First, apologies for not posting the Lit and SOL links here on my blog, Twitter, or Facebook. I don’t have any real excuse other than laziness. You can find them linked on those sites from the website, either on the Latest Releases or My Stories pages.
As to the news, it’s doing well in the contest at Lush. More comments than the bulk of the stories in the contest, a solid vote total ( at least if my timeline count is correct, since actual vote totals aren’t shown while a contest is running ) and better than average view numbers.
Of course, that doesn’t mean jack with respect to placing in the contest. The only thing the reader voting counts toward is the 10 votes to qualify. Everything else is up to a panel of judges.
At Lit, it’s my third story outside a contest to break the 1000 vote mark. It’s pulled in over 40 story favorites, quite a few ( rare, nowadays ) public comments, and a few emails. It has solid view numbers, and a better than 2% vote to view ratio, which is great for Lit. Holding a 4.67 score as well, which is nice.
The author favorites coming in after posting this story have also pushed me over the bar into the top 200 all-time favorite authors on Lit, and still climbing.
On SOL, it has a solid score, and has garnered a couple of emails ( also somewhat of a rare thing ) The big things there are that it picked up a glowing review on the site, and climbed all the way to #3 on the weekly downloads list. On a site with such a bias toward epics, having a short story pull in those kind of download numbers tickles me.
Even before all that good news started coming in, I was working on follow-ups, though. I don’t usually do that in this pen name, but these characters were still talking to me, and doing so loudly, so I’m writing it down. I’m probably three quarters through a Ch. 2, with at least a Ch. 3 to come.
There’s even a possibility of a website exclusive, non-canon addition of it that fulfills a request I seem to get every time I write one of these stories with these character archetypes. We’ll see about that. All of the stories on my “Hot Shorts” page so far are unconnected one-shots, and I’d always intended to post continuations of stories there for readers who visit the website.
Anyway, that’s all the news for now.
