I've spent quite a bit of the past two days pondering many things about my writing, and that thinking has resulted in this blog post.
The primary result of that concentrated thinking is that my writing plans for the next month or so need to change, and most of the reason for that change is due to Annah. I've discovered that writing installments of It's My Party goes reasonably easily (sometimes incredibly easily), but only when my mind is open to it. That's because I have no personal experience with psych problems, so frequently find it difficult to write in the way the various chapters need writing. That, then, will make adding many chapters in a relatively short time virtually impossible, despite how much I want to get to some of the parts of the story that I've had in my head for most of the past decade, but which reside much farther down the road than Chapter 5.
Nearly all of the rest of that concentrated thinking was really just a "Well, duh" moment. I can't move A New Tree forward without moving the story involving Las Amadas forward in lockstep. Go ahead. Say it. I can take it.
"Well, duh!"
That means that I've spent some of my writing time today (yes, another comp day; and I've got many yet to use) reviewing and editing existing chapters of the follow-on of _Beth_ and have also come up with what I think the final title will be. That title has changed a few times, but I may have decided on a straightforward descriptor of a title.
All of the above means that until I get some 10 or 12 chapters of the _Beth_ sequel written, along with some number of chapters of Smythe's story, I won't be publishing anything new for a bit.
On a mostly different topic, a while back, due to a blog post by oyster50 about his then-new story, I began paying a bit of attention to one of the -- I guess -- summary-stats bits about SOL stories: Weekly download totals of uncompleted serials. I was surprised to find _Beth_ in the top 50 of such most of the time, reaching as high as 26th. Call me surprised. To me, the most interesting aspect of the positioning of _Beth_ in that summary was that the number of weekly views of the story did not vary by more than, perhaps 10-15% around a rough mean of 2250, but that it's place in the list varied from 26th to out of the top 50, so was dependent nearly entirely on how many readers read other stories.
With _Beth_ now complete, it no longer qualifies for that summary list. Color me greatly surprised when, while taking a mental break and wandering through the other set of stats presentations in the front page left sidebar, I found _Beth_ in 6th place in the Top 50 Completed Serials, by Rating, in the Last 30 Days. That find led to another: That the story's score is it's best-ever 8.12. _Beth_ had reached 8.11 at one point a long while ago, but in recent months spent most of its time at 8.04 or so.
Speaking... er... writing about scores, I'm happy to see that the score of It's My Party has been rising after posting two more chapters recently. I understand that some readers didn't get it and that, with more text, some may have figured things out a bit. I knew that the first chapter would be difficult for many readers. Perhaps many were permanently turned off to a story that was too difficult to understand in that first chapter or two. I think that can't be helped, because many of us (including me) don't have much one-on-one experience with mental... instability, let's call it. That very inexperience of mine means that I have to do more online research for this story than I ever had to do for _Beth_, most of which was discovering when Elkton's sunset or sunrise should be or what the moon phase was. Researching mental-health issues is much more difficult. Yes, I could have told A story about a protagonist such as Annah without the mental instability, but aspects of the story I wanted to write required that instability. And, now, I'm stuck with it, a fact I don't mind at all. The story has been worrying at the back side of my brain for too long and it wants OUT!
Thanks, Readers, for following me down Beth's very long road.