It was always billed as a "weekly serial", but I'm sure you clever clogs out there have noticed that eighteen episodes over the course of a year does not exactly weekly make. Hey, I did my best.
When I began working on Glory in April 1997, I really did work at a TV station. I had material all around me. Since the station shut down in June, I've been depending on notes and memories. Still, I'd rather bow out now than risk having the serial's newsroom atmosphere become strained and unrealistic.
Will the story ever continue? Glory and Tom have now found happiness - although, it's said, every comedy ends with a marriage, and every tragedy begins with one - but perhaps once I find my true love, I'll do a sequel about their life together.
For the moment, site fans, "Tom" is named after my friend Tom Sullivan, who said he wouldn't read the serial unless he was in it.
King and Queen of an Empty Kingdom went up on this site in January, not exactly before I was finished with it, but certainly before I was fully satisifed with it.
Neither, judging by the mail, were you guys.
"This story is open-ended, leading to nothing, like day-time TV. Its as though you fire a bullet that goes and goes and, well, just goes," says Steve O'Dougherty, who slugged his e-mail "Empty Story."
"The bullet that you fire has to strike a target or at the very least, land someplace," Steve says.
Other readers took issue with Carl Magnolia, the hero.
"I don't have a sense of why Olive likes the guy and what she likes about him," said Judson Jones. "I also had trouble believing a computer keyboard typing text book would be a big change from a type writer text book."
Well, Judson's probably right. I fixed that, and fixed a variety of other small details in the story and I've also done some work on the ending.
"The end, the end!," said Gary MacDonald of Cape Town, South Africa. "You mention the Xerox cutting off the left hand letters in Glory. It seems the same machine was at work on the end of this story."
Okay, already. I have revised the end, taking full counsel of the advice offered to me.