Question Indefinite Hiatus

What would you guys think about adding a message at the end of orphaned stories along the lines of "This story is on an indefinite hiatus" ?

Probably no more detail than that, and specifically limited to incomplete story arcs like Call the Thunder and Ill Winds, rather than characters such as Jade and Tennyo who are orphaned but don't have any hanging stories.

Hopefully it would cut down on questions about when those stories will be completed. I don't think such questions are particularly common, but they do seem to recur, and I suspect that they are frustrating to everyone involved.


Arguments could also be made for putting warnings at the beginning of unfinished stories, as I think some readers would rather skip unfinished stories than read them, no matter how good they are (of course, then they'd miss out on Ill Winds and Call the Thunder, which are two of my favorite stories, so their loss), but I think that the merits of such a warning are more debatable than an ending tag.

The stories that I can think of that would get a message are:
Ill Winds
Call the Thunder
Hive's Christmas Holiday
Petra 1: Rock and a Hard Place
Christmas Chicanery
A Wellspring of Sorrows (maybe? EE can decide that one)

What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea?

(incidentally, writing this proposal has made me realize how much I like the phrase "indefinite hiatus". It manages to provide useful information while not actually committing you to anything.)

That's a good point. What about an ending message then? It won't encourage skipping stories, because they'll have read all there is to read in the story before finding it. Yeah, someone really dedicated could check stories for them, but I'd say that anyone who feels that strongly about incomplete stories probably derives more enjoyment from reading with gaps than reading incomplete stories. (And you guys have done a pretty good job, I think, of telling stories that build on each other without being dependent on each other. But that's neither here nor there).

I don't think it would actually help with the "When will it update" type questions. What it would help with is making it clear to new readers that the story does indeed end right there -- otherwise people might get confused and think the next chapter exists but they just can't find it for some reason.

You have to bear in mind that we are trying to close off these open ends - and with some, such as the Bastard with Ill Winds, we'll finish that arc, only not from a Fey-centric POV, and there will be some time gap. There may be missing bits you'd all like to see, but without Maggie writing Fey, we'll never see them. Same for other arcs. As you've seen, if I can get permission or other 'help', I'll put the characters 'on stage' only not in their own POV, so we might be able to fill in a few of these holes. But you can't count on everything being patched up perfectly.

so plausible Gen 3? (you did say Decades...)

Still, at the moment one of the stories, Ill Winds I think, says "continued in part 7" and there is no part 7. Surely, that could be changed.

Call the Thunder actually names the next entry, which does not exist as JG went on sabbatical at that time.

They both do it.

Ill WindsVI wrote: Events were set in motion. Soon, he thought, Whateley Academy would cease to be anything other than a haunted ruin among so many other such places in that area.

Continued in Ill Winds part VII

Call the Thunder part 7 wrote: “Diamondback, I hate precogs, but right now I could fucking kiss you.”

...To be concluded in ‘Ashes and Steel’.