As I write this, my latest story, "Family Jewels" has 1250 reads and 81 kudos.
And not a single comment.
I know that I've ranted about this before but COME ON!
I'm grateful for the kudos, but WHY aren't there any comments? Weren't any of those 1250 readers moved enough by the story to say something about it?
Even something negative.
I don't appreciate comments that say "Your story stank." No writer does. And, truth to tell, comments where the person seems to take delight in pointing out typos are no fun either.
I took a break from my writing -- yes, I am still writing -- to read the reviews of some of my older stories.
In SF fandom, they used to say that the "coin" of fandom was the "egoboo", something that boosted one's ego. I guess that was what I was doing collecting egoboo.
I noted that a number of (annoying) comments were about my use of grammar and spelling. I plead not guilty -- mostly.
I don 't post examples of proper English. I post stories.
As I said in my last blog entry, I've been asked on occasion to post a story here on Big Closet that I'd posted elsewhere.
I recently was looking at a story that I wrote some years ago that was set in a neighborhood bar called "Magee's Irish Pub." The story included some fancy layout that gave the folks at FictionMania a bit of a problem.
I posted my story "Choices" about a week ago. It's an old story, I admit, but I have been asked several times in the past, to post stories here that were already posted elsewhere.
Some years back, I was asked to write the 8,000th story for FictionMania. Instead of one long stories, I wrote right short one. "Choices" was one of those eight. It was an attempt to write a TG version of the classic tale "The Lady or the Tiger."
One of the comments Chris and I got when we finished posting “Eerie Saloon: Seasons of Change – Spring” was that we’d written (and posted) more than one million words.
Easter eggs are little bits of (alleged) humor snuck into a computer program. For example, in one early Microsoft product, going through a specific series of keystrokes produced a small on-screen caricature of Bill Gates who then used a squeegee to clear everything currently on the screen.
About a month ago, I posted the second Jessie Hanks story to this site. It didn't get near as many reads as the Eerie stories usually get, and the second part got a lot less than the first part did. The two parts only got a couple comments.
I'd like to know why.
It isn't that people don't like my work. As a test, I posted "Vengeance" a week ago. It got a lot more reads and a heck of a lot more comments. Even if two of those comments were about my lousy spelling of an unfamiliar word.
When Chris and I finished "Eerie Saloon: Spring", we did a tease about the next story in the series being another single adventure of Jessie and Paul. We hoped to get it done and posted fairly soon, say mid 2015.
Unfortunately, "Life" had other ideas. For one thing, the final work of "Spring" was done while I was in a rehab hospital, beginning my (lengthy) recovery from colostomy surgery,
I seem to have put my self -- or my characters -- in a dilemma in a couple of the stories posted here.
A lead character is transformed into a female by a woman with vast magical powers. She has rather slutty sex. Then she's told by the woman who transformed her that she can try to act in a less slutty manner, but that such behavior has become part of her nature, and that she can never become a male again.
Okay, I admit it. Chris and I are posting the latest Eerie Saloon story one chapter at a time, about four days apart, in the hopes of getting comments from our readers.
Chris and I are planning to post the next part of the Eerie saga, "Eerie Saloon: Seasons of Change -- Spring" in early 2014. We apologize about the delay. Life happens.
In the latest story I posted, "Bikini Beach: Swin Date", Paula, the tranasformee, meets a young girl in the Ladies' Changing Room. The girl is upset because she was a grown man, and his wife used the Beach to transform him into a twelve-year old. The girl is starting to think of the wife as her mother and is forgetting what it was like to be a man.
When Paula talks to Grandmother about this girl, the Old Woman seems happy at the notion that the adult male is "disappearing" and the girl, Sally Hammond, is taking her place.
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