Happy New Year and Dropbox Update

Below is my mild retrospective and thoughts on 2024/2025. Read that if you like to know a bit of what makes me tick. Otherwise, I've updated the dropbox with all of 2024 (and I think all covers but I may have missed one somewhere). Here's the link:
The Dropbox Link

As always, I appreciate your support through Patreon and however else you interact with my content. Here's to another year of smut!

The Retrospective:

2024 is behind us now and good god was it a mess for me. Nothing exactly bad happened and obviously many other people have faced extreme hardship, but as a whole the year was just a mess.

Three components contributed to the mess. First, technical problems and stupidity. If you're wondering why The Statue has stalled, it's because a chunk of it got lost in that whole hard drive death fiasco. Nothing more arduous that rewriting something you've already written.

Second thing is biochemistry. Like many folks with ADHD, I have trouble remaining medicated due to tolerance issues. Having reached my cap on my old meds, I spent the first half of the year rotating through alternatives until finally going off of stimulants altogether. The new med is working, but it can take three to six months to fully onboard. I'm at month three and it's been positive so far, so fingers crossed.

Third, and this is partly linked to the other two, is that my reading went to shit. I firmly believe that reading is fuel for writing. So, if I read a bunch of junk, I will probably get writers block.

While I read 60ish books last year, most of them weren't good. 35 of them were WH40k books. I burned through the Gaunt's Ghosts series and mostly enjoyed it, so I thought I'd take a crack at the Horus Heresy. This was an error. Those books are all split into a third of plot, a third for action, and a third for unnecessary filler.

The other half of the read pile had some highly recommended works that didn't work for me. In particular Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and 11/22/63. The latter being a Stephen King, who I normally enjoy, was a particularly heavy bummer. (I think he did portal fantasy stuff better in other books).

But!, enough of the negatives, let's look at some positives. The big winner this year has been fans of the Cowtagious world. Spurred on by reader feedback, several new entries in that subseries went out, and I was quite happy with the set. The Brain Slug series was also a happy diversion, and I still have a few of those in my back pocket. I am also strangely fond of the writing I did in the Harlequin HSA entry.

So, what is to come in 2025? My main thought at the moment is to shore up characters and let them breathe on the page a bit before having them go feral with lust. One of the pitfalls of writing transformation heavy stories is that you tend to wind up with characters that are effectively not human in their motivations. I've always had ways of navigating around this without addressing it head on. For example, the HSA stories have the Agency coda which serves to put a human perspective on things. Other series have external characters like Thaddeus or even the Milktec radio announcement blurbs that run at the end of those stories.

Softening that jump while remaining in the characters is a goal (if I have to have one) and it's why I think some stories remain popular, Cowtagious and a few others.

I've rambled long enough. Thanks for coming along on this ride, here's to a good 2025, and happy reading!