I moved the blog post to Saturday so that I could spend all day working on it. So as you might guess from this very late post, I have spent all day doing… not that. I've been "thinking" about it, I tell myself. I do an awful lot of thinking.
Lately I've been thinking about this story I'm working on. Namely, what should happen next. I haven't written it yet because I don't know. I don't know if it's going in a good direction, as is.
As I'm sure I mentioned before, one advantage to publishing episodically is that you can get feedback along the way, right away. You can see if a character or a storyline is doing well, and that gives you some indication of where you might want to take the story.
But there is a downside to this. If you're relying on your readership to give some opinion and influence what you write, there's also the possibility that you receive zero feedback, and then it's just like you're shouting your story off of a cliff, and there's no way to know if anyone is listening. Do they like it? Do they not? Who knows?
Now, some might so, "Oh, we'll follow wherever you take the story. We trust you as a writer." That's probably a terrible idea, just saying. I wouldn't trust me. I don't know what I'm doing. When left to my own devices, I tend to just kill everyone, or at least maim them horribly.
On that subject, is anyone else curious what happens when you get bit by a hell beast? I sure am. Sure, it could be nothing, and Patrick could just brush it off, but where's the fun in that? That's what I've been thinking about the past couple days. What kind of awful sulfuric infection would you get from that? Infernal rabies, or something? I think that's the subject of the next episode, but I'm not sure how I want to go about it, yet.
And somehow, I went from posting a… post at the beginning of the week, and posting a story part at the end to doing the opposite of that, and I'm trying to fix it. So bear with me on that.
I'm going to end with a question, that will hopefully get some answers, because I'm really trying to cater to the readership, but I never know what you all want. Regarding this serial story I've got going on, how do you feel about the length of each episode? The first two were about a page to a page and a half in Word, and I think they make good little morsels, wherein some event or issue occurs, with no extra filler. But are they too short? Does it seem like I should have filled something out more with… I don't know, trivial descriptions? Or feelings? I tend to skip over that because I think it's bullshit, but maybe people need that stuff.
Let me know. Seriously.
I'll see you… Wednesday. With… something.
I don't think you want to worry too much about the length of the post. You're readers are hungry to read what you give them. Not exaggerating here. I think if you worry too much about the length, you might lose content. You might be too focused on each chapter being the same number of pages or words, when some might deserve and need more or fewer. That being said, I enjoyed the episodes so far! They aren't so long that someone is going to put off reading it for later when they "have more time", and they end with the reader wanting more. So yeah, I think you have it right, but don't get hung up on the length.
ReplyDeleteYour writing style does leave out descriptions that you think are trivial, but that's OK. It's your style and the descriptions that are NOT trivial become important tools for the reader to know that something is going to happen. I, personally,do like a little more "trivial description", but it might not suit you. You do you.
I think this is also a safe place to turn around if you want to. You can publish an episode, and if it doesn't work, you have the latitude to replace it or alter it. The reason that would work is that your readers know that you are writing and publishing these episode in real time. Whereas old fashioned publications like this were probably just a little more planned out, and perhaps written weeks/months/years before publication and revised and reworked. I feel like blogs are different in that way, because today you are building a sort of friendship with your readers rather than a bunch of blind followers. A less personal website would be for followers, a blog is for relationships (I'm not sure how you feel about that, but I'll bet you just got the shivers).