Hey, you two. I thought I’ll add my perspective to this, not only for Schoolgirl Heaven but generally. Why I think that this might be interesting for some is that I beta-read this and other stories and represent a position somewhere between you two. Sure, I don’t really contribute anything significant to the story, but with my work of editing the stories I’m to some extend (again, only a tiny bit) a co-writer and on the other hand I’m a fan and reader, too (why else would I be on this blog 😉 ).
For me, it is harder to follow a story, if it is published less often. We had a time where some stories were released only every other week. For these stories I regularly checked the last few paragraphs of the previous chapter before starting the new one to remind me of what happened last. This works quite well most of the time, because of the cliff-hangers. You’re immediately in the mind-set where you left the story the last time. Sometimes I also do this for weekly released stories but that is a rather rare occasion.
While Schoolgirl Heaven is special in several ways, we had a few stories prior with lots of characters. Only because I edited this one, too, I’ll name Genie Harem as an example. There we had a character list at the beginning of each chapter. Sure, you have to ensure that you don’t spoil anything in there, but when done right this is a great resource for the reader to check the characters’ past in case you got confused. But as this requires additional work and is only necessary for really long stories (shorter ones tend to only have fewer characters and they are that, shorter, so I hope you can hang on to some thought for a few chapters yourself), you’ll probably never see those for any of the three-chapter-stories or anything close to this.
Another approach, that some readers take, is to wait for the story to finish and then binge-read them. Whether this approach is for you, is up to you. If I’d do this, then there would be days/weeks where I would only read and do close to nothing else, so reading them as they come out is definitely better for me. This way I on average dedicate let’s say half an hour per day to this blog (in addition to my beta-reading) and I think this is worth it.
All of this is no actual solution for Schoolgirl Heaven. Sure, you could binge-read them, but then this story would be like any other before as you weren’t able to vote on any of the story’s polls. A character overview is especially hard to do here, because what makes them sort of a by-product in other stories is that those other stories are planned ahead. You need some sort of character overview to write the actual story. Schoolgirl Heaven isn’t really planned that far ahead as far as I can tell. I get to see them less than a week before you do (for other stories I was close to two months ahead of the blog) and unless someone developed an oracle, no-one knows how the polls will end up beforehand.
Finally, to quantify the problem here, currently we deal with 74 students out of all 161 at this school (both times counting the protagonist). Perhaps I’m off by one here but would this really matter? And I count some girls we haven’t been given a name of, so we are somewhere around 70 named girls so about 44% of all possible students to get to know. And I know this, because as the editor I have to keep track of a bunch of things (I don’t want to spoil the impression, but I can tell you, all the editors on this blog are there for a reason, but that isn’t specific to this blog, every publishing company employ editors. Don’t think your favorite writer can manage their quality without help). So, I can feel with everyone having trouble to keep up with this horde of girls and women (just like our protagonist sometimes struggles to satisfy all at the same time).
Perhaps Reed and I could try to come up with a way to do character-overview-like summaries at least for every reset our protagonist underwent (assuming we will experience some more before the story is concluded? But then again, I won’t do this on my own or without permission.
Some of the stories are hard to fellow some times with so many different persons to keep straight of their rolls in stories.
Sorry about that. I’ll work on that.
Hey, you two. I thought I’ll add my perspective to this, not only for Schoolgirl Heaven but generally. Why I think that this might be interesting for some is that I beta-read this and other stories and represent a position somewhere between you two. Sure, I don’t really contribute anything significant to the story, but with my work of editing the stories I’m to some extend (again, only a tiny bit) a co-writer and on the other hand I’m a fan and reader, too (why else would I be on this blog 😉 ).
For me, it is harder to follow a story, if it is published less often. We had a time where some stories were released only every other week. For these stories I regularly checked the last few paragraphs of the previous chapter before starting the new one to remind me of what happened last. This works quite well most of the time, because of the cliff-hangers. You’re immediately in the mind-set where you left the story the last time. Sometimes I also do this for weekly released stories but that is a rather rare occasion.
While Schoolgirl Heaven is special in several ways, we had a few stories prior with lots of characters. Only because I edited this one, too, I’ll name Genie Harem as an example. There we had a character list at the beginning of each chapter. Sure, you have to ensure that you don’t spoil anything in there, but when done right this is a great resource for the reader to check the characters’ past in case you got confused. But as this requires additional work and is only necessary for really long stories (shorter ones tend to only have fewer characters and they are that, shorter, so I hope you can hang on to some thought for a few chapters yourself), you’ll probably never see those for any of the three-chapter-stories or anything close to this.
Another approach, that some readers take, is to wait for the story to finish and then binge-read them. Whether this approach is for you, is up to you. If I’d do this, then there would be days/weeks where I would only read and do close to nothing else, so reading them as they come out is definitely better for me. This way I on average dedicate let’s say half an hour per day to this blog (in addition to my beta-reading) and I think this is worth it.
All of this is no actual solution for Schoolgirl Heaven. Sure, you could binge-read them, but then this story would be like any other before as you weren’t able to vote on any of the story’s polls. A character overview is especially hard to do here, because what makes them sort of a by-product in other stories is that those other stories are planned ahead. You need some sort of character overview to write the actual story. Schoolgirl Heaven isn’t really planned that far ahead as far as I can tell. I get to see them less than a week before you do (for other stories I was close to two months ahead of the blog) and unless someone developed an oracle, no-one knows how the polls will end up beforehand.
Finally, to quantify the problem here, currently we deal with 74 students out of all 161 at this school (both times counting the protagonist). Perhaps I’m off by one here but would this really matter? And I count some girls we haven’t been given a name of, so we are somewhere around 70 named girls so about 44% of all possible students to get to know. And I know this, because as the editor I have to keep track of a bunch of things (I don’t want to spoil the impression, but I can tell you, all the editors on this blog are there for a reason, but that isn’t specific to this blog, every publishing company employ editors. Don’t think your favorite writer can manage their quality without help). So, I can feel with everyone having trouble to keep up with this horde of girls and women (just like our protagonist sometimes struggles to satisfy all at the same time).
Perhaps Reed and I could try to come up with a way to do character-overview-like summaries at least for every reset our protagonist underwent (assuming we will experience some more before the story is concluded? But then again, I won’t do this on my own or without permission.
I will see what I can do about a character list.