Oh Wow! It's October!

Hello everyone! It's October, it's October, it's October!

The beginning of the month post has returned... as you can see. I mean, it's right here in front of you and you're reading it, right? Though given that it's been a couple of months since there's been one you might not even be aware that they exist, or you could have forgotten what they even are, so...

The beginning of the month post is a post where I tell you all the sorta things that are going to be coming this month! Y'know, what my plans are, what I have in the works, all of that stuff... I also usually bundle in some general information, like how I'm feeling or what's going on with me. Pretty simple, right?

Anyway, I haven't done the beginning of the month over the past couple of months because my motivation was very low and I was, well, very burnt out. There were a whole lot factors that contribute it and I don't want to go into all of them because I'd really rather focus on looking ahead, but it was a very dark period in my life: probably the darkest things have been in many years.

You know the bit that sometimes happens in superhero movies where they lose their powers or whatever? It was a bit like that, only instead of flight or laser beams or whatever it was my ability to write. I'd sit at the computer for hours, sometimes typing but mostly staring, and I was just... never happy with anything that I wrote. Every paragraph, every sentence, every word, it all just kinda felt like... well, wet hot garbage.

This wasn't the case. For the most part, anyway! I wasn't writing garbage, I was just at a point where my self-confidence was so deep in the pits that it looked like trash. It could have been complete gold and I still would have thought it was shit frankly. This is a feeling that grew more and more as the months went on. The longer I went without writing something, without completing something, the more and more my self-confidence plummeted.

In other words, the longer this went on, the more my mental state deteriorated, which meant that it became harder and harder and harder to write, which naturally made my mental state deteriorate even more, and... yeah, one hell of a feedback loop to be stuck in.

This could have gone on forever, probably. Month passes, I try to write, nothing gets wrote, another month passes, I'm even more miserable and still, nothing gets wrote, nothing gets completed, no satisfaction is found... eventually it'd get to the point where I'd just give up, probably, and that'd be that and that would suck, wouldn't it?

Obviously I don't want it to get to that point: I want to keep writing until the end of my days, honestly. It's my biggest passion and the thing that fulfils me the most, so... to drop it because I can't do it is the most miserable thing ever. So, what's the solution?

Write!

Or at least, that feels like the solution to me. If I'm sad because I haven't been writing and sharing my work with others, then writing and sharing my work with others ought to make me less sad, right? Or at least it should bolster my confidence again. I miss the feeling of a job well done, of uploading a story or a game and knowing that I've done my best on it.

So, this month, I have a plan! Or a challenge for myself. A pretty tough challenge, I think, but challenging myself is what I need to do now also! And this challenge forms the basis for the content that I'll be posting up this month!

My challenge to myself this month is to publish around ten stories on Patreon. I have a couple of these wrote already so I have a bit of a head start, but for the most part this is going to be stuff that's entirely off the cuff. Some of them will be commissions that I desperately need to catch up on (less off the cuff) but for the most part they're going to be stories that I'm writing just to, well, write them, y'know?

Some of them will be short and sweet, others will be long and involved, others will be... somewhere in the middle of that? Expect a mixture of narrative-focused 'erotica' and smut-focused 'smut'. A variety of different vore types, macro/micro stuff, and who knows, maybe some other things? Some things might be based on simple ideas, other ones might be more complicated. At least one of them will be polled, as in I'll go, hey, which one of these characters d'you want to see eat someone or whatever?

Because of this there won't be a game update this month. I want to focus on writing and just writing. I need to get back into my groove with content creation and I think that this is the best way of doing it. I also feel like I've fallen behind on just writing stories over the past year or so, so having a month where I plan to upload ten (or even more) of them will eliminate that feeling a little, you know?

Next month (and December) there will be a big focus on game stuff. So don't worry, I'll be getting around to that very soon too. I just need to warm myself up before I throw myself back into the huge project that is wrapping up the end of A Tiny Furry In A Huge World v1.2.

Anyway! So there's going to be a story roughly every three days. That's the plan this month! I feel really confident in my ability to do this and I'm really looking forward to sharing my work with everyone this month.

The beginning of the month post is usually structured a little better than this - split into sections rather than just one big ramble - but I think that my plans this month and my mental health and how I'm feeling has all been summarised pretty neatly in the paragraphs above. So, I think that'll be all for the first beginning of the month post in a while!

For everyone who has been worrying, I am doing a lot better. I've definitely made some promises that have been broken (the release of A Tiny Furry In A Huge World v1.2 for example) and I want to thank everyone for their patience in regards to that and my absence. I know I've said it a bunch already but it genuinely does mean a lot. I couldn't have a better community of lovely people. You all inspire me to write more than anything else, and this month I plan on proving that.

I'll see you in a day or two with the first of this month's stories. Until then!