Mat Twassel: Blog

Cover versus Embedded

In preparing a story for adding to the posting queue, I found myself with a minor dilemma. The story (called Plain and Solid) is about six pages long. It's about a pair of college roommates, one of them, Steffi, student teaching at her old high school, and the teacher she's working under is her old high school math teacher, and back then she had a huge crush on him, but he paid her no attention. The roommate, Gena, unbeknownst to the student teacher Steffi, has a huge crush on Steffi. That might be something of a dilemma for Gena, but it's not the dilemma I'm faced with. I have one illustration for this story. It shows Steffi, the student teacher, in the classroom pressed against her old teacher. This action is described in the story much nearer the end than the beginning. Okay, I do not plan on doing any more illustrations. But where do I put this one? At its place within the story? Or at the beginning as cover art? I am leaning toward putting it at the start, as cover art. I think it acts nicely as a teaser. But does it give too much away? Okay, it may be that this action never actually occurs. It may be that it's only what Steffi desires. Or not. If the picture occurs late in the story, and it's the only picture, is it too late? While it's a nice picture, it doesn't really add anything significant to the story. Embedded, is it extraneous?

If you have any thoughts about this, or about cover art versus embedded art in general, please let me know.

Two insect stories today.

"Bees" is of historical interest to me since it was my first "official" flash fiction. Celeste, the preeminent sex story critique of the newsgroup alt.sex.stories (circa 2000) hosted a flash fiction contest-500 words and no more-and of the hundred or so entries, mine came in first.

In looking over my ladybug story, I thought I'd check out Shaker furniture. For whatever reason Yahoo was my computer's default search engine. And for whatever reason it's somewhat slow to get results in image search. I switched to Google. The results were quick but annoying: the first five pages were all ads. Maybe there's a way to turn off Google ads in search results, but I suspect not.

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.