By Natasha Hayden
April 4, 2014
One year ago, this week, I wrote a blog welcoming you all to Children of the Wells for the first time. It’s a little hard for me to believe a year has passed since we made this adventure public. Of course, we’d been working on it for at least a year before you first saw it.
Children of the Wells is something very special to us, the writers and crafters. Granted, it’s not perfect, as much as we’d like it to be. When you work with a group like ours, where only a third of us see each other on a regular basis, some of us meet once a month, and a few of us have ever only made it to a meeting once (and perhaps only on Skype), there are bound to be communications that slip through the cracks. But we are excited about the world we’ve created and about the story opportunities still before us.
Really, we’ve only just begun, in terms of story possibilities. Though it’s been a year in the writing, mere months have passed on Lomara. The world has been shaken and broken, and something new is emerging. The apocalypse of Lomara has happened, and at least for me, I find myself most intrigued by what happens after an apocalypse. That’s why I happen to love young adult fiction’s dystopian and post-apocalyptic trends. When the slate is wiped clean, anything can happen, good or bad. We have only just touched the surface of Lomara’s new age, and I can’t wait to see what happens from here.
I hope you’ve been following the story, but if not, you can catch up quickly enough. All our completed books are available here on the website. There are two storylines that can be read separately but that make the best sense read together, especially as they begin to cross paths and connect in the near future. One is Bron and Calea’s, and the other is Jaysynn’s.
Actually, if you are coming to us for the first time now, you’ve come at a great time. Change is in the air. Up to now, we’ve been serializing our books, releasing tiny installments a couple times a week. For those who like to know what’s going on and hate cliffhangers, this is not an ideal situation.
A year ago, we meant for our new website to be more interactive. We meant to join the world of web fiction, with stories released like TV episodes and seasons. The truth is, though the idea was a good one, we don’t work like a normal web fiction site. For one, we are a group, not an individual, and things move a little more slowly in a group. Two, we really don’t operate the way web fiction authors do. Our stories weren’t really written to be serials. They were written as whole books and broken into installments for the purposes of the website and web fiction world. Those two facts alone make us different from the rest of the web fiction world, where one person writes installments weekly, sometimes feverishly, barely meeting deadlines but interacting more with the audience. The audience then has a chance to affect the outcome of the story with their comments and suggestions, posted after each new installment. Our stories aren’t made to be changed. By the time we post an installment, it’s too late for the audience to have a say in what will be written next. It’s been written to the end already!
We’ve finally realized the difference, and since this is the way a group such as ours must continue to works, we are going to be making some changes to the way our website operates, Now, you will get to read our stories the way they were meant to be read: in full, all at once. This means there will be some long wait times between stories, but we won’t be abandoning the website altogether in the interim. We still want our audience interaction, and the best way for you to stay in the loop is to subscribe. That way, you won’t miss the release of our next books. Plus, there might be a few little extras along the way.
So, why is this a good time to hop on board with us? For now, all our books from the first year are fully available to you–no waiting!–and you have a little time until our next book is released, the first one to be released fully completed. Catch up and let us know what you think!
If you’ve been on this journey with us since the beginning or even since a month ago, thanks for reading! We hope the changes we’ll be making will be more to your liking and that the quality we will offer will be even greater.
Keep an eye out for more one-year-anniversary updates and the release of a new short story anthology, where I contribute my first piece of fiction to Children of the Wells!
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