Back to work.
Yesterday was a good weekend. Actually, taken in combination with the better aspects of Saturday (and ignoring the worse ones), I'd go so far as to say I had a really good weekend.
I'm excited about Sleeping Kings. In the past, I've said that because I was just excited that it was still going, that I was still writing daily. Now, I'm more excited about the story itself, and how the characters are coming together and the story is starting to pick up pace.
Y'know... I was talking to Nicki about this before, when she asked me why I stopped writing Sleeping Kings three years ago. It was always an idea I liked. And I've always thought it would be fun to write a serial novel.
I worked on one for an ex-girlfriend, actually. I think about that, from time to time. Girl I dated in high school, I would write her four pages every day, and slip them into her locker on my way out of school (for some reason, she stayed later than I did).
I kept that up for the entire time we were dating. She loved the story. We broke up, it was kinda ugly (I brought the drama, go fig), and then I never really talked to her again. Oh! No, this isn't Lindsey. All of the above was true for Lindsey, too, but I never wrote her a story.
Anyway, I'd given her my only copy of the story, handwritten as I went. I don't remember anything about the story now. I don't know if I'd try to rewrite it if I did. But...yeah. That was my first attempt at a periodic novel.
My second was Sleeping Kings. If you noticed, reading the prologue, I got about five installments done. About 2-3 pages per installment. That...that's really not very much. That's maybe an afternoon's work, if I'd done it all at once.
That's pretty sad.
Here's the thing about periodic novels: it takes a lot out of you, every single day (or week, or month, depending on the periodicity). Yeah, sure, a couple of my favorite authors wrote periodic novels. They also got paid for them. I can emulate them out of academic and professional interest, y'know, because it's cool, but I don't have newspapers looking to support an author for a weekly contribution the way they did.
So, the point is, from now on it's going to cost you $4.95 every time you access Sleeping Kings. Sorry, but it had to be done.
*Sigh.*
No, not really. That would be way cool, but no. Actually, what I was going to say, is that this time part of what I'm getting out of it is just the process of writing. It had been so long since I really wrote, that I do, to a big extent, feel like getting something published (albeit in a cheap and easy medium) is its own reward, to an extent.
The other thing I'm taking in payment is feedback. Comments. So when I'm bugging you for a response, try to remember that the response is much of what keeps me going. I'm not just trying to be annoying -- knowing (or imagining) that I have readers out there anxiously wondering what's going to happen today is a big part of what makes me post something today.
Also...I commented to Heather earlier about this. I'm trained -- college-educated -- to take any kind of feedback at all, and make the most of it. So don't feel like there's any burden on you to say something special, or something important. Just say anything at all. Whatever you're feeling after you read a post, that's useful information to me.
Beh. I don't mean to sound like I'm coming here begging. Just wanted to share a little insight into my process.
Also: I really hope you like the story. Deep down, I do. Who doesn't want to be liked, y'know?
Other notes:
Nacho Libre is fantastically good. Go see it, for yeah. Funny. Worth a laugh. On a similar note, Mom and Dad insist that you should go see Over the Hedge. I haven't been an obedient son yet, though, so I can't confirm or deny their praise.
*Spoilers* Nate dies in Act II. It's very sad.
Oh. So, like, three years ago, I spent several months writing a lot of Python scripts for our modded XBoxen. They were moderately useful. The most useful things I made were an emulator so other developers could write XBox scripts on their computers, and a detailed, formally laid-out tutorial for new developers wanting to know how to write Python scripts for XBox. I actually took an existing one, that was very poor English and miserably laid-out, and just tech-writed it.
Anyway, I put these up on my cheesy free website provided by Cox, and out of curiosity I got a counter, and for the four to six months I was working on it, I was getting around ten thousand hits a month, on average.
That's kind of a lot, for a little thing like that.
Anyway, when we moved, it got chopped down. That was sad, but it had been years since I did anything with it, so I just thought, "Aww, how sad for them," and forgot about it.
It just occurred to me today, on the drive in to work, that I could really easily re-create the same email address I'd used then, post all of the old website up to the automatically-created cheesy free website, and the entire site would be available again, at the exact same address.
Took me about twenty minutes, and now all those years-old links still work, and everything. I'm glad I did that. Yay me.
That's all.
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