Over the last few months I've been writing a series of short stories, all set in the same mythos. The result is the first entries in the Book of Years, available now on its own, rather ugly web site [bookofyears.com]. Hope you enjoy them!

Cheers,
Graham

Does this mean you're back? Or do we still just see your back?

We wondered why you were gone.

Quick fix: whast is not a word [64.233.167.104].

The only thing I'd say in addition is that sometimes it feels like you're forcing the telling. You have this world in your mind that you want to get on paper to share, but you have to let it unfold gradually to draw our interest. The cliched (but true) recommendation in creative writing is "Show, don't tell" [sfwriter.com].

Right now, it feels like I'm reading an encyclopedia rather than a story. I might pay $10 if it was an encyclopedia of real information, but it's fiction. So, you'd have to buy me with the storytelling.

Hope that this feedback is helpful for you. I know that it takes guts to be an artist and put your material out there for the world to see; that's partly why I've never done it.

In Response to Nagy_Vilmos (#24459):

I think that is Elvis leaving the building.

In Response to deerboy (#24475):

But has he not returned?

Honestly, I only read the first sentence. You can tell so much about a piece from the first line, and I could just feel that it wasn't going to be very enthralling; interesting and detailed maybe, but nothing to really grab me by the bootstraps and force me to pay attention.

In Response to Deathalicious (#24470):

Ok, I'm going to disagree slightly - while I think the writing could use some polish, I'm reading this as more mythos/saga-style story-telling, so 'showing' may actually be inappropriate.

Having said that - I feel that these kinds of pieces, when done well, can be deceptively simple. The language is often worked and reworked until it is pared down to the bare minimum. That might be what you need to do here. The first passage is sparsely elegant, but I feel the next two suffer from either over- or under-verbage. Basically, I'd either bring them right back to a stark, Norse-legend feel, or flesh them out more into some fully-involved short stories.

In Response to tynic (#24568):

I’ve read the first story and it’s okay. Personally, I veer towards the Pratchett style of using fantasy as a backdrop for humorous observations on life. I also noticed, on his other site [goats.com], that Graham has a (not so) secret desire to be the next Pterry.

Your comment about the style of the writing is interesting. I noted that Graham does say on the home page that the stories are written as *exracts [sic] from the Book*. I agree that using a stark legendary-tale style would suit the stories; as I see it.

I would be interested to know if Graham intends to re-edit the existing stories or to leave them as they are. A little bit of polishing would definitely improve things. I guess Jon’s left the early goats as they were so it’s not such a bad thing.

That said, I would not have the balls to write any form of fiction; let alone place it in the public domain. I have enough trouble writing [non- fiction] technical documents. To summarise, well done (so far) and I look forward to reading further and seeing pretty pictures and things

In Response to Nagy_Vilmos (#24601):

Me stoopid. Bad link, should have been other site [grahamrobinson.com].