Today, I have good news and... good news! The latest Iyessi song is now on my Discord's Child page, and my flash story, 'A Matching Pair', which came third in the Bowers Gifford & North Benfleet Residents' Association competition, can be read on the association's website. It's great when your work appears somewhere new and you can feel that it's being read by people who otherwise would never come across it. Will it last generations? The odds are against it.
Even authors who write the bestsellers of their day can fall totally out of favour, and of those who are still read, not all their works outlast them. Take the novel I read last week, 'The Loving Spirit', by Daphne du Maurier. People still love Jamaica Inn, Rebecca and many of her other works, but I had never heard of this book before. Like Rebecca, it's obviously inspired by a Brontë novel–in this case, Wuthering Heights. Any doubt about this is dispelled by extracts from Emily Brontë's poetry at the start of each section.
I believe the reason that 'The Loving Spirit' hasn't continued to be popular is largely because it follows several generations of a conflicted family. Readers are drawn in by the characters of the first generation, which get dropped when the next one comes along and the story gets diluted. It proves how difficult writing family sagas must be. To get people reading in the first place, you have to hook them with your opening characters' story, but to keep them, the subsequent generations and their problems have to be even more gripping.
I take my hat off to the authors who manage to pull this trick off. Maybe there should be a contest for flash family sagas–three generations in 300 words. Now, there's a thought!