There's nothing to be sorry about. I like getting critiques and feedback about format - if someone could tell me if there's anything about the way I write, format, tell stories, etc, that turns off the reader, it helps me.

The only time I get a little annoyed about feedback is when I post a 4-part story, and I get to part 3, and someone tells me this tiny thing this one character did 3 chapters ago is wrong, and I should pull all of it down and re-write it to change that one thing.





I don't believe the story format I use for weekly posting would work at all for an e-book - I made that mistake once already, trying to staple together weekly portions with a little re-formatting and re-configuring into an ebook. I think I'd prefer re-writing the whole thing preserving only the characters and story.

There's two problems with that: It takes a lot of time, and the audience I presented it to originally - in the case of World Class - didn't seem interested. Like I said before, that makes me worried about investing the time when I'm possibly telling a story nobody cares about.

I use the PVB as a test market, and to see if the style and format changes I make are working.





I'd like it to, but I'm also worried it might inspire me to give up the game.





I should correct myself there; we all need a personal non-poster-character cast we're willing to walk away from. Admittedly, as much as I like Lara Night as a character, adding her was probably the biggest mistake I made. Because she has other places to be, she's sort of tethered to me, and most writers would be afraid to use her at all, let alone in my absence. I'm not saying I'm removing her from the field,. just that I didn't think it through. I did think through the World Class characters, which is why they aren't here.

Liu Xi Xian, Anna, Yuki Shiro, and the Psychic Samurai were all created with this place in mind. If something makes it so I can't participate here anymore, anyone writing here can pick up the three of them and put them in stories.








I think the quality of writing keeps it going. I don't know how mine fits in though.





Exactly.





From what I've seen with message boards in general, quite often it starts very subtly with someone taking a chunk out of leisure time for "family time", and then that balloons out a bit with things like playdates, days are the park, family vacations, etc. Then they get a job where reading the PVB is either frowned upon or not allowed due to firewall controls. Pretty soon they live in a world where the PVB is seen as the equivelent of sneaking a cigarette, and it's not worth the risk or the time to stop by anymore, and they've been gone so long anyway it's tough to get back in.