The Horse With No Name: Blog

Eleven years ago I had one of those ideas where you tell your mate: Hold my beer...

The idea was to write a story in a foreign language. Now, I had done that before, writing some Star Trek fan fiction, but I wanted to try an original story. My initial idea was to write perhaps something like twenty chapters and one-hundred thousand words, which would have matched my longest Star Trek story. And all looked like I would do just that, except, one year into my work I fell badly ill and once recovered two years later, I got distracted by getting married for the first time at the tender young age of forty-three. By the time I felt like writing again in early 2024, my old account on this site had gone the way of the Dodo and couldn't be revived as I had no idea what kind of user data I had used eight years in the past. That meant - starting all over again.

Of course, surviving a life threatening illness and getting married for the first time, substantially changes a guy's perspective, so in hindsight, it was perhaps a blessing in disguise that the first version of my story sank into the abyss that is SOL's premium-only archive of aborted stories. That initial idea of writing 20 chapters looks almost funny in hindsight, as I have just posted Chapters 98 to 105, and the projected 100.000 words have been surpassed by a factor of five.

But now, after eleven years, and more than two years of extensive rewrite, I'm confident that I'm entering the home stretch now. The story began in 1988, has now progressed to the year 2001 and has always been slated to end in February 2002, so there are not too many chapters yet to come - ten, perhaps, tops.

Of course, when writing such a behemoth of a story, the characters take on a life of their own, and you feel like they are part of your life. That's why that story has spawned an entire universe, and no less than three supplementary stories, which are still work in progress. So, even though the day is already on the calendar - this year's calendar - when I will finally finish that story, its characters will live on, because I'm definitely not done yet.

Cheers,

The Horse With No Name.

Comilitones, in nomine Caesaris, avete!

It seems there is some upheaval about authors using AI lately. Now, let's put aside the sheer stupidity of that idea, after all, the writing itself is the purpose of the Exercise. I wouldn't ask a machine to boink my wife, so why should I ask a machine to write my stories?

So, here's the disclaimer you've probably read a couple of times today already. There is no AI being used to produce my stories. As a matter of fact, it would probably be obvious to anyone who bothers to read my stuff anyway. English is not my first language, so if my stories would suddenly be perfect, people would notice. I'm way too proud to have produced close to a million words worth of stories in a foreign language to let some piece of software have all the fun.

Mock me for using strange wording or weird grammar at times, or give me honest criticism and hints at how to improve my English, but I'm certainly not going to let some piece of electronic trickery take the fun away.

Cheers folks.

I've been in IT for over twenty years, but today I am feeling like a right ol' fool.

For quite some time I've been annoyed with the seemingly stupid spelling mistakes in some of my stories, despite the fact that I proof-read all stories at least three times before posting. Now, English is not my native language, so the odd misplaced punctuation or a rather odd selection of words here and there can hardly be avoided, but writing 'top' instead of 'too' is something that shouldn't happen to someone who thinks that he has a rather solid grasp of the English language.

I finally found the culprit. I finally checked the Autocorrect settings and found that it was turned on. As one great philosopher once said: D'oh!

The formatting bug in the latest chapter of "Leaving on a Jetplane" has been fixed. Thanks a lot to the site-admins for the prompt reaction.

Chapter 13 of my story "Leaving on a Jetplane" came out all mangled. I used the new 'SMS bubble' feature, but it seems it is not quite bug-free yet. I'm working with the site admins on rectifying the problems.