Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

I feel that's a pretty harsh way to look at things, honestly. This is not a piece of art in gallery, not a book available at Amazon. You are seeing the artist putting the book together or chipping away at the sculpture one bit at a time. Lots of pieces of art, many potential books, never get into galleries or stores because they are unfinished.

You only know that these unfinished stories are out there because the author, for free, wanted to share it before it was completed, and you got to be part of the creative process. You get a sneak peak at a potential gem if it ever is to be polished.

But you have to accept that you are risking not seeing it finished. That's the way it goes. Authors who are doing this for free owe you nothing, sorry, no matter how entitled you feel to get more. (BTW, I only discovered the author you complain about in the previous post after a reader of my stories on ASSTR, who had read a comment from another reader of mine complaining that I was taking too long on chapters, sent me a link to Nick's page and mentioned some of his response to this issue.)

Nick's response, to me, is fucking fair as hell in spirit, even if a bit nasty in the way he states it.

To think an author, putting in hours and hours of time, for free, owes you anything, is entitlement, and unfair to the author. I've been on that side of things, and it is infuriating.

There are a million reasons why an author doesn't continue a story or does so sporadically. Real Fucking Life gets in the way a lot. Giving you free erotica is often pretty low on the list no matter how much the author might wish to put up a new chapter, sorry.

I get why you are upset, that you want more of what you like, that it comes from an appreciation for the author's work, but please, stop feeling like an author owes you something. They simply don't.

Just to give you an idea of why this subject is an issue to some of us, here are a few (of MANY) examples of the sort of bullshit I've gotten when I've had to be away and have not been putting up new chapters fast enough for some readers:

Please hurry and finish the next chapters!!

Not so bad if a one-off, but when you get this same basic email from the same reader a dozen times over a couple of weeks... not cool. Make that a dozen readers and a few dozen emails, and it gets really depressing, especially when writing erotica is not on my list of priorities at that point.

It's been a while since the last chapter... [terrible suggestion for an ending] If you have a better ending, bring it on!!

I've gotten several like this, readers who 'just want it finished' who seem to think I will simply end the story because they want it to end.

Worse:

It seems you've lost interest in this story... sorry for us readers... There is nothing more disgusting than an unfinished story. Shame on you; you started a great story - but leaving it unfinished is a sign of weak authorship... If you run out of ideas, please write at least SOME KIND of ending. I think your readers already submitted some ideas for aan ending...

This is exactly the sort of bullshit comment that is infuriating. How dare this person suggest that a lack of recent chapters (it had been all of 6 weeks and I was dealing with a death in the family) meant I had abandoned the story. How dare this person try to shame me for not giving him free stories fast enough? This is the sort of comment that makes me want to give a Nickesque response.

I don't want to seem ungrateful for new episodes, but it seems to me that the timing gaps between new chapters has now become so much that the only thing that you have left to hold the story together is the sex.

I used to enjoy the extended wait between chapters when actual story progression happened, but I kind of felt slimy after I finished reading Chapter 114.

I know that there were hints of things to come, but come on, if you aren't going to give us something to grab hold of and look forward to in the next chapter, maybe it is time to put this story to bed.

Again, a reader who seems to think that I owe him something on schedule. Worse, when I publish a bridge chapter, which offers reflections on past events, a sex scene or two, and foreshadowing of future events, and which happens often in a story now at over 120 chapters and almost 450k words, that the sex scenes are somehow "the only thing that you have left to hold the story together." Fucking ARRRG.

Have you forgotten that you have a LOT of readers waiting for more chapters of this amazing story? It's been over TWO months for Flower Petals while it seems "Shipwrecked" and "Groundhog Nights" have all your attentions.

This is another one that really makes it difficult to be nice. I spend hours of my free time, charging nothing, because I enjoy writing erotica. I owe this reader, or anyone else, nothing. I'm glad he wants more of the series he enjoys, but I write what I'm feeling, I write what is flowing. I don't force-write new content, ever. The results of trying are low-quality additions to a story deserving better treatment.

One more on a similar subject:

With the understanding that you're the author (and a terrific one, too) and we're your readers and therefore subject to what you want to write, I'd like to offer a suggestion.

You were away" for a relatively long period. You have acknowledged the two readers's favorites, but since you've returned you've spent much more of your efforts to writing new serials, than moving these two onward.

I can't speak for any other readers, but I wish you'd take care of those two before writing new material.

Up to you, of course.

I offered a full, long response (much kinder than what Nick says, but the sense is the same) to this on my ASSTR home page, so I won't repost it here.

I hope you now have some idea what it is like being on the author side of things when readers believe they can coax, prod, shame, or otherwise influence the author to deliver something to which the reader feels entitled to receive. For me, at least, it doesn't work. I write what I write, not because a reader has tried to shame me, but because that's the story that flowed when I had time.

Edit: fixed a typo

One solution, although one readers may not like, is to write much shorter stories,

I appreciate the idea, but again, I'm not changing the way I write and publish to fit with reader expectations. Maybe that is 'arrogance' as cavejug referred to it above, but I don't see it that way. It's my story, my passion, my investment of time and energy and hard work. I love sharing it with others, I really do, and I love to hear that readers want more of my work (who wouldn't want to hear that?). But I won't change my methods just to prevent the butthurt of a few readers who can't grasp that they are getting free entertainment from my efforts as I can deliver it (a small percentage, I think, are such butthurt readers. I don't know if Nick's 99.9% v 0.01% is right, but close enough).

I haven't been on SOL long enough to know much beyond the general idea behind reviews and their importance. I certainly read reviews for any story I am considering reading or bookmarking, so I see the value. I'm not usually looking for spoilers, so when you describe your reviews as "suggest(ing) people who want to know what happens read the story," that resonates with me. I want to know why I should read the story, not what happens in it. I don't know why anyone would want spoilers in the review.

Cave,

Being disrespected is one of the things we have to face as writers. We don't usually get a say in it either. Because if we lash out, or post a blog (by the way, I'll be putting all reader feedback in my blogs from this point on) then we get looked at like the bad guys.

if you wanna see it from our point of view, Write a story, I bet you'll get atleast one.

Arq

I'm glad you have a better idea about this issue. I do want to be clear: there are many kind and thoughtful readers who contact me and I really appreciate anyone taking the time to do so. The ones who are abusive or otherwise rude are a very small minority.

There are nice ways to reach out to an author and show your interest in new material. A great one I got after I was away for a couple of months:

Hi Chase, I hope you are well! I have really enjoyed reading your story Shipwrecked and hope you will continue to write more of this tale. Thanks for your time and for sharing this with us! While I wait for new chapters, I'll check out your other series. Thanks again!

That was a really nice way for someone to reach out an express an interest in me writing more in the series without trying to shame me or suggest that I owed something. Thankfully, these sorts of messages are more common than the ones in my earlier post.

While I certainly can't speak for all authors, it can be nice to contact an author who has been away, let them know you've enjoyed the story so far and that you'll be certain to keep an eye out for new chapters in the future. I can't say whether Nick would still yell at you, but I appreciate that sentiment (rather than telling me 'shame on you' or 'when are you going to add new chapters?????!!!!')

It's always good to check an author's blog. Many, like me, are usually good at responding to emails, but there are times when the emails are going to bank up and go unanswered for several weeks. When I enter a period where I can expect that, I usually say so in my bog, and so do some others. While some will have a blog entry with what they will and will not reply to.

I can not teach my spell checker to do Grammar as well.

I've got a good spell checker, her book of spells includes dozens of spells and curses to deal with them old ladies in many ways.

Cavejug, the problem with the "Summer Camp" series, is that Nick, the author, got caught up in his website, which primarily posts free pictures every day. He's so busy maintaining the site, that he rarely has time to write.

He may eventually finish the series, but I wouldn't hold my breath. He's moved on to other things, and has largely put writing behind him. I'm glad he's found a source of expression which supports him, but like you, CJ, I'm frustrated by authors who insist on publishing partially finished stories, and THEN don't have the decency to complete them. If you can't finish it the way you want, the put an end to the story and wrap it up as best you can!

However, on the other hand, every author has a whole pile of unfinished stories. What you see here are the decent stories which ran into problems, rather than never having seen them at all. It's a product of watching something develop over time, instead of paying a set price for a finished product. You get some gems, but you also get the stories the author had to abandon (for any number of reasons).

Honestly, the biggest problem with authors who post single chapters is that the entire story never gets finished. I prefer writing a complete first draft, then revising a safe number of chapters before posting anything, so that I know how the story ends and can clean up the text and eliminate the many subplots which don't add to the story. You know, if Nick ever finishes "Summer Camp", that he's not about to revise and clean it up again!

Grant and El Sol, I agree with CJ. Anytime an author crafts a story, they engage in an unwritten contract with the reader. The reader may or not support them, either with payments, feedback or verbal encouragement, but there's a trust that develops. The reader trusts the author, and it's up to the author to develop that trust. Thus the author gets castigated whenever they break that trust. If you have someone act out of character, or you break the laws of the universe you place him in, he may complain, but more often than not, you'll simply lose that reader forever.

In these cases (of abandoned stories), the reader STILL believes in and supports the story, but the author himself has given up on the story, so why should the reader be any more patient with the story than the author is? As the saying goes, "Either shit of get off the pot", or in this case, "Either finish the story, or take it down as an unworkable experiment". (Sorry to be so blunt, but I believe the act of writing involves trust, even if they never allow anyone to read it!)

Chase, your "death in the family" example shows the other side of this argument, but again, if authors plan ahead, and have a 'comfortable cushion' of chapters waiting in the chamber, then that becomes less of an issue. I always (try) to maintain a 5 to 7 chapter lead on my stories. I can't always maintain it, but if life intervenes, I can go ahead and post. And each time I write a new chapter, I simply post another one (i.e. I maintain my lead, rather than leaving everyone hanging).

Richard, sorry to beat dead horses, but "decimate" hasn't meant "a lost of 10%" for a LONG time. Now, it simply means a "monumental loss", whether that's 10% or 100%.

Likewise, "gay" meaning homosexual, has been used for several hundred years. It's not a new corruption of the word, but a long time parallel meaning of the word. You can use "gay" to mean happy all you want, but if you do, be sure to provide context, because I can guarantee, most readers will be confused!

Chase, your "death in the family" example shows the other side of this argument, but again, if authors plan ahead, and have a 'comfortable cushion' of chapters waiting in the chamber, then that becomes less of an issue. I always (try) to maintain a 5 to 7 chapter lead on my stories. I can't always maintain it, but if life intervenes, I can go ahead and post. And each time I write a new chapter, I simply post another one (i.e. I maintain my lead, rather than leaving everyone hanging).

Good for you for planning ahead. Not all of us have that luxury, and not all of us write and publish the same way you do. I don't sit on a story for weeks or months before I publish it, and I rarely, if ever, have a 'comfortable cushion.' I don't like the implication that it is somehow my fault for drawing the ire of some readers for not doing things your way. This is the serial-author version of victim-blaming. I don't like what you are implying here at all.

Also, you're assuming an SOL like queue available. I spent most of my first two years writing erotica on ASSTR, so there was never a queue available. If I didn't have time to write, I also didn't have time to muck around with formatting the html and dealing with all the changes to index files, uploading new chapters, updating links/descriptions, etc that come with putting up a new chapter there. Having works in the queue would have done nothing to help.

Good for you for planning ahead. Not all of us have that luxury, and not all of us write and publish the same way you do.

Chase, one advantage of waiting for completion before posting hit home to me early in my career, I think it was the second or third story I was writing. What happened was I was near the end and realised I had a major issue with one aspect of the plot and couldn't find a reasonable way around it, until I had an epiphany and went back to chapter 2 of a 30 chapter story (at that point, ended up with a few more chapters) and made a small change to a sub-plot which flowed onto four other small changes in the story, but made it very easy for me to complete the story the way I wanted it to. That's not something you can really do if you're posting each chapter as you complete it, even if you have four or five chapters ahead. Many readers will have the old sub-plot in their mind and think you screwed up when they get to the part critical to the change.

Yeah, I understand your point EB, and it is good advice for many, I'm sure. But part of what I enjoy about writing erotica the way I do (one-to-two chapters at a time, then publishing after editing) is that it adds a constant challenge. The story is effectively set in stone, so it is up to me to continue it while keeping the plot interesting (with as few holes as possible), working from what is already published. It helps me improve my writing ability by ensuring I consider (and plan for) lots of future events and scenarios when writing the current chapter without overburdening the story with too many dead ends or useless narrative going nowhere. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I 'enjoy' the challenge of that.

Could I have produced a 'better' version of the story had I waited till the end to publish? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Some stories, especially long ones, I might never have progressed so far along if I had tried to wait till the ending was wrapped up. Writing and publishing in short cycles without having all of the story 'known' to me is fun and challenges me to keep the story tight, progressing with decent pace, and peppered with possible hints of things to come. Then, it's up to me to build on that foundation to add another chapter, then another.

I have done it the other way once (Semper Fi), where I wrote the whole story and then sat on it a couple of weeks polishing it. That worked out very well, no doubt! But it was considerably shorter and came from a decided burst of creative energy which I couldn't stop. I was compelled to write it over a week or so. I couldn't not write it at that time. Other stories of mine take some kicking around at times, and don't flow quite so easily or in such a sustained fashion. By publishing sooner rather than later, I avoid the times where I might get hung up on trying to craft the 'perfect' scenario (if there is such a thing).

I think every writer deserves the chance to write and publish as they wish. If it's not fun, if writing fiction for free feels like work, I wouldn't do it. So what is fun to me is the method I use. If that makes people like Wheezer compare me to a throw-away woman giving him a terrible blow job, so be it. I don't really care. I didn't ask someone else to tell me how to enjoy my hobby, and believe me, since blowing Wheezer is not likely to be fun, given the way he seems to think it is a one-sided transaction with him getting all the pleasure, I have zero interest in catering to such readers.

I am an author on SOL as well as a reader, so I think I have a right to express an opinion. If you are only writing for your own pleasure, then you are just engaging in mental masturbation. Like the other form of masturbation, it is best practiced alone.

I find your 'opinion' very bizarre, and your analogy is simply terrible, the idea that an author is somehow like a woman giving you a blowjob you don't like.

If she doesn't want to give a proper blowjob, THEN DON'T FUCKING START!

Heh. Whatever.

Also, you've missed out if you think 'the other form of masturbation' is best practiced alone...

I think every writer deserves the chance to write and publish as they wish.

I agree with this sentiment.

However, my approach is due to a number of issues, the most practical of them being the one about been able to write myself out of a corner if I need to. A second being to change the direction if I feel a need to once into the story - Odd Man in College is an example of that; when I started writing it I was thinking of doing a Much Sex BDSM style story, but found it worked better without the sex and that allowed me to introduce other sub-plots for a different tension. Another aspect of why I like to finish before I post is I have several unfinished stories half written with some start as far back as 2003. Check the copyright dates on mys stories and compare that with the posting date, in most cases the variance is due to how long it took to write - Flames of Life copyright 2015, posting March 2015; Interesting Times copyright 2011, posting March 2015; many others are similar. And the last reason is due to how angry I felt when I got really wrapped up in a story that was being posted as it was written, only to have it stop when it was almost completed and an e-mail to the author resulted in a reply of I got bored with it and can't be bothered with it any more, it's never going to be finished and later someone else asked permission to finish it, only to be denied permission. Yes, it's the author's right, but if he isn't interested anymore, why not give permission? I made myself a promise not to do that to anyone else while I'm alive. I've made arrangements with my son to post incomplete stories after I die, along with a notice for those wishing to complete them to contact him for the legal permission to do so.

Chase, one advantage of waiting for completion before posting hit home to me early in my career, I think it was the second or third story I was writing.

Chase, Ernest, I had a similar experience. I spent time on my first story, taking more than a year to bring it to fruition. But as I posted more books in the series, I decided to write one book 'on the fly' (as most here do). I didn't have Ernest's problem with plot holes, but I find I had several chapters and subplots that, if I'd written it out first, I'd have eliminated or streamlined.

My emphasis on writing out the entire story in a first draft, is that it enables you to revise the story with a view of the entire story. Not only can you cut the fat, but you can set up situations and provide foreshadowing, which makes the end result a better story. My point before was that, often, the 'stories written by the chapter' don't have the same foreshadowing and development.

I wasn't meaning to dismiss other writing techniques. We all need to do what we can to write, and we all approach it differently. But for me, I don't like the way my stories turn out when I write them a chapter at a time. I don't change the plot much when I revise, but I tend to add a lot of insights and character 'flavoring' into the characters at that point.

Grant, Wheezer, as I said before, the cost of having writers like me, who only post finished stories, is that you never encounter the beautiful failures, and often, it will take a year or more between stories if a story gets thrown away as 'unworkable'. There are pros and cons to finishing stories. Me, I appreciate the incomplete stories. A decent story is worthwhile, even if it never ends satisfactorily.

Chase, I think your method of posting/publishing a chapter at a time works when you aren't publishing sagas. When you write extremely long stories, they can get away from you. But when you write tightly focused stories, it's easier to craft polished stories on the first go round.

Squeaky wheels get the grease. So if you want grease, squeak. Even if you are not a big wheel.

Works until you get authors who state they'll delay working on something another month for each request they get to finish it.

Works until you get authors who state they'll delay working on something another month for each request they get to finish it.

I would never read a story by an author who did that.

Never is a long time. Perhaps you read one before he said that?

Actually, I don't read stories that aren't finished so it wouldn't apply to me.

I simply don't react well to blackmail or coercion so, yes, I really did mean never. And I'm not a very forgiving person.

Are you really comparing authors who write and publish free erotica to a woman servicing you? Seriously? Someone call Nick...

CJ, I still contend that the occasional incomplete story is the price to being in the front seat and watching the story creation process. If you don't want to be a part in the creation process, then walk to your nearest bookstore and purchase a completed story.

Instead, you're being invited into the artist/writers' heads, watching as they create their stories a chapter at a time. Occasionally, they'll beach their stories, all the subplots washing ashore or drowning. But in most cases, you watch them make the trip from beginning to end successfully. But that's part of the excitement in making a dangerous journey. You don't necessarily know how it's going to work, or even if it will. That's what makes SOL such a unique place.

You aren't merely investing in a finished product, instead you're watching the stories unfold a piece at a time. Sometimes you see genius, and other times you're witnessing a shipwreck. But in either case, you're in for some interesting times.

So weigh the occasional disaster against all the wonderful journeys these authors take you on. If it wasn't for those occasional disasters, the other successful journeys would never have taken place.