Mat Twassel: Blog

Today's story "What's That?" is of some personal historical interest. Quite a few years ago, a friend from an Internet writing group invited me to participate in a writers' challenge ongoing at Art of Darkness, a computer art site of which he was a member. The challenge was two-sided. Artists posted a piece of work, and writers attempted to do a story that went with the illustration. Or, writers posted a story, and artists attempted to do a picture illustrating the story. I had no experience with computer art at the time, and being a new member, I didn't feel it appropriate to post an original story, so I did a story which to my mind went with a picture titled "What's That?" The picture showed a couple of heavily armed robots standing in the street of a city reduced to rubble. They were staring down at a lovely red rose lying on the pavement. As one of them aimed his weapon at the flower, the other asked the question. As I recall, no one commented on my story. Maybe they didn't think it appropriate that a newbie take part in the challenge. Or maybe they just thought my story sucked. Anyway, that got me interested in 3D art, I bought Poser 6, a 3D art application, and started doing my own illustrations. Not long later, because Poser didn't fit my intuitive nature, I switched to DAZ Studio. A few years later I attempted to duplicate (more or less) the original art for "What's That?" It was okay but not nearly as good as that original picture. Probably I could do better today, but I thought I'd just present the story by itself. Let me know what you think.

Yesterday my SOL total downloads exceeded one million. The actual number of downloads might be a few thousand short of a million, because one story, "Hooping," was originally a chapter story, and the download count for chapter stories is significantly inflated. But by tomorrow or the next day, assuming 17-911-ED and 17-911-EF don't run amok, the real count should exceed a million. I'm very appreciative of SOL for providing this venue, and I'm appreciative of the readers.

I'm thankful SOL allows no-sex stories even if on any given day only about half as many people download my no-sex story as my sex story-or anyway that's been pretty much true for the eight no-sex stories I've posted so far. I'll probably post more from time to time.

This morning I converted my story "Hooping" from a seven chapter story to a single chapter story. I'd put it in chapters as an experiment to see how chapters worked. A number of people hated that the chapters were only a few words each. Some people also objected to the way the story was coded. I thought "caution" would be warning enough, but some thought it should be "snuff." I don't think it's really a snuff story, but I added that code.

Two "food" stories today. One of them, "Sexy Pizza," might not adhere strictly to the requirements of the food story code, but the other, "Yam," should more than make up for any Sexy Pizza shortcoming.

A week ago I put two old stories to the top of my author page list to see if that would increase their downloads. It did.

The Orange Dress had 134 downloads in the last six days for 38th place in the weekly download count of my stories.

Jazz did even better with 142 downloads for 36th place. That's the equivalent of 24th place if you don't count the 12 new stories this week.

What I hadn't realized was that elevating a story to the top of the list does not keep it there. Each new story gets ahead of it, with the group of new stories in alphabetical order.

Typically my stories have been getting between three thousand and five thousand downloads the first week. The second week the number of downloads drops to a few hundred. I guess this makes sense. What also makes sense is that of the older stories, the ones with titles at the beginning of the alphabet get more downloads than other older stories. I noticed yesterday that I have some control over the order in which stories are listed on my page, so I decided to bring a couple of my older stories to the top. I picked two of my favorites, which are also stories which were not especially well received by the voting SOLers. Jazz, which is (by a large margin) my least favored story among voters (which surprises me), and The Orange Dress, which has a special place in my heart, perhaps because it is almost autobiographical. I'll report back in a week to let you know what happened.