Archive: January 31, 2019

January 31

Integration <3

Apparently you can display blog posts on main pages with the right plugin. You can also decide by which category, date, etc, of what you want on the page. This feels like a solution to the whole comment issue. Just link certain blog posts on certain pages and if I delete the wrong page by mistake, the original blog post still remains, safe and sound.

The blog so far has been limited to the Newsletter. I’ve basically ignored it otherwise. I kinda have this habit of going through and deleting old shit after a year–Nothing I say actually has importance, just rambles in the cyber world. So, let’s try something a little more constructive.

In other randomness… Has anyone see Happy! On Netflix with Christopher Meloni? I just caught the first bloody, beautiful episode. Think this is love, babes. XD

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January 31

City Howls and dealing with limits

I found myself looking at City Howls to prep it for new writing with outlining, brainstorming, etc. I found problems, the same kind of problems in Demon Arms. All I do is bitch about how I didn’t realize how fucked my brain was when living in mold. Right now, I’m frustrated I just can’t go back.

If I didn’t have the new perspective, I wouldn’t give a fuck. Good enough would literally be good enough in my mind. It was then. The problem is, how I’m writing now is the only way I know how to write. My brain changed, it can’t go back, and I’m left frustrated at my new pace which requires time, dedication, and a willingness to tear up all the old shit and do the work. Hence, it feels like work and not fun.

I gotta fix my perspective on this stuff. I gotta find the fun.

The biggest issues with City Howls I can see are:

1) the moldy brain made it difficult to visualize scenes, led to a dump of exposition, while at the same time failed to explain concepts well enough and also made the action lag. I want to show how Sage is a thief, how his dreams are messed up, how his brother is violently abusive instead of the info dump of it all. Finding out how his parents die should be pivotal, not a one liner in a paragraph of exposition. I don’t know why my old style was about creating all the character background and just dumping it in the first scene but it requires me to clean it all up and start fresh.

2) I tried to work with the censorship. You couldn’t find the first book on a mainstream platform because of the beast content, so I tried to make episodes 2 and 3 platform friendly. I intentionally wrote less titillating content to conform, and I’m kinda disgusted when I think about it. Seriously, fuck censorship. These books were supposed to be a total dark fuck fest and I held back and grew bored with the series because of it. How fucking exhausting to sit down to write something fun, only to change it because you’re terrified of having your book banned and livelihood lost. It’s bullshit.

So this is the shit I want to remedy when I continue this series. The beginning paces too slowly because of the exposition, and everything needs a more visual, in the scene feel. And I want to push those limits I inadvertently made because of the censors. More taboo, more fun, less stupid safe boring ass bullshit.

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January 30

Library updated!

Okay, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the subscription site, what it’s all about, what direction I want it to go, how to help it grow, etc, along with my limitations lately. The library is now arranged with one main purpose: to ensure taboo stories are written. Specifically sexual slavery, incest, beast, and shota.

I think partly, I need to be brutally fucking honest with myself and just admit that although I love the PATB series, working on it alone has become boring, and it’s partially why I’ve lost speed and energy. Rewrites and editing are a different part of the writing process, and when I’m in this place too long, I suffer, the writing suffers, and it’s just not great overall. But I have pushed myself to continue what I’m doing because of a previous plan–one that’s pretty damn smart when I can keep my speed going.

My intention after I published Hellcat in March of 2018 was very straightforward. Finish Shiny Thief and rewrite Demon Arms to match the style to 1) publish 2 amazing books that I have strong stats will do well in the mainstream gay genre on Amazon, and 2) promote the PATB books as my signature series to attract people back to the website. It’s a great idea, one I felt would solve a big problem.

Hellcat was a great success and offered something a lot of readers haven’t had: kinky, erotic content mixed with a wild plot and story. But Hellcat was crippled in the erotica arena because of the way Amazon prevented advertising and refused to link it in the ‘also bought’ section of gay genre books. Realizing Hellcat was trapped in erotica felt like such a kick in the head when it hadn’t been designed to compete in that genre, but to instead heat up the more plot oriented gay stories. I couldn’t risk spending half a year writing a book that wouldn’t be seen, so I turned my attention to making PATB as desirable as possible in the gay genre.

So, what changed to make that idea not viable with my current situation? I went exclusive with the website. I never thought I would. It felt too daring. Lock my books up behind a paywall that can only be reached by joining my subscription site? Yeah, terrifying when I started this book game with the understanding that exposure on Amazon was the best (possibly only) way to make money. But I took the leap, and 4 months ago, I pulled all my books but 9 (Hellcat, Bullying Teacher, the original Demon Arms, and the Demon Bonded books) from every platform and kept them exclusive on my website. It was a gamble that paid off.

I haven’t been doing any new advertising or promoting or marketing; I haven’t been doing much of anything besides writing my ass off as of late, but I continue to see greater and greater traffic to the website with far more consistent, stable income than the Amazon ranking game. I have to adapt to that. I have to change my strategy and reward those readers who show up to give them incentives to stay. AKA, I gotta write something more than PATB.

The taboo content has stagnated since Hellcat and I need to make plans to ensure it is the greatest focus. It was everything I was as a writer until I realized Demon Arms had hit a market that was ravenous for more. I forgot my own fucking brand as a writer. The censorship happening on Amazon had changed my writing in ways I hadn’t noticed until looking back and realizing how I’ve been avoiding taboo for fear it would be banned. I avoided pushing limits even when writing taboo out of habit because in the back of my mind I associated it with losing my income. But the subscription site allows me to write the most dirty as fuck stories with only rewards to gain instead of the bullshit from other platforms. Going exclusive proved taboo was viable when censorship isn’t involved, and I want to see how far I can build this.

PATB will continue to be written and made ready for publishing, but it will now be second in line instead of the only focus. I’ve made a breakdown by word count of my fics and where they rank in taboo content, which you can find on the bottom of the library page. This is to help me focus on ensuring taboo isn’t neglected in the future and to promise readers that it’s being noticed. I’m still in the planning stages of what taboo story/series to continue next. I’ll be linking the comment sections into current wips in the future, to ensure I can get member feedback to see what readers want. I like the pretty, organized format of the website, but it refuses to work with the comment plugin and I feel like I’m in the dark about what readers want.

As for now, I need to get back to the Demon Arms rewrite this week, but I’m hoping to have things hit the next stage sometime in February. I’m doing good, babes, health wise. I might be slow to get started–my brain has some adapting to do to change to more than one story at a time–but it’s worth reaching that place. I haven’t given up on hiring content writers in the future, but for now it’s important to test that this is the content readers are looking for before I have to organize a new system around it.

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January 27

I miss writing porn :/

Seriously, when the fuck did everything become so serious? I miss my short fuck fics. PATB has taken over my damn life and there is no fucking, well, fucking! Why can’t I multitask? That used to be my damn thing. Multiple stories just to keep me sane–and I knew I needed it to keep me sane. Just, my brain broke from the damn mold and low dopamine, and when everything was repaired, I became this one circuit human who could only do a task at a time. Apparently very fucking slowly at that. Ugh.

I want my fun back. @_@ I can’t remember the last time I even wrote the word cock. There is not enough dick in my writing!

*sigh* I’ve missed ranting too. And writing completely inappropriate things that people fear going to prison over. I need my edge back. I’m losing my damn mind to all this adulting bullshit. I gotta figure this out. It’s like I’m starving a part of myself and it’s spilling into other aspects of my life.

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January 25

Insanity…

I would have to be a complete insane person to want my life to fit into predictable patterns when every day is a random occurrence, and yet, there I go, expecting the impossible and frustrated when it doesn’t occur.

My immune system is doing ‘a thing,’ and it sucks, and why can’t I just not be sick, yeah? Even though my norm has been to be sick for years, I have already decided being sick at all is unnatural and shouldn’t happen and ignored all my damn limits once again. Brilliant, yeah? Self delusion takes a certain amount of skill.

My fevers aren’t fun this time around with fuzzy happiness. I’ve just been bitchy and grumpy and sleepy… Like those seven dwarves, but, you know, BITCHY! And itchy, actually. The allergies are flaring with the immune response. I wish my body would just chill already.

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January 23

Fever

I have a fever. It might explain a few things…

I was thinking about evolution and how humans just, well, don’t. We don’t evolve physically but instead adapt the world around us. We’re working with the same genetic hardware and mental software our ancestors have had for thousands of years. The only thing that has really changed is our systems. That’s what humans are all about. We create language and we store knowledge. With that knowledge we build systems, some as small as creating a recipe to make a meal, others as big as creating a global business or dividing our days into a calendar and the globe into time zones.

You could likely pluck a human being up from 5000 years ago and drop him in our world, and as long as he utilized our language and educational system, he would fit in and adapt. But, in the same sense, take those systems away from a developing child and you could watch a process so similar to de-evolution like in the case of Helen Keller. She had all the cognitive software available, but her hardware was broken and it prevented her from getting those language and educational inputs. Once she did get access to them, she became as ‘evolved’ as the next person.

It’s fascinating to me. I’ve been watching ‘Horrible Histories’ and I just keep thinking how those atrocious behaviors happened not long ago. Not long at all. Humanity has a consistent history of violence, slavery, war, and oppression mixed in with innovation. We are currently facing a giant environmental crisis because we had these amazing innovations of technology that created systems–because humans build systems–but these systems are destroying the environment. They destroy ecosystems for farming, oceans for fishing, forests for paper and houses, water sources and ground stability for fossil fuels. Sometimes it feels like we have all been plucked up from the past and placed into this world where we are surrounded by all these systems from government to manufacturing to basic society, and instead of questioning it all, asking what’s the point and trying to avoid the danger, we just go along with the flow learning it all. Because that’s something very human too.

These systems wouldn’t become so overarching and widespread so quickly if we as a species didn’t immediately accept them. We accept the newest phone the same way we accept using plastic bags that are clogging up the oceans. You would think it would make it easy to change a system, but innovation seems slow and rarely accepted while the familiar but slightly different is far more quickly accepted. The new phone with ‘better’ camera instead of trying to solve the packaging crisis that is filling our landfills. The society change of fashion instead of deciding imprisoning people over debt is inhumane and pointless. How many different types of tooth brushes were ‘innovated’ before someone came around with the idea of a waterpick? How many room sized computers before the idea of a microchip? It’s the difference of wandering around searching for food, getting better and more efficient at hunting, before one brilliant idea said to stop and farm some land.

Innovation is humanity’s evolution. It can strike, but before systems were created to speed the implementation of such innovation, there was rare ability to have that innovation spread. In the past, governments were an ideal way to spread innovation. It’s why monarchies were both so damaging when they were destructive, and uplifting when they brought positive change; they were a system in place that could change things quickly depending on the mind in charge. The same with religion–depending on what ideology was passed around, you could be praising some invisible deity one day and murdering ‘witches’ and going to war the next. Governments, when not broken, can bring change immediately, but many are full of people who are mentally living decades in the past.

It also makes me wonder: what would evolution really look like for humans if it occurred in our bodies or minds? Would it be something that gets us through this current crisis, such as bodies that can cleanse the chemicals and toxins now spread throughout every inch of soil from worldwide industry? Evolution is more a lottery than a design; some designs last better while others die out or manage to survive even with the flaws because of other factors. Our current design has gotten us to a point where we can create systems so large that they can destroy the very planet we live on, such as nuclear power or climate change. It also lets us cope with that knowledge by allowing us to block it out, to walk certain on solid ground when we know atoms have so much empty space. We create systems of entertainment to hide away from reality, systems of religion to tell ourselves that death isn’t real and this chaos of life has meaning. We can pick a topic, any topic, and argue for hours with total strangers on the Internet while there are people on this globe facing starvation, dehydration, genocide, oppression and pain.

We are so very smart, and yet, still so damn ignorant.

I realized when I was a teenager that I was joining a world that belonged to generations before me. A world with old ideas that didn’t come from me, didn’t come from my peers or my family, but from people long dead. Humanity is good like that, recycling old ideas again and again with concepts like tradition to reinforce. But they were bad ideas, like women were weak, that money was more important than life, that a job will provide if you are loyal when already jobs were proving the opposite, that an imaginary deity made it okay to be hateful to minorities. We’re living in a world built by the past, a corpse of buildings and dying ideas, trying to follow rules that don’t relate to current situations, and I’m not sure why no one else seems to notice.

Our houses cost too much while there are 6 times the amount of empty houses in America than there are homeless people. Our laws are mostly bigoted with the intent to imprison black people and make rich people safe from the poor. Religion has completely corrupted the American system of government on all levels and is pushing inequality among the genders in the hopes of oppressing women down to their uteruses while also pushing bigoted ideas against minorities. The high school educational system teaches nothing of value when it comes to living in a world where you must work to survive, while less than 70% of students go to college. And college has little to teach of actual work unless you have a career field selected, but still many students experience burn out and fatigue learning things that will have no actual value in their lives–seriously. Many courses are of information that isn’t needed but is required, which you must pay for, and the course load is damaging. Add in the fact that many students deal with paying off student loans for their useless education long into their adult lives while those who never went to college face being shamed in a society who demands degrees for minimum wage jobs.

It’s broken system after broken system and instead of fixing it, or some responsible mind just showing up and saying let’s fix this! people keep doing the same thing, feeding the broken system, showing up to deport citizens because it’s easier to blame a broken system while getting that paycheck instead of questioning and changing something that no one seems to know how to fix. Are the modes of change gone from these broken systems or is it really just no one will be responsible for them from the mob rule apathy once a group of people are involved?

That’s a thing, btw, very interesting to watch. You can observe it in yourself too. The moment an individual sees something that requires action–be it a dog runs into the street, or someone cries for help, or even a piece of trash on the ground–they will be apt to act. Impulse, instinct, morality, etc. But if that individual is in a group, or is joined by a group, suddenly they find themselves waiting for someone else to act, to take responsibility, to fix the problem or give them permission to not act. This is a genetic software thing. I don’t know if it’s a fear to stand out, or sudden apathy, or even politeness. It’s bizarre but it happens all the time. Humans in group settings can be less proactive because of the group, while alone they might sail forward without a doubt in the world. What a terrifying reality when you apply it to congress, huh?

Humans are dragging old genetic software with them into the modern world like tribalism, PTSD, compartmentalizing, and drone like behavior while facing a global environmental crisis of their own creation. And what do they do? Well, in America, they bitch about a wall while imprisoning children at the border and claim how safe they’re making their country.

I wonder if there will be a future where they can have a Horrible Histories of this time and just how will it compare to all those witch burnings, genocides, and slavery of the past? We as a species have pushed our evolution outside of our bodies and into something as intangible as knowledge and language to build the systems we live in all around us. It gives us great flexibility and removes so many limits. Will we be able to rise above our own genetic software, or will our current evolutionary design prove to be too flawed to improve upon?

A Mote In God’s Eye was a fucking amazing book, and this mindset totally reminds me of it.

I have rambled enough, I think, babes. Fevers tend to do it to me. Night. ^.^

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January 22

It’s fucking cold!

I am so grateful to have gotten that multiple chemical sensitivity mess sorted out before winter. Living out of the car is doable during the summer, but with it being between -3 and 5 degrees the last few days, I’m so glad that I have a bed and blankets topped with cats to snuggle under. I hope people are warm and safe and happy.

When I was going through condensing the stories into events instead of scenes, I found myself skimming through a few wondering when I was going to be able to finish those fanfics. Intangible literally has only 4-5 scenes left until it’s done and I totally miss the Wayward Dragon and Sleeping Dogs fics. I don’t know why I was so blocked to finish Intangible… I think it was a negative comment I got when I posted it on a different website, and it just took the fun out of it for me. That could actually be why I don’t do comments much on this website. I like to think I can weather criticism, but there’s this little creative spirit inside me that just doesn’t want to play when people start talking shit about what I’m making, you know? Like, I just don’t want the battle over something that’s supposed to be fun. Let them complain or criticize elsewhere about my choices for the characters but in a place I don’t have to see. I think my best answer was to avoid it completely to ensure I wouldn’t get blocked like that again.

It can be overwhelming, answering comments. Even the positive ones demand from me, as weird as that may sound. I get stuck feeling like I need to say the right thing, or something creative, engaging, genuine–anything–back. When I was big into making digital art, it was one of the hardest things for me then, too. I had a few images blow up from getting daily deviations on DA and I dunno, it can feel like this overwhelming obligation to converse like a normal, reasonable human being when I just want to be quiet (and unreasonable. XD) My inbox would get full, and responding would feel like a job, a mountain to catch up on instead of conversation.

I’m glad to say that hasn’t been a problem as a writer–I’m prompt for the most part and nothing has gotten mountain size (thank fuck,) but sometimes it’s still pressure to feel, well, interesting. (How to be genuine and interesting? Don’t be me. XD) Then there are days where comments are like a happy drug of getting to know people, connecting, sharing and having amazing ideas grow around these stories I love so much. I guess my mood is the deciding factor (that unreasonable thing) in all this. Manic depressive conversational skills. Hmm… sounds right.

On a less weird but just as random topic, I’m mid scene of Fox leaping about a hundred feet in the air in his fox form, where he then shifts back to human mid air and grabs onto the hands of the guy ballsy enough to catch him before he can go tumbling to the ground. I really want to find ways to ‘show’ what it is to be a shifter. I feel like I neglected that a lot in Demon Arms. Sure, I said shifters were stronger than humans, but explaining verses having a flying Fox are two totally different things.

Fox breakdances, btw. It never came up, but it’s totally his thing. 😉

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January 21

612 pages down…

Ugh, so I finished getting the library condensed and ready for the newest membership plugin. Later, though. Like a week or two. @_@ Just went through and was able to delete 612 pages and my eyes and brain just hate me at the moment. Added new security stuff, all this coding bullshit.

Hate this computer shit. Hopefully things will be much smoother, etc, but still, fucking hate this neurotic stuff. We built computers so we wouldn’t have to act like machines, not so that we would train our brains to be computers.

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