Mushroom: Blog

In "Country Boy, City Girl" I have been talking about a lot of ideas and concepts that predate what people know and are familiar with today. Much is very archaic, and incredibly obsolete. But this is also being done to keep the story based firmly in the era it is being written in.

The BBS was a huge precursor to "The Internet" being available to the masses. At this time, if you had a modem (if you even had one, almost nobody did), you were limited to a service like CompuServe, The Source, or America On-Line, which actually charged you from around $2-25 per hour to use their services. Or you used Prodigy, which was more flat rate, but tons and tons of ads and limitations.

So most of us called a local Bulletin Board System (BBS). That would be a person like me, who put a phone in their house onto a computer, so other people could call it. We would have local chat rooms (the "Bulletin Board" part), download files like the Castle Wolfenstein demo, or text files, images scanned from Playboy, MIDI files, and things like this. Almost all a few hundred K in size, because storage was incredibly expensive.

They also had "door games", where you could basically play a few games which were turn based and others could participate in. Not really "real time", but it was getting there.

If the BBS was really advanced, they might install a FOSSIL driver, and use an ECHO service like FIDONet. A BBS would host a bunch of groups on various topics, and a couple of times a day we would call out to our main node and download a packet of updates, s well as the messages from our system going out. They then would repeat this process to the next higher step. It would take 2-5 days foe a message posted to be available across the entire network, and to get a response.

But hell, in this era 5 days of message lag was just accepted, it was faster than using the mail.

I posted a story that I first saw on a local BBS in around 1990. I even hosted it on my own BBS, but many here are trying to dig through places like ASSTR to locate the "author". Well, you will not find it there, I saw it before the ASS or ASSM Usenet groups even existed. So all that could be found is some other schmuck that just posted it there years later and did not write it themselves.

It really is from a time before The Internet existed. And it is obvious that many simply can not comprehend of people exchanging files before such a time.

After knocking out around 30 chapters in the last month, I am taking a quick break, and letting my fingers recover a bit.

It was a fun groove, but I could only keep up that kind of pace for so long. Quite literally, in 1 month I covered well over 2 years, starting when Pete was still on leave, and ending right as he gets out. And of course 4 chapters of Linda's story, as well as a few others I have posted here and there.

But I am not stopping, I am still writing. But I am slowing up a bit, has been a good month.

Well, for the last 2 months in between writing more chapters for Book II, I finally completed the re-edit of Book I.

There should be no major changes, so there is no need to go out and read it again. Primarily what I was correcting was my bad typos, some horrible syntax, and correcting some times when I blew it with names. A few minor characters got renamed, but nothing major in any way. Primarily done for clarity.

So hopefully those who complained my writing was unreadable will give it another try.

Well, there have not been many entries lately as I have been going through a patch of writers block. And finally as a way to bust through it I started a new story. But this is one I had already said I would be writing.

"Valley Girl" is the story of Linda, but from her point of view. It starts about a year before she meets Pete, and as of this time goes up to the point in "Country Boy, City Girl Book II" where she goes to his house while he is home on leave. There will be more to follow, but likely only after I finish she main story.

And realize, this is told from Linda's point of view. This was what I was keeping in my mind most of the time as I wrote the first stories. This is not the "realized perfect" that Pete was presenting her as through his narration, this is the real Linda. With her thoughts, which are quite a contrast from how Pete saw her for so many years.

And finally this should help put to rest all those that had accused me of "changing the characters". From almost the start, this was the Linda I was keeping in the back of my mind. What everybody has been reading is the "fantasy Linda", as Pete saw her. Not realizing what she was really hiding.

After about a month or so of constant updates (sometimes 2-4 chapters a day), I finally reached the point where I had to take a short break from Country Boy.

I am still hard at work though. Lately I have been mining my old site at ASSTR, and pulling out some stories that I have not read in well over a decade. Basically pulling off these relics from around 1996-2000 and giving them a light editing.

I will be honest, there is no way I would post them in here today in their original form. So all I have really been doing is just giving them a light editing. Maybe ultimately adding say 15-20% of new content to a 4 page Word document, but a lot of cleaning and other changes at the same time. Yet still trying to keep the same "look and feel" of the original story from 2 decades ago.

Case in point, "Beach Girls" was originally one of those, and set in the mid-late 1990's when it was written. It is still the same story, but now in a manner where it is told by a middle aged gal today, looking back at when she was younger.

This helps to both cement it in that era of time, as well as show who we are as kids may not be how we turn out as adults.

I will probably continue like this for a few weeks, digging through old archives to dig out my older stories and post them here, or going back and editing some of my older stories here. Hopefully in a week or so I will be able to go back and finish up CBCG.