Trust me, I’m glad to see it progressing, too. I can’t tell you how long some of the rewrites took me, especially Saturday. I must’ve written and rewritten dialogue, moved dialogue around, and edited the series of events a hundred times before I was satisfied. Many times, I had to leave the story and work on other projects until I had ideas and motivation to come back, The second half of Saturday is going to be the same way, but I’ve definitely found a groove that’ll keep me with it.

Other projects are coming, and I’m currently experimenting with AI tools to help generate ideas and work out scenes.

     So, this is one of the more common complaints I’ve received about the ending, and one of the reasons I chose to start doing rewrites. I want the ending to pretty much stay the same situationally, but I agree the whole discipline thing is a bit out of character based on how I wrote Natalie and developed her character throughout the story. Now, I would remind you that this story is more about hashing out scenarios and situations for my larger stories, so I would ask that you be a little forgiving on the plot; however, I also realize that this story has kinda evolved quite a bit from its original premise, and that my readers have become emotionally involved in the characters and are expecting a high-quality story.

     That being said, I think I like your idea about Julia being able to convince Natalie that Tim might not be able to keep his mouth shut about the whole ordeal; although, I did elude in an earlier chapter that Tim was too embarrassed about the whole shrinking situation to want to tell anyone about it. In any case, I think the ending is the biggest thing that’s going to get reworked; this will also help transition into the epilogue and the eventual sequel I’m looking to write in the future.

Thanks for the input

I know. I wasn’t trying to deceive anyone or anything and just quietly update the rewritten chapters until the epilogue was posted, but each time I start rewriting each day’s chapters, I find that a few of them are just way too long for my taste, and to break them up, I have to post a “new” chapter. I shouldn’t have to do that for the remainder of the story, however, as Friday is pretty well broken up already. In fact, I might even be able to delete a chapter once my rewrite is finished.

At the very least, it gets my story reads, and almost always brings more reviews, and I like responding to reviews.

So, you’re not the first reader to point out how oblivious Natalie is as to what’s been going on at home between her sister and son. I was really trying to play up how devious and coy Julia is, but Natalie‘s character still poses a problem. This is one of the reasons that I’m currently doing some rewrites, and will be doing a sequel in the future. There will also be an epilogue once I post all the rewritten chapters; I’m currently working on getting Thursday posted, with Friday coming at the end of the month.

In any case, thanks for reading and providing feedback, and feel free to suggest content for the sequel.

I assume “favorite scene” that you mean the laundry scenes. As I mentioned in the story notes, it’s an interaction that doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention in shrinking stories, so I’m going to be using it as a template for future stories.

Yeah, I find that dialogue-driven chapters take me longer to write because I need the dialogue to move the plot forward, but seem natural and not forced.

Natalie’s character arc is one that I’m really trying to get right in this rewrite: I really want her dismissiveness to seem like a natural progression, which is especially hard to get right considering her concerned nature towards her tiny son. I think the best way to do that is by emphasizing her disbelief that the incidents that Tim experiences with Julia are anything more than just accidents. I’m going to see if I can get more interactions with her going forward, but most of them are probably going to be situated on around Friday still. The issue is that Tim’ll eventually be discovered, and just like with the laundry incident, Natalie will definitely freak out. Although, it might make his ending up in the hamster cage feel like a necessity.

Anyway, glad you’re enjoying the rewrites; always happy to hear from you.

So, I actually do have the epilogue written, but in order to make it work I needed to make some updates to the story, and I figured if I was going to do that, I might as well make some other changes based on feedback and for proofreading purposes. I can’t guarantee that the ending’s going to change, but I’m hoping everything will make a lot more sense.

I hope you like the updates when they’re posted. In the meantime, I’ll check out your story and leave a review.

Well, I’ve certainly gotten mixed reviews with regards to the ending. Maybe people will feel better once the epilogue is posted. I think I will also go back and do some rewrites of this story to help the ending fit a little better.

With a sequel in mind, I probably would write a more cathartic, happy ending if and when I go through with it. It would also probably focus on Tim having to deal with the giant world outside his house.

Overall, I just need to take it all in stride and work on improving my plot development. I just don’t want to be pegged as a writer who always writes happy endings.