Mushroom: Blog

Well, I have decided that "Anthology Stories" really do not work here, so I have killed my "Dark Tales" series. And I am in the process of going over them again and posting them as individual stories.

It was an interesting idea, but I think that not many got that it was not a single story, but over a dozen different stories, each one very different than the last. This way, hopefully more will be able to find the individual stories they like.

Oh, and if you have read them before, you might want to look again after I post them. I also had another unposted anthology I called "Light Tales", and in some cases I am combining the two. So if you think you read the story already, look farther down and you may be surprised that it ends in a completely different way than it had before.

In other words, some of the previous "Dark Tales" are not so dark anymore.

I wanted to throw something out there, because some have been starting to pick it up from my writings.

A long running joke among my friends is that I am a "Radically Militant Moderate". I believe in compromise, and have no strong attachment to either side politically. And am in most ways "Conservative" by inclination, but rather "Liberal" in a great many other ways.

And my writing often reflects this viewpoint. Of course, I am also almost never "in your face" about it. Instead, I write my little stories and tell my little tales, dropping little breadcrumbs here and there. And hope that some might read it again, and see the layers I had crafted, like an onion. Many not even seen until after the story is done.

I just wrote one I called "Sally the Welder". Another period piece, set during WWII. And like many, one I purposefully built into the narration, to try and cause people to explode or explore their preconceptions. And spoilers ahead, in case you want to read the story before going any farther.

One, in what is actually unusual for me I actually did do a "reveal" of the race of the narrator early on (most times it is never obvious, or much later if it is). But I have to wonder how many read the first several paragraphs, not even realizing it. Dropping a few "vague accidental clues" that the narrator became pregnant, but never saying it overtly until much later.

My family is from the South, and I have lived there. And I always hate it when bigots just assume that they are nothing but a bunch of racist rednecks. Yes, there are still some like that, but they are very much the minority. There were ALWAYS good people anywhere, that did not give a damn about race. And worked in their own ways to eliminate such behaviors. Like a doctor in my story. Who worked at 2 "Black Hospitals", one of them a teaching hospital. Yes, he has wealth and a comfortable life. But he is having to work at basically 2 jobs to do so, where other doctors likely only had to work at 1 to get the same level of success.

This to me is my "radicalism". I do not get into people faces and scream at them, it's just not my style. Instead, I craft these little stories, in the hopes that at least some who read them take a moment and actually think. I have no interest in seeing people "woke". I just want them to think for themselves, and live with open eyes, and realize that there are a great many layers. And like in an onion some layers may be rotten, most layers are just fine.

OK, Book III is now fully up.

For anybody that was current prior to my splitting the story, you can pick up at Chapter 44, which has now been posted.

As I have been discussing in the comments at the end of the story, I decided to break up Part II into Part II and Part III.

The end of Part II is now when Pete has the accident, and everything after is in Part III. At this time, that means 43 chapters that were previously in Part II have been moved into Part III. So once you see Chapter 44 posted, that will be new content.

And there was an issue with some of the chapters I posted, so am now reposting them one at a time. So please be patent as I upload them one at a time manually, but I promise that as soon as they are up I will post 44 and shorty 45 so there is new content.

I was bored the other day, and decided to try something I had not done before. I had tried doing voice narration of my own stories years ago, and once even did the first chapter of one of my stories before I realized I would have to do it over a dozen more times, and gave it up.

But the other day I decided to try it again, but used one of the computer generated programs to do it. And the result was, interesting. I admit when I take long road trips, I often use my e-book reader on my phone to narrate stories as I drive. Even my own, as it can help me catch things I did not find when editing them.

I then decided to pop it in and try to incorporate some stills, but after about 30 minutes decided to return to my story in progress, and simply upload what I had done.

Has anybody else done this, and what did you use? Myself, I used a program called Balaboka to convert the text to MP3, and then VSDC to add in some images and save it as a video file. Both are free to use, but if you have never used a video editing program before it may take you some time to get the hand of it.

Does anybody know of a place we can send things like this? And has anybody else done it, and what were your results?

This is the one I did, it is Chapter 1 of Valley Girl, but only the first 3 or 4 minutes have any images. If I continue it, I figure I will also add some video clips.

https://xhamster.com/videos/valley-girl-erotic-story-test-xhHCS2b

And yes, I know the audio is a little out of sync with the images. I think it is either my slow computer, or something to do with the video output I used.