Keeping Promises - completed

Okay (breathing hard), it's done.  Chapter 3 was submitted to my ASSTR web site, last night, and to SOL this morning. Hopefully it'll show up when those sites refresh, today. I also posted the story in its entirety to my ASSTR FTP site, as a PDF document.  I hope you enjoy it.

I'm going to take a vacation from the Swarmiverse, and try once again to finish some of my ongoing, stalled-out stories, notably Schroedinger's Cat and Homecoming?.  They'll be slow going though, because I have to re-familiarize myself with the story lines - it has been that long.  IF I ever get them finished, I'll probably take a long vacation from writing.

Yah, yah, I know.  Some of you think I've already taken too much time off.  Let me remind you once agina, that this is a hobby for me.  I only do it when I can't find enough quality reading to occupy my time, and the only currency in which I get paid for it, is your gratitude.  Not that I don't appreciate that, but it doesn't help squeeze blood out of the turnip!  

Another author that I follow said it best: "Why don't you try it for a while, and see how long it takes for you to burn out?"

It isn't easy to create entertaining, believeable, logically consistent fiction, populated with sympathetic, and hopefully, well-developed characters, out of nothing but your imagination.

Anyway, for those who like the story, thanks for your appreciation. For those who offer constructive criticism, thanks for trying to make me a better author. For those who can only engage in name-calling, or bitch about characters, situations, and outcomes that they find disturbing... well, you get what you paid for.

QM

Keeping Promises

... is the title of the new story that I posted tonight.  It is set in the Swarmiverse, and further investigates the coping mechanisms of the cosca, as it adapts to life away from the familiar trappings of Earth.  The blurbs read:  "Heroes die young.  Life goes on.  The rest of us have to stand up and be counted.  Sometimes keeping promises costs more than you think it will."

I'm pretty sure the final edits will be completed sooner than I expected.  If it happens that way, I may post a chapter each day for the rest of the weekend.

QM

Status

Currently working on Chapter 7 of Schroedinger's Cat. If all goes well, I may have it posted by the first of November. If not... well.... Anyway, next up after that is Chapter 2 of Homecoming?, and it's got a lot further to go before it's ready for prime time - less than a thousand words written, so far.

No, there won't be any more Swarm stories from me for awhile, at least not until I've caught up a little more on my backlog. There are a bunch of other Swarm authors, though, and judging by the discussions going on, a lot of exciting new stories coming down the pike! Be sure to check frequently on the Thinking Horndog's New Swarm Stories page.. or, you could do like I do, sometimes, and haunt SOL...

Changing Priorities

I've posted a new Swarm story. It's called Changing Priorities, and it develops on the concept of "the Godfather in Outer Space," that was exposed in Family Values. It's on both ASSTR and SOL.

I'm going to take a vacation from the Swarm for awhile. My other writing projects have fallen 'way behind, and I need to move them along a little faster, so no more new Swarm stories from me for awhile. There are lots of great writers doing stories for the Swarm universe, though, so if you haven't checked them out, this would be a great time to do so!

Another stories site

Yielding to pressure from my new friend, deGaffer, I have established an author account at Storiesonline.net (SOL), and today I posted Family Values to the Swarm Cycle universe there. In addition, any future Swarm stories that I may write will be posted there as well.

Of course, any stories I write, including any in the Swarm universe, will continue to be posted on my main stories site at ASSTR. SOL is just another venue. It may also have a positive side for a couple of readers who have mentioned that my main site is hard on their eyes. Although SOL allows some minor customization, I have no intention to try for anything striking at the moment. I will also continue to convert stories, as time permits, to PDF format for both FTP and web download.

An FTP experiment...

In the two or three years I've been posting to ASSTR, I've never used the FTP site. The reason is simple: I wanted more control over the stories than uploading plain text files, or Word documents, to an ftp site would allow. I could have solved the problem a long time ago, except that I always felt that the cost of Adobe Acrobat (full version) was much too high to justify buying it for that purpose.

Recently though, I had the good fortune to come across the PDF995 software suite, from a company called Software995. The suite contains utliities for creating, signing, securing, and encrypting PDF documents, and all of the elements are available via free download. The freeware version has the usual annoying popups, but hey, it's free! If you dislike the popups enough, you can get rid of them for less than twenty bucks.

I've decided to use the PDF995 suite to test the demand for ftp downloads. I've created a PDF document will all four chapters, plus the epilogue, for Breakdown, and before I go to bed tonight, it'll be posted on my ftp site. I'll watch the download statistics to see if there's enough demand to continue it with the other stories.

New Galen Story!

I've finally finished the first chapter of the long-awaited sequel to Breakdown - a new Galen Cuvier story, titled Homecoming? I posted the new chapter today.

The addition of the new story caused a need to reorganize several parts of my ASSTR website (naturally), so today's updates are more massive than just posting a story. Galen has gone from being the main character in a single story (Breakdown), to being the central figure in a universe of stories (The Life and Times of Galen Cuvier). And yes, it's likely that there will be more Galen stories after Homecoming? is finished.

Phantom updates on ASSTR

Sorry about that. Nothing for it though. Changing the links to my blog, on my story pages is probably going to cause several of these.

All done!

I've just finished correcting and updating the last of my old web pages, including all stories already posted, index files, and ancilliary files. Now I can get back to writing. The next chapter of SC (Chapter 5) will be subtitled Fly Away Home.

When Chapter 5 is done and ready for posting, I'll post all of the other page updates at the same time.

Site rework

Well, as I mentioned in my last blog, in rereading the stories on my ASSTR website, I found numerous spelling and grammatical errors so now I have a major overhaul underway. In addition to correcting those errors, I'm reorganizing the filesystem, to hopefully improve and standardize file access, and in the process I'm making all of the pages what I hope is XHTML-compliant.

Don't expect a major change in the "look and feel" of the site, though; most of the changes are below that level.

I've finished the reworks for Breakdown and Whither Away?, but I'm going to wait until the whole site is finished before re-posting anything. This is necessary because the changes in the filesystem structure will affect the URL used to get to any particular story. I may even wait to do a mass update until the next chapter of Schroedinger's Cat is ready for posting. The reason being, to avoid creating an "invisible update".

Incidentally, I have been guilty of "invisible updates" to my site before; you know the kind, it's where an author makes some minimal change in one or more pages, and his handle shows up on the "New Author's" list at ASSTR, but there is no actual new material. My favorite authors do "due diligence" in trying to avoid that, but everyone does it inadvertently at times. Considering how much it irritates me, I will also attempt "due diligence," but I'll probably slip up sometimes.

Ciao.

QM