Grey Wolf: Blog

I've added a paragraph to the Foreword to Variation On A Theme, Book 1. It reads:

One important note: I'm telling the story of many people's lives, seen through the eyes of my main character. Bad things happen along the way, sometimes to good people. If they're outside the story codes, I'm not going to add extra warnings. That seems consistent with many other stories. I don't want to say 'X happens to someone at some point' and have everyone wondering to whom X happens and who the bad guy is who does X. I apologize if someone is upset by something that happens. I'm personally upset by some things that happen, but the story is richer for them, I think. There's lots of happiness and love, but all happiness and love all the time makes for a bland story.

I've considered the caution tag, but I don't really think it's appropriate. This is a slow, coming-of-age story filled with what I hope are relatively realistic people. Bad things will happen. How bad is partly in the eye of the beholder. If you have something that is a particular concern, you're more then welcome to ask me if X happens. I'll let you know (and ask you to not share that).

Please don't ask me "what happens that's bad"; I can't answer that. I don't know what someone's particular sensitivities might be and I might miss one.

There's nothing here that's designed to creep people out or upset them, hence my deciding against the 'caution' tag. They're much more in the category of 'life happens', and 'sometimes bad things happen to good people'.

If something happens that is covered by a code, it will be mentioned. Period. I'm not using this to cover a surprise incident for which there's a code.

If you have comments, please let me know. I don't want to cause someone distress by taking the story to a place they're not comfortable going.

One last comment: 'this' (bad things happening) isn't 'imminent'. There are specific things I'm thinking of; don't expect them in the next week or two. I just want to let people know well in advance that not everything will be happiness.

Chapter updates have been made. Almost all are very small grammar or wording changes. There's no point in checking on them in almost all cases, but everything that's been reported to me should be fixed. It should help later readers / re-readers.

Several people have noted a comment Steve makes about his parents' church in Chapter 6, and the change there is worth noting. The original text was a bit too brief and simply used "Lutheran" to describe things. There are many branches of Lutheranism. Steve's parents' church is a member of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod (LCMS). LCMS is a quite conservative denomination, which is where Steve was going in his comments. However, that's not what the actual words said. There were and are liberal Lutheran denominations (hence Steve's flippant remark about 'heathens').

The rewritten text makes the LCMS affiliation of the church explicit. I imagine this doesn't matter to most readers, but to some, it does, and what appeared was not what I meant. Now it better reflects what I meant.

First - thank you to everyone who's written to me. I appreciate it!

In the spirit of that, I've had a few changes suggested by astute readers. A missed word in one place, a few fact checks, a bit of clarification. They'll post as revisions to the affected chapters, and that's the question.

I've got a few options:

1) Just silently update the version on affected chapters. Obviously the least disruptive and easiest option, but the one that gives readers the least information.

2) Update the version and post a general "hey, things changed!" blog entry.

3) Update the version and post a more specific "these things changed" blog entry.

4) Keep a list of changes that itself gets updated.

5) Something else.

There's also a question of how often to update. My preference is sooner, really; it saves new readers from hitting things that have been fixed. But it also creates more opportunities to distract readers. On the other extreme, I could simply update the whole thing as posting concludes.

In a vacuum, I'll probably go with option 1, silent updates, and maybe every other week or so, but I don't want to do that if it's going to be upsetting. To be clear - this would only be for missing words, grammar, little clarifications, and the like. If anything had impact on the story, that's entirely different and I would never do that without making it clear it was happening.

And the underlying message here is that, yes, I really value comments and corrections, even if - maybe especially if - it's a missed or poorly chosen word, a grammatical issue, etc. Bigger issues are harder to fix - if I've written a character or scene in a way that doesn't work, that might be nearly impossible to fix, but fixing spelling and grammar and missed words is easy.

Everything posted has been through at least four rereads on my part plus the work of two volunteer editors/proofreaders. There's a caveat: obviously, something fixed later in the process will miss one or both of my editors. That's the cause of the missing word that made it out to posting.

It's amazing what you can't see even after that much attention, so thanks again for letting me know what you spot.

I'm going with a suggestion of 4x/week (one chapter each). If this doesn't work, the aim will be twice or three times a week.

My current planned schedule is M/W in the morning and Fri/Saturday in the evening. Obviously, for those who prefer to read less often, pick a couple days and there'll be a couple chapters waiting, with any luck.

Chapter 9 should be out shortly, 10-12 are queued (and I'll get 13-16 in the system shortly).

Thank you to everyone who's taken the time to write to me!

I received a suggestion to change my posting frequency from 4 chapters once a week to two chapters twice a week. I think that makes a lot of sense, so I'm throwing it out that. Thoughts? Which days are best for you (I'm tentatively leaning towards Monday and Friday)?

As implied, my leaning is to change, unless a lot of people prefer larger posts once a week.