Lubrican: Blog

I'll get right to it. I'm starting the posting of a new book called Dancing For Daddy. It is 28 chapters long and I wrote it specifically to address a common complaint - that I end my stories too quickly. The Foreword talks about that.

It will take about two weeks to post and, for the impatient ones, it will be available on Bookapy in complete form.

A note about that. If you buy one of my new books on Bookapy, remember to re-download it a month later. This is because, while Michelle and Andy do great work cleaning up my mistakes, the final review I do while posting inevitably leads to me "tweaking" things. I add and subtract things and errors slip back in. That means that, if I publish the book on Bookapy when I start posting it at SOL, those errors will be in that version of the book, too.

Nice readers often write to me and point things out, which then get fixed. Once I'm pretty sure everything got caught and fixed, I re-publish the book.

Okay, lastly, I don't get much room to write a teaser when posting a story at SOL. It's something like 400 characters. Publishing platforms often give you a "long version" of the teaser, so I'll print the long version of the teaser for this book in this blog entry. That is what follows:

Bob was a Marine, and his repeated deployments made his wife crazy. In her case, it was literally crazy. She thought divorcing him and taking their daughter with her would solve the problem and, to keep him from finding them, she even got the judge to let her change their last name. When he got back from his latest deployment, it was to an empty house. There was nothing he could do about it. The only clue he found were pamphlets from NGOs that typically worked in Africa, digging wells, or distributing aid. Had his wife gone there? Had she taken their daughter with her? He got out of the Corps and tried to move on with his life, but it was empty without his little girl. Then, one night, he took his visiting boss to the only strip club in town. His boss got drunk and was waving a fistful of money at a dancer dressed as the rodeo queen. Bob went to stop him from climbing up on stage and the rodeo queen looked him in the eye. His life changed forever when she said, "Daddy?!"

Thanks for reading.
Bob

Okay. This might seem like an odd blog entry, but what the heck.

Back in the 2004 -2008 time frame, I wrote a whole raft of short stroke stories. They were how I got started posting at SOL. I got a lot of very nice mail from people who encouraged me to keep writing. I got some really not nice mail, too, but I shrugged that off. My pen name back then was Beating Off Bob, for those of you who are young.

Then I started getting mail from people who thought I should write longer stories. I experimented with a few and got a good response.

So I started writing longer and longer stories until I was writing novellas (which, as I understand it, means a long "short" story) and then full-fledged novels.

I liked writing the longer stuff because it gave me a chance to get to know my characters better, and let them develop more.

So years of that go by and then I try to write a short stroke story again. It didn't work. The story got stretched out. I wrote a blog entry about that.

I tried again and again, but it just didn't work. I couldn't write a Beating Off Bob type story anymore.

Well, wonder of wonders, I've recently been sifting through my projects folder, which has a lot of half-finished stuff in it that got back-burnered for one reason or another. I found this story that was based on someone else's work. I've done that before, telling someone else's idea with my own spin on it. And this one, when I finished it, qualified as a good old B.O.B. kind of story!

It's called Breeding My Nieces and it has no redeeming value at all. There's no lesson and no philosophy. The girls wanted to get knocked up, and they do.

My current working theory is that if I get my own idea for a story, it will end up long. If I poach someone else's plot idea and just spin it my way, it might end up as a short stroke story.

So there you go. I said I'd keep trying, and it might have paid off.

Of course, you'll have to be the judge of that.

Thanks for reading.

Bob

A number of people have written about the "new chapter" posted to Any Soldier. It is not a new chapter, however.

Here's what happened.

A reader wrote to me and asked where the epilogue to Any Soldier went. I looked at the SOL copy and the epilogue wasn't there. Chapter Fifteen was the last chapter listed. So I reloaded the epilogue and sent it in, explaining to the moderator that it wasn't really new, just replacing a missing file. I have no idea why it went missing.

This triggered a "new chapter" notification for some reason. I guess that was the moderator's call. So then I got mail with a variety of subjects. Some thanked me for a new chapter, but moaned that they didn't have a premium membership, so could not read this new chapter. Some said it was nice to finally read the end of the story. Others asked why I broke the epilogue out of chapter fifteen, and were there any substantive changes to the story.

Working off of my memory and logic (neither of which is a great idea, in my case) I think this is what happened.

I think the original posting had the epilogue embedded in chapter fifteen. If you downloaded the book when it was first published, then that's probably what you have.

At some later date, I decided the epilogue deserved to be its own chapter, so I broke it out and made it so there was the prologue, fifteen chapters, and the epilogue.

So if you downloaded the book after it had a separate epilogue, then that's what you have.

To my knowledge, there were no changes to the story (other than the inevitable small tweaks I do any time I send in a file)when I broke the epilogue out of chapter fifteen and posted it, or when I re-posted the mysteriously missing epilogue recently.

In any case, if you read the story and there was a wedding in it, you read the whole story. If there was no wedding, then you got caught in that Twilight Zone where there was no epilogue for whatever reason it disappeared.

Clear as mud?

Sorry for the kerfuffle.
Bob

I hope everyone is being intelligent and practicing social distancing. Please do that, and wear a mask, even if you think it doesn't do any good. Whenever I see someone running around without a mask, the image in my mind is of Typhoid Mary, smiling at everyone and saying, "It's good to see you. Give me a hug!"

I've been sifting through my projects folder. It has some things in it that got started, but then put on a shelf for one reason or another. I'm picking a few things that can be finished relatively easily. To compare them, to food, they're more like peanut butter sandwiches, than steak dinners.

But there's a place in the world for a PB&J. Right?

I'm posting one called Riley's New Bikini. I'm not going to repeat the foreword, here, so read it. This isn't my idea and another author has written something like it.

It is, however, my imagination, so if you've liked that in the past, then here's something to relieve the boredom for a while.

It's eight chapters long and will be completely posted by the weekend.

Stay safe, everybody.
And thanks for reading.

Bob

What with all this stay at home stuff, I looked around in my projects folder and found an idea that plays to "not going out" for a while. In this case, Uncle Bob gets snowed in with his assistant librarian, who happens to be his niece.

You already know what happens.

That's what I'm doing for a while, just looking through things that are half finished, or got shoved onto the back burner for a while. There won't be anything like The Seventh Sense for a while. Those ideas are few and far between.

This one is short, just four chapters. It's called Library Niece and will be fully posted this week at the rate of one chapter per day.

As always, thanks for reading.
Bob