alan14: Blog

I started this story a couple of years ago and got maybe 60% of the way through Before Poppy's story took my focus away.

Now what I'm calling Season One of Poppy & Belle is finished I've started reading Pictures of Lucy ready to pick up the story again.

So far it's 195,000 words and I think it's a better story than Poppy, there's more depth in the two main characters, and it doesn't wander about quite so much.

The bulk of the story is set in the same school as the one in Naomi & Pixie's story (A Beautiful Wonderful Trap Cont.) but there is no other connection between the stories, it just happens to be a boarding school I know well, so I've used it as the location for two different stories.

Anyway, when I've finished reading the part I've written so far I'll upload the first 20 chapters, then I'll give you a few chapters a week while I write the last part of the story. Hopefully I'll finish writing it before I've finished uploading the chapters I've already written, that way I won't leave you all hanging like I did with Poppy.

But we all know how well I keep my promises - has one of my writing heroes, Douglas Adams said: I love deadlines, I especially love the sound they make as they zoom past...

Here we go, the final part of Poppy Season One.

It's taken longer than I'd hoped to write this part, but I wanted to make it special, then a dose of Covid knocked me sideways for a few days.
Anyway, here it is, the end of a story I started well over a year ago and thought it would top out at 20 to 25,000 words, I think it's close to half a million now, with scope for many more adventures.
I had no real plan when I started Poppy's story, and she took me to many dark places, but we've also had a huge amount of fun on the way, and fallen in love with the whole family and more people besides.

I've got to thank everyone who's stuck with Poppy through this story, I've loved reading all your messages, and taken note of all your suggestions for places we can take the story in future.

Now I'm going to rest my typing fingers for a day or two, then pick up a story I started a couple of years ago and sidelined when Poppy appeared - Look out for Pictures of Lucy in a month or two...

As I've been writing part 50 of Poppy (which is almost finished, I hope to post it in the next couple of days) I was thinking about the action in Force of Nature, and about how we didn't get our friends' reactions to Jeremy's revelation.

So I devoted today to putting their reactions down on paper, so to speak.

I hope this story fills in some gaps.

Again, this is 6 months after the end of Season One of Poppy and Belle's story. There will be more of these little vignettes to come, I'm leaving a few threads to pull in the final part of Season One.

OK, more ending Poppy story one avoidance.

Educating Amber started as a little germ of an idea and I thought I could tell her story in one of my 12 hour spurts of action, but she had so much more to tell us.

She ended up taking over my life for a month in a 60,000 word novella.

Trigger warning: There is discussion of familial child abuse and CP in this story, but no graphic detail.

I recently found a half written Amy story in my One Drive, so over the weekend I re-read all 12 Amy stories - yeah, I know, I should be writing part 50 of Poppy, but I'm finding all sorts of distractions to stop me finishing the story because I don't want it to end.
Anyway, I always liked the Amy stories. They're not great writing, but she's an excellent character.
I didn't have a big audience back when I posted these stories 9 years ago, so I don't know how many of you have read them, I know very few people sent me messages picking holes in my grammar, so I had to learn the hard way (also, at least one character's surname changed along the way).

Anyway, I really enjoyed reading Amy's story, so I've added it to my jobs list to fix them all, and when I'm done I'll take the old versions down and repost the new ones. I might do them one at a time, I might do them in a big lump. Either way, the old and the new will not exist at the same time as you can't have two stories with the same name.
No time frame for this, because my jobs list is growing all the time...