The text of the latest chapter is written, just leaving links and some formatting to do. I'm very happy with the results, in that I think this next chapter captures the mood I was going for exactly.
As a brief recap: We've finished Act I (Chapters 1, 2, and 7), in which the main characters were introduced, the setting was established, and the community was formed. We've also finished Act II (Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6), in which we saw how the community dealt with relating to the post-apocalyptic world and each other; we also saw the community separated, leading to Rose seeking refuge at the Cooper family farmhouse and Walter being killed and reborn as a revenant. The upcoming Chapter 8 begins the final Act by returning us to the events at the very end of Chapter 6.
Before posting the next chapter, I'd like to get some reader thoughts on the technical presentation up to this point. If you think the story/characters/themes are crap (or if you think they're great, for that matter), feel free to talk about that, but that's not what I'm thinking about right now. I'm mostly wondering about things like frequency of links, length, etc.
I'm particularly wondering about the length. This chapter is about the same size as the last two, a bit over 2,000 words. Up to this point I've been dividing these longer chapters in half, figuring nobody wants to sit reading a blog post much beyond 1,000 words. However, the chapters would flow better as a unit. I've thought about trying to get the length down to around 1,500, but I just don't think I can cut that much (and I always make sure you readers get what you pay for, I'm sure you won't be too upset).
I'd just like to get some thoughts on this before I put chapter 8 up. Chapter 9 will probably finish the story, although I wouldn't be surprised to see it hit 3,000 words, so I really need to deal with formatting issues before racing to the finish line. Please comment early and often.
HOW I FEEL WHEN I’M TWO WEEKS OUT FROM QUALS
9 years ago
Posts
6 comments:
Teaser: Chapter 8's title is 'Leviticus 26:29'
This post wasn't nearly as meta as I had hoped.
The post is just the intro. The comments are where the Meta-Discussion is supposed to take place. If you want meta, you've gotta get meta!
The word has now lost all meaning.
Uh-oh, empty signifier alert! You know what that means, eh? Somebody call Freud!
I think the story lengths have been fine and could be longer; I wouldn't object to reading two thousand words at a pop. Of course, reading stories in general is also pretty much my job, so perhaps I'm biased.
For me the links are largely distracting, but not necessarily in a bad way. (After all, they are links to different pages: their function, strictly speaking, is to remove one from the narrative trail.) Some of them especially have been clever and suggested alternative layers of meaning to words, and forcing more attention in the reader. This can be a problem in the action scenes, however: there have been times when the narrative needs to start scurrying and can't because I'm stopping off to let the pictures load; or else skipping the links and looking at them later, which diminishes the effect.
Of course, occasionally they come off seeming a little banal, which is disappointing. But the quantity is generally pretty good: these are questions of quality and distribution.
Jessie, who has chosen to pass comments on to me directly, also feels the links are distracting. I think I may try to cut back on the links, hopefully only keeping those with a high marginal benefit.
I started putting the links in for a couple of reasons. First, my wife had been putting funny links in her blog, which I thought was fantastic and wanted to replicate here. Second, the blog is a different kind of medium, and I wanted to integrate the fact that all the readers are on the Internet.
It's a bit late for this game, but I'm also interested in opinions about character development. Now, I originally decided to save space by minimizing character development (which coincidentally makes my writing look more like Lovecraft). It also makes for a cleaner story, since after all you're reading fiction written by a statistician. That said, would more character development have been worth the space and slower pacing I would need to do it?
Discuss.
Almost certainly, although as you say it's late in the game now. I have had difficulty remembering which character is which from episode to episode, and even in checking back to previous episodes, remembered that I never really knew who character X was in the first place. It made it a little more confusing than it needed to be, especially given the constraints of posing in installments.
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