This was back in Februrary. I was making good progress on an earlier story idea that was looking to easily be my longest story. It was around 100k in length and maybe halfway done before I decided to start it over and flesh it out more. I absolutely never wanted another story to take my attention away from that project. And when I saw these images and got this idea, it wasn't going to be anything long or epic. Here's the basic premise I started with:
A guy submits to a radical research project where he is slowly turned female, having his picture taken every few days. He doesn't think it will work and is still in denial at day 100 or so.
That's it. I figured the meat of the caption would be his denials. Like 'My hair doesn't look particularly feminine. My eyebrows are plucked, but they're still masculine. My lips aren't feminine except for the lipstick. My face would be perfectly normal without this makeup. These tits don't make me a woman... do they?' Something like that. As always happens with me, I started by fleshing out the scenario before the cap. He wasn't just a random guy or even just a college student, he was a PhD candidate in gender studies. It wasn't just a random research project, it was his thesis project and he was doing this in a group setting. They didn't get someone else for the project because they couldn't find the right volunteer, so he HAD to do it and once it was going he was more or less stuck because it was move forward and continue getting feminized or ruin his whole academic career....
Yeah, it became the beginning few paragraphs of the story. I didn't really stop or pause or change my mind on what the story was, I just decided I'd let it write itself out. If this ended up as a 10k story then fine. If it was 20 or 30 k, then fine. Well... I kept writing. At that time, I thought the story was finished up around 100k as I had written it ALL DAY and most of the night. It's actually one of the reasons I made the post "Length Matters". Here's what I had to say after that first big writing spurt:
"And then came yesterday. I saw an image and fell in love. I had already written an obscura (Bottom Ballerina Bitch) and made a cap (A Study In Contrasts), so I didn't exactly start writing this one early in the day. But it became clear pretty quickly that this could go on and on and on. So, knowing how much I was getting into longer pieces, I just let it all flow out of me. I wrote around my laundry. I wrote around lunch and dinner. I wrote around everything. My normal bedtime on a quiet weekend at home is between midnight and 2 AM. My head hit my pillow at thirty after five AM"
So, one of my biggest problems has always been proof reading. There's the relatively simple part of proof reading that's catching misspelled words and grammar problems. Site, sight. There, their, they're. To, two, too. But I can get lost in my own narrative sometimes, writing something that I expect to have a payoff later, and just never come back to it. Or worse, writing something that ends up contradicting something I'd previously written. So at this point, I still considered the story raw.
I started proof reading that week in little chunks. By the next weekend I realized I didn't like the story... or rather I didn't like where I went in the last half. It got dark. Real dark. As I had more or less worked through in the Length Matters post and some discussions outside of this blog that stories like this would be posted at Fictionmania, I figured this was worth a polish. At the very least, I could try to re-write it. If the re-write failed I would just dump the idea and put it out as is. BUT... I wanted another opinion.
Now understand, I'm not a big sharer. At least not for my own creations. I don't even like to complain about a problem in my outside life if I don't have a probable solution. So not only sharing my work before it's done but sharing work I wasn't happy with is a BIG step for me. Thankfully I had already gotten over that hump with one person and I quickly decided that sharing is sharing, and I could share this with her and see if it hit any of those good fun squirmy spots in her mind. She's Tygress who found me via this blog and I met on D+X (I got to be a big part of her transformation there!).
Anyway, she actually liked the darker theme but was happy to be my sounding board with where I wanted to go with the story. I started the re-write and.... well as is my modus operandi... it got out of hand. I was more or less writing the last half of a 50k story so it should come out about the same length. Maybe a little longer, maybe a little shorter. Instead of ending up at 100k, I ended up over 200k. I cut off half of the story and made the remaining part 4 times as long!
Admittedly a big portion of that was writing several squirmy sex scenes. As someone has recently commented on Fictionmania (it was published there this morning and it has 2 reviews as I write this) the story "gradually devoted into a bit of a trashy sexfest" My thought on that.... DAMN RIGHT! The only G or PG stories I write are the ones that only HINT at the trashy sexfest parts and I was perfectly happy with these parts. Not only were they hawt (IMO), but they still drove the story forward. I won't go into why or how they do that as I don't want to ruin a big portion of the story, but I do feel that they're necessary. You don't get to the ending of this story without the sex.
In fact, while writing I tend to like inspiration. I have my femmy music on when I write and I even found an image to keep my sexually interested when putting thought to screen. I've said before that I have a 21:9 widescreen monitor. Well it really helps with vertical based programs like MS Word and vertical photos. I had the above photo to one side and a photo I had found (I don't remember where I got it) on the other. This second photo had nothing to do with the story. It didn't remind me of any scene and wasn't indicitive of any scene I had in mind. It didn't even look like the 'Taylor' I had in the story. It was just wickedly hot and arousing and got me juices flowing (mental juices!) in the right direction. Here's what my desktop would look like when I was working on the story:
Anyway, Tygress really helped me rip through this and I was finished with the story by the end of April. That left me with two things... proof reading it and deciding how to present it.
We'll come back to proof reading. Presenting it isn't as easy as just posting it on Fictionmania. At least it doesn't have to be that easy. You see, at 200k (the final published version on Fictionmania is 221.5k) its one of the longer stories there. Many of the stories are under 10k. A lot of stories range from 10 to 30k. A good portion run between 30 and 100k. Then there are the long ones. I think I looked at it, and at 200k, this was in the top 10% for length of story on Fictionmania. What I've seen several authors there do is cut the story up. They'll post stories that go over 100k in-between 2 and 5 parts to keep them more bite sized length. Several of my favored authors do that.
Tygress and I went back and forth on that a bit with her making a very good case for separating the story up into 4 50k parts. There were even natural breaks at those locations. But at the end of the day, I decided on just staying with a single posting. At the end of the day, I don't like waiting for multiple parts to post and I don't like scanning through multiple parts to see if the story fits what I want.
For example, I tend to read stories like this with the sex in mind. Call me dirty all you want, but I don't go to Fictionmania to read stories without sex. And even with sex, I don't want the story of someone that just changes into a woman and starts gleefully sucking and fucking everything that moves. So I'll pull up the story and do a search on terms I like... suck, fuck, blow, cock, cum. Stuff like that. I'll scan ahead to those parts and see if that fits what I'd like to see. If that part works, then I'll back up and read the whole thing, hoping the story is as exciting as the sex scenes. Well... that's hard in multi part stories. If they only have 2 parts of a 4 part story published, maybe the hot part only exists in the last part (which is fine!). Or even if they have all 4 parts published, I still have to search through all parts to see if it's what I like.
So publishing it all together was where I ended up. I could always change my mind after proof reading. And proof reading? I honest expected to do that in one sitting and have this up if not before May, then by the second weekend in May. That obviously didn't happen. Work, life, and everything got in the way. I just wasn't in the mood or was too busy to devote enough time to sit and read. I tried putting it on my iPad so I could read it while watching television, but that was more burdensome than I thought and really just took me out of the mood to read my own smut.
I actually pushed for time this weekend to get it done. I honestly should have been doing other things, but I wanted this to be done and off my plate. So I finished read it, re-wrote the ending so it echoed a new beginning I had written, and send it in last night.
I know with a lot of my work I'll say that I find it on the meh side of the scale. It's not great, but I'm happy with it. Those opinions will often change. I'll think less of the work later or hold it in higher regard at a later time. I just really had to sit with it for awhile. Well I've been sitting with this story in one way or another for three and a half months now and I can honestly say I'm really proud of it. I like the characters, I like the pacing, I like the sex scenes, I like the multiple arcs... I'm just really happy with this. I think if everybody read this and said they disliked it, it wouldn't change my opinion on it. I'd accept that maybe writing isn't for me as I don't know that I could honestly write for an audience of one, but it still wouldn't change my mind on the quality of the story.
I know a lot of you don't go in for longer stories and that's fine. But if you can read a longer story like this and not have it be a burden, then I'd really REALLY like you to give it a go. I honestly think that if you like my caps and obscuras, you'll like this too. Maybe even as much as I do!
So, without further ado, I present to you...
Its been three days and I still haven't been able to finish this story! So sexy!
ReplyDeleteThank you blog glog! I hope you're able to finish it... or at the very least enjoy some of the parts over and over again *wink*.
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