Bronte Follower: Blog

I've spent quite a bit of the past two days pondering many things about my writing, and that thinking has resulted in this blog post.

The primary result of that concentrated thinking is that my writing plans for the next month or so need to change, and most of the reason for that change is due to Annah. I've discovered that writing installments of It's My Party goes reasonably easily (sometimes incredibly easily), but only when my mind is open to it. That's because I have no personal experience with psych problems, so frequently find it difficult to write in the way the various chapters need writing. That, then, will make adding many chapters in a relatively short time virtually impossible, despite how much I want to get to some of the parts of the story that I've had in my head for most of the past decade, but which reside much farther down the road than Chapter 5.

Nearly all of the rest of that concentrated thinking was really just a "Well, duh" moment. I can't move A New Tree forward without moving the story involving Las Amadas forward in lockstep. Go ahead. Say it. I can take it.

"Well, duh!"

That means that I've spent some of my writing time today (yes, another comp day; and I've got many yet to use) reviewing and editing existing chapters of the follow-on of _Beth_ and have also come up with what I think the final title will be. That title has changed a few times, but I may have decided on a straightforward descriptor of a title.

All of the above means that until I get some 10 or 12 chapters of the _Beth_ sequel written, along with some number of chapters of Smythe's story, I won't be publishing anything new for a bit.

On a mostly different topic, a while back, due to a blog post by oyster50 about his then-new story, I began paying a bit of attention to one of the -- I guess -- summary-stats bits about SOL stories: Weekly download totals of uncompleted serials. I was surprised to find _Beth_ in the top 50 of such most of the time, reaching as high as 26th. Call me surprised. To me, the most interesting aspect of the positioning of _Beth_ in that summary was that the number of weekly views of the story did not vary by more than, perhaps 10-15% around a rough mean of 2250, but that it's place in the list varied from 26th to out of the top 50, so was dependent nearly entirely on how many readers read other stories.

With _Beth_ now complete, it no longer qualifies for that summary list. Color me greatly surprised when, while taking a mental break and wandering through the other set of stats presentations in the front page left sidebar, I found _Beth_ in 6th place in the Top 50 Completed Serials, by Rating, in the Last 30 Days. That find led to another: That the story's score is it's best-ever 8.12. _Beth_ had reached 8.11 at one point a long while ago, but in recent months spent most of its time at 8.04 or so.

Speaking... er... writing about scores, I'm happy to see that the score of It's My Party has been rising after posting two more chapters recently. I understand that some readers didn't get it and that, with more text, some may have figured things out a bit. I knew that the first chapter would be difficult for many readers. Perhaps many were permanently turned off to a story that was too difficult to understand in that first chapter or two. I think that can't be helped, because many of us (including me) don't have much one-on-one experience with mental... instability, let's call it. That very inexperience of mine means that I have to do more online research for this story than I ever had to do for _Beth_, most of which was discovering when Elkton's sunset or sunrise should be or what the moon phase was. Researching mental-health issues is much more difficult. Yes, I could have told A story about a protagonist such as Annah without the mental instability, but aspects of the story I wanted to write required that instability. And, now, I'm stuck with it, a fact I don't mind at all. The story has been worrying at the back side of my brain for too long and it wants OUT!

Thanks, Readers, for following me down Beth's very long road.

My muse was mostly absent for the past couple weeks that saw the number of chapters uploaded ahead of time dwindle from four to zero. I have Chapter 278 mostly finished, but it's not ready for prime time, so will probably be another day.

Perhaps only four more chapters to go to the end of _Beth_ as we know it. However, take heart. While it will be a while before I get enough chapters written of the follow-on story to begin posting it, I've got a few written already. The format will be different, as Beth will not be the sole storyteller, but the story will pick up the storyline immediately after the last chapter of _Beth_.

HOWEVER, I'll be spending a lot more time and energy on It's My Party for the nonce, so I can get that story up on its hind legs, given that it's the very first story idea I ever considered actually writing, much less publishing. Perhaps I can get the scores up, as it's obvious that many readers don't understand the nearly psychotic aspect of the protagonist's writing. Regardless, the protagonist is obviously NOT Beth and, except for age and sex, not at all similar to Beth.

Cheers, all, and welcome to the northern-hemisphere's backside of summer!

Chapters 271-273 are all uploaded and will publish on the 11th, 14th, and 17th, respectively. I've greatly revamped the Cast "chapter" and it should publish sometime on the 9th. I've also recently begun posting a satellite story -- A New Tree -- with Emma Smythe as the protagonist.

Hold onto your hats, folks.

While very similar in spelling and somewhat similar in meaning, clench and clinch do mean different things and are used in different situations.

Clench: contraction or tightening of a body part, such as jaws, hand (into a fist), and sphincter

Clinch: an embrace (the two illicit lovers were found in a clinch)

or, in sports when I was much younger, winning some aspect of play, such as a season, before that aspect of play was over

Formerly, "clinch" was used mostly near the ends of regular seasons (such as in baseball, American football) but before the season was over in situations that a team's lead was too large to overcome in the length of season remaining. Once the season was completed, "clinch" was no longer used. Instead, the team was said to have "won the league (or division or whatever)."

Now, however, it's become a synonym of "won."

Since I have chapters 265-268 uploaded, am deep into Chapter 269, and should have sufficient free time to write for a while, I decided to change to 3-day intervals rather than 4-day publication intervals. Thus, Chapter 265 will publish after 8 pm New York time on 23 June and the others at 3-day intervals after that.