Weekly Update (Patreon)

Work continues for "A Treat's Trick" and I'm anticipating to have it out on Friday or Saturday (10/29-10/30) and it's been fun revisiting the early 90s. The story is Halloween/supernatural themed, and is something I certainly wouldn't mind revisiting again in the future, so expect to see it as an option in future polls on things I should be working on for the month. I really don't want to say too much about the story before anyone reads it, but after it's been up for a week or so, I'll be happy to discuss about where the characters might go from there and what it would look like if the voter caste decided they wanted me to revisit them. The story actually has a series name if readers decide they want more of it, but we'll talk about that after the story has had a chance to live in your consciousnesses for a while. I'm excited to share more, but I need to nail this opening story first, so I want to be sure it rings as much with you as it does with me.

As requested, every old story post now also includes a PDF version of that post attached to it, for those of you who don't like reading long Patreon posts, or for those of you who want to save my work for offline reading. A few things to keep in mind - I didn't do almost any reformatting for those PDFs (like I did for the Patreon posts) simply because of the time investment it would take, so you'll see asterisks around things that are meant to be italicized in a lot of them, though not in the most recent pdfs, as by that point I'd taken to writing as italicizing first and editing to asterisks for when I send stuff to EMCSA later. (Also, yes, I know a couple of the Old Times posts have the wrong chapter title at the top, but the files have the correct names, so you know, minor mistakes happen.) I will, at some point, do a complete retrofit for Quaranteam to convert all the asterisked text into proper italics and post a "to date" QT file, but that's a bit more work than I can crank out today, so know that it's coming eventually - it'll just bit a bit. In doing that, I'll also probably do a full edit pass on the backlog of QT, fixing a handful of errors that I caught post-publish and making some changes that have bothered me for a while. Nothing that affects the story in any fundamental way, just minor shit, basically. To go through 200+ pages of text, however, isn't a quick thing, so it'll happen when it happens.

The voter caste decided that for 11/5, I'll be writing Quaranteam Chapter 31, as expected.  It's only partially plotted, so a good part of that may be seat-of-my-pants writing, but I have a broad idea of what's coming. It'll be plot heavier, but I'm not entirely sure how long it's going to be. Part of the fun of writing QT is that I've now developed these characters enough that sometimes I sit down expecting to write a 5-7k word chapter, and 10-12k words just come blasting out in a rush. The goal is to always have at least 5k of new words out for you each week, and so far, I've been blowing that goal out of the water, but expect there will be more thin weeks here and there where I'm right at the 5k. 

For 11/12, right now I'm thinking I'm going to do another chapter for Morgana's Gift. It's been a while since I've been in that sandbox, and a lot of people have been asking when I'm going to get back to it, eager to see Kevin bring Elizabeth into his family, especially since we've been dodging that for so long. (One of my favorite comments on that story was "goddamn do I respect the kind of vision that says "I'm going to take a ton of time out of my story about a man with a harem of sex slaves to talk about his failed band." That comment made me physically hurt with laughter the first time I read it and still makes me chuckle.)  I'm always going to be making sure to write a good story with good characters first, and to include sex second, but make no mistake, I know what people want, and the build ups usually have good pay offs, I feel. The more invested you feel in characters, the more resonance the sex has.

Forecasting to 11/19, that'll probably be when we have the first half of November's Brewster's Brood updates. The poll results were heavily in favor of me doing whatever the hell I wanted (way to encourage my ludicrous ascent to God Emperor, folks!) but of those of you who did have a preference, it was four to two in favor of having two smaller posts in a month rather than one larger post. So what I'll do is divvy up that larger post into two pieces and post the first part around the 19th, and the second part near the very end of the month. Also with the next BB update I will include a "current active cast" list for that story, like we're doing for QT. With 100 women in the Brand Game, plus all the people working with Mrs. Churchill, it'll help readers keep them straight, I hope. They're even divided up by group, which should help some.

Chapter One of Quaranteam: Phil's Tale (our first commissioned story) has begun the process of rough plotting, which involves me scribbling line after line of a handful of words as I try and map it out in my head, with a mental targeted date of 11/23 with the expectation that I will just skip making an Old Times post that week. Worst case scenario, I'll kick it back a week to 11/30 but the blueprint is gelling pretty well in my head right now, so I feel like the 11/23 date is more likely. There's an open document with notes written in it and everything, so progress is happening.

I'm also considering making a minor change to incentivize a few more people to kick up to tier 3, by letting them vote for two different weeks in a month, rather than one, but with the added rule that whatever was chosen for their first week's selection would be ineligible for their second.  It would mean that the voting caste would still get the extra QT chapter they seem to want each month but also would have some direction on what else I'm working on later in the month. So in the first week, voters would decide, and whatever they picked wouldn't be on the vote for the third week of the month. That's just a thought right now, and isn't set in stone, but feel free to weigh in with your thoughts on the matter, especially if you feel like it might inspire you to kick up a notch. If I did do that, it would start in December. But also don't feel like you have to kick in more if you aren't comfortable with it. Just having you here means a lot.

If you aren't on the Discord, consider dropping in if you ever want to chat. If there isn't a channel for something you'd like to talk about, let me know and I'll happily throw one up there. Just a few minutes ago, I created a Story Trivia channel and posted a bit about one of the bands I've referenced in Quaranteam which I think most of you thought I made up, but was in fact a real Russian band. I'm likely also to open a "recommendations" channel, as I'm always interested in the music, movies, books and games that people are playing, but I also don't want to flood anyone's Discord with notifications.  

Anyway, back to writing and I hope everyone enjoys the Halloween story when it hits!