I won't leave you in suspense; that is for stories, and not for blog posts. It is my intention to finish the story Eagle In The Sunset. There is a reason I am doing the rewrite as a separate story.
I am probably a lot younger than most of my readers think I am. I'm not bragging about the quality of my (somewhat sub-par) writing skills; I just know I have cultural reference points in my life that tend to make me seem older than I am. The reason for me mentioning that is that the transitioning almost 11 years between when I started the story Eagle In the Sunset, and now have been extremely transformative to me.
I am nowhere near as naive and romantic as I had been back then; I have been effectively married to my wife for 12 years now, I have experienced real life a lot more thoroughly than I had then- or really ever wanted to. I also used to be a flaming railfan; as time got on I transitioned into being a transit advocate (which is a very different thing) and then I burned out on the whole subject as a result of politics I am not going to go into because this is my story blog, not my political soapbox.
I still like trains, but I can read it with the eye of a reader who looks at paragraphs and pages of car histories, equipment details, rail operational narratives, and the like and have their eyes roll clear into the back of their head. I am still including some; I think it gives the story color, but I am trying to trim out George's nerdgasmic monologues down to a reasonable level. Feel free to comment on how you feel I'm doing on that; I've gotten it on both sides (don't trim it, I enjoy it! and Dear God STOP!) and I would love to reach a level that pleases everyone. Yes, I know thats never going to happen.
Some of the subject matter I was writing about back then was more comfortable to me then than I am with it now. I know that the site rules are supposed to grandfather older stories. Personally I think the site rules are a bit silly; these are stories that hurt nobody in their creation, I hope, and what they contain is clearly marked; I'm sure they had good reasons for doing it, even if I don't know what they are, though.
Either way, I'm just not comfortable expressing it on a personal level, so I am going to change it into a story that really does not contain those elements, partially because I feel more comfortable sharing it that way with people that I know personally. I think that the basic story that I had wrote back then is fundamentally solid, even if my writing skill would have benefitted from substantial improvement. So I want to leave that original story in its original format for people who want to read it.
The fundamental backbone of the story has not changed; so the completion of 2019 is de facto the completion of the original story, although a couple of threads in it will be changing a bit.
I am hoping to maintain a daily chapter posting of the story until I am done with chapter 15; that is to say, what has already been largely written. Once I actually have to craft the entire story line from scratch, that pace will likely fall back a bit. I hope I can maintain the pace I had with I've Been Everywhere. I mean besides the fundamental 10 year hiatus.
It is my intention to write a part two to I've Been Everywher; which will work in elements of chapter 25 and beyond, but not everything. After I have done that, I may continue this universe. I have to see how well I can play with the characters. This universe is very different than IBE, because many of the characters in the ROTR series are based strongly on real people I knew ten years ago, and I know practically none of them now; IBE was created almost whole cloth from scratch.
IBE's characters exist as real people with distinct personalities inside my mind, and only inside my mind. Anyway, please keep enjoying my stories.