posting at SOL. I got a lot of very nice mail from people who encouraged me to keep writing. I got some really not nice mail, too, but I shrugged that off. My pen name back then was Beating Off Bob, for those of you who are young.

Then I started getting mail from people who thought I should write longer stories. I experimented with a few and got a good response.

So I started writing longer and longer stories until I was writing novellas (which, as I understand it, means a long "short" story) and then full-fledged novels.

I liked writing the longer stuff because it gave me a chance to get to know my characters better, and let them develop more.

So years of that go by and then I try to write a short stroke story again. It didn't work. The story got stretched out. I wrote a blog entry about that.

I tried again and again, but it just didn't work. I couldn't write a Beating Off Bob type story anymore.

Well, wonder of wonders, I've recently been sifting through my projects folder, which has a lot of half-finished stuff in it that got back-burnered for one reason or another. I found this story that was based on someone else's work. I've done that before, telling someone else's idea with my own spin on it. And this one, when I finished it, qualified as a good old B.O.B. kind of story!

It's called Breeding My Nieces and it has no redeeming value at all. There's no lesson and no philosophy. The girls wanted to get knocked up, and they do.

My current working theory is that if I get my own idea for a story, it will end up long. If I poach someone else's plot idea and just spin it my way, it might end up as a short stroke story.

So there you go. I said I'd keep trying, and it might have paid off.

Of course, you'll have to be the judge of that.

Thanks for reading.

Bob