A New Story

I started work on a new short story today. Actually, it's one that's been rattling around in my brain for, ooh, years and I already have various scraps of ideas, conversations and plot points jotted down. Now I "just" need to pull it all together and make something coherent from it. It's SF and it's called A, T, C and G. And it's going to be completely fab.

I also had another comment on Hedge Witch over at YouWriteOn. I was very pleased with it. It says for example :

This was a very polished piece of work, with well-developed characters and lovely descriptions (e.g. "The torches ... hissed and crackled, giving off a faint smell of honey", and later, "a transparent moon ... little more than tatters of lace). It also had a great beginning, which captured the magical atmosphere immediately, continued at a good pace, and then with the unexpected arrival of Merdoc and Fer, and with Hellen's words, "There is something very wrong here," set up the tension right on cue.

I suppose I have mixed feelings about YouWriteOn. Some of the reviews are considered, constructive and very helpful. Others have clearly been dashed off without much effort, in order to earn the reading credit. I've had reviews where the reader has clearly skimmed the text and then complained that they couldn't understand what was going on. Hedge Witch is hardly Finnegans Wake ferchristsake! I've had reviews that have concentrated on making bogus grammatical "corrections" rather than talking about, you know, characters and plot and all that. And so on.

The problem is that your rating and thus chart position are at the mercy of everyone. I suppose that's fair enough : not every reader will be interested in every book out in the real world. The ability to delete one review out of every eight is some help. Still, getting a stupid review is galling.

Hedge Witch has been up to #11 in the YouWriteOn chart, which is great - but obviously I'd like to get it higher. Top ten would be ideal.