Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

And maybe avoid absurdities like some authors spitting chapters or removing and then reposting to be listed again on New/Update

Gauthier, I've fallen prey to this. I sometimes divide stories, after the fact, based on reader responses. I broke the very first chapter of a story to make it read better, and was disturbed the story now listed a new conclusion since I'd only make small changes to the first chapter.

In other words, I doubt this is a nefarious act, but is probably an example of authors doing just what you're suggesting.

By the way, I try to post corrections, which I have a Lot of, but I frequently forget to add them to SOL, and since there's usually a delay in posting, I don't always remember to double check that the changes went thru. :(

I don't mind people offering advice and editorial help, but I won't be using the storieswiki because of one condition:

Don't be afraid to contribute, as long as you're willing to put whatever you put here into the public domain.

I wish to retain copyright control of my stories.

You're exactly right, and why I didn't participate and don't or won't.

That's a whole different ballgame to asking some one for editing advice or taking editing advice.

I fixed the typos. For my earliest writing where I didn't even follow the "one speaker per paragraph" rule, I fixed that up a bit. But I've rarely gone deeper into a story to fix things with the plot, for instance. That feels a bit like rewriting history. I'd rather think about new stories than revising old ones.

Every author has their own level of story "abandonment". Yours is a bit more extreme, where you wouldn't even correct typos, but everyone draws their line in the same at a different place. Some authors consider past stories as being 'in the past', but most of us at least fixes typos of the fly.

For me, I encourage reader feedback, and stray comments have generated whole new threads, new subplots and even new books. However, my cutoff point is when I find I can't make changes to a book without wanting to rewrite the entire thing. Then I put it aside. As you said, ones effort is better applies to new stories than to old ones. I still fix typos, but I refuse to read beyond the section being patched.

I really wish we could edit, in fact, instead of having to bug Lazeez with a resubmission.

You can always revise/repost a chapter or 23. I do it frequently, even years after I first post it. Like you Daydreamz, I'll also think of better chapter titles, though I'll rarely change the basic plot points.

Thus encouraged CW I'll go resubmit that last chapter, in which as too often I didn't always use quite enough words, thanks... :)

Thus encouraged CW I'll go resubmit that last chapter, in which as too often I didn't always use quite enough words

For years, every time I glanced at a chapter it would grow. My average chapter was 6,000 to 10,000 words, with some going as high as 14,000.

It's only with my next book that I managed to control that and learned how to 'cut'. I don't quite 'slice & dice', but at least it gets a tiny bit tighter with each review. But then it got out of control. One story I was working on started turning in chapters only 2,000 words, and I had to shoot it to put it out of it's misery!

The first story I posted on-line (a long time ago and far, far away - about a thousand kilometres from where I live now) was Ed's New Life (not at SOL yet due to contractual limitations). The story had 165,000 words in it, and the publisher had a limit of 100,000 words in a story, so I had to slice and dice it down, ended up at 112,000 words after I cut out a third of them (mostly in minor scenes - many of them sex scenes I felt I could lose without any plot loss), and they took it at that, anyway. They decided the story was worth taking despite it breaking their two top rules - it was the first story with graphic sex they ever carried as well as the first over the 100,000 word limit. Thus, I learned to slice and dice very early in my writing career.

When I revise a story it's mostly a case of changing the word choices to make it read easier, fixing typos, or changing the sentence structure or order to make the meaning clearer. Only once did I do anything more extreme, and that was to change the location of a place used because a reader pointed out I couldn't use the original due to their operational restrictions, so I moved to another facility of the same type nearby, and adjusted that part of the story to suit. In that case the plot stayed the same, just the name changed and the way to get there changed.

You can post an amendment to any chapter or number of chapters, or the whole story. Lazeez and his crew don't mind the work, so don't let that slow you down fixing things.

You can post an amendment to any chapter or number of chapters, or the whole story. Lazeez and his crew don't mind the work, so don't let that slow you down fixing things.

One word of warning: be careful changing the size of chapters on a finished story. I did that once, reposted the entire story after splitting the first chapter into two different chapters, and it listed as a 'new addition' (chapter 24) to the completed series. Got everyone excited about a minor change.

Ernest, I never got that lesson in cutting stories. Instead, my reader encourage more detail while I write incredibly complex stories. While my editors are reluctant to cut or change my language, I kept seeing more details to add (or scenes to flesh out).

I struggled to improve my pacing with "Stranded", and to improve my editing in "Seeding Hope". Instead, the techniques I learned in "Stranded" were hard to duplicate, and "Seeding" didn't end up any shorter. However, I'm finally figuring it out, but it's a slow process.

It's been my experience there are situations where there isn't enough detail, and others with too much detail. I spent many months helping Ascending Author edit DVA for his print book series of it. The major cuts were to remove most of the technical information he had and a large number of the sex scenes. I told him his best bet would be to take out 90% of the technical details and put them into a separate book as a technical aide for the readers as a free e-book. That sliced a hell of a lot out of the main story and made it a lot more free flowing.

In my own works I've had readers get upset because of the detail I go into in some things, such as the descriptions of the garage in Shiloh the Manor and repairs in Michael's Mansion and the farm in Mack but included images because early readers wanted more detail and the pictures made it easier to visualise for them. So it's a very hard line to draw in a story.

How would you feel if the first story you ever wrote was generally accepted as the best one of your career?

Actually, Richard, I've long been convinced that's the rule, and not the exception, including most of the major literary figures of the past hundred years. My first story has always been my most downloaded and achieved the best sales (thought part of that is building on each subsequent books sales boost).

Authors work with themes, and an author's first story typically expresses those themes more directly and honestly than his later works. The more experience he gets, the more convoluted and disguised his themes become, and rarely do the themes that an author focuses on change much.

I've always preferred authors' first works. It's nothing personal about you.

How would you feel if the first story you ever wrote was generally accepted as the best one of your career?

Oddly enough, my writing style has improved since then and I know I can revise it and make it a lot better. Something I plan on doing when I get the time to do so. Some of my stories since then are better than the first one, just in different markets.

I tend to write stories in the 40,000 to 100,000 word range, yet I have six stories in the two top 50 short story lists, with none in the top long story lists. Yet, of the 27 actually stories as Ernest Bywater I've 22 score better than 7.5 and the three of the ones under that I expected lower scores due to their controversial topics with the lowest at 6.55; as Ernest Edwards there are 21 stories with most in the 7 to 8.5 range, and the lowest is 6.95. Thus I feel I must be doing OK as an author and people like what I write, when I can think of something worth making a story out of. Between what i write and co-write there's 1.5 million downloads as well. So there must be an interest out there.

In general I write each story to be able to stand alone, although some do flow onto each other, such as the Al Adams Chaos Calls stories where each stand alone story fits into a large story arc. The only exception to that is the Clan Amir series I write as Ernest Edwards. Again, each story stands alone, but they're much more closely tied together in that the majority are short stories as vignettes of one persons life. Not all of these are at SOL yet, contractual issues with the first publisher, but will be eventually.

One review I know personally and he gets a preview of the stories before posting, so I suspect he's the one who beats you to it because he gets the whole story before I start to post it at SOL.

PS that's why I have only one 'D' in the name.

How would you feel if the first story you ever wrote was generally accepted as the best one of your career?

You mean like Joseph Heller? ;)

- Actually my first full story probably was. I wrote it in Wordstar. I was still reading a lot of print erotica, mainly Grove Press and the like. I recall stumbling on it and not believing I wrote it, it was so good.
Too bad I lost it many years ago.

You mean like Joseph Heller? ;)

Or Harper Lee. 'D She only published one story, the other was rejected by her editor as not being worthy of printing.

If it were an aside in a Damsels story, no, you don't need to go into everlasting facts about how to build a fortress.

And that's exactly why the detail on the cavalry wagons and the supersized caltrops, but not the housing or the fortress walls in my DiD stories. I put in detail where I feel it's needed for the reader to understand without having to go check wikipedia in the middle of the story.

Slight digression - you can enter the italics and other formatting into the posts by using the code tags listed under the box Post.

i = italics start

/i= italics end

b= bold start

/b= bold ends

you use the angle brackets above the comma and full stop around them < .. > so they read as bracket then code then bracket with no spaces - if I included an example it would activate and not show.

You just type it in either side of the text you want to have affected.