Friendship Fossilised

Introduction

This has been inspired by the fact that I often include old stories of mine, to expand or enhance new stories, and also to make sure that I am not repeating myself too much. It is OK for some repetition to give emphasis to some points, but I don't want a virtual repeat of any old stories.

I know a few are past their sell by date and are no longer relevant (even though I have only been on Vocal for three years), but I am not going to ditch them as, at worst, they help show me how I have developed.

So Lost Vocal Friends

Since Vocal introduced commenting, we now know some creators who have read and enjoyed our work. It used to only be comments in Facebook Vocal Groups that let us know this (I'll include my Facebook Vocal Group poem at the end) but the addition of Vocal comments kept them with our stories.

Comments came in two years ago

And the good thing was that we could comment on older stories, and we got notifications of when people commented on our stories. Unfortunately, this was drowned out because Vocal included publications from subscriptions as well (totally pointless) so most comment notifications we never see.

This was my first ever post on Vocal and comments appeared well after it was published, but a few of the commenters have disappeared from my universe. I don't know whether they gave up on Vocal or they decided that my work no longer interested them. I have only had two people tell me they will no longer read my work, but I treat things like that as their loss, not mine as they gave no reason for their actions.

Sometimes you will see comments from Test and it makes you think, who was that creator who left Vocal?

These comments on old stories show you who you were once close to on Vocal, many of them are still close to me but a lot have gone. These are the fossilised friends on Vocal.

I know at times that I don't read people's work on Vocal as I should, but it is usually just a time thing, but I still feel incredibly guilty about it.

Vocal's platform still has problems but it is very good, and the friendships I have built thanks to Vocal I will always treasure, and I love seeing their comments on my stories and I always try and reciprocate (and recommend that others do as well).

In all my stories is a history of all the people I have met on Vocal. On my profile are links to some of my favourite creators, my Creationati, and that changes over time as people drift away from me or Vocal or both.

This is a six month old challenge I set up and we have one example of Test on here but almost all are not Fossil Vocal Friends which is good.

Conclusion

I suppose this shows a lot of the good things that we can find by being a Vocal Creator. Although I do criticise Vocal a lot for not addressing long running problems and not informing most Creators when the site has issues, I still feel that that is a great platform to share your work on, and I still recommend it to creative friends who are not members, the most recent one being my friend Aly who recently got her first Top Story which you can read here:

The music I have included is The Kinks, "See My Friends"

And to conclude my musings here are a few of my favourite Vocal Facebook Groups in a freeform poem.