Happy 2024 and Dropbox Update

I'll put this bit up at the top. The Dropbox is now current for January 2024.  I don't think I broke anything this time, but if I did let me know.  And now for a bit of a look back and look forward:

2023

I think it went well? It's all a bit of a blur, really.  I'm certainly pleased with my output, but in the never ending game of plate spinning that doing this requires I fell off on my publishing cycle.  On the other hand, I brought all my stories up to a (mostly) standard form and have them all available now through the patreon.  The revamp on Nymph went well.  Convent of Sin worked out much better than its predecessor.  Took some big swings expanding the Milktec universe, had a fun time with Moo Manor, and added a good bit to the ever expanding weirdness of the HSA.

Looking back, last year I claimed 250k words including some reworked content.   This year, with no reworks counted, I wrote another 300k words.  For some comparison, if you put that on an 8x11 page, double spaced, it would be a 1200 page stack.  Obviously, word count is not the best metric for quality and I could certainly edit things down a good bit, but for me it's a comfort to see that despite the mental anguish that occasionally goes along with writing, my output isn't faltering.

2024

So, where to from here? My first step is to kick my own ass out of this "lots of irons in the fire" phase and zero my focus in on something.  This weirdly follows a seasonal trend.  Holidays tend to bork my brain while the spring and summer allow me to do a lot of output.  

My main thought between looking back at 2023 and looking ahead to 2024 is to lean a bit more toward the visceral in my style.  If you go back and read my earlier stuff, like the original Crimson Milk, I tended to use more explicit language rather than the sensual/spicy stuff I drifted toward later on.  I think I may have lost too much of that explicit stuff. I've been making jabs at getting more of that tone back in different stories, but on the whole I think a consequence of focusing on longer narratives was a softening in style for the spicy stuff.  It's a subtle distinction, but one that's been bugging me.  Another part of this is that I haven't written any truly evil characters having sex in a long time.  Even the big, horrible monsters are ultimately kind of nice.

With that in mind, my first "chunk project" for this year is currently a coin flip between this "werewolf apocalypse" and "mind control battle royale". I've written openings, sketched out characters and arcs, and all that jazz for both.  So it's more a matter of which captures my interest when I sit down to start.  Once the boulder moves, the rest flows pretty easily.  

Of course, I'll have odd little one offs here and there. More Milktec shenanagins, hucows, bimbos, and unspeakable monstrosities for the HSA to work out.  I've let the genderswap stuff languish but I've toyed with some ideas for longer form stuff on that one too.  I wrote a ton of the genderswap stories in a very short span of time and kind of burned out, but it's been a while.  I've also had several inquiries over the past year about writing continuations of some of the shorts from the different anthologies, and I've been giving that a lot of thought.  

If you've stuck with me this far, I hope you're pleased with what I've had to offer and that you'll be excited for what's to come. Your support is what has allowed me to keep up this more focused and slightly experimental way of putting out content.  So, thanks for that!

Happy Reading and Happy New Year!