Story Hour Updates - how long and how often?
- Thread starter Queen_Dopplepopolis
- Start date
The_Universe
First Post
I'm still happily plugging away at mine. 
I just updated today, in fact!
My preference as a writer is to go for loooooong updates - 15-20 manuscript pages, or about 10 pages single spaced in word.
But, I didn't start writing the Story Hour in my sig until 10 months after the campaign began, and the session(s) that have made it in so far happened something like 14 or 15 months ago.
On the upside, starting this far beyond the actual session has allowed me, as a writer, to lend clarity to things that slipped by in the real session, and overshadow some of the sillier things that are fine for games, but crap for stories (like players who bring a different character to every session, or players who leave the game causing their character to disappear or slowly fade into the background....)
So, what I'm writing happened a long time ago, but when you read it, it will read like a coherent plot, rather than the scattered musings that a game session often becomes.
Many thanks to my readers and players, who keep me going!
I just updated today, in fact! My preference as a writer is to go for loooooong updates - 15-20 manuscript pages, or about 10 pages single spaced in word.
But, I didn't start writing the Story Hour in my sig until 10 months after the campaign began, and the session(s) that have made it in so far happened something like 14 or 15 months ago.
On the upside, starting this far beyond the actual session has allowed me, as a writer, to lend clarity to things that slipped by in the real session, and overshadow some of the sillier things that are fine for games, but crap for stories (like players who bring a different character to every session, or players who leave the game causing their character to disappear or slowly fade into the background....)
So, what I'm writing happened a long time ago, but when you read it, it will read like a coherent plot, rather than the scattered musings that a game session often becomes.
Many thanks to my readers and players, who keep me going!
Rel
Liquid Awesome
I've seen a fair bit of anecdotal evidence that shorter, more frequent updates are more popular than longer, less frequent updates. So I tried to adopt that style for a while with my story hour. Didn't work for me.
I found that when I had short blocks of time to write I just couldn't put myself in the right frame of mind to do it and did other things instead. When I had longer blocks of time to write I wrote longer updates instead of short ones.
The obvious solution to this would be to take the long updates that I'd written and break them up into smaller chunks to post over several days. But I always felt like I was holding out on my (few) readers by doing that. Why deny them the portion of the story that is already written just so that I can put up a mini-update every day for several days for the sake of keeping the SH near the top.
Actually I did this recently during a week when I had little work to do. I posted a long update every day that week and I got a lot of good response from it. And my "views count" rocketed upwards dramatically. Heck, I even outpaced Darklone's ability to read the thing! So I may try and do this more often if I've got an opportunity. But mostly I just post when I can. At this point the readers I've got have stuck with me for the very long haul and know that I will sometimes dry up for a month or so. But they also know that I love the Story Hour too much to give up on it entirely.
I found that when I had short blocks of time to write I just couldn't put myself in the right frame of mind to do it and did other things instead. When I had longer blocks of time to write I wrote longer updates instead of short ones.
The obvious solution to this would be to take the long updates that I'd written and break them up into smaller chunks to post over several days. But I always felt like I was holding out on my (few) readers by doing that. Why deny them the portion of the story that is already written just so that I can put up a mini-update every day for several days for the sake of keeping the SH near the top.
MerakSpielman said:
Actually I did this recently during a week when I had little work to do. I posted a long update every day that week and I got a lot of good response from it. And my "views count" rocketed upwards dramatically. Heck, I even outpaced Darklone's ability to read the thing! So I may try and do this more often if I've got an opportunity. But mostly I just post when I can. At this point the readers I've got have stuck with me for the very long haul and know that I will sometimes dry up for a month or so. But they also know that I love the Story Hour too much to give up on it entirely.
Similar Threads
- Poll
