IronBuddah: Blog

I've got over 20 chapters in the rough draft of this story now, so you might think I'm close to wrapping this one up. However, I think I've actually added more chapters to the outline than what I've completed since last I posted about how writing was going. 

I've decided to give myself a hard cap of 30 chapters. If I think of some idea that inspires me and would push the story past that limit, I just need to save it up for another story. If I had to guess, I'd say this one is going to end up in the 40k word neighborhood. That would make this one longer than any completed stories I've written other than Predatory Mothers and Boobiliscious.

I'm a little bit delayed in getting Chapter 9 polished up and posted because I went to a concert Thursday night and also because I realized I had made a mess over who the point of view character was in one scene.

It seems like this story is getting a nice level of interest. It has over 250 people who have added it to their library, and after just one update, it has over 5000 downloads. That's enough to put it in the top fifteen most downloaded ongoing serials for the week. I do think I like posting the first three to five chapters of a longer story if I don't have the entire thing edited to post all at once. Probably enough to get to the first spicy bit of the story. That way someone reading gets to see at least some payoff from reading some initial setup chapters.

The good news is that I've added two more chapters to the rough draft since the initial posting. The bad news is that one of those new chapters wasn't on the original outline, so I'm only one chapter closer to finishing. Overall, I don't see any issues with getting another chapter polished up and posted this weekend. I should still be able to finish up the story and post new chapters every few days.

I probably should have expected a bump in the number of downloads for the other story in this series, Swing Set Swap, but I didn't. That was a pleasant surprise. It's always interesting to see which older stories get checked out when a new one gets posted.

In general, getting at least one chapter of month of Chaos posted has kept me writing. I expected to be able to start posting a new story, Topless Daughters at the Pool, before now, but the story has been growing as I write it. I'm pretty sure the original outline was in the 10 to 12 chapter range. I now have 17 chapters in the rough draft, with six remaining. Assuming I don't add any more chapters, I think I can get the story finished and post chapters at a reasonable rate. To that end, I cleaned up the first five chapters today and submitted them for posting.

Hopefully you will enjoy the adventures of Jana & Jeff and their hosts with a backyard pool, Erica & Greg. This adds a second story to the Daughter Swap series. I felt like Swing Set Swap was a bit lonley as the only story in that series.

Now that automatic grammar checkers are a lot better, I've been using them more. They still aren't perfect; if I were to blindly accept all suggestions, my stories would be full of cumin and pussycats. However, going through things I've written recently, I've decided I need to make them a regular part of my workflow. I'm sure I won't go back and run all my old stories through a grammar checker, but I decided this one deserved that level of attention as it is by far and away the most popular story I've written.  There is no new plot or new scenes, and most things that got caught involved commas and semicolons. However, there were enough other things that got caught and corrected that I consider this a worthwhile exercise to have gone through for a popular story. If you've never read LSAUB, now would be a good time to give it a try, or if it's been a while since you've read it, this is as good an excuse as any to reread it.

I'm traveling a lot this April, so I'm not sure I'll finish up the story I'm working on, Topless Daughters at the Pool, but I'm fairly confident that will arrive in May.

Also, Donna is outlined as the POV character for the next two installments of Chaos, so I'm going to do my best to get both of those posted in May.

Also, I knew posting an update would get Chaos over 10k downloads and it's now the 5th longest story I have on the site. Collectively the Meagan series is bound to be the longest, but still, it's nice to see the steady progression starting to add up to a long story.