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The first stories I published on Stories Online, the Stewart stories, I dropped as complete novellas. I received some criticism for that strategy because the title only appeared on the SOL main page for one day (except when one story appeared as "Random Storie from the Archive."
This time I set up the mechanism to drop one chapter a week (on Saturdays). So, the title will appear several times over the next few weeks.
It's nice to let go of this story and let everyone else read about Tony' headache. I do hope you enjoy it.
After a pause of several years, I'm posting another story. I had started it in the heat of composition as soon as I completed the Stewart stories. The story was intended to be a departure from the Swarm cycle; a lighthearted 1960s sitcom, complete with commercial breaks and wrapping up in four segments.
But darn it, these characters wouldn't cooperate. I hit a roadblock and set it (reluctantly) aside. I never forgot about it, but I could never make the comedy flow in the story. It devolved into an ugly farce. There it sat, just a story idea. Recently, I pulled the old story out and asked a test reader for some advice; they pointed out that there was a very dark subtext to my story.
Subtext? Me?
So, I picked it back up and restarted. I amplified the dark hints in the earlier scenes. I found that the story went from 1960s network sitcom to 1980s Basic Cable movie. Think SciFi channel meets Skinimax.
So here it is.
I'm an older guy, I admit it. With classic older movies and television shows available for (nearly) free, I have been able to revisit some of the most beautiful women ever filmed. Some of them are breathtaking. Rita Hayworth, for example.
But for me, some of the most attractive, sexy, and desirable women were on weekly television in the 1960s. Networks had access to armies of stunning talented women and were able to cast the cream of the crop: Barbara Eden, Elizabeth Montgomery, and many others. As a kid, I didn't fully understand how wonderful it would be to come home from a tough day at work and have Samantha Stevens waiting by the front door with a cold martini. I have since learned.
Of course, for me as a space kid, the ultimate was Jeanie. But as I have grown older, I wondered, "What would a genie want? What would I want from a genie?"
I was playing with the free version of Grok and I tried making some cover art for the Steward stories.
Most of the AIs are both exhilarating and infuriating, (Sense a recurring theme here?)
They were fun, but they were always just a bit off.
I guess I should not be so cheap and shell out for the paid versions.
The very worst sin that a writer can commit is wasting the reader's time and attention. This sin can be committed by simply writing a bad story that goes nowhere or contains characters that in the end, the reader doesn't care about.
More commonly, this sin is committed by inattention to mechanical issues such as bad grammar, poor usage, misspellings and typos that make a reader work harder than she must, and, if bad enough, cause her to stop reading the story completely, abandoning the time that she already invested. (Easy writing is cursed hard reading!)
I have flubbed a major goal in re-posting some of my older stories. First, I used an less than adequate editing software and did not verify that I produced compliant ASCII text files (it did not.) Second, I blindly struggled with the SOL mechanism for updating a story and screwed up the posting. Unknowingly, I announced on my SOL blog that the story Steward's Third Mission was ready for readers. Several very kind people have re-read the story and noted these errors. I want to thank them more than I am able in this short space; and I want to apologize to them and everyone else who took the time to re-read the story and shrugged, wondering what kind of drugs did I take back in the 1960s that brought on early dementia.
Thanks to: UncleMerlin, Dinsdale, Quine, te987, adraken, nsn1955, davidl150, wires, joebee, Lion13, Desert Baseballer, zululook, inioth, atoner-90626, Gordon Johnson, CoullPert, and CoffeeMojo11.
Finally, a very humble thanks to Lazeez, Webmaster extraordinary.
It was so simple it plum evaded me."
I've been posting on this site for more than a decade. You'd think I'd know HOW TO ADD A DAMN CHAPTER to an existing story.
Well, I do now.
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