Chapter 4

Even Some More More Rants

Okay, I think this will have to do it for now. I'm feeling kind of ranted out and I'm tired of trying to clean up other people's crappy pornographic pictures and make them fit my web page. So, this will be the last of my so-called rants and I hope you've ignored tham and concentrated on the world peace problem. Jeeze! That one's been kicking my butt for awhile now and God's getting impatient!

What else? Ummm ... I guess there's really nothing else to say. Most of these blogs appeared at one time or another on Stories Online and most readers generally ignore me over there because, hey ... let's face it, I'm kinda weird! SOL is a haven for people looking for cheeerleader harem mind-control stories involving revenge, romance, and ... I need another "r" word. Let's see ... revenge, romance, and ... I dunno, whatever it is, they ain't getting it from me 9 times out of 10!

So fuck 'em! - rr

An email about aliens blowing up cities...

2009-08-26

This is a real email, exhibited here in its entirety and I found it vaguely amusing. Maybe you will too. Who knows?

On 8/26/09, SOL Feedback: Re Talis <feedback@storiesonline.net> wrote:

Message from: <christXXX1@comcast.net> :

My only reply to those of you who would echo similar thoughts can be:

Hi, Thanks for reading and thanks especially for taking the time to drop me a line.

Don't confuse me with my characters. I'm much taller :))

Best always!

Rachael

Talis and my (edited) Plausibility Rant

2009-08-12

This story is kind of weird. "The first title it had was, "As if I didn't have enough problems" and then it became "My life without pockets" and finally, "Talis" once I found a name for the alien that I liked ... It's a bitch naming aliens, ain't it?

Currently it ends after three chapters, but I might write more. I'm posting those few chapters slowly to give me time to decide what I want to do.

So... "How Plausible Does A Story Have To Be?"

Kind of a funny thread. I largely ignored it because I read the topic as a rhetorical question. It is, right? One of those questions that requires no answer because it's perhaps self-evident? Obvious. Plain.

As plausible as it needs to be? Is that a possible answer?

It's like, let's quantify plausibility on a universal basis. We'll call it the Plausibility Constant and apply it to everything we read and write. That would be so cool. Never mind approaching art from a subjective point of view; we can computerize it! Reduce writing to a mechanical formula, a Deterministic model of the universe by which we must all abide! Vanquish opinion. Gullibility is overrated anyway.

(I got an email once about "Blacksheep" that said, " ... anyone who would believe this story id a moron!" [sic] and I couldn't have agreed with him more!)

Yeah, we need an entertainment to plausibility ratio by which to deduce our relative worth! Suspension of Belief could be renamed "Suspension of Plausibility" and taught to bark, sit up, and play dead ... especially that last one. Escapism would be outlawed and imagination limited to footnotes and appendices. Every motive, every plot point, every aspect of the fictional world would be grounded in facts. Logic would rule the day and we could all buy Spock ears and ... oops! We could all buy Johnny von Neumann hats and pretend we're displaced Hungarians. Theory would be recognized as the new old fiction it is. Deniable Implausibility would be the watchword in literary circles, a dark, suspicious phrase with which to label and libel your friends!

Just think how thin our dictionaries could be! Orwell was on to something there. (Animal Farm - Plausible or No?) We'd nurture an anorexic language in which the expression love, hate, joy, lust, anger, and jealousy would be tempered by the masterworks of Freud, Jung, and Dr. Phil ... I'm getting wet, time to wind this down.

In summary, I have to wonder ... Plausibility, is there another face of Satan more contrary to the mirror of our sweet disease?

best always,

rache

My New Me, My New Blog

2008-12-04

I'm setting up an external blog for no other reason than I'm bored and I want an excuse for not writing fiction.

The other night (Monday, 01 December) I was rather inebriated. Intoxicated, you might say, with my success. I killed a few minutes telling the world about it and I must apologize to some of you. I was letting off some of the stress that had been building over the long summer. I wrote my doctoral thesis and it was published, paving the way for my dissertation and public defense of that same article.

Upon getting published I experienced an ominous calm, a dreadful silence really. Thankfully, having spent much of my adult life posting unwanted (and often unpopular) erotic fiction to sites like SOL, I'm used to getting little or no feedback. It seems, however, that unlike ham-fisted perverts who are simply too lazy to offer commentary, academics simply read slower. Doubtless they jerked off, sitting on their toilets with the latest professional journal quivering in their excited fingers as they pumped and pulled and otherwise rendered critical judgment on my life's work (to date) ... And then they called and emailed and offered me opinion, fact, and irrelevant supposition. I was praised and flamed, often in the same breath, and it was quite an experience. Joan of Arc? Maybe not, but the allusion pleases me to no end. We all want to be martyrs for our beliefs.

When they said " ... first week of December." I didn't know they meant the first goddamn day in December!

That hurt quite a lot, which was perhaps their intention, I'm not sure. I'm not usually so cynical. I lectured for a little over an hour and then fell back into a defensive posture I like to call "Stalingrad." It was cold and bloody and by the end of it we were all speaking German. Historical metaphors rarely make sense, so I don't even try. Somehow, by the end of a very long day with breaks for lunch, tea, and the occasional vomiting session in the restroom, I was deemed worthy of the honorific title "Doctor" and I shall be vested in mid-January. Myself and a number of others, live and on-stage before a captive audience just returned from the holidays and in hardly any sort of mood to clap politely and offer congratulations around a large bowl of meager punch.

Life continues. I continue. And I never really believed I would reach this point in my life. At one time it was the only thing I wanted. The goal that quite literally kept me alive. When I had no other reason, I had this, and now it really is mine. It begs the question that should have been asked, but never was ... What am I supposed to do now?

rache

I'm so Numb, er ... gettin Dumb, er ... all the time

2009-07-21

Wow ... I usually try to write my blog notes offline because the internet café here is right next to the bar where I like to hang out. Usually I hang out for awhile, go internet for awhile, then hang out some more. If I try to do my blog entries, or do anything more complicated than answer emails and yes/no questions, I usually end up embarrassing myself.

The proof is in the pudding.

So, I take back whatever I said yesterday and instead, I offer this gem of sobriety...

Rachael's Really Deep Thoughts on Download Counts

Stat counting is pretty much useless for me. I'm sure some people get a kick out of it and maybe they even have some use for such things, but I've just never found much value for totaling my downloads or anything like that. Word count is handy and you have to understand what that is and what it means and how to use it as a writer, because it's important in a lot of ways, but those are numbers that I have sole control over. I'll confess that I never contemplated comparing my story size to anyone else's. It smacks of penis envy ... or something.

Weird.

After reading AscendingAuthor's blog, and I don't know him at all, one way or any other, I'm a little mind boggled by what he says there. Of course dedicating oneself to 3.2 million words in a single story??? Wow! It's safe to say that he and I have very different views on storytelling in theory and practice and I'm sure neither of us is more right or less wrong than the other. I wish him the very best of luck with reaching the longest story on SOL goal or whatever the thrust of his efforts is. Good luck with that.

But the whole numbers thing, daily vs weekly downloads and losing some of them ... I don't know about that stuff. About the only numbers I look at are the number of favorites lists that I'm on, just because that's right at the top and it's hard to miss, and the number of libraries a given story is in.

Downloads don't tell me anything. I could have fifty thousand downloads, but I don't know how many of those are people who actually finished the story or just popped in for a quick skim, a midnight jerk, or just to cheer me with a ten or spank me with a one ... I mean, how many people read the whole thing? That's what I'm concerned with, and SOL and the best bean counting software in the world won't ever be able to tell me.

As I've mentioned before, email and feedback is really the only method I use to determine a story's "success" if I write a story with nice high scores, but I only get a dozen emails ... It's a failure. I have a couple of those and I think, "God! That story must really suck, cause nobody emailed me." Likewise, posting a story to terrible scores and limited downloads, but getting thirty emails, which is what happens with TS Severe for example, she's doing okay. I know transgendered stories aren't going to get big numbers. Same with Kylie and her stories, but they get so damn much email from the readers who are into it, they're really vocal and enthusiastic and I love them!

That's rewarding, it really is. Numbers ... blah. Who cares? That's another toy for readers and I think authors should just ignore that crap. It is tempting to write a 3.3 million word story though, I have to admit! I have a title picked out for it already, "Doorstop" ... But I have so many other things to do. I still have to figure out if Kylie is going to hook up with Karen or her father!! That's what I should be doing right now ... Yikes! At least I finished Tina (7) just a minute ago, that was a relief! I kept putting it off and putting it off. I really need a cattle prod shoved up my butt sometimes, you know?

Yeah ... See? You do know, but probably for a different reason than mine, huh? I need a drink.

Story Removal

2008-10-18

The following stories have been removed from the Stories Online "rache" index:

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Forty-Seven

Reasons Until After

Stage Daddy

Talis

TS Neighbors

Ts Wife

The above to be reposted under the pen name "T.S. Severe" as time permits.

Loren - To be reposted under the pen name "Kylie X." when I get around to it.

This is just being done as part of my SCP (Spring Cleaning Project) and there's no real cause to panic. I've been meaning to reorganize for awhile now and I'm always forgetting. Well ... Today I remembered! Except I don't have the files with me, blah blah blah

In the meantime...

You Lied!

Characters lie all the time and I was talking about this in an email and so I figured I'd mention it here. Some people, some readers, look at a story and assume that because the words are written down they must invariably be 100% accurate.

What I mean is that they think that the narrator would never, ever lie, cheat, steal, exaggerate, falsify, marginalize, blaspheme, or otherwise tell an untruth to the reader.

That's often true in a story that is (a) written in third person/omni; and (b) written by someone else.

In my stories, especially in first person narratives, the narrator is a character. The person telling the story is someone who usually wants to be liked, as any of us do. He or She wants your sympathy (most times) and craves your understanding and good opinion as she relates her adventure. What the narrator reports to you is (usually) taken from a perspective of remembrance. The character is retelling events from memory and so we can safely assume that they are filtered through the lens of time, if nothing else.

Sometimes I play with that deliberately, but most often I do try and keep the narrator honest. Still, there are times when I do make it a point to lie in the interest of developing either character or plot, or both. I use it as a tool to avoid details when I'm not in a mood to provide them. I like the ready excuse first person allows me to be vague and obscure at times, if it benefits the story. It offers varying opportunities to enter a sub-textual dialogue with readers and provide information through what is hidden or revealed.

None of it is ever obvious (I hope) and such devices should pass largely unnoticed if it's working. But, being the author, I am conscious of what I say and how I say it and I just wanted to confess. In those few stories I have where the opportunity to tell a story from two different points of view exists, like one of the chapters in "Daddy's Little Whore" for example, I tried to exemplify two different memories of the same event. Dialogue is different. Some of the events are remembered differently, and it should emulate real life that way. Reading the two versions shouldn't be confusing, but neither should one be considered correct over the other. They're both correct in essence and complimentary.