I have done some stories, on occasion, with people turning into objects–usually underwear–but I tend to shy away from those themes more generally. For one thing, inanimate TFs aren’t really my favorite ideas–I use them, but usually not as a end goal. Also, its really hard to generate conflict and a good story around an inanimate TF, because it removes all agency from the character being transformed. The story, then, has no capacity for any sort of push and pull between antagonist and protagonist, because one character is now completely powerless by definition.

As for finality and death…I don’t really find death to be particularly erotic–or I should say, I don’t find the death of a body to be particularly erotic. I mean, most of the characters in my stories do die, at least so far as their non-physical identity is concerned. They emerge on the other side of the story as someone entirely different in most cases: new motivations, new desires, new bodies, new memories, etc. You can call it a torturous limbo if you want, but those characters are people too–they have as much inherent worth and value as the people they were before. But more than that, death is lazy writing. Stories don’t really end, the author just stops paying attention to them. There is no real finality in these stories, and that’s the point. I suppose you could say I prefer to leave up to the reader’s imagination, but I’m by no means expecting the reader to keep doing the work, imagining a story beyond what I’ve written for them. In each case, the story I wanted to tell has reached its conclusion. There’s a new status quo beyond, but that’s a set up for a different story, not the one that’s finished.

I just want to see people write more! I get off to lots of stuff, but reading my own stories gets kind of boring after a while, so I always enjoy seeing something from another author, even if it’s not the sort of thing I usually enjoy.

Honestly, I’m not at all qualified to even attempt to answer this question with any sort of academic force, so I’m just going to speak from my personal experience instead.

I never had much luck with physical queer spaces, but whether that was because the spaces themselves were collapsing, or those spaces were losing the ability to provide the sort of resources I was looking for, or because I was locked out of many of them at the time I was pursuing them (can’t get into a gay bar when you’re under 21) it’s difficult to really know. The queer club at my college didn’t interest me much, and seemed less interested in offering personal support and camaraderie than pushing for visibility and political action, which I wasn’t particularly interested in. Beyond that, I couldn’t enter into spaces reserved for queer adults, and I felt…really fucking alone for a while. 

It was probably one of the worst depressions of my life, because I felt so alone, at a liberal college, which I had been telling myself for years would finally give me a chance to be gay in the way I wanted to be–but which I quickly found out couldn’t actually provide me with the sort of support/relationships I was looking for. In the end, I turned to online spaces instead–at the time, that was Bear411.

I can’t say that it was perfect–my husband and I met on there, but at the same time, I also suffered through a couple of abusive relationships with men on there as well. But at the very least, it was a place I could go to find men in some semblance of a community which reflected the sort of life I wanted to live. Seeing a bunch of older gay bears online gave me some hope that there was a future for me, somewhere.

I don’t know who or what I’d be without the internet, but I think you can’t avoid, with this question, the usurpation of physical spaces my non-physical ones instead. I think gay bars and queer spaces aren’t dying because of a growing acceptance–they’re dying because they’ve been replaced by apps and other internet spaces–which isn’t to say, of course, that these non-physical spaces are necessarily better. 

I know that alienation is fairly prevalent. I feel it, and it’s a feeling that has been stated by other queer friends I know. You open up an app, and there are so many *men” around you, and yet it feels like you are completely, utterly, alone, typing at a screen, waiting for a reply, sharing pics. The few gay bars I have been to, especially in the Seattle area, can feel very…insular. Unless you know the right people, or are displaying the right look/gear/appearance, it can be…a really lonely experience. In Europe, the atmosphere is very different, for reasons I don’t quite know how to articulate. I feel at home in a gay bar in Amsterdam, even as a tourist, in a way that the Seattle Cuff, Eagle, or Diesel will always feel like foreign territory when I walk in.

As for gay culture, assimilation is real, and assimilation is a problem, but gay spaces can’t do anything to stop that, whether they are physical or not. The problem isn’t that gays are leaving spaces and joining mainstream ones–the problem is that displaying cultural and physical signifiers of queerness and femininity are, at the present time, really fucking dangerous for one’s safety. It’s a new closet: one where you can be gay and out, as long as you are white, nationalist, monogamous, follow the gender binary, and otherwise cater to the comfort of cishet society. It’s a closet I think a lot of people, gay men in particular, are more than happy to inhabit, but it’s incredibly harmful to the cause of queer liberation. 

The problem, to my eyes, is that queers stopped demanding liberation, and began asking for tolerance. We got what we asked for, but it isn’t what we should want, or what we need.

I’d be more interested in a story involving a young guy from San Fran going to the south to live with some family for the summer, only to come back…different, while the rest of his friends in SF try and figure out what happened to him, the more time they spend with him…well, the more they start to see the appeal of country life themselves.

But isn’t being Pewdiepie torment enough?

Nah, in all seriousness, he would end up at a cam site instead of his usual streaming services, and be forced to obey the commands of all the old perverts on the site, installing cameras all over his apartment to livestream himself 24/7, begging men to come over and abuse him in whatever way the perverts desired, just for the attention.

I live in the Seattle area of Washington State. If you want to buy me a drink, and can’t do it in person, you can always throw money at my Patreon too–I guarantee at least some of my budget goes to beverages of various varieties. That said, I’m not opposed to meeting fans irl, but you’d have to come off anon and send me a message for that to happen.

You can ruin someone’s life through muscle growth, of course–but frankly I don’t find muscle at all attractive, and so, I just don’t have much interest in writing it. The reason for that, is that for me, ruination is all about forcing someone to give in to sloth and excess and gluttony, but maintaining that sort of muscle mass is all about regimentation, effort, and incredibly hard work. I can see the appeal in that too, of course, but personally it does little for me.

As far as change-by-magic and wish fulfillment go, your question is based on a misunderstanding. Wish fulfillment, as a type of story, doesn’t have anything to do with the type of MacGuffin being employed. For example, a character who wants to be a powerlifter, and is conventionally trained by a benevolent character to become a powerlifter, is still a wish fulfillment story–the character, in the end, got what they wanted with minimal conflict. 

In fact, the vast majority of my stories are magical in one way or another (or at the very least, not realistic–in the sense that a chance-by-science is just as impossible in real life as a change-by-magic would be) regardless of whether they contain weight gain or muscle growth, or whatever transformation is going on. I prefer magic because it allows stories to develop quicker, and for scenes to involve more contrast without requiring massive leaps in time. That’s a personal preference of mine, but of course you could have a story developed only through conventional means too.

I wrote a short metawriting essay on the first question a few years back, actually, which you can find here. In the end, it really comes down to your particular style. I myself err on the side of leaving details out, because I trust the reader to be able to fill in the blanks with their own imagination. In particular, I get very tired of reading stories where the first 1000 words are meticulous descriptions of the characters involved, listing everything from height and weight to eye color etc. It just isn’t relevant, but a lot of new authors feel compelled to include this sort of exposition, because they don’t trust the reader enough. The only way to make exposition interesting, is to make the exposition relevant. If it has no actual bearing on the story, then cut it. 

As for developing ideas…it’s a skill you have to learn, I suppose. I personally have a lot of different systems that I use to brainstorm new ideas, and most of them basically involve randomly grouping porn pictures together until they inspire an idea in me that I want to write about. That said, it sounds like you aren’t lacking in ideas, but rather struggling to develop those ideas into full fledged stories. That’s a bit of a tricky question, and not one with an easy, one-size-fits-all answer, but I would offer a few questions you might ask yourself when you run into writer’s block.

1. Is there enough conflict? That is, can is there a way for the characters in the story, both protagonists and antagonists, to act against one another? This sounds like a no-brainer, but more often than not, when I’m struggling to develop an idea, the main problem is that one side of the story lacks any real power or agency in the narrative. The best stories provide opportunities for characters to try and affect the outcome of the story in their own ways–that’s where the best development comes from in my opinion.
2. What do these characters want? This is a question you have to ask–and it’s amazing how often I forget to do this when I’m coming up with ideas. A story can only progress through character action, but those characters won’t act if they have no motivation. You need a ‘why’, before you can ever get to a ‘how’. You have to remember that both protagonists and antagonists need motivation as well. Rethinking about why your characters are involved in this story at all, and what they are trying to get out of it, can help show you the way forward through a plot muddle.
3. Is there something I can do to complicate the story? Sometimes, what a story is missing is a new element which shakes up the conflict and reorients the power of the characters in the story. It could be the introduction of a new MacGuffin, a new character, a new turn of fortune or an inversion of power. If you’ve hit a wall and don’t know where to go next, the introduction of a new element can help push things through. That said, if you add in too much, the entire story begins to bloat–so use this advice with caution. Throwing more shit in won’t make a bad story automatically better, but it might give you a new direction for a decent story to take off and shine.

Lastly, it’s important to remember that not every idea is a good idea. Be willing to discard story ideas that feel boring or overdone, or which don’t excite you, or thing of new ways to liven them up. If an idea feels boring to you, then there’s no reason to think a reader will be anymore excited to read it when it’s done.

As always, I don’t take requests through my askbox. If you’d like to see a story like that, then there’s a few things you can do.

1. You can sign up for my Patreon at the one dollar level or higher. This lets you submit ideas at the beginning of each month, which I use as inspiration for a small collection of flash fiction stories I produce for Patreon supporters. 
2. You can try your hand at writing it yourself! If you give me the start of a story that you don’t feel like, or don’t know how to finish, and I’m intrigued by it, I have been known to fix things up and extend partial stories for my own amusement.

There’s always other authors to ask as well! You try @gravick, @mcbaer, @chaoticdjinn, or @vikingzombieboyfriend for starters.