A Clarification

 So a while ago I started talking with a fan. They don't write often and I like having someone to talk about my work with since this is not something I openly share IRL. He of course wondered how things were going. I showed him the draft of what I had so far, as well as telling him where things are going. About how the plot arc I was working on up to the Opulent Mall was something I was beginning to have serious doubts about, and yet having trouble coming up with another one.  

If anyone wants to see what that general plot arc would be, you can read the epilogue part 1 where I speed run through what would have been another 6-8 stories to finish off the series. The idea was to also create a part 2 with the original original plot arc that I abandoned way back around part 10.

But back to my talks. We talked through things but one of the things that made this different was that he offered to write the ending himself. We had discussions about where it should go and what it should be.  I rewrote some parts to try to fit together smoother with a less extreme end to the party. Then something came up in my life and I basically put all that aside for a while. After long enough I just wasn't thinking about it. He tried to reach out but I only really skimmed them. Then I got an email, followed by notification of new comments, that he had finished the story and had put it up. It's my fault that I wasn't contacting him and had I been keeping up I would have read this was his plan. The story is in fact largely what had been part of my draft, written by me. 

However, while he took many of the ideas we talked through, many more are new to me, and he envisioned having whole new arcs before reaching an end. 

The selfish instincts of being an author makes me want to say no, the fate of the characters must be mine to dictate in full! But the practical side of me knows it has been years since I've last published, and I can't promise if left to my own I ever will. 

So if anyone wants to get that, it is about 60% my own words but I don't personally like the direction it was going at the end. I've had a few messages with him and we may need time to sort out differences if I'm to keep letting him write the rest for me. 

The link to the story is here.

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.

So how "am" I?

 It's been a while, and after a few of you asked on my last post I thought it was time for an update. It'll be a little personal and a little political, but it unfortunately won't have a story below it so read or skip this accordingly.

I wish I could give you another story, but I can't. This year has been so much, I'm hanging on by what sometimes feels like a few old threads. The company I've been working for collapsed, combination of its own failures and the covid downturn. I thankfully have saved enough that I'm weathering it alright, but I still don't have a replacement job or  even really a firm idea about what kind of employment I'd want to pursue next. I also have medical conditions that put me at very high risk of this disease and so I have been very limited in what I do while also having this grey cloud over me for a lot of the time. And then there's the election.

I don't know these are really excuses for why I'm not writing, I certainly have downtime, but I just have trouble staying focused or productive in that way. But as the last few years of updates without stories have shown, this isn't just a 2020 thing.

I can't remember if I've shared this or not, but I suffer from a mood disorder causing high levels of anxiety and depression. It's been with me most of my life, and since college when I really had a breakdown I've been trying different treatments and medications. Around 2014, I got on a new drug cocktail that kinda seemed to make a difference on average. However I've also looked back and noticed that 2014 is also around the time my story output began to drastically slow. I've often wondered if they were connected, but never enough to say so out loud to a doctor. But for nearly two years I've felt that either I'm numbing to the medication or my condition is getting worse. And that was before all the 2020 noise. Unemployment, global pandemic I'm at risk of, election, it's a lot.

So I'm hanging on, sometimes it feels like by a little, sometimes it feels like more. I'm trying to be kind to myself and forgiving of shortcomings because everyone right now is just doing their best. I hope you are all still in good health.

As for this damned beast called the election, in almost every state it is already started. As of me writing this, 9.1 million ballots have already been cast (you can follow updates here if you want). And even though one party openly refuses to honor the results, even as one party openly tries to tilt the rules in their favor, even as one party packs the court for the expressed purpose of possibly overturning the results, even as one party looks into using the electoral college to ignore the will of voters and cast their state electors for Trump regardless of results, by all available measurement they are losing. It is not reason to celebrate or assume it to be a done deal (mostly for the reasons I listed above). But Republicans haven't run against a white man since 2004, and they are struggling to figure out how their brand of identity politics and white male grievance can work against another white man.

And as much as I supported Warren in the primaries, and feel she would have made the best president, it's clear now Biden is the best candidate we could have picked. Someone seemingly moderate enough for the white suburbs (and somehow seniors?) to line up behind him over Trump. Someone coalitional enough that he adopted a platform written in equal parts by his people and Bernie's people, making it the most progressive platform any major party nominee has run on. AOC literally co-wrote his new climate plan. He's adopted parts of Warren's platform in full without alterations, including on the topic of bankruptcy where he was famously opposed to what she believed because he now admits he was wrong. Imagine, after the last four years, a politician who can admit when they were wrong and change accordingly. He has credibility with the black community without any of the social expectations an actual black candidate would face. And after 4 years of a heartless president, he is empathetic in a way we all need. The president isn't just the head of government they are the head of state, and that role requires that a president feel our pain. Obama during his 8 years gave more national addresses after a mass shooting than he had state dinners. 

He's also the first candidate in the history of modern primaries who moved away from the center after getting the nomination. Not only does that make his policies closer to my own, but it proves he is willing to move when there is pressure to do so. Lincoln didn't start a strict abolitionist, he was moved there. Johnson didn't start out supporting a Voting Rights Act, he was moved there. Biden can be moved if we move him. It's telling that the area he probably moved the most on has been the environment, the area with the most activist pressure. He's also moved on police reform, healthcare, college tuition and debt forgiveness, all the areas progressive activists care most about. He even moved to embrace the possibility of ending the filibuster and rebalancing the court, and if we can hold him to that we could end up with more progressive victories than any president since at least Johnson. So I don't care who you supported in the primary, I don't want to hear you aren't excited, not only is this election vital to the continuation of democracy but Biden is a fundamentally good person who is at his core a coalitionist who wants to find common ground. In 1974 he was rated at just a hair to the left of the median Democrat. In 2008 he was also rated as just a hair to the left of the median Democrat. As we move the party, he has shown he's willing to move with us. Not to the bleeding edge, but he will move. 

So to all you who are American, have a plan to vote, make sure your friends have a plan to vote. But don't just vote, volunteer. Phone and text contacting is even more important in a pandemic world where it's not safe to go door to door, and it means you don't have to be local. Donate if you can, there are several good Senate races that could flip that chamber (which is basically a prerequisite for any legislation anyone might want). Alaska, Kansas, North Carolina, two of them in Georgia, Arizona, Maine, South Carolina, even Texas and Mississippi are within the margin of error. There is a major effort in Texas to flip the state legislature, they are just 9 seats from a majority and whoever has a majority will draw the congressional map after this year's census. A fair map in Texas without gerrymandering would be the biggest win for small d democracy we could make at the state level.

As for me, I don't know what my future holds. I hope that the election goes smoothly enough I can get some decent sleep again. Really looking forward to next year when there should be an internationally verified working vaccine. As for stories, I don't know. As has been the problem for years I have ideas but can't make myself sit down and bring those ideas onto the page as easily as I once did. I don't know if that will change because I don't know what's causing it. But I appreciate you all for sticking with this as long as you have. You are all great.

That thing I promised myself I wouldn't do on here

So, when I started this blog I wanted to keep it just about the stories. It was a nice alternate reality, and while there were politics in them in places, I actively tried not to make them or this site political.

But I'm a very political person. As had been hinted at, I went to American University in DC (living in the dorm room Andrea had if you care to figure that out) and majored in political science. I even got some jobs in politics after graduating before burnout became too real and loans came due etc. Campaigns are not known to pay well, especially to people like myself at the lower end of the totem pole.

So why am I saying all this? Well like many I've been transfixed by what's happening, and I want to share a thing or two. If you don't want to hear about politics you don't have to click "read more." Know that I'm not ready to post the rest of the epilogue, but that progress continues in fits and spurts. This update won't have anything more about that, bu if you would like to please read on.

Halloween Story Missed

So for the second year in a row now I've been trying to write a story for halloween since it kind of has some mystical/dark elements to it, but second year in a row now I underestimate my time I'm able to commit and fall short of being able to deliver a story. Oh well.

So I just felt like sharing that, not a big deal. Back to the epilogues!

Time flies and other updates

So, it was pointed out I kinda just went dark for 4+ months, so I wanted to give a small update. Life has been crazy and time is not working like it used to or something.

Anyway, I'm planning basically two more pieces to the Bound Friends Epilogue.

There will be Epilogue 1½ which is the continuation of Epilogue 1. Epilogue 1 had been the "end goal" for a very long time, but in that time I'd had many ideas of "and then what" that I'm consolidating into a volume, albeit shorter (hopefully) than Epilogue 1 and with a less bittersweet ending. Epilogue 1½ is 100% optional and if you like your headcannon of what happens after Epilogue 1 then just keep it and go onto the next part.

Then comes Epilogue 2. You will need to have read Epilogue 1, but Epilogue 1½ will not factor in at all. This is the branch I started coming up with once I started getting squeamish about the end goal I had in mind. I had been writing Andrea and Megan and Zainab so long I didn't want to put them through that much pain. So I started coming up with alternative directions to go, ones without so much sadness. So this is where the "new" endgame was heading when I hit massive writing block. I've written basically a full length story already going down this path, so that will make the heart of it. Then, at the end of Epilogue 2, is a bit of a conversation between Andrea and Megan in the time in which the storytelling takes place. They are living in a world much closer to Epilogue 2 than 1 and they give me a chance for an ending that way I wouldn't have been able to have if I didn't do this epilogue format.

I want to try to give these characters a bit of an ending, but I also know that I have to rush myself a bit to get there. (As if it looks like I'm rushing now!) I've also started writing some side stories that are unrelated to any of this that I will post here when they are done but they are both far from it. One I hope to get by Halloween, but that's a long shot.

Either way, I'm still here, I'm just really busy and burned out but I am trying to finish this off when I have the energy to write.