I'm working on adding to an old story of mine that I really like and that is crying out for an addition. The going is painfully slow. The ideas, the situations, the action, the dialog, none of it comes to me as easily as it did back in the day. I've been working, on and off on adding to this story for about three days now. I've got several hours into it and I'll bet that I haven't added a hundred words to it.
I don't have any trouble polishing the story. I read it and I see the factual errors, the awkward transitions, the wrong word, even the actions that go against the character's established personality as they've been written. The corrections or improvements (I hope they're improvements!) come easily but they don't involve any major changes to the characters, the plot or to any subplots. At most, I'm just adding a sentence or two to clarify something or improve the way the story moves along.
There's more of this story in my head, in fact, I know goddamned good and well that there's more of this story waiting to be told. The problem is that I can't seem to find a way to do it that doesn't require a major rewrite of the whole thing. That's what seems to need to happen if I'm going to add on to this story, and that I will not do.
I have zero confidence that any rewrite I do now will improve the story. Small steps. If I find a way to extend this story that I like, then I might tackle a rewrite.
I can sense the general outline of the subplot I want to add but I'll be fucked if I can tease it outta my head and on to my computer in a way that isn't jarringly different from the bulk of the story. I'll keep working on it but to be perfectly honest about it, I'm not very hopeful that it'll happen. Either way, I'll keep you posted.
I said in my first entry that I thought I had written for SOL from 1995 to sometime after 2008.
Wrong.
I discovered some reviews that I had written back then and my review page had a very short bio on it. It said that I joined SOL in 2004 and started posting here in 2005. Missed it by ten freakin' years. And I still have no real idea as to when I stopped posting here. My best guess would be during or after 2008, since 2008 was when I wrote my last review.
I'm pretty sure that I was starting to have trouble writing. I would write something, set it aside for a few days and then reread it. And my first impression was inevitably this is crap. And I'd shitcan it. My continued inability to write stories up to my old standards was coloring my whole life, which was a real shock to me because I didn't think I was that heavily invested in my writing. As it turns out, I was. After a few months, I said to hell with it and pulled back from writing completely. I don't recall why I pulled all my stories from SOL, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
At any rate, I'm back, sort of. I'm mostly polishing up my old stories and putting them out there to see how they're received.
So far, so good.
I used to write for Stories Online almost 30 years ago. It was a difficult time for me and my family, my mother had had a stroke and she was paralyzed on her left side and marginally incontinent. She required around the clock care which she got, mostly from my father and my brother for the next fourteen years. I was working a 12 hour schedule which was 4 days on, 3 days off, 3 days on, 4 days off. I filled in as needed to give dad and my brother time off. It left me with a lot of time on my hands and one day, out of the blue, I decided to try my hand at writing porn, mostly to relieve the stress and to forget, at least for a little while.
And I discovered that I was good at it. The stuff I wrote was explicit, stroke stories mostly, detailed in ways that I wasn't finding in stories on the site. I don't know exactly how long I wrote for Stories Online, but I think it was at least 12 years, from I think 1995 to 2007 or 2008, maybe longer and maybe shorter.
Anyway, I'm retired now, not in the best of health and bored. I still have quite a few of the stories I posted back then and I think I'm going to clean them up to meet Stories Online rules, maybe touch them up a little and file off the serial numbers to make them a little different than they were back then.
Enjoy!