Boy from south Ohio, single mom, best friend is next door girl whom he has sex with, graduates, heads to Chicago, gets job as mail clerk, works his way up in a short time. I was following it closely but I'm not sure if it's ended or it's been dropped.
Sounds like "Climbing the Ladder" series by Michael Loucks
Three completed books have been posted on SOL so far. A fourth book is in the process of being written and will be posted sometime after it's complete.
ML is taking a three month break from online life and writing. It started today (11 Apr). He expects to be back in July.
GM9 will still publish daily as he scheduled the releases to occur automatically.
A hiatus like that can be a very bad sign, I remember when Wes Boyd announced that he was going to be unavailable for around two weeks. That was end of February / start of March 2018.
Here's hoping ML's reasons bear no relation to Wes' back then.
While he had eye surgery in the last six months, he stated in the post announcing his current hiatus that he "had not received any kind of diagnosis that would impair [his] ability to resume writing."
A hiatus like that can be a very bad sign
True, but you have to pay attention to posting style. The most recent book in the "Climbing the Ladder" series is over 400k words long and was posted in a two-month period.
While it's possible that Michael Loucks writes 7,000+ words every day, it's far more like the books are completed before posting. This is also supported by the length of time between postings: the first boo was published in 2021, the second in Jan - Mar of 2023, and the third in Dec 2023 - Feb 2024.
So a posting date of August for part four is, if anything, a bit sooner than would otherwise be expected and is completely consistent with past postings.
Now I don't know about Wes Boyd, but from a brief look it appears the stories are both shorter and published over a longer period of time, suggesting more of a post as you write style. Neither style is necessarily better than the other, but authors who wait until a story is completed before posting are less likely to disappear mid-story (although they can still leave a series uncompleted).
Wes' stories were still being posted 18 months after he died, and those were just the ones he'd checked after they had been edited. Then his editor started on the stories which were complete but had been unedited and they ran out over two years later.
He originally posted three chapters a week, dropping to two when the "reservoir" dropped below a certain point.
I wasn't aware, thanks for the information. It's unfortunate, then that his series may not have been completed, but at least the individual stories were.
Let's face it, just about any story can be continued and could be ended at any point, although some conclusions are more satisfying than others. Readers have to take what they can get.
