I've decided to discontinue my series of mini-stories for the Lesbian Book Bingo Challenge event. Although it was a fun idea, there simply wasn't enough interest for it to be worth the time and effort I was putting into it. If you were one of the small handful of people who were enjoying the series, I'm sorry for disappointing you.
Writing free fiction is a tricky enterprise. As a rule of thumb, it either has to be a project that gives me immense personal joy, or a project that serves to draw attention to my work in general, or a project that will bring me significant positive feedback and make me feel good about my writing. The Bingo Mini-Stories were meant to be the second, as a context for continuing to promote the reading challenge throughout the year without feeling stale. But it's clear that participating in the Bingo Challege has been a flop in terms of bringing new readers to my work. If the stories themselves had drawn sufficient interest, apart from their use in promoting the challenge, it still would have been worth continuing. But in the last month, the project has felt more and more like a burden that's pulling me away from my other writing projects. It was a voluntary burden--one I invented on my own, with no external commitment chaining me to its completion. I've learned some hard lessons in the past about being careful about inventing rules for the Game of Life that don't allow me to win. I invented the burden, I picked it up all on my own, and here I am laying it down, also of my own accord.
If you like, you may imagine that Lena, Martijn, Laura, Isabel, Marie, Lisette, Hélène, and all the rest whose stories were never told all eventually found their happy endings.
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Oh, I have been imagining
Oh, I have been imagining their happy endings, and also details of their journeys that didn't fit in. I love the idea of the Bingo, but I've never been able to write to prompts, back when I was writing, without it going dead on me in about two paragraphs so I am not surprised that it became a burden.
It wasn't so much writing to
It wasn't so much writing to prompts, but simply that I need some sort of "pay" to keep me going.
I got into the same swamp a lot back when I was active in the SCA, where I'd do these in-depth research projects for no reason other than because some random person asked me to. A lot of the time, I could persuade myself that the "pay" was my peerage--that I was retroactively paying it off. But when I went above and beyond any reasonable expectation, then I needed some sort of appreciation to make it worth doing again the next time. I still remember the time I was asked to do a Medieval Welsh translation of the Caidan fealty oath, and I not only produced a good translation but it was in a poetic meter with authentic alliterative ornamentation. I was really proud of the job I did. I sent it off, complete with a detailed pronunciation guide. And I never heard back. Not from the person who had asked me for the translation. Not from the person whose peerage ceremony it was for. Nothing. Not even an acknowledgement that it had been received.
In this case, nobody asked me to do anything. There was no implicit contract. But there's still the problem that if I'm not getting "paid" in some sort of coin, eventually I'm going to stop producing. If no one notices, well, then it was the right decision. And maybe one or two people do notice. But I can't survive writing for an audience of one or two.
Oh, no, I am sad to hear that
Oh, no, I am sad to hear that you will stop writing these, I was really enjoying those stories! Do you have enough details there to pick up these threads and write an actual book that has nothing to do with the book bingo? If the "pay" of people like me reading and enjoying them isn't enough, perhaps turning them into a book for publication would generate enough pay? (Not that you have much writing time available given how many projects you are already in the middle of, but I was enjoying not only the characters, and the way their stories seemed to be part of a larger story, but also learning a bit of the time period, which is another I haven't studied.)
The main problem is that I'm
The main problem is that I'm not a telepath. The nature of the internet is such that I put things out into the world, and unless the people who find them enjoyable and useful give me some way of knowing that, I have to assume that nobody cares. I get weary of begging people for validation and the sad fact is that people don't tend to value the things they get for free. I need to prioritize my writing time, and the Bingo stories weren't paying their way in terms of satisfaction