Changing nature of a story...

[Voboy]

I am never killing off another major character, I made myself sick when I realized that I just killed someone I care very deeply about even though she is imaginary. I had to write a novella dedicated to her just to work the sorrow out of my soul. Only peripheral characters die in my stories anymore.

I just killed off a main character.

It's an SF story, though, so I think my readers assume she's not really dead. They might be right, but I'm not sure myself.

 

[Duleigh]

I just killed off a main character.

It's an SF story, though, so I think my readers assume she's not really dead. They might be right, but I'm not sure myself.

I did an entire chapter on the mourning process (That comes out in December) just to get myself through the trauma... and she was always going to die. I took a one off contest submission and turned it into a multiple chapter novella because I loved writing that character so much. I promised myself "No More Big Stories" and sure enough, I did it again with Stormwatch series... and again in my Gate story, coming out in a couple of weeks in the Geek Pride event.

 

[Maxiine]

FULL CIRCLE

I started writing here because "mainstream" media edited out my sexual content-- at least the explicit sexual context-- and that context was important. Without it many of my stories, heavily based in reality, made no sense. (Spoiler, people do some really illogical things when sex is involved.)

Looking over my tales chronologically, I can see how my prose tightened, then I saw how I could vector what I wrote. Not lie, or embellish beyond what was inferred by the evidence. But be selective on the parts that I focused on.

I ended up back in the mainstream, and this time the sex was there, as motivation and at times it is quite explicit. But once again the story itself was paramount, the erotic elements contributing to-- not being-- the whole.