Haven’t you considered writing a longer piece that would just happen to contain several various transformations instead of just a bunch of stories? That way you could always try marketing it as a gay novel (assuming you come up with an actual story instead of just a random excuse to make the two characters have sex) instead of a collection of porn stories.

Yes, I have thought of that. Here’s why I decided against it.

I have several ideas for novels–and several that I’m in the midst of writing, including City of Bears, however, I don’t think novels are the best way format to use when writing in the MC/TF genre.

MC/TF stories are sustained by the character’s transforming and controlling one another. Usually, these conflicts are so one sided that they can be resolved within the scope of a short story. That is (at the most simplistic level) there are two characters, one character changes and controls the other, they have sex, the end.

Now, the question is, how do we expand that idea in order to create a longer work, that is, a novel? I’ve tried a few methods, but there are two which stand out. The first is to extend the change and control period of the story. This can be done my making the change conventional rather than supernatural (because conventional changes necessarily require time, whereas supernatural changes do not) or by simply slowing down the rate of change in the story. This works, but in most of the stories that use this, I tend to lose interest, because when you stretch out the change, you decrease the payoff of the change itself. Something that might have been exciting happening all at once tends to become duller the slower it takes.

The second method is to create an episodic story, like you mentioned. In an episodic novel, you multiply the number of transformations, thereby making a longer work, and then connect those transformations thematically and narratively into one story. However, I don’t particularly see the use in this method, having already written several stories which employ it. In the end, the episodes always tend to feel more separate than unified, and always feel a bit…disjointed.

Now, in City of Bears Series Three, I’m trying something a bit different, which is to extend the story beyond the change, in order to deal with the ramifications of what the story caused, but I’m still playing with that idea, and don’t want to rely on it just yet.

In the end, I’m trying to strike a balance. About half the story will be a new long work with several transformations, like you’re looking for. I then want to pair it with some thematically similar material that I think will enhance the entire collection. I don’t want to just pad out the collection with stories I’ve already written though, which is why I want to take the time to revise and extend some stories I’ve already started. In the end, I’d like the stories to stand stronger together as a curated group, than they would on their own. I hope that explains my reasoning.