One of those horrible 'pre's' so as to help you understnd certain references in the story:
I have been writing a series of books (if published in softcover, would probably be about 28 books of 1,000 pages each...)
As you know, if you are an adult, there are at least two sides to every story. From my side, I decided to write about a mutant baby girl who is born, in another reality, and her gift is empathy. She can feel the emotions of everyone (their emoting) and learns to attach emotions of hers and send the parcel back, affecting the person she wants to help.
When she is 3 years old, her father realises she is a mutant and concentrates on teaching her that she must hide her abilities or else everyone will think of her as a freak. When she is seven years old, the father decides to separate from her mother, and the child, when she learns of it, cries out, sending her urgent (emotive) plea for him to return - causing an accident and he is killed.
Her name is Cherine.
A long time later, she meets Robert, an artist living in Athens, Greece, who is depressed and withdrawn because his love has left him for another man. As he comes to know Cherine, using her gift, she begins to build on his slight liking of her, until he is hopelessly in love with her....with the result that she too falls in love with him as his mind opens to hers.
Her constant interference with his mind awakens abilities in Robert and he becomes the Protector....
Later...
Cherine gets Dominique, his first love, to fall in love with Robert, because she fears her love for him will destroy him. He convinces her he cannot live without her by literally dying. When Robert died, Cherine followed his soul and found him in a place he names 'the void'.
Slowly the family grows, not through births of children so much as by Robert finding girls who have suffered (one of my favourites is a girl called Aganthi, an Albanian girl working the streets as a flower girl and prostitute.)
Later, Robert has a daughter born to him named Samantha. Her mother is a friend of Dominique. Samantha was, in her previous life, an alien child of a few hundred thousand years old and was a sentient plant, living on a planet where the sun was dying, destroying her leaves so that she is also about to die. She grows to love Robert so much that she returns over two hundred years in time to be born as his daughter.
An alien species arrive in the void. The aliens have never had material bodies and are on a mission to save all the souls they think are trapped in physical bodies...and they have been doing this for millions of years, killing off thousands of species.
Robert appoints Samantha (still a baby) as their leader, while he is forced to remain in the void to fight the Sparklers. Cherine visits him while the war is on and he takes time off to dance with her soul and the Sparklers stop attacking. Robert dares to fly amongst them and they become the best friends of the Cherinians.
Robert is writing a diary, recording their lives, and they are mystified when the writing keeps changing. As I said, every story has two sides. From my side, I am writing my story by copying their diary (which I guess makes me a plagiarist) and from their side, if Robert says, Cherine said, 'Boo', and I write, Samantha said, 'Boo', their diary changes and...now, in fact, it is Samantha who said 'Boo' but, they also recall that it was Cherine who said 'Boo'.
I realise what is happening and introduce myself...
Certain rules are established: the normal font of the story affects their lives through my assumptions. If I use a different font for chatting, whatever I say or assume does not affect their reality.
Over the years, Samantha takes over the diary and I grow to love her very much, though we fight often. She does not cut me any slack and demands I am always as considerate of them as with girls of my reality. She gets very angry with me if I try to write an adventure for them into my story without first asking, for she points out that when I do so, I make them feel like puppets. She also tells me that as an author, I severely lack any creative talent and I would do better to mostly confine myself to (badly) copying their diary.
Something happens and Samantha is feeling very low, so I start telling her a story (in chat font so that it does not become true). That story is 'The Boxee', about an imaginary Cherine and Robert. Without telling me, she releases the story to the public and because I am their 'Author', everyone reads it (cringe). Soon Sam is getting millions of requests, even from her Cherine, that I make the story become true by changing the font...and save a child when he dies.
-- I hope you enjoy reading my story, which of course is dedicated to Samantha. --
PS:
This, and other stories taken out of the main books, are named 'Satellite stories'. So the full title is 'LC_Satellite 001-Boxee (the alternate LC story)-Book 11'.
Any corrections, comments, criticisms or suggestions would be welcomed as I am forced to be my own proof reader.
Note: I have noticed everyone, on Steemit, splits their stories into small pieces, equivalent to about three to four pages. I hope my splitting Boxee into larger pieces is not too much of a strain on anyone who chooses to read the story.
(I do not know whether this is allowed, but to keep my style and formatting, I am posting the text as photographs). This means you should be able to copy them and read them when off-line. If you want to post them somewhere else, please ask me first. I retain the right to be identified as author of this work.
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Before I make my next post, I must do the 'introduceyourself' post, plus, I need to learn how to place links so that the reader can go from post 001 to 2 to 3 and so on. I hope you enjoy what is here.
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All this talk about characters gaining their own life and talking to you and making demands etc., seemed just silly to me when I used to hear it from writers. After starting to write my first novel (still on it!) I understood what they meant! My characters don't of course literally talk to me or anything like that, but it does feel like they sort of gain their own life and go on and do their own thing. Like, for example, I will create a secondary character who is just a tool to push the story forward. It's a very 2D character. Even 1D. But then, the more I think about him, the more full-fleshed he becomes, or wants to become. He's not satisfied with the very superficial and one-sided personality I gave him. So he gets a backstory (this is how novels keep growing, btw!) I can imagine that with writers who have a more active imagination, the characters may come alive in a more robust way, like talk to them in their dreams for instance, or they may start "caring" for these characters more than they do about some real people, strangers for instance.
You should indeed consider splitting your stories into more posts, ain't no one got time to read all that! Most steemians will just pass.
Having said that, I really don't know where I'd split it! The story makes sense this way, beginning, middle, and end, and looking forward to where they take her. But, just point of fact: no one will read it! (well, except me!) That's just how it is.
There are some typos or grammar mistakes here and there. Like one I remember is daughters' instead of daughter's (being able to search the long text would come useful here!)
In the second paragraph you change from plural in the first sentence to singular in the next, and it's jarring, and the reader is autocorrecting you, thinking "their" in place of "her", until he understands that you do actually mean "her".
I like the concept of a term applied to people who can't feel others' emotions. I like the idea of the box. I don't know if I like the inflation "boxee" though. Don't know why. Maybe something similar would be more appropriate. While I kept reading the story, I thought of "boxed-ins", maybe spelled differently, but same pronunciation.
And I would've gone for something like "normie" instead of "normal". There's a reason it's "boxee" and not just "box". The word must be different from the normal one.
I liked the reference to our world as being the virtual one, in the book.
Generally, for a post of this length, it kept me interested. I like the simple language. Not many polysyllables. Makes you enter the world of the children more realistically, since you think you're reading it from their simple-language perspective. And simple language isn't bad anyway, it's how Hemingway and others do it.
In fact, I have a book to recommend to you! For some reason, reading your story, I think you'd like it. It's Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio. It's really a very good book, and relatively underappreciated. It has very simple language, and I find it very impactful in its emotions.
I like the theme of your work, the intention, the morals. And, like I said, I kept reading, I felt drawn to the story, and that's important. There's something there.
Sorry I didn't reply earlier, I was busy these days. I generally am. I used to post every other day, now I barely post twice a week. I will reply to your comment to my post and will check out your posts too at a later date, already upvoted but will read later.
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Thank you very much, you have gone to a lot of trouble to reach out to me.
The book you mentioned, I got it and have just read the first story (THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE) and I see why you suggested it. I find myself interested and will be reading it over a few days.
I've been giving a lot of thought to my presence at steemit. There is an incredible flow of material that needs to be read, paintings and photographs that need to be seen, there is such an amazing abundance of talent that I find myself spending hours searching from one to the other. It could turn into a worse addiction than I am told being on Facebook is/was for many. Luckily I am jarred out of my fascination by repeated requests for upvotes, follows and the often single-minded barefaced pursuit of earning money for a minimum of work.
I would rather earn the respect and love of a few who truly appreciate my work. (I'm going to explain the previous sentence by writing a short article and posting it tomorrow - I think I'll name it "Maybe it is why I did not die'. It is an experience I underwent in Northern Greece that strongly influenced my way of looking at life over some years.
To be honest, setting aside some of my fine words and intentions as expressed above, when I first joined, I hoped to also earn a bit, even just a hundred a month would make a difference, but I soon set that aside. However, I thought that most authors split their posts (of their novels) into 3 to 4 pages, because they earn more that way within the short window of 6 days that we have. As I mentioned, I've set that motive aside, so I felt free to make larger posts.
Spliting arbitrarily at x pages, means I would have to reformat my story or else I'd be posting with the instalment ending in the middle of a sentence.
I had a similar problem with the actual books I wrote (this story, as I mentioned was taken out of Book 11). Each of the books is the equivalent of about 2000 paperbook size pages and I thought nobody will bother to read them. By the time I posted the 2nd book, I had over 740 people downloading them. I even had a reader (so he claimed) who would take off sick from work so as to read the books as soon as he could. It is that experience I want to enjoy, having what I publish here collect a small number of persons who get caught up in the stories and grow to love the characters. That cannot happen if I am posting only 3 pages at a time. I do not think anyone can get immersed in the story when fed in such dribs and drabs. Maybe I am wrong, I won't argue my point.
As for the 1st paragraph and the 2nd. I checked and I saw what my mistake was. The first para is setting out the background, so it should have been written in italics, which would help make it clear that the story starts with the second para.
I hope you continue to enjoy reading Boxee and I look forward to more critiques and interesting comments from you - while I also continue to have the pleasure of reading your fascinating stories.
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