Best,

Ray

Your comment about increasing tension in new ways is interesting. They say that every sentence (ha!) should heighten the tension. One suspects that they don’t follow their own advice. Either that or they are all secretly Flannery O’Connor (much on my mind tonight for some reason). I have toyed with posting my own work, but every time I think about the approach I’d take, I don’t have a straight narrative fiction thing coming back at me.

But you are inspiring me to get off my lazy chair and start working.

Yes, I do agree that losing the narrative thread will be troublesome for Greg’s readers. The blog format is already a backwards approarch to reading, and I imagine there will be some who want to approach the work in a more linear fashion.

As mentioned in a post on my other blog, Flogging the Quill, the story blog is causing me to approach keeping the story’s tension up in new ways. There’s this sudden need in me to somehow create enough of a hook to bring a reader back after a week has gone by. For me, that’s seeming like a much tougher task than writing to get a reader to simply turn a page in a manscript.

With luck, this experience will inform my other current novel in progress, written in the standard way and going through a critique group. With “Death Sucks,” I do get comments, and they are helpful.

One thing I wonder about Greg’s effort–he says an installment will disappear after two weeks, never to be seen again. I’m taking the route of leaving it all up, with the oldest post first, just as in a book. I figure that if someone comes along a couple of months down the road they’ll want/need the whole story. And I wonder if latecomers to Greg’s book will be frustrated by the lack of a chapter’s predecessors.

I hope you’ll stop in at vampirekittycat.com, give it a read, and maybe leave a comment.

Best,

Ray Rhamey