A very cool thing happened today

My last two blog posts shouldn't be online.  I know the best thing I could when I post a story is to walk away for two to three days.

I didn't.

I obsessed the last two days.  I posted my fears in two blog posts.  I hit refresh on my story knowing full well that if I'm lucky maybe 10 people will bother to leave a review in the next few weeks and then the story will fade into fictionmania's vast stack of old stories that no one reads anymore.

By noon, I had 2 reviews.  I got another in the afternoon and another after dinner.  Four reviews on the first day!  Wow.  The story is twice as long as I originally intended and I didn't expect a quick response as 20,000 words take most people 1-2 hours to finish. 

Then I saw I had another review.  I opened the link and it floored me.  Here it is:

Maggie Finson - 

A very nice, and poignant story, Sarah. Change is necessary in life, but with every chage something is lost to offset the gain. That was shown very well with Sams 1,2,and 3 and their efforts to make things better for James and Lynn. I really enjoyed this one.

 

Maggie

Ok she spelled my name wrong but she also misspelled the word 'change' too.  Who cares? It was Maggie Finson!!!!  When I saw this I ran around the house beaming like a little kid with a secret.  Her name might not mean much to many people but it does mean a lot to me.  To explain I have to give some backstory.

About ten years ago I was having some issues with a girlfriend who told me she thought I was gay.  I'm not effeminate in a stereotypical Hollywood sense so her words confused me.  She explained that in our relationship she felt she was the guy and I was the girl.

It bothered me but I shouldn't have been surprised.  My whole life I've struggled with my identity and back then I didn't know that sexual orientation and gender identity were two separate things.  I knew I wasn't gay as I liked girls.  A lot.  How was it possible that I was a girl?

I couldn't ask anyone about it so I went to the internet.  I found a website that had tests to tell you if your brain is male or female.  Over time I found there's lots of bias in the tests themselves but the site had lots of other stuff on it too.

I think the website's purpose was to get women to sign their boyfriends up for hypnosis and do real live forced feminization on them.  I'd post a link but some pages have nudity and I don't want to get myself in trouble (if you really want to find it google - hypnosis and wishes.  The site will be one of the top answers but it is definitely NSFW).  I'm not sure how legitimate it was but I had fun going through all the links and trying to use the internet hypnosis on myself.

 

Now I'm not a believer in that you can force people to do stuff against their will using an internet flash program but I do think that over time a person can learn to get comfortable with things they don't want to accept about themselves.  I had crossdressed in little since I was in middle school wearing mom's wigs and high heels, smoking her cigarettes, and putting on her makeup.  When I got out of school I had kept a few pieces of clothing I'd gotten from a few girls I'd dated while I still snuck putting on makeup when the occasion allowed.

The internet site let me feel ok to push it a little further.  Luckily my job responsibilities had changed and I was travelling a lot for work.  That meant I'd never get surprise visitors as I was staying in a different hotel room just about every night.  That gave me the confidence to fill my suitcase full of makeup, wigs, dresses, panties, heels, along with a ridiculous amount of makeup.  I found I loved every minute of it.

I realized I wasn't gay but I am at least 50/50 where gender ID was concerned.  I found by ignoring it I was hurting my ability to interact with other people but in our society you can't cross dress all the time and keep a job.  I needed another outlet and I found it in TG fiction which is where Maggie comes in.

The hypnosis website had lots of stories of forced feminization which really aren't my thing.  There was one series called "Heaven and Hell" that was different.  The stories had good characterization, great pacing, and well developed scenes.  It was essentially professional writing and they helped me find a part of myself I'd never really known before.  Of course you've probably guessed by now the author's name was Maggie Finson.

I must have read the Heaven and Hell stories on that site about 20 times each and I needed to find more.  I was searching for more of Maggie's stories when I found her stuff on fictionmania.  I didn't know there were entire websites dedicated to TG fiction.  The rest, as they say, is history.

That brings us back to the present.

A day ago I was obsessing in fear that my story was terrible.  My exact quote was:

...it's left a bad taste in my mouth.  Combine that with the few grammar errors and I can't read my story.  My anxiety is too high and I now feel the story is bad.  I know this is irrational but I took some chances this time as I wanted to try to write a story in 1st person instead of my normal 3rd.  The only thing I see now is a story written too passive (told not shown) with lots of formatting issues.

A day later later Maggie Finson says she likes my story.

I can't stop smiling and it just proves my old girlfriend was right.  Sometimes I am a girl. 

Editing problems!

Yesterday I posted a note about my fears as I had just published a story I really liked called 'Mystic Godfather'.  It's been posted (I've added the link the my stories here too) and already gotten a review that was lukewarm favorable which is certainly better than no response.

I am having trouble reading it for a few different reasons.  The first I discussed yesterday.  The other makes me mad every time I put a story up. 

This is my 7th story on fictionmania.  You'd think I would have figured it out by now but perfection in posting a perfectly formatted copy still alludes me.

The biggest issue is fictionmania as their posting process drives me nuts! I write my stories in Microsoft Word's *.docx format which is the defacto standard as Word dominates the sector.  I actually write in LibreOffice and save in *.docx but the problem is fictionmania prefers *.rtf files using a character set from 1990.  They accept an older version of *.doc files but I've tried that before with unpredictable results. 

Every time I've posted I think I've finally got it figured out only to be denied.one more time.  Last time I used LibreOffice and Notepad but still had a few weird characters in my story.  This time I wrote in LibreOffice, edited in NotePad++ as NotePad++ has more options than plain NotePad.  I used a plugin to save in *.rtf, and then pulled the file up in both NotePad (in *.rtf format) and WordPad (in *.txt format) to see how it looked.  After that I sent it.  During this process I noticed a few small mistakes and I corrected them (verb tense, 3rd vs 1st person, among others).  They weren't huge errors so I fixed them and moved on.  That was a mistake.

Whenever you change a story, no matter how small, it is important that you reread it to make sure the sentences surrounding the error make sense and you've added back all the words you needed when you rewrote the sentence.  This was a bit tougher because of the translation process.  Notepad++ doesn't use margins and is hard to read but I didn't want to send it back to LibreOffice and start the process over.  Instead I decided to do a final look through in NotePad but by that point my frustration was getting high as I had spent about two hours formatting and translating so after a cursory review I sent it in.

That was a mistake.

When the story posted last night I started to read it.  I found a grammatical error in my very first sentence.  I continued and found another in the 4th sentence.  I was only reading to make sure the formatting looked good so I stopped proofreading (it was too late anyway) and looked for odd characters.  I found about 5 instances where I had a '-' that had turned into something like a '&7'.  It's an issue with NotePad++ that I need to work on for the next time I post.

Fictionmania also has another little quirk.  When the site was developed in the 90s they set it up to be viewed in DOS (Windows didn't gain popularity until Win95 came out).  DOS only allowed a fixed number of characters per row and at the time the most common format was VGA.  VGA gave the user 75 characters per line and so files uploaded to Fictionmania have a soft page break whenever a line hits 75 characters.  Twenty years later and that is still the limit.  That means there will be many times where you post a file with careful space to make things easier to read but you ended up with a mess with page breaks where you didn't expect them.

Add the character translation issue with the line return issue and you can get a mess.  It isn't a problem for 99% of the characters and I'm sure most people don't even notice or even care.

I do.

I decided to get a little fancy this time as I was sure I'd figured out their posting format.  At one point in the story I posted a chart of the changes happening to my character.  I used exactly 75 characters per line as that is what the system allows.  I know this.  I counted.  So I made my charts exactly 75 characters long only to find out that it will put a soft return in at 73-74 if the work is long enough.  So all my charts are messed up.

Like I said most won't notice but it's left a bad taste in my mouth.  Combine that with the few grammar errors and I can't read my story.  My anxiety is too high and I now feel the story is bad.  I know this is irrational but I took some chances this time as I wanted to try to write a story in 1st person instead of my normal 3rd.  The only thing I see now is a story written too passive (told not shown) with lots of formatting issues.  I know the story isn't that bad but this is why I wait so long to publish stories that I really care about because if I feel this way for a story I worked on for 2 weeks, imagine what I'd feel for a story I'd written for two years.

In the end I need to keep reminding myself that I write these for me to cope and I had fun writing 'Mystic Godfather'.  In the end that is all that matters.

The fear before the storm

Edit note:  I have included the story I'm talking about in the link section of this site.  It's called 'Mystic Godfather'.
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I haven't posted much lately and its mainly because I've been travelling but I've also got a bad case of 'I-dunno-when-its-finished-itis'.  When I started I had two stories I was working on and now its grown to three.  I like all of them in separate ways and the funny thing is I started on all of them before any of my published work.  The only published worked I put as much time into as any of these was 'Small Town Journey' (which I desperately want to rename Small Town Boy).

I think this is common for most writers as the more time you spend with something the more you love it and the harder it is to let go as it no longer is a living/growing thing but has been released to the wolves of readers who you fear won't like it nearly as much as you.  They might even hate it.

I had inspiration last week and wrote at 20,000 word story that I just released to fictionmania.  I will probably post later when I get the link but I was able to envision, write, edit, and format the whole thing in about 20 hours of work (that's close.  I wasn't really watching a clock.)  I don't know if 1,000 words an hour is fast or slow for a story of that length/complexity but I was mostly happy with the finished result.  I'm sure I will go back later and pick apart scenes that are worded weird or wish I'd added a few comments to give added depth that few will care about but I've released my child to the world and it is up to them to fly.

The site I am posting most of my stories to these days is pretty gentle on writers as the readers desperation for good content won't allow many to criticize and those that do get shouted down.  It's a nice safe womb for a nervous writer to post their works before they take the anxious step of a wider audience.  Even then, I get nervous as I wait for the reviews to come in and that assumes anyone will even read it.  20,000 words is a lot for a site that doesn't allow for easy downloads to an e-reader and I may get no response.  People may hate it.

When you write a story it becomes part of you and it is hard to let go.  I'm sitting on three that I need to kick out of the house but they aren't ready.  Not yet. 

Fictionmania stories only get readers during the first week they are posted and then get lost in the electronic maze that I think some feel is a feature of the site.  I hope a few people read my stories and post a nice review.  It might help me let go of things I've held onto for far too long.

PS - The story is called 'Mystic Godfather' and can also be found under my name 'Sara Keltaine'.  I think it's a good read.  I liked writing it and I liked how it came together.  That doesn't happen too often.