Writing Update: 17/01/24 (Patreon)

Change: +6,717

Year to date: 7,758

I've set myself a daily writing target of 1000/day, or 5k for the week. Honestly, I don't know if it's a realistic target but less than that just feels too slow, like I'm barely making any progress.

Working on something new-ish has helped with the momentum. It's disappointing that due to illness I wasn't able to get this out at a seasonally-appropriate time, but I'm enjoying writing this Christmas side-story. I say 'side-story' but in the writing it's working its way ever closer to the main narrative. A few scenes popped into my head with shocking clarity and I was keen to write them out, but in the writing I began to wonder what the point of it all was. That is, it started with wanting to write something that was just a bit of sexy, seasonal fun, an exclusive side-story for subscribers. But Christmas has come and gone, and my mind turned to more practical questions like: why would he do this, what does this contribute to the main story? And in answering those questions, this side-story suddenly became more relevant and now, I think I'll be adding it in after chapters 7, as an interlude that sets up the events of chapter 8. That chapter covers the relationship between Cindy and Tom, and considering how their previous meeting went, something needed to happen to push David into seeking out his friend. Hopefully, A Christmas Story achieves that.

Meanwhile, I never reported the results of the polls I ran back in December. I canvased the free membership for their preference in common fiction tags. There were 56 votes. "Tricked or Secretly Forced" was the most popular with 11 votes; "Crossdressing" followed with 10 votes; "Deals, Bets or Dares" came in third with 8. If find it interesting that some of the keywords relevant to Constant - like "Workplace Situations", "Maid or French Maid," "In Hiding" come in well below those results, with 4 or 2 votes only.

There were a few specific comments on preference, which I appreciated as well. Definite food for thought, and I'll plotting something out that hopefully appeals to this audience!

Meanwhile, for top-tier subscribers I ran a poll canvasing preference for a set of specific plots. With eight votes equally distributed between two options, it came down to a split between "body-swap thriller" and "escalating cross-dressing drama". The first was inspired by a short story by Murakami, the second through discussion with Fraylim several months back. I'll be turning to these in the near future.

For now, I'll be finishing off Chapter 6 (nearly there) and the Christmas Story (good progress there as well). Then I think I'll put Constant to one side for a month to focus on a couple of shorter works of around 5k to 10k in length.

No specific release schedule for the week, yet. I still need to build up a bit of a buffer between what I'm currently writing and what I'm publishing before committing to pushing one or two things out a week as I did throughout 2024. That being said, I expect to be able to share the second part of a Christmas Story at some point next week.

Take care, everyone! Have a great week.