I recently chalked up 3000 Addventure episodes and will be going a little over.
This is my final competitive act as an Addventurer. From time to time I've enjoyed trying to bolster my standing amid the other contributors, but for at least a year now I've become aware of rising new prolific writers like Dragon FangX (evidently once ChaosX) and Blues32. It is inevitable that such writers will overtake me, and perhaps very soon indeed -- but somehow I could not acquiesce to the idea of DFX reaching the 3000 mark ahead of me. This was it, my final "surge." I made it into the 3000+ circle and that will be enough to satisfy me.
From here on I become semi-retired. In the months ahead there are a few collaborations I will continue to pursue, and I still haven't come close to sufficiently wrapping up the business in so many dangling threads, so there's still plenty to do. There will simply be no longer any great urgency to this, other than not wanting to leave the occasional friend seething with suspense.
Nearly ten years ago, it was the Addventure, months before I ever properly registered here, that began to accept my crazy all-in-one-paragraph submissions when I had not yet come to appreciate the necessity of employing <, p, and >. (Inserting porn cliches into the Google advanced search also led me time and again to Chili Palmer's stories here.) Priorities have shifted since then, and with a ton of luck I may have even learned a thing or two about writing. I think of Malcolm Gladwell's "outliers" theory and how it took a certain group called the Quarrymen hundreds of hours playing in some German strip club before they could go on to become the Beatles. So remember, you read me here first.
But seriously, it's had its frustrations but it has ultimately been a blast, perhaps a far bigger and longer blast than it ought to have been. My only hope now is that before much longer -- before March, perhaps? -- gOOber will post more than me here at the Forum and bust me back down to the rank of #6. If this can happen, I may ever so briefly get to be #6 here and #6 in the Addventure -- and then the rankings can proceed to mutate from there.
This is as high as I dare reach, before I turn "cyco" or "bonkers" or some other such delicate mental condition. I always meant the Empire in my name, not as some typical military-industrial threat complete with John Williams theme music, but as a kind of galactic museum, a playground of artifacts, powerful toys littered hither and yon to be discovered and tried by new waves of barbarians. I still need to bring that museum into some kind of order, but at least I can't argue with the size of the floor plan.
addendum: to all below, thanks -- but in particular to Bonkers (by way of Adama -- thanks, Adama), I think this goes to the question of "What is porn?" I fear that too many people pride themselves on not reading porn, with the specific self-compliment "Hey, I may not read the greatest stuff, but at least it's not PORN ... !" But porn, I think, is relative. I say that there are all kinds of porn, that any literature that indulges and caters to a certain desire is porn. Thus what we take part in here is very specifically sex-porn, but that begs the existence of other kinds of porn: horror-porn, mystery-porn, police-porn, battle-porn, tech-porn, and most definitely romance-porn. One of the more interesting descriptions I ever heard of Jane Austen was that it was "porn for girls," and having read over one woman's shoulder into a "Twilight" novel I can vouch that the prose is relentlessly purple. It's also easy to dump on sex-porn because "Oh, it's all just about getting to the sex" -- but frankly, for many of us this is the story of life. Yes, we honor all kinds of respectable and intellectually challenging topics, and yet at the end of the proverbial day many of us would love nothing better than to get laid. This is all my very roundabout way of saying that no doubt ideas which cropped up here in one form or another may get recycled in any non-sex-porn writing of mine -- but still, the prose must be properly fitted to the genre and the format. As many of us know, just because we may write less about sex does not necessarily mean we'll be thinking at all less about it.
