You ever walk through a big-box store like Wal-Mart and see a bin of DVDs with old Pauly Shore movies, and stinkers like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, or anything by Larry the Cable Guy in Witless Protection.
You wonder "Who the fuck would ever watch a movie with this Git-R-Done guy pretending to be a FBI agent or whatever the fuck this is?"
You wonder "Who even has a DVD player anymore? I stream everything"
You wonder "Wait, this is 99 cents. Maybe I should buy it."
Maybe that last one is just me.
I was looking over my catalog of older stories on this site.
When I first started writing I didn't have any grammatical tools to assist me. I still don't have a regular editor - just a fellow author who already has his own stories who is kind enough to read an advanced copy and point out the multitude of mistakes I make even with the many self-editing pass throughs I do.
https://storiesonline.net/a/eddie-davidson
I had a story called Reba.
I have a thing for sassy red-heads. The TV show Reba screams incest to me - because her eldest daughter is this teen beauty queen, her neighbor is this hot but dumb milf - I dunno, its just so middle America - like a Rebecca Hap cartoon.
In the story, Reba gets roped into being involved in sex parties that Norma Jean and her eldest daughter have at the house for extra money.
I thought it was great when I wrote it.
It's basically Paul Blart Mall Cop 3 to the readers here. I think grammatically it suffers and needs a fresh polish of edits but nobody would know because no one reads it. No one goes back to my old catalog and looks at them.
I took a chance and wrote a Game of Thrones story that was my take on the ending with way more sex than even George RR Martin would have probably been comfortable with. I wanted a satisfying ending and to close some loops. I was also really interested in making Yara Greyjoy go pantsless in battle and force her enemies to lick her salty butthole.
The number of people who read that story is equal to the number of people who are still interested in the real Game of Thrones series on HBO = zero.
It was a little popular when I wrote it but no one ever goes back and looks at my old stuff. My library of work is literally the Pauly Shore DVD bin.
I wrote "Do you have a big dick? why not?" and I made vast improvements in writing. I ponied up and bought Microsoft Word which offers very basic grammatical checking. That improved a lot of the mistakes I frequently make and also this was one of my favorite stories.
The premise is that a nerdy boy meets a cute girl. The cute girl and her sister and mom do webcam at night for money. The mom asks him if he has a big dick, because he literally has nothing else going for him and she wonders why he is talking to her if he doesn't have cocaine or money. He needs at least to come at her with a nice cock.
I did a follow up to that one. They may as well not even be on the site. No one bothers with them anymore. They are ghosts.
The biggest and most popular story I wrote is Homeowner's Association: A big day at Sunny Manor
https://storiesonline.net/s/20891/homeowners-association-by-eddie
Somewhere between Smackmagnet's "Pinch Week" and Home Owner's Association by Mister Archie is the inspiration for this story.
We start with a nerdy boy again except this time his dad and step mom move to a BDSM kink friendly community. I have plans to tap a sequel on it. I am not unhappy with the total number of readers but what shocks me is with new readers joining the site daily - hardly anyone even knows about it or would go back to it.
I tried my hand at historical fiction several times. I wrote a story about antebellum civil war where the woman has to plow the fields like a pony girl because all the horses were gone and the wicked woman who runs the plantation blames her for a broken leg.
I also wrote Madeleine -which was a love letter to the stories of Georges Prichard. I wrapped it up at Chapter 7 because by the time I finished I had gone from 3000 readers of the first chapter, to 400 total (ever) for the 7th chapter. I did a lot of research for that story - even quoted old naughty books from the Victorian era as inspiration.
Honestly, more people saw the opening night of the Jerky Boys in the movie theaters than read my story Madeleine. (if you saw Jerky Boys you know it was a shit movie).
I am fascinated with the TV show the Goldbergs. The MILF mom is always saying she wants to devour her kids they are so yummy, and the older sister has these soft brown doe-eyes and a bitchy attitude. It is a perfect template for middle-America incest stories.
I wrote a mind control story with a twist. I hate mind control stories. They are basically wish fulfillment - "Hey what if you could make everyone do anything you like and everything worked the way you wanted in your favor. You have everything you could ever want and more of it on the way"
There is no challenge then. There is no struggle. I can't tell a story without some sort of conflict or challenge. There is no tension when you literally can just control everything like a puppet master. Its not my cup of tea (if its yours - my apologies).
I wrote a mind control story for people who hate mind control stories (Which is probably just me).
In it the mind control is totally bogus. Eric buys it from the back of a Penthouse magazine and obviously it doesn't work. Did you ever see those ads for spanish fly that promised you would be irresistible?
The mom and sister pretend it works just to fuck with him. They make a bet that Eric is going to make it perverted. Obviously, for him to make it perverted they've got to go along with it or else they won't know for sure if he really would.
That's a clever twist!! (or so I thought)
Apparently, about as clever as a caveman waking up 10,000 years later in some ice, shaving his face and looking like Brandon Frasier while Pauly Shore and the guy who played Samwell in Lord of the Rings "riff off his sick beats...yo" to ride his coat-tails to popularity. Almost no one read it when I wrote it and no one reads it now.
It is disappointing.
I think this latest story "Keeping the women folk in line: cumming of age" is popular but in 3 months - no one will read it.
It's not your fault as the readers though. You have so much new content it is hard to keep up. I am just venting what it feels like to have your work sit in a low-budget DVD bin and basically be a cellophane wrapped turd that nobody wants. I want to write stuff that inspires people like Vulgus inspired me to write.
I am hoping one day to be that good. I'll keep plugging along. Thanks for listening to me vent.If you get bored - I've got some old cheesy DVDs in my library you can take a look at.