Hi,
Here in Forum we have chance to tell our companions about lost stories.
We have chance to make some Stories discussion and feedback.
But what should we do about good stories we would like to recommend to (if we are not reviewers)?
PS:
Sorry for my misspelling above, but even my keyboard does not listen to me anymore :(
But what should we do about good stories we would like to recommend to (if we are not reviewers)?
From the charter of "Story Discussion": This is the place to discuss stories publicly. Love an SOL story? Hate it?
So this is the right place. Have at it!
bb
Good idea! I'll kick off with the couple of mine if I may.
Lubrican's "Fossie's Revenge" comes to mind, then "Making of a gigolo" longish tale of 20+ chapters if I remember correctly.
There is an ongoing saga written by "penguintopia" titled "A well lived life, then G.Younger's "Stupid boy" not finished yet.
Kid_Wigger's "Flight of the code monkey" I found interesting.
Al Stiners stories a well written as are "bluedragon's". If you like western themes, JRyter must be given a good go.
Nick Scipio's "Summer camp is a "must", however he seems to be dragging his feet near the end, not in a hurry to round it off!??? Make sure you read all of his stuff. "Jazz club" is very saucy.
There, for my taste, plenty to amuse yourself with.
Cheers.
... And we older readers must know about well known reads on this site. You can find them in top 50 list.
I can recommend everyone who is starting (or has not read them already) to read them.
What I'm looking at - are stories we all have somehow missed, some small diamonds shining to us from this site....
Diamond finding, at least in theory, is one of the functions of reviewers. Every reviewer is a little different, but reviewers get the bandwidth they do to perform a service for other readers. Bringing to the attention of SOL readers stories reviewers think they will enjoy.
If the current flow of reviews don't quite do it for you, you might want to hit the reviewer button at the top of the main page and cruise the past reviews from earlier in the site. Celeste was perhaps the best reviewer of all. At least they are almost all well written, even if you might not want to read every story she reviewed.
Reviewers are indeed big help.
And I have been reading their words as much as I can.
But there are a lot of stories that don't have reviews - and there are some stories (a lot of them if we want to be honest) worth reading.
And lot of these stories are worth couple of words - at least here :)
I agree we have some great authors here...
True but one must accept that some of their writings are incredibly good and some by the same authors distinctly not so good (some might consider them crap)
The original suggestion related to the recommending of specific stories which avoids the question of whether so-and-so is as great an author as Pliny, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Mark Twain or F Scott Fitzgerald
as great an author as Pliny, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Mark Twain or F Scott Fitzgerald
I think most of those were the movie stars (etc) of their times. They not only had the income but the fame as well. I wonder at times if they had as many problems going out in public then as the stars of today.
(1)
Then it was much less authors and works to read, so you may say competition was easier. But also there was much less people who were able to read.
(2)
Level of available information for average citizen at the end of XVI century for their whole lives was less than "average Joe" receive today in just one day.
(3)
If you don't have enough money to buy your food you are dead, and this rule was valid then and is valid now.
It's so simple - either you write something good enough that you can sell, or you must be rich enough and have enough to not to worry for spending time for witting
(4)
Authors who wish to sell their work must write what people want to buy, and that was true when Shakespeare wrote, when Dickens and Dumas wrote, and today is same.
So there is some (or all) true when we are comparing them with present script writers :D
Yeahhhh!
So, we al like to read :)
An today, I have read (another) one good from SW MO Hermit: "Ne'Er Do Well".
Surprisingly good read, with "it" in it :)
And -it's fresh, so fresh that looks like it has just been pushed from his pen (or what ever he uses to put words together)
My suggestion would be to just make a specific topic here for those stories and/or authors. Then each story listed in it should at least provide a link to the story and optionally for the author. I find if a writer has one story I will like the chances are they will have more that I will enjoy. Links save having to search for recommended stories as well.
Do you think one post for all those stories in this part of Forum (Story Discussion and Feedback) or one independent part of Forum (like Lost Stories)?
I am not sure which would be the best solution. I do admit I follow the lost stories grouping just to see what I might have missed. I have found a few good ones that way as well. The problem with just one topic is they tend to disappear as new ones are created unless they are constantly added to by the forum users.
So do I :)
It's another good way to find some new read..
I agree with you, it would be better to have separate part of Forum just for this - It can be called "Good read", or "Good forgotten stories", or something like that ...
have separate part of Forum just for this - It can be called
A good title would be:
I Recommend
A good title would be:
I Recommend
A good one Ernest, but regardless of title. It needs to be something that will not be easily maintained by everyone involve especially Laz and his helpers.
It needs to be something that will not be easily maintained by everyone involve especially Laz and his helpers.
It doesn't need to be. If Lazeez sets it up as a new Page on the forum and then people can post their own lists as new threads using their name as the thread title, it then needs no work by Lazeez and his team, just the individuals posting the threads with their story recommends.
Thus the Page is I Recommend with a threads like By Ernest Bywater and I list stories I recommend, and it can be more than the limitations on the Favourites page on the main site. The next thread could be by docholladay followed with by Crumbly Writer and so on.
People can open a thread and read a list, and the stories should include a link and be restricted to stories at SoL or FS.
If someone wants to post a reply agreeing with something on a person's list, they can but it becomes part of that thread and not the forum page.
Wow!
That's sharp mind.
Ernest, thank you for very elaborate posting, and clear and well thought proposal.
I totally agree with this.
PS:
I was here just mumbling, and now it seams that this idea may be for something good :)
There are stories worth reading on both SOL and Fine Stories. For some values of "great author" there are great authors here. Top fifty lists have most of the top stories and therefor authors. Not every author on the top fifty list is a "Great Author" even in the sense Robert Heinlein was a Great Science Fiction author. I'm not sure even Nobel prizes indicate the recipient was a "Great Author". I suppose there are some names like Shakespeare or Voltaire or maybe Charles Dickens that qualify as Great Authors. Likely you can think of others that get recommended by English teachers.
What we have here are very good, well worth reading authors. At least some of them are. If I misunderstand what you mean by "great author" I apologize. There are slightly more than 35,000 stories posted, and since most authors write more than one story, probably less than 10,000 authors. The Bell curve or Normal curve indicates that about two thirds of all authors will be within one standard deviation of the mean (average for normal samples). Of the remaining third, half will be below one standard deviation and the other half (one sixth) above it. I don't know how many standard deviations above the mean it takes to become "great" but likely it is more than two, so perhaps a fraction of one percent might be great. One percent of 10,000 authors is 100 authors. There are probably less than 50 "great authors" posting here. Maybe far less, or even zero, depending on what your criteria is for a great writer. I would guess most writers in the running for "great author" have made significant income writing. I am afraid that hurdle lets out most of our favorite authors here. That doesn't mean there are not a lot of good stories, well worth reading here. It just means there aren't very many great authors in any generation.
I would guess most writers in the running for "great author" have made significant income writing.
When you compare the quality of some of the SoL stories and the quality of what's on the Best Seller lists of the print books, SoL wins by a large margin. There's a lot of shit getting printed just because the author has an in with the publisher or an agent who has the ear of the publisher.
Just think of the number of what are no seen as top 100 print book authors whose first few books were Indie publishing jobs, but they had the money from other sources to promote them well enough to get picked up by the print publishing houses. Grisham is the first that comes to mind, like that.
I suppose there are some names like Shakespeare or Voltaire or maybe Charles Dickens that qualify as Great Authors
The trouble with authors on this list is they are hard to understand today. So students especially the younger ones have a real difficult time learning to read if those are required reading. I remember once coaching a 8 year old girl in reading. I took a sneaky method. I learned what she was interested in. Then took her to the library a few blocks from her home (had parents permission). Found a few books that included those interests. Asked her to read them for one half hour a day as well as reading the required books. It was funny how fast she went though the books we picked out and could then explain them to me and her parents. But she couldn't understand a word from those required reading lists. Her reading interests grew as she found how many other things related to her interests as well.
I suppose there are some names like Shakespeare or Voltaire or maybe Charles Dickens that qualify as Great Authors.
What I find funny about lists with names like Shakespeare and Dickens is when you look at how they're regarded today, and what they were doing then. If those two were alive today they'd be script writers for soapie like General Hospital or Days of Our Lives or something similar, because they did the equivalent of that for their day. They were working hacks writing what they thought they could sell.
Well Ernest, you are really off into La-La land! Talking about Dickens and Shakespeare and equaling them with soapie writers!
Just the two names our literature is standing upon and yet you have tried to pulled them so low. I think you should apologize, honestly.
It may be, in your opinion, they are not in vogue as they once were, but to dismiss them in such a manner is just silly, at best.
Just the two names our literature is standing upon and yet you have tried to pulled them so low.
If the truth hurts you, bad luck. When you study what they wrote, and who they wrote it for, they were catering to the equivalent of soapy watchers of their day. Dickens wrote for a weekly newspaper aimed at the common worker, while Shakespeare wrote plays for theaters who's audience were common workers.
And, by the way, I wasn't the first one to reach that conclusion. I came to it after reading a paper produced by an English Professor at Cambridge University in England. I saw the paper back in the mid 1970s while sitting in on some uni classes for people studying to be high school English teachers.
You should look at what they were writing and for who they were writing it, not what some people think of it a few hundred years later.
You'd be surprised how much of what is seen as classical English literature was just lowbrow fluff at the time it was written.
A lot of what is now classical music was popular when it was written. Composers then were like rock stars are now (or is Rock dead, replace by other stuff I can't stand?) The waltz where partners actually held each other in their arms was scandalous. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The ancient Greeks complained about modern morals and what the young people of something BC were doing. Opera and Ballet were popular arts, not something to get all dressed up for and be stuffy and highbrow.
Mark Twain and Kipling, just to name a few great writers, were popular and their stories sold, even before public relations experts. Or Arthur Canon Doyle of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Popular doesn't mean bad. Someday, maybe sooner than I think, works now on SOL will be appreciated. Probably not all will be "great writing", Sturgeons Law is 90% of everything is crap. That is probably too strong for SOL, but maybe not strong enough for ASSTR.
Again, you are fucking delusional! You;ve done this before and you can not help yourself, can you? I'm glad we'll never lay eyes on each other, because I'm sure I'd be repulsed by an attitude like yours. You remind me of a third grade bully!
The great Ernest and his literary contribution to humanity will live forever and be praised as the ultimate literary endeavor!
By Great Authors..it means we have authors that leave you impatiently waiting for the next chapter or the next new story..or the next blog update......they write the stories that I can visualize most of the places or Characters ......
Big names doesn't mean that their stories are one bit better than the authors that post here
Big names doesn't mean that their stories are one bit better than the authors that post here
How true that statement is. A big name can be created by those publishing houses by advertising in one form or another. In fact those top 10 lists. I wonder how honest they really are. I think many of the lists are paid by publishers to push certain books and authors. I have personally seen books that never made the lists out sale the so-called number 1 pick.