Occasional Writer: Blog

I have now officially started 'The Ancient', one of two story ideas I mentioned in a previous blog entry. This will be a fairly long story. Not only that, but it will have a plot where any changes later in the story will quite likely affect elements at the beginning, necessitating changes in those.

This means it would be foolhardy to post the story before it is complete, so I'll have to resist any temptation.

Given my (admittedly limited) experience so far, I would anticipate being able to write 15 - 20 thousand words per month. My guess for the length of 'The Ancient' would be 60 thousand words or more. So no updates for a while :-(

Somehow I doubt I will be able to resist the urge to post a blog entry every so often...

I noticed, while 'My Bus Broke Down' was very active, that its score would slowly rise and then drop suddenly. It did this a couple of times. Now the TPA scores shed some interesting light on this phenomenon.

Before going into the scores I should first explain that authors can see the (anonymised) individual TPA votes, whereas we cannot see a breakdown of the basic votes, only the average.

The TPA results for 'My Bus Broke Down' show a peak around 9 with a small spread: sort of what one would expect from a discretised normal distribution - albeit one with very few points since there are only twelve TPA votes as I write this. That part one would expect for any story, although the peak would be somewhere else depending on the story's merit.

The unexpected bit is that there is a gap (no sevens or sixes) and then two fives (on the appeal score, from which the overall score is partially derived). I see a bimodal distribution, though I can only say this with a low confidence level due to the small sample size.

Obviously these fives, and perhaps others like them folded into the basic score average, were responsible for the sawtooth like drop in score I saw.

I am not complaining about these fives: feedback is feedback. I am interested, though, in finding or figuring out why some people were so much less satisfied with my story than most others. It's information like this that should help me become a better writer.

My current working theory is that there is a bit of false advertising going on with 'My Bus Broke Down'. It has the d/s tag, but the d/s element is so mild and is explored so little that readers attracted specifically by that tag will be disappointed. All I can do here is explain that I put the tag there to warn people who *really* don't like d/s, and apologise to the true d/s lovers out there who were disappointed in this way. Assuming my theory is correct.

Thanks to all those who have sent feedback about 'My Bus Broke Down'. I think it roughly breaks down into:

- An over-arching generally positive opinion.

- Some minor punctuation, with a little confusion over conventions in my British English style.

- Specific positives:

-- Some descriptive elements.
-- Dave's character.
-- Mr A as an antagonist.

- Specific negatives:

-- Sally's character is not developed nearly enough.
-- The sub/dom and boundaries element is not explored enough.
-- The environment (specifically Edinburgh, since most readers will not be familiar with it) could be described better.

Now I have to figure out what to do about it.

The punctuation and other minor errors I'll fix soon. Some correspondence with those who were kind enough to give me feedback has suggested that, rather than fixing the more structural parts of the story, I should learn from them and incorporate the lessons in future writing.

On that note, I have two ideas for future stories:

1) Adventure with scifi element (but set in the current day), working title 'The Ancient'. Would probably work reasonably well as an episodic tale with a longer 'pilot' introduction.

2) Future-set scifi (on Earth though - no space ships), working title 'The Indefinably Sad Case of Mr Contrary'. This would be a no sex story, designed to be co-published on the finestories sister site.

Both of those would be a bit longer than I have tackled so far. I'm pretty sure I'll do The Ancient next: Mr Contrary will need more skill and experience than I currently have.

I've not had any responses to my inquiries to editors, nor have I had an answer to my advert, so I'm going to post my second story 'My Bus Broke Down' without any editorial oversight. It's not there as I write this, but it's in the submission queue and should appear soon.

However, I think this new story is long enough to almost certainly have grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors. It also is my first attempt to develop a plot and have some characterization: I know there is room for improvement there.

I'd like, therefore, to invite anyone who reads the story and spots errors in grammar, spelling or punctuation, or sees room for improvement in pace, plot or character development, feel free to send a comment to me detailing corrections and/or suggestions.

At some point (presumably when comments either fail to arrive or die down) I'll post another blog entry and freeze the story there and only accept minor corrections - spelling and the like.

I don't know if anyone out there is reading, but if you are...

I've just finished the first draft of a new story. It's called 'My Bus Broke Down'. This one is a bit longer than my last: 19,000 words or around 100k. That gives room to try out a little bit of plot and a smidgeon of character development.

It is also long enough for me to feel that it needs editing, so I am currently trying to find an editor. I will post once it has been through the editorial process.