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

New Swarm Story coming this weekend

I just finished a new story set in the Swarmiverse. This one deals with the aftermath of the death of one of the cosca's pilots. It's about 15K words in 3 chapters, and is now under editorial review.

I don't like the working title, so I'm not going to use it here, but I hope to choose a final title and post the first chapter by this weekend. I know, I said I won't post unfinished stories anymore, but this one is finished. I'm just not going to post it all at once. I will post the chapters as I get them out of final edits.

The Priests' Wedding

Waltzing Melissa honours me by setting her latest effort in my own little corner of the Swarmiverse. Her new story is called The Priests' wedding, and picks up the future history of the cosca somewhat after the events described in Changing Priorities.

As you might surmise from the title, it describes the toils and tribulations of the priests sent to minister to the cosca, as they try to implement the Pope's directives concerning marriage and the priesthood. Melissa has assembled a wonderful, sexy tale full of humor, angst, love and purpose. Please enjoy it as much as I did!

New Chapter

Well, as promised, Schroedinger's Cat, Chapter 7 is finished and posted, and will be available with the next ASSTR update. No real suspense, I think, but some interesting personal stuff going on, and a little local color. Getting real close to the party now.

Homecoming Chapter 2 is underway again, and I hope to finish it soon.

I may or may not get back to writing in the Swarm universe soon, but another author has indicated some interest in writing a new tale involving the cosca of Family Values and Changing Priorities fame. I've seen some of the preliminary work, and what I've seen looks pretty good.

I'm not sure how much longer I'll continue writing for the Web. Writing, for me, is a way to fill the time between stories by my favorite authors. When they go on hiatus, that's when I write. When I do write, there are usually several stories vying for my time. One thing is for sure: Once Schroedinger and Homecoming are complete, I'm only going to post new stories that I've completely finished. Chapter-wise posting aggravates readers (even when they want it!), and causes me too many headaches in maintaining story flow and logical consistency.

That's all I have for right now. Have a great day.

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.

It's FICTION, dumbass!

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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.

Moving day is over!

Well, hello again.

I've finally gotten fed up with the restrictions that MySpace placed on my blogging. I write stories. Some, perhaps most, of my stories describe sex acts in more or less explicit terms. This means that many, perhaps most, hosting services classify my stories as erotic stories.

For me, the only reason to have a blog in the first place, is so that I can let my readers know about the status of my stories. That includes not only which stories are actively being worked upon, and where they are in the creative process, but also live links to websites where they can be found, like ASSTR, Electronic Wilderness Publishing, and Literotica. Simple things like that. Every time I tried to make these links available in my blog on MySpace, the censors redirected them to the MySpace login page. Not very helpful.

Anyway, I've now migrated the blogs that I'd previously posted on MySpace to this site, and I'll be changing the links on my story pages to point here for my blogs.

For my readers: thanks for your patience. Please bear with me a little longer. For everyone else: read my stuff! You can get to it at the above links.

QM