The Little Shop of Rubber by AmyAmy

[64Fordman]

Part One
storycodes: F; latex; cons; X

http://www.latexstories.net/storieslr/little_shop_rubber.html

Part Two
storycodes: MM/f; latex; cons/nc; X

http://www.latexstories.net/storieslr/little_shop_rubber2.html

Part Three
storycodes: F/f; latex; cons; X

http://www.latexstories.net/storieslr/little_shop_rubber3.html

Part Four
storycodes: F/f; latex; cons; X

http://www.latexstories.net/storieslr/little_shop_rubber4.html

Please feel free to leave your kind comments & feedback here about this story. Thanks.

[TomW_83]

please continue writing this story the first 4 parts are very good and it feels like there more to be written in part 5, 6, 7 and 8

[AmyAmy]

Thanks for your comment TomW.

I happy to hear that this old story is getting read from time to time, and that anyone liked it enough to want an ending.

I never got the impression it was a story that people cared that much about, and I don't remember any other requests for an ending, but I may simply have forgotten. I think the first version was written around 2003, though I'm not sure when it first appeared on the Plaza. I have some recollection it was replaced with an updated version at some point.

In my mind, The Little Shop of Rubber didn't have a proper ending, but it is continued in other ways. I'll explain below, though it may not make much sense to anyone but me.


The Little Shop of Rubber is the first story I wrote, and I'm not so proud of the writing in it (though I think it did get revised at some point).

The original draft of this story had more chapters. It went up to Chapter 9, and wasn't finished at that point. It would probably have had to reach about 12 chapters to finish.

The four chapters that eventually got posted, were edited quite a bit, and somewhat censored compared to the original. Yes, they don't leave readers with a meaningful conclusion, but this is the first time anyone has questioned it. I think they were then edited again, a few years later, along with Doll House Hotel, but it's getting so long ago I honestly can't remember.

What I do recall is that while I was writing it, I decided I didn't like the original planned ending, and chapters 5 to 9 were all headed towards that ending. It was around that point that I had the idea of a whole series of loosely connected stories, and those five chapters didn't fit in that new universe. Since then, I've written a lot of words, and all of them had their inspiration in the events that were in that early draft, in some way or another, all of them exist in that universe. But those five orphan chapters do not comfortably co-exist in the universe they helped spawn.

Every one of my published stories are connected, if you look carefully enough, and so I think there are plenty of continuations of this story for those who want them, but there is no direct ending, no clear explanation of what happened, though a careful review of Return to the Doll's House would probably be enough to figure out the rough outline of how it ends.

Well, maybe that's not entirely true, because The Haunted Costume stories don't have any obvious connection, though they do have a tonal connection to Narelle's Discovery.

I did plan to rewrite the original chapters 1 to 4 so that they better told the story I intended, and showed things from some other character's view-points, explaining how events followed from actions various characters were acting, even though they seem coincidental to the protagonist. I even started that work, but other things have got in the way, and it remains unfinished. I got through most of it, and also wrote a new version of chapter five. That was in 2013...

Since then, I've been trying to find time to finish From Ashes (which I seem to have been writing for years now), while other projects and regular life keep getting in the way. Maybe the right way to do this is for the end of this story to be the last thing I write in that universe, but I'd like to hope that's a few years away still.

In the meantime, there are several new stories coming from me, two medium length stories already in Gromet's hands, and a "novel" length story that just needs a bit of a check-over before I send it to him.

[rbbrlvr]

Oh yes please continue this story!!! We need an ending

[AmyAmy]

I'm a bit conflicted over this. It's an old story, and the gap between the me that wrote it and the me writing now is a big one.
I wonder if I can go back to this time, is it even possible?

It's been years, and suddenly two people want an ending. In Plaza forum terms, it's more interest than I expected, but it's difficult to say whether that really indicates much ongoing interest in the story.

I won't rule it out, but I have bigger better unfinished work, and that should probably come first.
Put another way, is it just that it's obviously incomplete? Or were these characters more interesting than the ones that came after?

[Rubberh]

Sometimes it's best to leave the story the way it was originally intended. I have stories I wish I could have continued but there are times when you just have to stop and let the work speak for itself. As you writing style evolves you can always write sequels or spinoffs from your original story. I intended to write more of The Rubber Baroness, but I had to say enough. I kept telling myself to start the sequel but I haven't come up with a satisfying outline which would allow the characters to evolve.