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Metafictional administrivia
One more. This is the third entry in an hour, so you may want to give that Previous link down there a workout first.
Mack just asked me via ICQ - referring to the tale of The Forbidden Pearl - "So, did you seduce this folktale gently, or did you savage it by force?" (I paraphrase slightly.)
Looking back, I'm afraid I was pretty rough with it. Mine is about three times the original wordcount, at least. All sorts of details - Pearl's house, Pearl's appearance, the daughter wanting to kill herself, her regret at having to kill the doves, et cetera - are mine.
Then again, I don't feel there's much point in retelling something if you don't do something new to it. This fits Eric's philosophy (which I agree with) that he doesn't want to hear a cover version of a song unless it bears almost no resemblance to the original.
But that's not the main reason I'm posting this third entry.
Today Mary Anne #2 wrote me about my mention of the H story, still unfinished, from twenty-six. She said, is twenty-six dead? I told her no:
I'm still blazing with ideas and enthusiasm. The problem is threefold:
1. Never enough hours in the day.
2. If I'm working on fiction at all, my brain tells me, I should be entering Quarter Moon edits.
3. I swore to do them alphabetically and the H story is the most blocked I have ever been with a piece of fiction, any length, in my life.
But - look - I don't keep these subdirectories active unless I know they'll get updates, however seldom. If I think something's gone permanently stagnant, they go straight to the Vault. Clio may be gathering dust (she does that well) and Stay Tuned may only be getting one entry a month and my alphabet may only have seven letters in it, but none of those sections are dead.
So now you know too. In case you were wondering.
But - that, combined with my plans for Quarter Moon and the fact that Mary Anne #1 just rejected Bad Water and Dry Water, leads me to announce a small change in the way I do things.
As you may know, I have several locked areas on this site that hold fiction I think I might be able, in an alternate universe under favorable wind conditions, be able to sell. Normally I make these areas "available on request" to people I trust, under the theory that putting potential pay copy in the open on the web is an invitation to steal it.
Well, things have changed. First off, my short story output has dwindled steadily over the last seven years. Second, I'm not really trying to sell them actively. Third, my new reasoning is that if I leave a paper trail - if a lot of my friends read the stories and can attest that They Saw Them Here First - it makes the stories just as hard to plagiarize as if they were locked up tight.
So, from now on, when I add a story to the locked story area, I'll remind people how to get in. I'm still keeping it under password, to make it harder for people to link directly to the stories. Please don't do that.
This will affect Quarter Moon too, when it's ready to be seen. For that, I might put in a CGI so I can track who's looking at it, but I'm definitely going to make the access more public than it has been in the past.
So. The story area is here.
[Details of login deleted - see above]
Have fun, and consider yourself warned.
© Columbine
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