Zen Master: Blog

One of my author buddies asked me to turn comments on. Sure, no problem, but how? It took me a while to find it. It's on the "stats" page for an individual story.
There does not appear to be a global setting for all stories. Which means that I have to open up the stats page for each and every story, to turn comments on for that particular story. Thankfully, I only have 16 stories posted here. This does not scale well, ya know? What is Aubie56 sposta do if he wants comments? He has hundreds of stories here!
Oh, and I heard somewhere that comments do NOT go to the author. They just sit there on the story's page until someone else reads them. I'm not gonna go check every story I ever wrote every day, to see if someone added a comment. Of course, that may not be true. Maybe they are sent to the author somehow. We'll see.

-ZM

I see more and more comments about ASSTR.org being down. That site, like this one, is funded by donations, and I'm pretty sure that the donations aren't sufficient to pay a full-time webmaster to keep an eye on it at all times. It has been down a lot in the last year. The maintainer has pointed out on several occasions that expenses are piling up and it is not possible to immediately pay for repairs, the site will be back up when repairs can be paid for.
The current issue appears to be that they have configured their web server to _only_ use HTTPS, to refuse to fall back to HTTP if there is a problem, and on the 14th their HTTPS security certificate expired. Until they get an updated certificate or they allow HTTP connections, the site is down even if the server is fine.
Folks, I don't think that the certificate is free. Without donations, that site may never come back. Similarly, SOL isn't free to run, either. Just sayin'.

This is a pretty well-designed website. I know, it's just a place for people to dump stories that aren't good enough to sell, right? Well, it's also a place for people to publish really good stuff that the author could probably have made money off of, but just didn't want to go to all the trouble.
One of the features that I recently noticed is an "Authors' Favorites" list, a list of those stories which are in the most authors' own favorites list.

Oh.

I've never bothered with that on my ownpage, it's just too pretentious to put stuff there because all three of my readers really want to know what I like to read, but hey there's some value here. If I populate my own author's list, that goes into the counting for that big list. Stories that I really liked will move up on that summary list that people should be looking at. Sure. For that, I'll put stuff in my own favorites list.
Only, there's a quirk. See, I don't write for others. I write for me, and I've learned that some others like to read my writing, so I post it here. I _like_ my own writing. I mean, if I didn't then I would probably stop, right? I've even mentioned before that one of my goals is to, someday when I'm senile and no longer remember who I am, stumble across this website, discover some good stories, and realize that I really like that Zen Master guy's stories. I wish he was still writing.
So, yeah, two of the stories I've put on this site are two of my favorite stories. I can't add them to my favorites list, though. Lazeez has that blocked. Authors can't list their own work in their own favorites list. Bummer, man.

ZM

Awright, it appears that all the votes are in. Actually, they've been in for a while but I didn't think of doing any kind of analysis until now. I had asked the blog-readers for an opinion on whether or not I should post my stack of unfinished stories with an admission that they were unfinished and were likely to stay that way. See, I started writing as a sort of therapy when my life wasn't very good, and now that I'm happily married to a woman who is much too good for me I don't write much.
I have, over the years, published 17 different stories. Not all under the pseudonym "Zen Master", and not all on this site. I have 24 more that have made it as far as owning their own set of working files. I have another 28 that haven't made it that far, they are still in the "I wrote this scene" stage.

Of the 24 that I can seriously consider in-work, three are almost done and I'm trying to finish them. The Swarm Cycle novel "Ending This Mess" has gone out to the proofreaders and I'm cleaning it up. Another short story "Learning to Please" just needs one scene finished and it'll be done. And, really, 4 more are reference files for the Swarm Cycle, not really 'stories' per se and they wouldn't be published here anyway.
It's the other 15 or so unfinished works that I'm thinking about putting up on SOL, and I asked for feedback. I got enough answers to be worth reporting the results here, instead of trying to answer each one. The replies all strongly grouped into three answers, of course. "Sure, good idea" (60%), "Who cares?" (20%), and "NO!" (20%) pretty well sum up all the possible answers, right? I also grouped by 'reader-only' and 'has published under that name'.

I'd like to start with the "NO!" answers first. At least one responder was polite enough to say "Please don't do that." The others were considerably less polite, along the lines of "For even THINKING about publishing an unfinished story you should eat shit and die." Um, I checked all of the user-names I got replies from. Not a single one of the "NO!" group has posted any of their works on SOL. So, they read stories posted on a free site but don't themselves contribute anything for others to read.
Granted, that probably is a far larger group of readers than those who both read AND write here, but I think of SOL as a sort of free test-bed for those who are interested in writing, just to see if they can do it. I've seen some pretty dreadful crap here, so clearly the site accepts just about anything as long as you don't focus on sex with people younger than 14. If you haven't been able to get anything published here, it's because you don't want to bother. So, even though the "no" group is pretty strong, they are outnumbered by the reader-only "yes" group even before I add in the author "yes" votes.

If I throw out the middle, the "Yes" group was 3/4 of all votes. Even including the ambivalent group, the "Yes" group was still a clear majority of all answers. They also had some good ideas on how it should be done. One was to not admit in the title that they were unfinished (as no one would read them if I did that), but I really needed to admit they were unfinished in the forward.
One reply pointed out that if I started the title with "Unfinished", then an alphabetic sort would place them all in the back where no one would find them unless they went looking for them. I don't like that as it seems to say that "Unfinished" is the most important concept in the story. If I thought that, I'd throw the file away.
A suggestion I saw over and over again was to publish them and give readers my permission to take the incomplete stories over and provide their own endings. Frankly, that was in the back of my mind anyway, since some of _my_ stories are alternate endings for stories I read here or elsewhere. So, that's what I'm going to do.


-ZM

(This blog post was manually formatted using HTML codes supported by SOL, just to see if we could force some formatting into the entries. It worked great in the preview, but when it came out on the home page all I saw was the raw codes so I went back and pulled them out.)

I hate reading unfinished stories. When's the next chapter coming out? Some authors are regular, every Wednesday or whatever. For those, it's like a serial TV show and we wait for the next exciting episode but it's not a problem because we know it's coming. Some stories, however, haven't been updated in four months or three years and you know that the author never finished it.
I have one long story, the Swarm Cycle "Ending This Mess" which is done except for going through all the proofreader comments. I have another short story "Learning to Please" that is almost done and I'm trying to concentrate on filling in the last couple of gaps. Right now those are my priorities.
I have 20 or so unfinished stories in my own files. I work on one or another whenever it seems right. Are any of them ever going to be completed? I don't know. My life is getting busier again, and as I get older it seems my ability to concentrate is fading away anyway.
I don't want to post them on SOL yet 'cause they ain't done. Still, that's an awful lot of labor that I don't want lost, and I'm egotist enough to think that some people like to read my stories. I was talking to another author here about one of his unfinished stories, and something that's been in the back of my mind for a while jumped forward.
What if I started publishing them with titles like "Unfinished: Lessons" and "Unfinished: The Burglars" and "Unfinished: After the Party"? That gets them out where people can enjoy what's there without any expectation of another chapter soon. All three of those examples are over 100K, so there's something there if people want to read an unfinished story.
Pros? Cons?

-ZM