I have one PVB story that involves Lara Night being hunted. It's not yet finished, but I'm ahead of schedule enough that I could start posting it. The problem is, it includes characters that are currently involved in other things in Ian's posts - so I may end up having to re-write a large part of it, meaning the story will be suspended in the middle.

I also have a World Class story in 5 parts so far I can post, but I'm not sure anyone will read it. The last World Class I posted got zero replies.

Or, I can hold off posting entirely this week until the next story with Shen Rae has a chapter or two completed.

Suggestions?

Sorry for the delay in replying. The last couple of times I've tried I've just not had the patience to struggle with the multiple reloads required for me to interact with the board right now. Today I'm making an effort.

It's an odd time for the PVB just now. In part that's my fault, since I've tied up everybody's cast in a complicated and lengthy status-quo changing plotline that's holding other people up. I apologise. Things are exacerbated because we're at the very lower margin of viable poster activity.

Instinctively it feels to me thatr the short-term solution is for people to write quick-win one-off stories, character pieces or complete-in-one action scenes or whatever. It feels like its time to offer instant gratification tales to offer a good experience to occasional-but-confused readers and adds value to those who are familiar with the characters and situations.

So an in-depth look at one character might be the way forward, or a team-up or conversation between two characters that don't usually talk (Liu Xi/ebony, Anna/Flapjack, Chiaki/Dancer, Mr Papadapopolis/detectives, Lara/Lisa), or a pure action scene against a genuine supervillain might be a refreshing palette-cleanser.

It instinctively feels like the wrong moment to launch a big multi-part story that expects to carry readership with it.

I should emphasise that I hope that's a temporary board condition. I hope to find time to complete the Untold Tales line-up story, with the first parts appearing later this week. I hope that generates some momentum and reinforces regular site-visiting and responding habits. So by this time next week me may have an entirely different zeitgeist on the board.

However, the first rule should be "Write what you want to write", or better yet "Write what you can't resist writing" and the rest should roll out from there.

Apparently some ISP out there is blocking or throttling traffic to and from Europe. I found someone in Sweden - Alvaro from Comicboards, no less - who has the problem and hopefully will help me diagnose it. Since very technically inclined viewers from Europe are so rare, it took me a while to find someone to provide the constant supply of data support needs to fix interconnection issues.





To be more accurate about that first story I wasn't sure about contains an appearance by Hatman around part 3 or so. It's brief, but long enough that I'd have to re-write an entire chapter if I can't use him, worst case. Also, the Foundation is mentioned in the same chapter, same rule there. Best case, even if I can use them, I'd have to post part 1 and 2 and then hold indefinitely until the Untold Tales plot is wrapped up (or go ahead and rewrite part 3 anyway out of caution).





Sadly I don't have any of those at the moment. That means a delay while I write a couple of them.





Usually when I'm itching to post one of those, it's because I already have most of it written, and I'm becoming worried that it has an expiration date - a point at which either things have moved on, or previous events have faded from memory - and I end up scrapping the entire story altogether rather than going back and writing in all kinds of recaps and changes to an old story. It's happened before.





What worries me about that? That this "temporary lull", though less than permanent, will be far longer than I expect - that instead of it being a holiday lull a week or so in length, or between now and July 4th, it becomes a "summer lull" and the board will essentially die completely for the next 3-4 months. If I'm mid-story, when it dies for months, I'll be stuck with that annoying choice to finish posting the story and watch no one reply, or re-post it all again in a few months when and if people come back.





I usually do - the question then is when and whether to post it.

I didn't get the memo in time.

~Hat~