Has something happened, or is it just me?
I seem to be getting no feedback at all.
Unashamedly I cry out for it, but I am getting a lot of silence.
I have also contributed to a couple of blogs but I am not sure how they work.
Do they just die after a few hours? Or are the authors notified?
The recent one "Sigh, amateur (sic?) writers and laws" sparked my interest.
A big subject worthy of wider discussion but how do I know if my contribution mattered?
Maryanne
Feedback is Food
A word from our sponsor:
Comments
Comments and blogs
Comments seem to travel in waves. You get a lot, then you get only a few. Blogs stay up in the blog column for a few hours to a few days depending on how many blogs are being posted.
Myself, I comment less than I feel that I should but posts like this stir me to try to do better.
You're a great writer and several of your stories are going to be classics on BC, read over and over by your fans. However, the fact that some of your stories are available on another website has probably led some of your fans to go there and read them before they get posted here. So your comments there may have gone up.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Slutty Behavior
I am guilty of standing on more than one street corner to get wolf-whistles, but it seems that is what I want.
I like to think that I my stories help people like me. I hope so.
When I hear that somebody has been moved or their life has been made a little easier by immersing themselves in my fiction, I feel happy.
The other site has messages, but I feel that here on BC I get thoughts. I just want more.
BTW my last stories (and others) arrived here first, as with originals prompted by suggestions made here on BC.
Thank you Erin, for everything.
Now, for something different, I am going to post a narrative story ...
Maryanne
Your Stuff Is So Good
It could be people have been a bit overwhelmed. I've read about all of it. On average your stories run between really good and excellent.
At times they so meaty they read more like a synopsis than a story. Even that doesn't reduce their entertainment value.
Take it from a two decade vet of BC. A lack of comments or even a smaller than usual percentage of kudos means nothing in regard to the quality of your work.
If comments mean a lot to you try writing serials about young boys who become young girls living happily ever after. Allow your readers to become a active participants in choosing where your story goes next.
Or, learn to write for your own enjoyment. Which is what I do.
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
very true
this.
If comments mean a lot to you try writing serials about young boys who become young girls living happily ever after. Allow your readers to become a active participants in choosing where your story goes next.
not my thing at all.
As Angela says, write for clicks or write for yourself. Like Angela, I do the latter and it finds an audience but not one as large as the type of story highlighted above. Most of the time it works thankfully.
Samantha
Although....
Love, Andrea Lena
There have been lots and lots of comments
for stories about Princesses due to the competition that is now closed to new entrants.
Hopefully, things may settle down a bit in the coming weeks and the comment icing gets spread a bit wider.
Samantha.
No Specific Criticisms
I have read stories of yours that I like. Lately I have been occupied reading Admiral Krunch's, "Being Christina Chase", and most of Anastasia Allred's stories. There are some other stories that I follow, but often their output is low.
I hope this does not insight a rock throwing war. I have my preferences and unapologetically so. If a story is well written and with good sentence structure, that helps. Generally I don't read anything that is too explicit. I do not prefer gay penetrative sex. Transgender, coming out stories are OK, but having done all that, it gets boring for me.
There are situations that are quite painful for me, so I don't read them.
There's no reliable gauge
There's a short novel set in Hollywood called Ape And Essence by Aldous Huxley. I read it a long time ago, so I may not remember it exactly, but near the beginning a truck overturns and spills its cargo. The cargo happens to be movie scripts. The truck is chock full of movie scripts.
We are all standing near that truck, or near the place it was going, or near the place it was coming from. I'm talking about BCTS. There is an immense number of stories and series and pieces of series in here. There are entire, complete books and series of books in here. It's daunting. I don't think a single human could read it all. Those of us who are writing now and adding stories now are living on the surface of an immense repository. Just look on the front page: so many stories submitted every week, and how many weeks has BCTS been in existence? No one knows.
All those stories didn't get their by themselves. Every one of those submissions was written a human being just like you and me, and all of them have a feeling for what they posted.
I think we're lucky for whatever attention we get.
AND, there is one thing we don't get: rejection letters. ("Sorry, but we can't use your story at this time.") That's pretty nice: we publish our stories world wide. Anyone on earth can read them. That's not how the writing business used to work.
To me, the most interesting statistic isn't my comment count. It's my attrition rate: in a multipart piece, how many people make it to the end? For my stories, it's about 46%. I know it's not based on reliable numbers (the page hits), but it means something. I see that percentage and think, wow -- I couldn't keep them to the end? Comments are nice, yeah, but I'd like to be a good enough writer with good enough stories that people would want to see how they end!
At least that's something I can work on.
- io
Food
That's an interesting metaphor, since your bite-sized little solos are the perfect "snack" fiction for when you don't have time to dig into some big multipart thing, and despite your tremendous output none of them feel stale.
ooh... snack fiction
nom nom
Love, Andrea Lena
Snack Fiction
Everybody likes a snack - right?
Is serial a snack? Cereal maybe.
It seems it is not for me. I wrote one Part Two last week and go no comments - zero!
When I write my stories I usually start them, maybe wait a day or two, or maybe not, and then just type away until they end.
But I can try cereal. Should I? I am generally low carb.
Maryanne
I like your stories a lot.
I like your stories a lot. But how may I express it other way than "wow"? Wouldn't it be too primitive.
Dinner With Polly
Here is a prime example of a story that is well written but that I will not read. My own wife, whom I was married to for 39 years threw a huge fit when I revealed Gwen. Though I tried very hard to suppress myself, everytime I came out, she threw a huge fit. That eventually ended our marriage.
The Wife
I posted my own comment of "Dinner with Polly" before I read this note.
I suppose it is empathy if not an apology, towards the wives who suffer.
Hugs to you Gwen
Maryanne