Update: Captioned Image Stories -- not gonna be a thing. :( Sorry! (Patreon)

Hey guys, I have some sad news unfortunately. :( While I was on my little one day Staycation (god I love floating in a pool.) I came to the conclusion that including captioned image stories as Patron rewards was not gonna work out. 

Yeah, I know. :( No one is more bummed than me. But, like... I have this personality trait, where... when I do a thing, I wanna be the BEST at that thing. I just closed over 200 - TWO HUNDRED - website tabs. Various model image galleries, pictures of sex bots (so that I could photo manipulate them into looking like unworn bodysuits), tutorials on photo manipulation (how to make a model look like a mask or a skinsuit...)

I have probably spent well over 100 hours trying to produce the 10 captioned images that I was working on for this month. It was insane. Can you imagine how much further I could have gotten in FINDERS KEEPERS if I'd spent all that time on writing instead? Heck, I might be done by now. You might be waiting on the release of Part Two of Addicted to Womanhood instead of part 4 of FK. 

Plus, I started stressing out about legality. Captioned Images have always sort of felt like a murky gray area in terms of legality to me. Putting a model's picture next to a story about a character involved in an erotic situation always just seemed to blur that line between 'this is no big deal' and 'this is a little bit like deepfaking/involuntary porn.' As I was working on Part 5 of Nikki Choi tonight I just sort of had a moment where I was like "...ehhhh, no, I can't."

Book covers for erotica are different - they're an established part of books and publishing, and there are like disclaimers and things to clearly differentiate that the model on the cover is not the person being depicted in the story, it's just for illustration, and so on and so forth. Captions don't work quite the same way. Enjoying a sexy captioned image - and yes, I have done that a lot in my time - is ABOUT the connection between the image and the text. There's no disclaimer, there's no disjunction between the image and the text: you're SUPPOSED to imagine the model in the picture being the EXACT person in the text. 

I just started feeling a little bit icky about it. I had to stop. Maybe a couple of years ago I would have kept on going, but like... times have changed. The people we're captioning images of are ON the internet with us. They can see those images, and a lot of them didn't sign up for that particular kind of attention. That's one of the reasons I only buy cover art images from Depositphotos -- it's one of the only major stock image websites out there that stipulates that certain kinds of photos are ALLOWED to be used for erotica e-book covers. And even then - the model in question can always yank her approval if she wants to and file a copyright claim. 

So yeah, no captioned image stories. It's a shame, because I was really enjoying the evolving story of Nikki Choi, Bodysuit-wearing Queen of Kpop West. And I know that some of you are probably almost as bummed as I am about them. I mean, I'd LOVE IT if people started doing art work of my stories so that I could share them with you guys, or if I had the money to commission anyone to do that, because I really enjoy beautiful visual media of TG stories, but that's apparently not a thing I can provide right now. :( Bummer. 

For $10 dollar tier supporters, don't worry: if you were enjoying Nikki Choi's story, you'll get an Amazon Kindle version of it sometime in the future (after Finders Keepers Volume 1, Addicted to Womanhood Volume 1, Gender Bending for My Girlfriend, My Gender Bending LitRPG novel, and My Office Masquerade - so, probably sometime early next year, alongside the return of Sabina Kim and my magical Werewomen.)

If you joined my Patreon in the last month SOLELY because I was planning to offer captioned images, and you would like a refund for whatever you've donated to me in terms of support, that's cool. Just let me know, and I'll handle it. 

For the rest of you, I need to come up with some other sort of reward that makes being a $5 or $10 dollar supporter of mine worth while. I don't suppose any of you would like to watch me play video games once in a while (something I do while I'm brainstorming story ideas), or chat with me/each other on Discord on a private server?

Maybe I should just eliminate the $10 dollar tier all together and just have $1 dollar supporters and $5 dollar supporters. What do you guys think? What kinds of rewards could I give you that would feel worth while and neat but not take up productive writing time?