On Ulysses, Avalon and The Magnetic Stones

In the spirit of our new Critique community, here are three stories of mine for Vocalists everywhere to throw their collective eye over!

(1) Ulysses

Ulysses was written earlier this year, and please don't bother telling me the title's already been used! There were in fact three principal sources for this story: Homer's Odyssey, James Joyce's Ulysses, and the 1980s science fiction cartoon series Ulysses 31. For those who don't know, the latter two were based on the first named.

Those weren't the only inspirations for my Ulysses. Personal lived experience played a large part, and so too did no fewer than three different dreams I've had, all of which made their way in there too. However, I do see it wouldn't be quite fair to ask any of you for critique on those parts of the story!

What I would love to hear about, however, is how I did on the Ulyssean components - classical, modernist, or animated. Or for that matter, all three!

(2) Avalon

When I wrote Avalon in 2020, my aim was to combine Arthurian and beach party elements. So, can you see what I did with the title? I was overjoyed when one faithful fan actually got that!

Now, to return for a moment to my interest in James Joyce, something you either know or you don't is the chapter titles of Ulysses ('Telemachus', 'Nestor', 'Proteus', 'Calypso' and so on) don't actually appear in the first published edition. Joyce did use them in his notes when he was putting the novel together, and later editors have added them, but the author himself wanted his earliest readers to figure out for themselves just what he and his book were doing.

My final decision with Avalon was to take the same approach, although in the initial stages I very much considered dividing the story into chapters whose titles would make explicit the Arthurian influences - for example 'Merlin', 'Mordred', 'Tom of Warwick', 'The Holy Grail' and others, listed here in no particular order.

So, it goes without saying I'd be most grateful for any and all observations on Avalon. If however you'd like to go really in-depth, you could always let me know how you'd split the whole thing up into parts, and what character or concept from the King Arthur legend you'd name each one after!

(3) The Magnetic Stones

Ah. Right. The Magnetic Stones.

As I wouldn't want this preamble to influence your responses, I'd better confine myself to a very few facts. The Magnetic Stones, written last year, was intended as the shocking finale to a series of seventeen complete stories. Coming at the very end as it does, the said shock was dependent on readers being familiar with my continuity and universe - at least as far back as the preceding sixteen episodes. In other words, if you've never read anything of mine before, by all means skip this one. It wouldn't be fair of me to expect a newcomer to see what I hoped to do.

The problem was, my long-standing readers didn't seem to get The Magnetic Stones either. That's what's made me suspect this story was more of a miss than a hit.

Above all else, please believe me when I tell you that in posting the above here in our Critique community, I'm not begging for somebody to tell me it was very palpably the latter! All I ask of you regarding The Magnetic Stones are your thoughts on how you feel I did with it.

And that's all for now, fellow Vocalists! Any comments and suggestions, either here or on the stories themselves, would be much appreciated!