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Chapter Thirteen is live.
January, exams, a tutoring room that keeps growing, and two people who tell James the same thing in the same week without ever meeting each other.
A word about the rest of it. I started this to see whether I could write at all. Thirteen chapters in, I am still learning something with every one of them: how to let a scene end early, how much of a character can live in one gesture, when to stop explaining. The comments have taught me more than anything I have read about writing. Half the things I now do on purpose, I first did by accident and only noticed because one of you pointed at it.
It began as a bit of fun. It is turning into something I care about quite a lot, and that is down to you reading and saying so.
Book 2 is already being drafted alongside Book 1, so there will be no long silence when this one ends.
About the other story
Some of you have found Available Light. For those who have not: it is a different animal. No second life, no knowing what is coming, no building to buy. It is one man in the present tense, a former medical researcher who now photographs weddings for a living, standing in a hotel room in Prague rewriting the same sentence for the ninth time. Where The Long Way Back is about a man rebuilding an entire life with an unfair advantage, Available Light is about a man who is very good at looking at other people and has no idea what to do when someone looks back. Quieter, smaller, closer to the bone.
Available Light has been uploaded for a re-post. The story is now seven chapters where it was eight.
The old chapter one was a man alone in a hotel room for two thousand words before anything happened. The numbers said what I already suspected: a lot of you stopped there. That material is now the opening of chapter one rather than the whole of it, and Sofia arrives while you are still in the first chapter instead of most of the way through the second.
There is also a new scene in the party chapter. Evan does something with his camera that he should not, and then has to tell her about it. It costs him something, which is what the middle of the book was missing.
The ending is unchanged, down to the last line.
Chapter eight is now an afterword about the Available Light Cycle, and about the two people Evan walked past that weekend without ever knowing they were in the building. One of them gets the next book.
If you had a chapter bookmarked, everything from the old chapter three onward has moved down by one. Sorry about that. There was no way to do this without it.
The ebook edition on ZBookStore carries the same text.
Scores and comments are the fuel. Thank you for reading.
Star Again
Chapter 12 is posted.
First, a thank you. Several of you sent notes about the earlier chapters. The praise teaches me nothing about the craft and everything about why I keep going. The rest was the useful part: a scene that ran too long, a line that did not sound like the person saying it, a stretch where the pacing sagged and someone was honest enough to say so.
I went back and fixed what I agreed with. Nothing structural, nothing that changes the story you have already read, but the early chapters are cleaner than they were a month ago. Keep sending it. I would rather hear it than not.
About the pace
Worth saying plainly, because a few readers arrived expecting something else.
This is a slow burn. The heat is earned over chapters rather than delivered in the first one. It is explicit and it is there for a reason, but if you want a story that gets to it quickly, this is not the one, and I would rather you know that now than at chapter four.
Plenty of excellent work here is built the other way. Mine is not. Different appetite, different book.
If you like the wait, you are in the right place.
Summer
It is summer, which for most writers means the schedule quietly falls apart. I would rather it did not. The chapters are planned and I intend to post them as promised. If anything changes you will hear it here first, but I am not expecting it to.
I am also writing a longer post about two things readers keep raising: the dialogue, and the problem of writing a man who already knows what is coming. That will follow in a week or two.
Two small asks, both optional
If the story is working for you and you have a Goodreads account, a review there helps more than you would think. A few honest lines from a real reader outweigh anything I could write about my own book.
And if you want to support the work directly, the book is at ZBookStore. Reading it here is free and will stay free. Buying it is not expected, only appreciated.
Either way, thank you for reading this far. Chapter 12 is waiting.
The ebook has had a revision pass, mostly the dialogue in the later chapters. The story is the same. Same chapters, same ending. What changed is that a few characters stopped being quite so good at talking. Everyone in that book landed every line, which is not how people speak, so some of them now miss.
The updated file is on ZBookStore.
Nothing for you to do about it if you read here. When I revise a chapter I replace the posted version, so what is on StoriesOnline is always the current text.
Available Light is up too, all eight chapters, complete. A standalone novella about a wedding photographer who can read any room and cannot stand being seen in one, and the woman in the third row who notices. It is shorter than The Long Way Back and the voice is looser. I want to know what you make of that one, and I would rather have the honest reaction than the kind one.
The other thing.
I read the comments. All of them, including the one-liners, including the ones that are mostly a score with a sentence attached. Some of them have changed the actual work. In the next book the money is handled differently, because someone here pointed out that it moved too quietly in this one. I would not have seen that on my own.
Thank you for that. And for the rest of it.
Star Again
Two bits of news today, and both feel good to write.
First, Chapter 9 of The Long Way Back is live. Go read it. We're staying on the two-a-week rhythm you voted for, and so far it feels like the right pace for this story.
Second, the novella is complete. Available Light is finished and fully online now, start to end. If you followed Evan Reed into that too-warm hotel room in Prague, you can now walk the whole way with him. I'm proud of this one, and I'd love to know what you think.
Both the book and the novella are up on ZBookStore as well. Any support over there is genuinely welcome and it's a big part of what lets me keep doing this. No pressure though. Reading here already means a lot. And that's the thing I keep coming back to: your comments and your mails. I read every one. Some make me laugh, some make me rethink a scene, and a few have stayed with me for weeks. That back-and-forth is half the reason I write.
So thank you, honestly. I'm not slowing down. There's more coming, and I'm looking forward to writing it. See you in the next chapter.
S.
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