I haven’t blogged anything for a while, so here’s something just to get me back on track… A little bit on video weirdness and fan fiction weirdness.

(...or, as far as subtitles go, "a lonesome geek posts stuff that doesn't exactly demolish all of those stereotypes" or perhaps "I just had to post it, okay?")

Yesterday, I posted here a plea for feedback, addressed in general to my well-hidden and sporadic crowd of readers.

Today, come what may, I'm asking a question that has been bugging me for a while. I'm asking for opinions about my stories from female readers. I want to write fiction that's accessible and comprehensible for all kinds of people, say, young adults upwards. (As the sufficiently self-critical author of the stories, I just can't imagine anyone's enjoying these stories really all that much, so I'm shy of advertising them as "enjoyable" in addition to those traits. But I do hope they're enjoyable too.) It's hard to get a comprehensive picture when most of my friends, the regular commenters, are all male. The only female reader who has commented on multiple stories of mine is my sister, and a) she hasn't commented on my recent works at all, so I have no idea how I'm faring now, and b) a group of one is hardly a statistically representative sample. She, along with the few other gentle passing-by ladies who decided to comment on the stories, appeared to like them though. I'm just curious about the rest of them.

In yesterday's post, I failed to list which of my stories I want feedback to right now. Only to the latest of the stories, because they haven't really been read and commented by so many people. And by latest, I mean the one with the rainy day, the strange religious contemplation, a bit of war and the eternal mysteries of the society - perhaps even that one bit with the odd animals, but I know it was not technically a superb story. Also, I'm curious about the webcomic. I don't really know what else to say in this request, save of what I already outlined in yesterday's request. I'm just curious about what works here, and what doesn't; good sides, bad sides, what went right, what went wrong, what's to love, what's to hate.

So, that's my request, and when I read through it again, it didn't quite read like as weird as I thought it would look like, so I guess I'll just go ahead and post it now. (I feel so much better when I've got these odd questions out! Maybe I'll post better blog posts tomorrow!)

...which should be easy if no one's reading this. Well, I'm sure someone is. Maybe.

The only thing that annoys me about writing is that I've written these Avarthrel stories and stuff since 2005... and I've gotten about two or three brief unsolicited comments on how the heck am I doing. The people whom I've asked comments from have usually only pointed out technical problems and given broad overview of "yeah, you're definitely going in the right direction with this thing".

So here I am, suffering from seasonal depression, drinking coffee at 23:01 and whining in a blog about how lonesome I feel. ...see? see? When I put it like that I start to smile right away.

I think I should just use this time for my advantage and tell what I really am looking in feedback. I've so far electred not to post some of my stuff to absolutewrite.com, even though I read the boards from time to time and sometimes even post there. That's because the share-your-work forum seems to be for people who revise stories. I don't really look for that sort of feedback. I'm looking for post-mortems.

Yeah, of course it'd be helpful to get feedback while the story isn't done, but I usually tend to only torment my friends with these things. And I usually don't ask opinions from many people anyway. It's hard for people to read the story many times and even more so to give helpful feedback while the story is not completely developed. Hmm... come to think of it, there's at least one story that's still not done because one of my friends never sent back the critique and the story sort of fizzled. *sigh*

So, from most of the people who stumble upon this text on their own, I'd appreciate post-mortems. What went right, what went wrong. No need to use fancy words. Just list big things that went right and big things that went wrong. Little details that worked, little details that shouldn't have been done. And definitely make them post-mortems in the sense of "focusing on what went wrong".

And extensive gigantic missives aren't required by all means. If you read my stories and spot anything wrong, just hit me. I like to critique people's YouTube videos by posting something along the lines of "x:xx - this reminds me..." - and with 500 character limit, YouTube won't let me write giant long bits of feedback. So even bite-size comments are fine. It works, or at least I think it works: People can look at the specific part of the video and see what I'm commenting on. This should be even easier in text. Most of the critique I get from my friends are already as notes in word processing files or scrawlings in margins. If you post in the comment forms, I can usually find the place if you just hint where the problem is.

So this is my nightly whine - a bit of a plea to encourage people to comment more and what I'm looking for.

(Author's note: I was not actually that sure what to do with this little essay... thing... blabbery. Since it was inspired by a thread in a writing forum, in a blogging subforum, I decided to, um, post it in a blog that I... do... about writing. Or something. It's kind of grossly off topic in regards to Avarthrel. But it certainly is on topic as far as my own writing is concerned. You can't get more writing-like text from me, no!)

Recently, I've followed one unrelated case of a badly-run-away fan fiction, and it has made me think of the fan fiction as an overarching genre in general.

It's probably way too early to think of what I think of fan fiction of Avarthrel, because a) there's no fan fiction that I know of and b) there's also no super-enthusiastic fans of my writings that I know of to write the said fan fiction in first place. And yet...

I've always intended Avarthrel to be an open world. I'm not sure it's ready for "release" yet (whatever it may mean in the context of writing stories - I'm just a tinkering programmer), and I'm awful at creating anything release-quality... but it never hurts to be prepared.

Okay, I think I'm finally in proper condition to write something about the latest story.

But first, a few random comments on web design. Or, even before that, a few thoughts on fantasy art. I have some personal problems creating engaging fantasy art, and that's because fantasy art requires attention to detail. So, creating an interesting-looking web site for fantasy literature would require making artwork with a bunch of details.

Yesterday, I reorganised the page with the already published Avarthrel stories. It kind of inspired me to look at some of the past work I’ve done, and it seems… quite curious so far, indeed.

These stories are the first thing that I’ve written as any kind of a serious writing. As such, they are a bit rough, but each story shows some signs of new things I’ve learned. So, I think it’s good time to analyse what I’ve learned so far, and, in turn, look at what I’m doing right in the new stories. Read on for the full story!

Here's one odd perspective to my writing. For some odd reason or other, sooner or later, no matter how adventurously I start, I end up writing about plain ordinary life of the characters. It can be a good thing, because that's actually what I want to write, but I'm not entirely so sure that it is what the people want to read.

Let me recap: Jenyr's Company went to investigate a forgotten temple, went through a mind-numbingly pointless trek through seas, went to take back a besieged city... and now they're kind of stuck where they are.

And oh boy, will the fun ever stop: Sooner or later, Faira's getting married to, of all people, an elven duke, and right now spends time in Anchorfall running a pawn shop and sorting out, er, little things. Gnedrnygr's a magician, and magicians can spend decades sitting by a stack of books. Facyr's dreams have come true and he's happily guarding the city with his newfound soulmate and wife Cassandra. And the giant crises that threaten the country have gone, gone, gone! Great opportunity for covering life in a pseudo-mediaeval world. Not-so-great opportunity for fantasy genre in general!

So what can I do right now? I can't think of a big crisis to shake things up, so I have to deal with little crises. Let's see what I have in store for the future: Facyr's and Cassandra's new life as a married couple -- and as city guards. Faira's new business venture, a good investment for the future, and some gambling luck. And, um... well, I have a whole bunch of little stories on little people on not so epic events.

The point is, since these are small events, they don't really expand all that well into short stories. And that hinders me. I have always had the tendency to write short stories -- my stories just seem to grow naturally into the short story or novella size. Perhaps one day, I'll even finish that novel. But here, I have a bunch of small stories that just don't work as short stories. I seem to have had this irrational contempt, I verily dare say, for flash fiction. I certainly seem to have the material for them -- why the heck am I not writing them more!

I recently did a Flash a Day thing to, among other things, shake my thoughts loose. I don't think I'll be doing a Flash a Day soon, more like "More or less pre-prepared flash fiction story published every day for one week" -- but I really, really need to start thinking of writing more of the flash fiction stories, because I think they can help me dislodge some of the ideas that are too small to grow into the scale of short stories. I also think I'll not do the "limit to one page" thing; I'm, after all, writing this stuff on a crappy lappy and LaTeX right now.

But the big point is -- I hope to write more flash fiction soon! I really need to rethink the whole thing... again.

I really need an editor.

I have this obsession about not touching anything that is already published: Established facts in the fiction become established because they don't get changed. Yet, I've had to touch a few of my stories lately retroactively.

And then, I see that I don't really know a whole lot about fiction writing yet. I really, really need more practice. The truth is, I make mistakes that in retrospect seem completely amateurish, but I just couldn't see at the time; I'd really need someone else to look at my texts to see if there's actual big or small problems. When rereading the same stuff for the thousandth time, my eyes bump right over the obvious flaws.

I still find a ton of stuff from my writing that I'm very very concerned about. Not to spoil anything (not that I encourage anyone to find out about the mystery), but I had to change some word usages in already published stuff yesterday and today. Reason? English isn't a logical language. =)

Anyway, I still have high hopes. I just hope everyone realises that this stuff is, in the most emphatical sense imaginable, written by an amateur. =)

It's entirely regrettable, sad and awful that a known scam publisher PublishAmerica has decided to pick on people smaller than them. Apparently, one user at Absolute Write was threatened by them. Apparently, things have gone rather awful.

Now, PA is a scammy publisher. I oppose them for various reasons - they're misrepresenting themselves as a publisher rather than a vanity press, if they're trying to be a publisher they're doing a shoddy job at quality control, and, apparently, they snatch more than fair share of author's rights.

Which brings me to this topic - my own small, feeble attempt at annoying PA. However, I'm full well aware this may not work. After all, I'm far out of their jurisdiction, and I'm not exactly famous enough to be seen on radar...

So - my big beef with PA is that they apparently ask the authors to sign away their copyrights. No real publisher does that these days. The authors are supposed to have the copyrights, the publishers just buy the rights to sell the book. Right? Right? I'm a big fan of Creative Commons, free software, Open Source - I'm aware of all these weird little entanglements these copyright issues create.

So I'm hereby criticising PA for their history of trampling on peoples' rights.

But wait, there's more.

Ages ago, when I was still in school, someone (my parents, my teacher, I can't rememeber) apparently sent a writing of mine to a children's magazine called Kipinä that was published in Russian Soviet Karelia. (I can't remember anything at all about the magazine, except it was in Finnish for some reason and was apparently aimed at Karelians and Finns learning Russian. Or something like that.) Apparently, I won some sort of a prize for my little essay on photography, my big hobby at the time. (I can't really remember anything about the essay, except that I was boundlessly embarrassed by the ending: "...especially if the batteries are okay.")

So, hey, what am I?

Am I an acclaimed writer, a known critic of corporate copyright ownership, and at one point backed by repressive anti-American Communist government? Am I now criticising this All-American Company from the safe haven of a socialist country?

...or am I just a random nobody who's raising a valid point to keep up the discussion?

I hope I just shot myself down. I'm obviously not the best person to criticise this company. =)