Mushroom: Blog

Finally. After just a tad over 3 years, 199 chapters, and 7 megs of writing, the Country Boy, City Girl saga is completed.

It has been a fun ride, and I want to thank everybody who went along on it with me. I will admit, when I first started to scribble a simple short story (or so I thought) 3 years ago, I had absolutely no idea what it would grow into.

I am going to miss Pete, but I think I left him and the others in a good situation.

I want to apologize to everybody for the sudden stop in my writing.

Several months ago I moved in with family members because one of them was having medical issues. And sadly, they passed away this weekend. So that has been taking all of my time, and will be for a while yet I am sure. But I will resume posting as soon as I can. I just have other things which have been of a much higher priority.

Yes, I have not stopped writing "Country Boy", I am still hoping to finish it by the end of the month. Even though I have posted 60 chapters, I am almost finished with Chapter 62. And still adding every day.

But as is often the case, I find I have to take small breaks from one story, and move to another. And at this time, I am doing a major re-write on "Bohica". The Night of Madness has often been my escape mentally from Country Boy, as it is a darker story. I find writing a more gritty story is a good relief from the "love story" that one is, and a week or so away allows me to return to it with a clear mind wanting a softer story.

And as this is editing and cleaning and not writing, it lets me move a lot faster. In the last 3 days I have covered 10 chapters, and when I finish it it will be 90% the same story, but some things expanded upon and changed. But because I am also condensing it, it will be both larger, and have fewer chapters. It was as I was writing that that I started to expand the length of chapters, so in the earliest ones I have combined 2 chapters into 1 many times. As at the same time I changed many passages.

But for any that read it before, once again nothing major has changed. I will probably not post it until next year, once I finish Country Boy, and as the final step before I resume on Dire Wolf. In fact, it is because of that I am revising this now. So when I return to the Night of Madness universe, it is all fresh in my head.

Over the past year or so, I have had a few write and ask if they could submit a story to the "Night of Madness" universe. And I decided to just go ahead and work on a "Writers Bible" to help others to understand what the basic rules are.

For those that do not know, this is common in any kind of episodic creation where multiple people will be writing it. Especially in shows like Star Trek, or when a property becomes a series of novels like Star Wars or "Thieves World".

In short, it lays out the "rules" that should be followed. What conventions should be used, and what should not be used. That way multiple authors can create multiple stories in many different ways, and not conflict with each other.

And it also is a work in progress. I plan to return to Dire Wolf in the near future, and decided to first give Bohica and the Dire Wolf story I had written so far a polish and cleaning. And as I was doing that, to write things up a bit more for clarity.

Thanks to a suggestion from somebody else, I have created a "Dark Tales Universe", which is where I am going to be putting all of those stories, along with others that fit into that and were not previously. So stories like "Once Again, For The First Time" and "Little Sister's Surprise" can now be amongst the others. Where is always where those really belonged, as thematically they were Dark Tales, even though I wanted to post them individually.

And I noticed that they also have been getting a lot more views and comments than they ever had as part of an anthology. I even chuckled when one said they loved the twist in the ending of one.
And I realized it was a story almost a year old, it had simply been hidden in an anthology was all.