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This blog post is just blatant advertising for my latest story Monsoon. Its a story about a boy going to Thailand and discovering that sex, even good sex, isn't love. The description of the Thai nature, I think, fairly accurate. You really can still go find beach bars on beaches like those described. You might even find real love?
I don't want to spoil the tender love story (although its super-predictable so perhaps there is no such thing as a spoiler) but I have had a few comments expressing disappointment at the ending. I got that feedback for Distance and Mid Summer Madness too, so I guess I'm not very good at endings?
Anyway, in Monsoon, it was important to me that I end with the heroine being an equal and not rushed into a marriage. It was also important that the protagonist not succumb to the temptation offered by the very nice and very beautiful girl who is not used to being resistable. This is probably the only story on this site that involves an offer of a threesome declined? :) Please mail me suggestions for better endings.... ;)
I have another couple of stories in the pipeline- "Emily" and "The Heist". As usual I think of the characters first and try and imagine what they want in life and how they'd get it and how they'd respond to different scenarios. I then imagine some fun scenarios and events, and then try and tie them together to weave a story. This may be why I'm so bad at endings? Anyway, these two stories are much the same although one is a bit funny and the other is a bit too soppy. I hope you enjoy them; they'll be out in a couple of weeks if I can't get the shortest before the weekend.
Thanks everyone for the steady stream of suggestions prompted by my previous post.
Now I haven't had anywhere near time to go through all of them, obviously, but I have already followed up one lead and discovered my so-far-favourite author! The stories by Ryan Sylander are sublime.
I have just updated my story Mid Summer Madness. As I originally envisaged it I deliberately left the story with imperfect heroine. Of course after the story was out there, my feelings towards the heroine softened and I wanted to give the story a nice hopeful happy-ever-after ending. So, from half-way down page three onwards, is Sanna's just desserts :)
In other news, I've just published Chapter 3 of Distance. The protagonist is going to learn romance the hard way :)
I read more than I write.
How do I find stories? I read the 'new stories' section! And if I like the story or if its a continuation, I click on the author and see what else they've written.
But of course there aren't many new stories. I can read quicker than people post. So I've taken to searching.
Only searching is very crude. I'm kinda skeptical about the scoring algorithm and classifications. I have actually taken to searching by random word like a thing 'lake' or a person 'alice', just to get random stories and see what is good.
What this site really needs is a recommendation system. "People who liked this story also liked..." etc.
Technically this is called 'collaborative filtering'. Its not as scary mathematically as it sounds. If there were a list of users (anonymous, their usernames are really not useful data) and their views and scores, it would be trivial to group stories by who likes them, and to suggest to people what stories they might enjoy reading next.
As it is, the homepage announces there are over 46 thousand stories, but I'm sure that searching by category is not going to find good ones just as I'm sure that the absolute scoring doesn't reflect anything useful.
In the meantime, if you know any authors with good romantic stories, please let me know; the chances of me chancing upon them by random searching are pretty slim! ;)
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