Saturday, February 18, 2012

More Stories

          This year is the celebration of Charles Dickens' 200th birthday. Dickens was a master at writing serials that he later turned into novels.  The trick was to end each segment  with a cliff hanger that kept the readers coming back to see how the story turned out.What he wrote in the 19th century is similar to what Wade and I have been doing recently  in our Black Coffee Fiction blog.  Each of us wrote a three part short story. 


           I posted the second part of my story on our Black Coffee Fiction blog at  http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com yesterday. This week I ended the installment with a rather nasty killing of a seagull.  I hope that will hold our short story audience until I come up with a conclusion next Friday.     


              Dickens traveled all over the world to lecture and read his stories to encourage a wider readership.  I send our blogs to public libraries to encourage the adult book clubs to read our words. I do this with by pasting a message into an e-mail with a click of a computer mouse.  Think what Dickens would have done with a computer!  His output would have been even more prodigious. 


           Wade and I do seem to have regular readers.  Last week Black Coffee Fiction had readers in every continent with the exception of Antarctica.  This week, this Storytelling Trails and Tales blog had readers in every continent with the exception of Antarctica.   I'm not absolutely certain how a "hit" from Antarctica would show up. Perhaps it would come through Australia or New Zealand.  


            Both blogs have regular readers in Germany and Russia though the Dutch, who for some time were reading this blog regularly, now seem to have quit.  Black Coffee Fiction once had 17 readers in Jamaica, all at once.  We assume that was a class of some kind and proposed they invite us to do a workshop in February.  There were no takers.   


            Whoever they are, we want to hold our readers. We read the classics and emulate the masters, like Dickens.   









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