As the story in Vengeance, My Heart shifts from setting tone and atmosphere to character evolution and development — and quite possibly as a result of changing focus from short, snappy bite sized pieces of the story and shifting over to giving the story more room to breathe — I’ve discovered more tolerance as the writer for longer episode fragments.
My goal up through the end of Episode 5, was to make sure there was a targeted max word count for each fragment/part/sub-episode to finding in Episode 6 that character development doesn’t work so well with those kinds of metrics. I don’t think it is a significant spoiler to say it is about time to move to that tone/color-setting of the early episodes to dig down into the motivations and explain, in drip-feed fashion, the previously unexplained.
Some of this might emerge also from removing the metrics of SEO and trying to mix long-form content (serial fiction, web novels) in with short-form content (poetry, flash fiction, commentary pieces) when I decided to fork the story over to a site dedicated to long-form fiction without SEO or any other metrics being measured — I’m still not 100% certain I shouldn’t have a stats plugin, but for now I am forcing myself to do without — but Episode 6 is regularly defying my attempts to fence it in. Instead, I’ve gone with the flow and just let sub-episodes run longer if they need to run longer.
Episodes might be running longer as a result. When it was mixed in with the content here, it felt like a bit of a failing not to meet those targets. Over there… well, most people that take the time to visit ravensweald.art are there for the purpose of reading the story, not for all of the other reasons. Those “other reasons” simply do not exist over there.
There is no way to drive traffic to someone’s own site, if that is their goal. No comments. No likes. No feedback loops.
You can explore. You can sign the guestbook. You can view my links to other people I appreciate as writers who regularly offer their content out for free on the internet.
And, you can read. Mostly, you can read.
My above comments are just observations. They are not complaints or something I’m looking to fix. They are the design and it is interesting to see how that drives some of my editorial and writing decisions in ways that I didn’t anticipate.
In ways, it is terrifying. In others, there is a feeling of liberation.
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