Boosting, since it's only about a week 'til the contest starts!
For many of us BCTS is a huge part of our lives, or has helped us pull through rough times thanks to the community and stories the site has helped to foster.
Well, what better way to show our appreciation of that than a 25th anniversary contest?
Yep, that's right -- BigCloset turns 25 in June! And to celebrate, we want to give back to the community with some prizes and a contest.
Piper is hard at work on the site figuring out what's going on and trying to fix it. Part of that process is involving a lot of backups and a lot of software updates. As a result, there is a chance the site may go down for an extended period of time as we work on the issues.
We apologize for the interruptions this is causing, but ultimately our goal is to keep the site a safe place to visit and post your fiction and comments.
We know that there are a lot of issues folks are having with weird popups and stuff right now. We're trying to tackle it as best we can, but it's a bit slow going -- we're managing to fix the symptoms as we find them, but we're still rooting out the causes.
If you're having issues with things on the site that you think are specifically related to this situation, let us know here before posting another blog, please. That way we can keep things easy to find while we look into this.
Are you ready? It's time for a second helping of...
BCTS Recommendations!
A Strong Start
Sometimes all it takes is one good sentence or paragraph to get you hooked on a story, and this time around, I want to see some recommendations of stories that do just that: stories that kick off with a bang, that grab you and rivet you to your seat and scream "read me!"
That's right, folks! We've been working on a new, updated version of Kelly girl, and it's live now!
If you've never read the book before, but are a fan of Wanda's stuff, then I highly recommend giving the book a shot. It's a fantastic story, with some great characters.
If you HAVE read the story before, but haven't picked up the ebook and it's been a few years... then now's the ideal time to give it a re-read.
Do you wanna see what happened with my original contest story idea? The one that ballooned out to over 12k words and I didn't have the heart to chop down? Well, do I have good news for you!
Just a head's up that the site might be seeing some downtime later this evening (24th January 2024.) There are going to be some updates coming through, and while they're going to be processed as quickly as possible, they might result in the site being unavailable for a while.
If I get any more information on specifically when to expect such outages I'll try to let folks know here.
Y'know, I was gonna put out a story for the current contest.
I've been working hard on it, and had every intent of entering it!
Except that I'm currently 9,250 words into what's supposed to be a 5,000 word story, writing on the fifth chapter of what's supposed to be a one-part-complete affair, with one chapter left to go after this 'un.
I can say without ego that I'm very proud of what I accomplished with Wednesday Knights. I feel like it's the best story I've written -- which might not be saying much, but it is what it is.
A lot of people have told me they really liked it, or even loved it. Many people have said -- perhaps simply to make me feel good -- that they think it's one of the best stories they've read.
Honestly? I like hearing that, because it makes me feel like I'm growing as a writer.
As a warning for folks, we're getting ready to put guidelines in place for content and ratings.
For most of the site's content this won't mean much of a change, but for certain more sensitive topics we'll be needing to re-evaluate how we allow them to be presented on-site.
That's right! I've finished an actual FULL-ON NOVEL LENGTH STORY! 77k WORDS! WOO!
But for real, I finished the final chapter of the story earlier today and sent it off to Ms. Erin for approval (she did so.)
Normally there would be one chapter of the story each week, but we will *probably* wind up posting the last two chapters to Patreon as a single post, mostly because they're both relatively short (about 2400 words combined.)
We're prepping an upcoming Doppler release that contains all my previous books, PLUS a handful of other stories, so I unpublished the other versions to make sure there weren't any issues with it.
Special Someones, by Melanie E., out soon on Kindle!
So, I just posted a WIP of a project I'm in the middle of: The BigCloset User Guide. I'm hoping to make it the ultimate one-stop shop for information on site features and story posting best practices.
What I have out is *maybe* 1/2 of what the guide will ultimately be, but part of creating a document like this is getting user feedback on the value of the information provided.
Thank [insert deity of choice here] for California health insurance!
I had my doctor's appointment with Planned Parenthood this morning, and just got the call from them that my prescriptions for Spiro and estro patches have been called in to the pharmacy!
So, within the next couple days, yo' girl is gonna be on the girl juice! Woo!
And I got ANOTHER great piece of news too: my insurance *actually covers hair removal.* I'm not certain how much/where, but that's a HUGE relief.
In preparation for the sequel coming out, we're running a sale on The Arctic Fox on Kindle! In fact, we're running the biggest sale possible... because we're giving it away for FREE!
Checks can be made out & sent to:
Joyce Melton
1001 Third St.
Space 80
Calimesa, CA 92320
USA
Note: $6000 is the operating, maintenance and upgrade budget. Amounts received in excess of the $6000 will be applied to long term debt accrued over the last 19 years.
