Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2002 03:48:05 -0500 From: gay storyboi Subject: Surviving Thailand: Announcement I just wanted to let everyone who's been following the story know what's going on. First off, I really appreciate all the support and encouragement I've gotten with this story. I'm sorry I've been lax about returning individual emails lately as well, but it seems most of them are asking or saying similar things so for simplicity's sake I'll address that here. The reason why I haven't been submitting new chapters isn't that I can't come up with ideas or who to pair off in stories. While I appreciate that people are interested enough to offer suggestions, this is basically a closed story arc and I already know who is going to be included....for the most part the characters we see now with a couple surprises--again, I already have those worked in as well. The real issue is just that I've gotten a lot busier than when I first started writing this series, which is good for me personally but bad for the series. But still, I had been working on it in my spare time. I had written 41K worth of Chapter 4, which was called "Educating Robb" and was further Ken/Robb, when Hotmail decided to go all screwy on me. I saved the draft as usual (I only have MSN TV so the only way I can save work is through email drafts...yes, I agree it sucks, but before telling me I need a real computer give me the money to buy one!!! :-P ), but while the draft showed up as being 41K, the text somehow got eaten....it was as if I was dealing with a blank email. I notified the help desk at hotmail and told them how vital it was that I get that text back, but over a week later still hadn't gotten a response. I decided to try to rectify the situation on my own and send the draft to myself in the hopes that I would get the text in the email, but only succeeded in getting a 1K blank message. Sending it wiped out the draft, so now it's completely gone with no chance of recovery. You have NO IDEA how pissed I am at Hotmail right now. This was a really long and detailed chapter that solidified the character's relationship with each other and took it all the way up til Robb's boot...and on a sex level, there were 4 different (in every sense of the word) sex scenes. The frustrating this is I was only about 6-7 paragraphs away from finishing it!!! Anyway, I'm really up in the air as to whether I want to go back and remember and retype everything or just call it a day. You see, in the meantime, I've come up with a couple other ideas for stories that are a little more interesting to me personally....series of short stories that I could potentially turn into an an actual novel eventually. One would be loosely based on my own experiences with men, with each chapter being about a different guy...kind of like a diary-type thing in a way. Another would involve a straight guy moving in with a gay guy and would have a very similar dynamic to what I came up with for Ken/Robb, only with the "Ken" being the one who was straight in this case. There is a chance that they both could be merged and that the first scenario would be flashback chapters of the gay character. I would submit it here to Nifty as well a chapter at a time, although I have no idea what category it would fall under. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know what's been happening and that I'm not exactly sure of what I plan on doing. On the one hand, if I didn't continue the series, I'd feel like I was letting you all down and would feel bad. On the other hand, I need to be selfish and think about what would be the most productive use of my now limited free time. I will promise you this much though--if I decide to scrap this series and move on to a fresh one, since I already have everything planned now that Ken's been booted, I won't leave you COMPLETELY hanging. I'll write a detailed summary of what would have happened, so if you were following the plot and the characters you'd at least know how everything turned out. It would be like reading a good recap of a Survivor episode--not as good or satisfying as reading the real thing, but at least you'd know what happened. Anyway, once again, thanks for all your interest and support--it really does mean a lot to me. And like I said, I do intend to continue writing. It's WHAT I write that remains to be seen.