The damn gray zone

 I'm someone who likes to worldbuild. I want to create a world with a set of rules, create characters with a history, and see how that history in those rules would naturally sort themselves out. 

In my bound friends series though, there is a reason I start it on the 18th birthday of the youngest character. I understand why there is an invisible wall at that 18th birthday, but that's not how real flesh and blood people live. And less sexualized media gets to explore that, there are simply too many shows to name where all characters are set in high school and most if not all are under 18 where relationships are the primary driver of plot. Because of course high schoolers are thinking about or having sex, they always have and always will.

I don't want to violate rules by exploring that, especially because I as now quite the adult do not want to be describing sex scenes of young teenagers. I especially don't want to attract or validate the kind of people who would like to hear that. 

But who are we kidding? What 18 year old is born anew their 18th birthday?

So I guess to some degree this is also me crowdsorcing a question, if your primary characters are 18, how do you write a sexually charged book without ever including their sex lives before the day of their 18th birthday? Are there any good examples that spring to mind?

Because Preview:

I'm writing many things, but one of the many things I'm writing as a potential series is I want to kind of follow a single person through their life, from college to into their 30s at least. The Erotic Adventures of Emily (not a real title yet). I have the idea that she is basically in the closet about being bi, but it feels cheap. Maybe I'm one to talk, because as someone who is bi-adjacent I never really dealt very seriously with "being in the closet" in any of my Bound Friends series because.. I am not sure, it might have just been not something I wanted to deal with. But now making it plot central seems, also not great. Maybe I'm just self critical and don't like what I write no matter what!

Anyway, Book Recommendation

This will be in a very different vibe than my last one but I got to mention Tangled Vows by Anna Stone. The writing is well done, the characterization is interesting in that it's like pealing back layers. I don't know, I just really got into it even though it's light on bondage, "SugarKink" as I've newly learned the term. 

Get the Damn Shot

 So, I know I just said I'd be trying to make update journals every two weeks or so, but my last little bit has been thrown into a little chaos from family issues and the resulting headaches that come with that.

To make a long drama short, a whole branch of the family tree are getting hit with COVID. And they didn't have to. They could have gotten the damn vaccine free months ago. The only ones down there in Texas who did were the ones forced to by work, and between them they have 16 kids under 12 their recklessness has now put in danger. The spikes last year, there was so little alternative. Now there is a god damn miracle of science a decade in the making is available for free while the rest of the world struggles to get any at all. Southern states are throwing out vaccine that is spoiling because no one is getting them any more. Like that whole cluster of my family has decided not to, and now there are two struggling for their life on ventilators.

Get the damn vaccine. If you already have, pressure those you know who haven't. We have the technology to make COVID relegated to the status of polio, we just have to have the collective will. Whatever negative you've heard about it likely isn't true, and the alternative is I may lose my last uncle and more than a dozen children too young for the vaccine have all been exposed and to a variant that seems much more deadly to children than the ones that came before. That's the side effect of not taking it.

I'm a bit of a history buff, and one lesson I wish could be written on giant letters in the sky is that the world's first government-sponsored immunization campaign was initiated by George Washington while camped at Valley Forge. Smallpox had been spreading and so he required every one of his troops to get what was at the time an experimental treatment of placing a small bit of pox-puss into a cut on the arm. He required all serving under him, including himself, to take this new treatment because he was losing more men to disease than to the British and a big outbreak of smallpox at that moment in the revolution could have snuffed it out. There is nothing more American than all of us coming together to save each other, of many we become one. E pluribus unum. Right now we all need to become one, we need to get the damn vaccine as one society so that it stops spreading to those who can't get the vaccine, like children. 

Is the sappy pap? Sure, but I can't give this speech to someone already on a ventilator, someone who already chose to selfishly and destructively prolong this plague by rejecting the one tool needed to end it. I can give it to you fellows though, so I am. 

I've not been writing much, I'll return to updates hopefully soon.

Putting the Work in Jessbaby's Workshop

 So as I continue to spend much of my free time reading and learning more about the strange niche of the publishing world I'm thinking of jumping into, I figure I should use this blog for occasional updates. And just so you have reason to come back, I'll make recommendations as I read things that don't suck. 

So as a first update, I am certain now that I'm going to at least try to get some real paid books going. They will have what you might expect, maybe a little more vanilla but still playing to my strengths and trying to make the characters three dimensional. I've started a story and I've made an outline of where it's going to go. One of the things many agree on is that stories should be viewed of as installments, because the real money is in bundles. So I'm planning for bundles from the start and hopefully if I find the character don't take me in too much of another direction as I write them (something Zainab very much did for example, she was originally supposed to be an eventual villain! Can you even imagine that now?). 

The series is going to be more grounded, (no wizardy techno-chips or slave contracts) but still have plenty of escapist and unusual fun. I have most of the core of the main character but I'll go into detail in another post, which I'm going to try to do at least every other week at minimum.

But like I promised, I'm reading so much now that I do run across good works I want to share so I will. Each post I will pick one story that I have at minimum partially read (so sue me, I start more than I finish) Also want to add, on top of this becoming a repeating thing it will never be paid promotion:

The Farmer by Ashley Zacharias

It may have one of the more captivating openers I've ever read. And until July 31st it is 100% free. The basic premise, and I do not want to give much away as that's a lot of the magic, but a mystery woman volunteers to be the sex slave of some random person, knowing the risks of doing that and getting very turned on by those risks. The author's writing is very good at conveying emotion and has moments of comic surrealism very well. This is a hefty 58k word full novel length and is only book one of a four book set, meaning it can take its time going wherever it wants to go.

With that I sign off and enjoy the weekend.

Wading into the pool

 So as I've been looking for new work I've also been familiarizing myself a lot more with the world of paid erotica. I am not ready to do a full relaunch of myself as an actual professional writer rather than the ameture I still feel I am, but I will absolutly keep this place as informed as anywhere.

And in preparing, not only has Kindle Unlimited just been so helpful but there are also a good many books written by published authors about how they've managed to do that. How they might suggest others do that. And even though they'd be direct competition they all have been surprisingly helpful in their books, probably cause me reading their books gets them paid regardless of what I end up doing. And one thing they all agree on, read as much as possible especially of the books that make up the top sellers. 

I still maintain a lot of it isn't great, and that there are more than a few armature writers that write better, but I'm also realizing a shift I hadn't made by my last post is that if I want it to be a business, it's important to put out what people like not necessarily what I like most. 

I also feel a weird amount like I'm reading so much I should almost start just a recommendations list, but that's maybe more work than I'd want to actually do. But while there's a lot of tropes I'm probably not going to touch (so much incest content!) I am trying to get into the headspace of producing the kind of thing people seem to be liking and put my own spin (and hopefully skill) on it. Not pure vanilla, still plenty of D/s kink, but maybe with a bit more focus. I've planned out some stories and have even started writing even if it's not been near the speed I'd need to do to be more competitive since it's largely a volume/frequency game. So smaller more frequent stories rather than longer less frequent. 

I also think reading as much as I have been is messing with me, my thoughts seem to drift to the lude so much faster than normal. Anyway that's basically as much as I will update for now, also if you are into it Smashwords has a sale for the month of July that I have been taking advantage of and if any of you like me crave this stuff there is a lot to like.

Really Testing Sturgeon's law

 So it's been a little more than half a year, but what a half year! Lots of ups, lots of lows, but some things are just leveling off which is nice. I don't have nearly anything new written, at least not that's also finished, but thought I'd check in.

So for those who don't know, there's an adage called Sturgeon's law. It basically states "ninety percent of everything is crap." Meant to be applied originally to art but has generally been expanded over time, that truly "good" works make up an overwhelming minority. 

Why am I bringing it up? Well, I have crossed over from just reading free stories to reading some of the paid stuff. I want to see how much of a difference there is, thinking in the back of my head that maybe some of my future work I might try to sell for some side something. Several of the early examples really did show "oh yes, there's a big jump, this is very well written." Some even annoyingly well written as a sometimes author myself, game recognize superior game. 

But damn, there is a lot of crap out there. I cringe when I re-read what I've put out and there's a typo but I've seen typos in things people are actually asking money for, to say nothing of dry characterization and flat setting. "Oh, a billionaire/nobleman/warchief/boss wants me but he wants to dominate me, which I don't like but oh maybe I'll find out I do?" There are small libraries worth of stories where that is the sum total of the plot. And some of them are getting away with selling less than 10,000 word instalments as "books" in a series with that plot.

But maybe that's what sells and I'm the weird one for thinking there should be motivations and such with characters with enough personality they aren't just blank placeholders for the reader to self-insert. I've never been good at understanding what's popular and not.

Really makes me feel a lot more competent, and strangely appreciative of all the authors putting out work for free that absolutely is better than a whole lot of what is being sold.

I will assure anyone reading that I do not intend to lock the ending of this saga behind a paywall, I only got a following at all from these free stories and it would seem mean to change that. The worst I might do is if I write the events of the epilogue in more expanded form, *maybe* those might cost something if I get into that world, but I have mostly entertained the idea of selling stories for some of the other ideas I've had. 

Mostly I just wanted to use my generic update to vent about what I'm finding in the state of paid erotica mediocrity. But hey, Sturgeon's law is holding up at least.