Last night, I put the finishing touches on Dallas and was about to post the short story when I went over to FanFiction.net and they had a little sign up: Oct 11th, 9PM PST, 12AM EST FanFiction.Net will be down for approximately 6 hours for previously scheduled maintenance. I’m not sure if anyone over at ff.net bothered to check the time, but it’s about almost ten in the morning over here in California, and I think that’s far outside the six hour maintenance window they had intended. Since I pay money for that service, you would think they’d be kind enough to update their main page with some current information. It’d be nice to set my expectations accordingly.
Anyway, yesterday was pretty busy for me, after coming to realize that this particular short story was the longest in the series so far, coming to a total of 15,300+ words. Agamemnon was just a little bit under 15,000, but I think that was due to the HTML entries, making it a lot less than fifteen thousand and closer to fourteen thousand. Point is, that after fifteen thousand words, it ceases being a short story and enters into the recognized range of a novella. I had never really intended to write a series of novellas… I’m not sure I have enough creativity for a series of novellas. I am very happy with the way that Dallas turned out, as is my roommate, who is my first critic and editor. He told me that he really liked it, though he believes the ending would be enough for readers to come hunt me down and kill me for ending it in such a fashion. I can promise right here and now that though my intention was for death and destruction, there is none of the former and a little bit of the latter within the final draft of the story.
Now that Dallas is done, the next is going to be called Excelsior and will include some characters from a previous story a little bit more than I had with Dallas.
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Now they claim it will be back up at 6 PM PST (meaning in the dead of the night for us Europeans). I will believe that when I see it, and not before; I’ve long since stopped having any expectations whatsoever when it comes to ff.net. I see it more as a nice bonus when the thing is actually up – but then, I haven’t paid a penny for their services, so I’m really not in a position to complain.