Myr

Thanks Gary! I've been slowly but surely working in the background. There will be more of Jerry seen in stories.

This book is complete. There are 30 chapters total. I'm doing a scan with Grammarly to fix most of the comma errors prior to post. dkstories seems to have absolutely hated commas.

I know... I got it. looks gorgeous in 4k on my Xbox One X. It's just a time thing

Well, I used to be an adventurer but then I took an arrow in the knee.

They are in Author News Blog:

We had to do a server update earlier today and I had a small configuration issue. The background task was not processing the last few hours and I've corrected that issue. There was a glut of notifications that were off by several hours. We also had an odd incident where an Author group expired. If this happens to you, you can just go back to the store and select author again. (In theory) If there is an issue, just send us a support request from the help menu.

Explanations of the Reactions are there when you hover your mouse over each one. In order from left to right... Love Haha Wow Sad (that's a sad face on a teardrop, by the way) Angry The reactions are standard part of the site in all sections. And they are reactions. Chapters can make you react in many ways from good to bad. Just like any post...

Interesting story with good characterization and a great use of a hook right up front.

Great characterization in this short story captures the spirit of a young boy.

No need. she found one for me and I've already reported it to the programmer. That particular issue I think was caused by the upgrade/conversion. since adding new emojji support, this shouldn't be a problem going forward. (ie a one time issue with the conversion of systems)

Very well said! I agree. I, personally, try to make sure I comment on everything I read. Further, if I'm reading a completed story, I try to make sure I review it as well.

Nifty is a different audience than Gay Authors. Stories work there that don't work here and vice versa. You should certainly post where you can get the best satisfaction for doing so! I write FanFiction stories and get FAR more responses on FanFiction.net than I do on my own site. So, I follow my own advice on posting where you get the response. There are strategies for building an audience here (and other sites), but those take time and effort. Some commentary on views: A "View" is a page load. The story views number is All of chapter views plus the views of the Table of Contents page. If a story has a lot of views listed, but when you look at chapter views and they are low, that means your story description/tags/genre attracted enough attention for someone to read the description, but didn't sell them on the story. If you have a sharp falloff from chapter 1 to chapter 2 in number of views (after a few weeks), then you're chapter 1 failed to keep a reader's interest, or the posting time was bad and people missed it, etc. This has been our experience. Authors that get the most comments and interactions are Authors that engage on other people's stories, on the forums, and with comments on their own stories. This is a kind of sink or swim together sort of thing. Good Advice! What do you mean? Comments have not been removed from the system. The built-in emoticons have not been touched. Do you have an example of an "empty" comment from you where the emoticon has disappeared? This is not acceptable behavior and when it occurs and the staff is alerted, it gets addressed. Carlos, your whole post was excellent and spot on. In 2018, we averaged 16,000 Unique Visitors per week. We averaged 1600 members signed in and visiting per week. We averaged 1034 comments on stories/chapters per week. We also averaged 80 new chapters per week. But yes, the vast majority of visitors are not logged in members and thus cannot comment.

The link in the editor is for linking to something. You could drop the Amazon ID number in that and it'll create a link in your post. We removed the link to Amazon from the pages, because it really wasn't doing much for us, even when it did get clicked. Thanks for thinking of us though!

That's the hope.

Interesting story @Carlos Hazday. Good characterization and good hook with leaving out the issue during the initial discussion with the Mayor.

A great sci-fi short story with a lot of good characterization.

A great short story that highlights true friendship.

Question: How do I add a Story to a Series or World? Short Answer: See full entry for step-by-step instructions View full question

I have done some updates on the underlying server software today. If you were around while I was doing this, the site was going up and down like a yo-yo. A reboot and a couple of services restart later and I think we are up and running. Everything I tested seems to be working and all the big red warning flags I was getting have cleared. (for the technically inclined, we went from PHP 7.0 end of life version to PHP7.1. I had to get the extensions right and update the caching system. bleh. I hate command line linux) In theory, we should be good. If you bump into a hairball, be sure to post below with as many details as you can so I can reproduce the issue.

what topic?

We have a love/hate relationship with eBooks. We've very recently, as part of the new year cleaning up, removed eBooks from the site. They were getting little traffic and the software for handling them was less than ideal. There is a possibility of us getting back into it in the future. But we are currently resource constrained (time/staff). We are an official publisher complete with our own set of ISBN numbers we can issue. To be successful in eBooks you have to go all in and still, you're competing with either Amazon (Gay Authors isn't even a spec of dust in comparison) or as an author, you are competing against other eBook authors.

If you browse to the stories page and use the filter, you can see what stories you follow: If it doesn't filter, simply hit the - and do it again. It sometimes gets confused.

Yes, I know this feeling all too well. I get it almost every day when I get home from work and there are emails sitting there and tasks to do on the site. I've got a novel or two in my head waiting for that moment when I have both the time and the energy to actually write it down. I was on a YouTube loop last night. Then I broke the loop and started going through the "Everything Wrong With..." series on various movies. That ate the whole night. But I was pretty energized this morning and knocked a lot of things off my list. Including finally getting that email to all our authors written.

As mentioned in previous announcements, we are undergoing clean up and consolidation. As part of this, some of the temporary links that were on the forums have been removed and placed in the newly streamlined "Help" menu. Help -FAQ = a list of common questions with links to the answers. Help Topics = a database of common questions and answers Step-by-Step Guide to Authors = How to become an Author on the site. Support = Open a support ticket if you need help related to your account or other private site related issue Staff = list of staff on the site with contact information Guidelines = site rules Writing Resources = a page full of links to handy writing tools, guides, and articles About Gay Authors = a bit of history of the site. A reminder that we encourage you to have your account set to receive news email from the site: https://gayauthors.org/notifications/options/