tendertouch: Blog

I was hoping that saying I was almost ready what give me the kick in the pants that I needed. It worked. I also decided to go with it as is - the first three chapters are queued (later today, next Tuesday and next Saturday.) Once I see that those are working correctly (it has been a long time since I posted something!) I'll queue up the remaining six chapters.

Please feel free to contact me with corrections/suggestions. Note, though, that this is fiction so I've taken a few liberties to help me move the story along. So if you find yourself thinking, "That's not how a police investigation would work" or similar, you're probably right but I've made the choice to handle it this way. Still feel free to let me know but realize I'm unlikely to make changes of that scale to this story. Future stories might well benefit, however.

[Edit] Something went haywire with the submission - the submitted chapter has change tracking marks that I thought had been removed. I've reuploaded it as straight text pasted in to see how that works, but it won't show until maybe tomorrow morning.

I have a new story coming. Eventually.

It's completely written and a couple of editors have worked it over. That's the good news.

While I was cleaning up from those edits life and work went all to hell, though, and I lost the thread - that spark and excitement that makes the story pop for me. I have made myself get back there and cleanup bits and pieces but it's not done yet and even then I want to get it looked over again.

Note, this is not a sequel to "Building a Better Past" but a separate standalone story. Nothing much has happened with the sequel is a few years and I don't want to get anyone's hopes up there - it needs a spark to get any further.

If you're at all into ff then you really owe it to yourself to read No One's Ice and Fire . Humor, self-consciousness, sexiness, some actual sex - it has all of that, but that doesn't do it justice. On the surface the two main characters seem very different but that's not the whole story and given such a short story they round out nicely.

Hard to say Happy Thanksgiving given everything going on in the country but I do hope you find a way to enjoy it as much as you safely can.

Unlike some, I tend to go back and reread my favorite stories and sometimes I'm reminded of just why I enjoy them so much.

A case in point is Janna Leonard. She's no longer writing but she has left a fine body of work for us. What I've found I like so much about Janna's stories is that they mostly don't deal with the silver spoon set, no bankers or stock brokers. The characters aren't managers or CEOs, not even engineers and programmers. They're deputies, privates, nurses, mechanics - in short they're the people getting their hands dirty. Yet she treats them with dignity and compassion.

The stories are mostly set in the upper midwest of the United States - more than one in North Dakota of all places. They mostly deal with gentle romances between women, romances aimed at a lifetime together. Her characters face tragedies and disappointments and help one another through them. All in all they feel lifelike, but without being repetitious or boring.

Gentle, compassionate, empathetic, uncertain and dignified. That's really saying quite a lot.