Whew. My Love Has No Boundaries story made it in on the deadline, complete with an illustration by the lovely and charming Rachel Roach for the cover. I’m looking forward to sharing!
And in the meantime, I’m pondering the merits of a self-published collection. People who’ve known me since before I had the courage to start subbing to publishers will remember the Bijou, a big sprawling collection of erotic short stories about slave boys working in an extremely fancy whorehouse. (Expensive boy whores are a perennial weakness of mine.) I’ve been sorting through them lately and — well, wincing at how rough they feel now, and how little made it into the stories beyond all the sexy bits. But also remembering how much I love those boys and their romances and their determination to find their way to happy endings. (Also, blindsided by how badly I want the madam and her charming libertine patron to get together.) So it’s extremely tempting to pull those character arcs together and try to make a few somethings out of this, but dang is that going to take time and energy. The most complete arc right now is just shy of 40k words, nearly a third of the total; it’s pretty obvious they were the pairing of my heart, in all their dysfunctional D/s adoration. Then there are… four other arcs that are shorter but follow distinct characters/groups, plus a fifth one that would probably just get booted off most retailers’ sites because it’s so heavy on the twincest, plus another 30k or so of stories that don’t fit neatly into any of the bits above.
Probably I need to write some things down on actual physical bits of paper so I can spread them out and rearrange them and figure out what crucial bits of a satisfying narrative arc each group is missing. Possibly I need to do this while somebody stands over me with a taser to keep me on task. I should start looking for volunteers.
…In between continuing to job hunt and trying to teach myself programming, obviously. Isn’t there a witty saying somewhere about being under pressure and creating great things? I hope so.
oh my gosh, I would line up all internet-style for a Bijou collection. <3 :D I'm glad that you're even thinking about it. :DDD
Good luck with the jobhunt!
Thank you! I am trying to stay optimistic. ^^
And yeah, would love to get something done for the Bijou — when I pulled everything together into one file, leaving out the bits with Drake and Gabriel, the little unconnected snippets that went nowhere, and the explicit Nikolai/Tristan (wow, unsellable)… I wound up with 127k words. HOW DID I WRITE SO MUCH ABOUT BOY WHORES. A lot of it feels clumsy to me by now, with what I’ve learned about writing since, but there are still a lot of good moments and characters I love. ;3;