The State of Things: 2024

Hello, my lovelies, and Happy New Year! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season. I'm currently bouncing back from a fierce bout of post-holidays executive dysfunction, but I am bounced back enough for now to properly end the hiatus.

This is just a post to briefly cover upcoming plans, update you all on the Bonus Pairing finalists, and hold a quick celebration of a major milestone!

2024 Plans

Upcoming Projects

Immediate

The next couple updates will be focused on Guests of the Mapleseed, because I already have the chapters drafted and it's a nice chance to slowly transition back to standard work hours. I'm hoping to play with a few flashfics during that time, too!

Winter-Spring

After Mapleseed Chapter 4 is up, my creative focus will be almost entirely on the third and fourth chapters of Tesseract Trance.

Next, I'll try to wrap up Really Should Go and Gretel vs. Cuttlemaid.

At that point, I should have a bit more leeway to slide my other projects (like Winter Rose, Teacher's Pet, the last chapters of TT, Bonus Pairings and older series) around a little more freely!

Summer

As we head into summer, I have a couple pet projects I'd love to get to. Aside from wrapping up some series and maybe starting new ones, I have a really silly monster girl encyclopedia project I'm hoping to get done by the end of August. Let's just say it's based on a certain very popular existing game with fairly generous copyright management.

I also really want to get the Tumblr running again. I made great progress last year, but fell off for unrelated reasons. I have new plans for flashfics that may bring it back into the spotlight, though!

Finally, I'm strongly considering doing Camp NaNoWriMo in July and pushing one big smutty story out. As with all of this, we'll see how I'm doing then, but it'd be nice to just drop everything and focus for a bit.

Fall-Winter

Winter and fall are a little hard to predict, of course. November I'll likely take off entirely, just like I did last year. One goal I have is to actually have my festive stories finished in advance for once! I came close this time around, but I'd love to not have to frantically edit content on Christmas Eve to get it up on time.

So consider this my low-key New Year's Resolution: Valentine's Day, Halloween and Christmas will have their themed stories ready on time.

Other Plans

I don't want to focus things entirely on work here. I don't seem to talk about my personal life a ton when it's not to explain a story delay, but I'd like to change that a little, because I'm trying to define my value a little less by the content I create and the rate at which I create it. So, what else am I planning for 2024?

First, I'm hoping to visit my local farmer's market more this year, and in general try to be more active in my real-world community! I also really want to set up a proper garden this spring, so my chickens have something to have fun destroying. My girlfriend is moving in with us next month, and it's gonna be really nice being under the same roof officially! And I'll be trying my best to survive what is no doubt going to be an extremely exhausting election no matter who wins.

Take care, everyone. Get your flu shots.

The Bonus Pairing Finalists

So, the last of the polls for the Autumn Bonus Pairing has completed, and I am pleased to inform you all that we have our three finalists!:

• Librarian vs. Werewolf: A timid librarian from the modern world wanders too far into the stacks and inadvertently wanders into a very different library--specifically, into the Sugarcane Athenaeum, a lost library within an ancient subterranean fortress that has been overtaken by dark forces. Not realizing he's left our world, the librarian doesn't know to be afraid when a seductive hellhound encounters him. He takes her for a cosplayer, and she's delighted by his lack of fear, his certainty that her gleaming red eyes--so hard to look away from--are just contact lenses, that her pheromones--so sweet, so intoxicating--are just perfume. Can he find a way to escape before she persuades him to accept a 'hug'?
• Sloth Succubus vs. Summoner: An overconfident and inexperienced summoner girl tries to strike up a bargain with a curvy succubus of Sloth. Things seem to go the novice's way when she presents a pages-long, airtight agreement, but as the legalese drags on and on and gets more and more confusing, and her new servant keeps making more and more perfectly reasonable corrections to the terms, the contract might not be only thing up for revision...
• Brass Sprite vs. Rift Ranger: After defeating a wealthy summoner noblewoman, a rookie Rift Ranger drunk on her success discovers an ancient lamp in her vaults. The gorgeous glittering brass sprite within seems only too accommodating of her every wish, every whim. She can only do exactly what the Ranger wishes of her. Surely, she convinces herself, there's no harm in... indulging a little. And if the wishes seem to be getting granted in increasingly suggestive ways, if her sweet scents are making the Ranger a little drunk in the other way... well, is there really any harm if her wishes start to get a little... irresponsible?

I'm planning to write a short "test run" for each and see which one draws me most to a full version, and the winner will be announced by the end of the week! Whichever one I pick will then get a full, proper bonus pairing. I'm feeling good about this new structure for BPs! We'll see how it goes.

The Milestone

So, last little thing. I am very excited to tell you all that I've just passed my ten-year anniversary of posting smut online!

This is such a big number, I'm not sure how to emotionally engage with it. My brain sort of defaults to reviewing what I've done and haven't done--tallying wordcounts, making lists of things I'm running late on, and so on and so on. My brain tries to think of a Promotion I could do, a Wish-style Event I could put on to monetize my celebration.

I didn't get around to doing that, though. I want to be better about appreciating steady effort over rapid production. So, I've been doing this for ten years. That's the longest I've stayed committed to... anything, really.

It started in a weird place. I didn't even know I was a girl when I started out, and my early stories were totally untouched by ideas about earning a living. I just wanted to write what people wanted to read. The writing was often kind of bad, but some of it must have been good, because plenty of people really liked it. That means a lot to me.

I was in such solid control of things back then. I had no outer life, no friends, no responsibilities. I could just write and write and write. I think I see it through rosy glasses, though. I seem to recall staying up to 4am every night to hit my goals, panicking, disappearing, putting up paid placeholder posts to Patreon on the 31st because I needed to hit a quota. And I remember how lazy I was in writing and editing. It wasn't ideal.

It's true that I did manage to write so much content back then, and that haunts me. But I always felt like I wasn't writing enough, even then. It's hard to strike that balance, but I'm closer to it now than I used to be. My burnouts last weeks instead of months, and I don't have to rework everything about my life to recover when they hit. I write things I want to write. I don't drown myself in commissions.

And I have a Discord now! That's fun.

I hope you all are enjoying the output nowadays. I worry about that a lot, just like I always have. But I really like the new styles of stories I've been exploring.

I can't wait to explore more over the next ten years.