One thing I find with your stories,
@gag1195, is that I come back to them more than once, reread and appreciate them - or particular aspects of them - anew.
This one perhaps more than the others because of the particular way you based it around reader engagement and interaction. That, as I think we've all acknowledged, is not a straightforward prospect here on this forum because the commenters-to-readers ratio is low. I wouldn't ever claim that's unique to this place; lurkers are a fact of life, the "dark matter" of the discursive internet.
(It's not just with fiction, either. Back in the '00s, I posted a regular blog exploring aspects of kink and fetish - mainly bondage - but, much of the time, it felt like I was writing into the void. Eventually, for a load of reasons, it came down and, to this day, I still get messages from guys on social media saying, "I really liked your blog, how come you deleted it?". If even a quarter of those guys had actually commented while my blog was running, it wouldn't have felt like a pointless exercise.)
I'm ashamed to say that, despite being a story writer myself, I can be part of the problem in that I'll read something, enjoy it and just move on without adding a comment. I need to be better at that.
In the case of
Moral Quandaries, I found the interactive element intriguing but saw it could potentially be precarious - for example, relatively early on, I voted for the plot to unfold in one direction and saw the decision turn the narrative in another. Weirdly, that put me off following the story for a little while. I say "weirdly" because if the interactive aspect hadn't been visible and the plot had just gone where it would without "showing working", I'd have been A-okay with everything. Somehow, knowing a different plot development
could have been written - one more in line with my own specific turn-ons - but wasn't... felt like a missed opportunity?
I know that isn't a wholly rational response, it's sullen and arguably, rather selfish and it's certainly a Me Problem rather than any kind of flaw within story or storyteller. I just felt that, in the spirit of pulling back the curtain a little, I'd give feedback on that early response. At the time, I felt - and I still feel - that my saying what basically amounted to WHY DID THE VOTE NOT GO MY WAY WHYYY WHYYYYYY would've amounted to little more than whiny poor sportsmanship.
Now
Moral Quandaries is concluded and time has passed, I find myself remembering this tale and being able to appreciate it for what it is: a masterful piece of bondage fiction based around an experimentally structured means of reader engagement - and, in the end, an experiment that you made
work through sheer quality of writing and characterisation, perhaps against the odds!
So now I'm rereading it. Again.
