I haven’t done one of these in quite a while, and I know some of what I will write below has been said in asks off and on, but this would be a very good time to address it. Most likely, the number one question I get from readers is about City of Bears–or more precisely, when City of Bears is coming back. It turns out I finally have a short answer for all of you! The answer is tomorrow!

Just in time for Christmas, right?

I have a long answer too, however, and it has a lot of important caveats to it, before you all get carried away. Really, I just want to soften the blow a bit–if you were looking for a continuation of the story I was telling before, from “Big Bears on Campus” through “Rising Powers”, I’m sorry to say that this isn’t what you will be getting, and I want to take a moment to talk about why, and why “City of Bears” means so much to me, and why it has taken me so long to get back to it–after all, it’s been five years now since that November where I hammered out 60,000 words as quickly as I could, but when I stopped and looked at what I was doing, and where the story seemed to be heading, I couldn’t help but feel a creeping dissatisfaction, and one I couldn’t quite explain, even to myself. So I sat on it, planned on continuing it later, and then eventually shelved it along with many other unfinished stories of mine. I knew that there was more to tell, and more to write, but what I had written then wasn’t what I needed it to be.

There were a few false restarts along the way. I tried on occasion to pick up where I’d left off, but I’d lost the thread of the story–or rather, the way I had initially planned the story developing was no longer the direction that I wanted to see it go. Tristan’s magical hold on the world was always intended to be temporary, in one sense or another. I never really could imagine a scenario, when I started plotting things out, where he won–it just didn’t seem to make sense any other way. It didn’t necessarily mean that the world was put back the way it had been, but the entire notion seemed too outlandish to really be sustainable. As I’ve written before, in various replies to asks on the topic, the question of what a queer future looks like is one which is very difficult to try and answer, especially within a hetero framework, because the future, for heteroculture, is always defined within generations of progeny–but as queers, that framework crumbles to bits very quickly, for obvious reasons.

My original plotting tried to address this conundrum in a few different ways, but none of them really felt satisfying or thought through. It seemed to me that City of Bears might actually be a dystopia of sorts, a society predicated on its own end, or one which required a parasitic relationship with a society outside of itself in order to bring in new bodies to sustain it. I tried various ways of conceiving it as a world that I might want to use, but none of them felt authentic–in part because I didn’t want to try and explain how something like the City of Bears could exist. But an origin story is, by necessity, the creation of a world. By rooting the narrative in our own world, I had necessitated, in some ways, the need to explain how it could function as one.

So I sat on it. I considered the possibility that it might just be a dead story, and that I’d never continue it. I considered the possibility that I was overthinking everything a bit too much, as an excuse to foster writer’s block. But I kept writing other stories, and as I did, a few other building blocks fell into place. I managed to separate out and distinguish between setting and world, and decided, firmly, that I much preferred to use the former. Pigtown, as I’ve written before, is a setting. The same with Louisiana Acres. These settings recur, but they are never the same. Pigtown isn’t one bar, in one city–it exists anywhere, potentially. It can be anywhere, and confront anyone–as a dive bar in the country, as a seedy sex club, as your friendly neighborhood pub with a suspicious curtain in the back, as a corruptive neighborhood spreading through the city. Pigtown is all of those things and none of them, because it is just the set piece to the actual story itself. It took me a while, but I realized, at last, that City of Bears didn’t need to be some world I had to build. It too, could be a setting of sorts–and when I had that realization, I felt like I was awash in possibility.

Still, it took me a while to work up the nerve to actually sit down and write something using it, in part because I wasn’t quite sure how to translate all of my ideas from before into a different framework, but a few important qualities stood out to me. City of Bears is, fundamentally, about identity and change–especially in the later entries. What would it be like to exist in a place where, from day to day, you might not even be the same person, with the same memories and desires, as you were the day before? If identity was rendered so fragile, then what would it even be like to exist as an agent in those sorts of circumstances, where a puff of the wrong cigar, or wrong turn around a corner could send you spiralling into some entirely new life? Those were the stories I found exciting. But beyond that, City of Bears has always been, to me, about imagining the possibilities, and the hope, of a queer community utterly divorced from the cishet social structure we all find ourselves in. It wouldn’t be a utopia by any means, but it would be radically different–and that is something I have always longed to see.

And so, last week, the kernel of a story came to me, and I wrote it, and here it is. I’m really fond of it–it feels new to me in a way a lot of my writing doesn’t. It might be a bit confusing, and for that I apologize–I’m not a fan of explaining the rules of a world in story–I’d rather just show them in action, and this story is as much about introducing the mechanics of the setting, to you, the readers, and as a way for me to test out some ideas. In any case, this is just a short story, meant to be self-contained, and next year I hope to write more using the setting. There are some characters and conflicts and stories from the first run of the series that I definitely want to revisit–but what those stories might look like I don’t know, as of yet. Like everything else, I’ll figure it out as I go along.

In any case, thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed all the stories this year, and thanks again to everyone who supported me on Patreon–especially through the tumult of the last month. As I wrote earlier, given that Patreon isn’t rolling out the fee changes after all, I won’t be changing the cost of any of my reward tiers–that said, as of right now, I’m just about $20 shy of the seven hundred dollar mark, which would mean content seven days a week for all of you! If that’s something you’d like to see, and you don’t already support me, you can find more details here.

This post was precipitated by a conversation I was having with @mcbaer about some of the differences in our two styles of writing. In particular, I told him that I appreciated his stories and the style of his writing because the choices he makes about where (and more importantly when) he focuses lead to quite different stories than I would have written, given the overarching narrative and plot. He wanted me to elaborate on that, but I was heading to bed, and now that it’s a new day, I realized it was going to take a bit of extra space to explain what exactly I was talking about, so I thought I would expound a bit on the concept of chronological focus, and it’s role in determining what sorts of stories we tell.

First, let me explain what I mean by the term chronological focus. To help explain what I mean, we’re going to use some diagrams of a possible narrative, let’s all it Narrative X. We might represent this narrative like so:

Narrative X involves a few plot points we’re all familiar with. There are two characters at the start. At point A, the two characters encounter a MacGuffin with some power to change or control the two characters. At point B, the two characters interact with the MacGuffin and become new, sexier, men. And finally, at point C, the two characters are in a new, sexual relationship of some kind–a new status quo different from the start.

Narrative X is very generalized–a good chunk of my stories, as well as the ones written by a fair number of other authors, can be said to be various versions of Narrative X. Often, what differentiates these stories from one another is content–in one version, the two characters might become a muscle bears thanks to magic gym equipment. In another, a magic cigar might turn one character into a leather bear dom, and the other into his submissive fat pig. I want to set these various content differences aside for the moment, however, and instead discuss the ways in which we can get different stories out of Narrative X not by applying different content, but by varying structure instead.

Before getting into the meat of this, however, I want to clarify one more distinction which will be important here. I’m going to be using the words “narrative” and “story” distinctly here, such that “stories” are defined as different versions of a more general “narrative”. The former are more specific than the latter. If you don’t keep this in mind, what I’m about to discuss will seem very confusing, and I will do my very best to be precise.

We have established already that two stories of the same narrative can look very different because of content–but structure plays just as important a role, and generally, this structure has to do with what point of the narrative we focus on within the story. That is, not every story is going to traverse the narrative from “start” to “end”. Instead, we can imagine, say, three different stories–Red, Green, and Blue–which all traverse different portions of the narrative–that is, each of these stories will possess a different chronological focus. Those three distinct stories might look something like this, when laid over our previous diagram of narrative X:

All three of those stories focus on different chunks of the narrative timeline. Let’s say, for a moment, that all three stories draw from the same narrative content–the characters are two friends in college, and one friend finds a smoking pipe in a thrift store–this would be point A to point B. He smokes the pipe, and becomes a older daddy bear, and when his friend arrives, he becomes his younger cub son–this would be the space from B to C. Lastly, reality shifts around them giving them new lives as a wealthy gentleman, and his obedient, horny cub slave–From C to the end. Now, given how the three story bars are structured, each story is going to end up omitting some of this content. The green bar, in the middle, would cover most of it–say, from the point of discovering the pipe, and ends around the point of reality changing for them both. The red story, on the other hand, spends more time developing the characters at the beginning, and stops right after the changes have begun, leaving everything which is to come up to the reader’s imagination, with help from the author by way of foreshadowing. The blue story is the opposite–it focuses after the change, as the two characters adjust to their new reality and forget their old lives. It’s all the same *narrative* but each *story* would be wildly different, with their own distinct climaxes and conflicts.

The choices an author makes, about where to start and where to finish their story–within the broader context of the narrative–is one of the more important things we need to consider. Do I want to focus mostly on the transformation? Then I’m going to go with something like the green story, but perhaps shrink it at each end even further. Do I like the idea of watching these two students find their minds overwritten by personalities which aren’t their own? That would be more along the lines of the blue story. Do I want to tease the reader a bit, setting up conflict and characters and then providing them something which stimulates their imagination? Then I’d go closer to the red story.

Of course, not every story is linear, either! You can imagine a completely different story in the narrative being told backward, in chunks. You begin with the older gentleman and his slave cub for a while, examining their life. You back up to the midst of their change, looking at them struggle. And then back up once more, showing how they arrived at such a predicament. The length of time you’re covering in the narrative also has no bearing on length of story. In the diagram above, it’s perfectly conceivable that the green story could be covered in fewer than a 1000 words, while the blue story span the length of a short novel. There are an infinite number of ways to cut up and tell a narrative structurally, and each one yields a unique story. The challenge as an author, is in figuring out what you want the story to *do* and then selecting a chronological focus which best accomplishes your goal.

This post was inspired by this question.

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I’m not sure I’ve mentioned this before here, if I did, it was years ago at this point, back when I was doing more metawriting posts. I think a lot of people who want to write (note, I did not just use the term “writers” to refer to this class of people) have a rather flawed understanding of how writing works, as a skill, and as a form of art. I’ve seen this reflected most often in people who are just beginning to explore writing, and it was a notion I myself had for years, before I finally got rid of it, and the notion is this: that stories just spring from writers fully formed, that the path from beginning to end is a straight line, that the secret to writing something is to just press onward. This idea? It’s bad. Super bad, not helpful, it’s a terrible way of trying to write, though like all lies that do the most damage, it does have a kernel of truth at the rotten core.

The kernel of truth is this–yeah, if you want to be a writer, you do have to get from that beginning to that end, and fill in all the stuff in between. That’s true. But that’s just not quite how it works–for me, and anyone else I’ve met who writes regularly. And to try and explain why, it helps to pull in some examples from other art forms where this misconception is a bit weaker, or easier to defeat. Think of, for example, a visual artist. A painter doesn’t just sit down at an computer and just create an image out of thin air. They have to sketch it first. Usually they have to sketch it more than once. Usually they have to scrap things and start over. Sometimes the process by which they get to the finished product doesn’t seem to make any sense at all, as they layer colors over and over. The actual process of art isn’t necessarily the same as the consumption of art. The same goes for music. Someone playing a composition, when they perform it, they go from the beginning to the end, linearly–but to think that is all it takes for music to happen is to ignore the hours of practice of the performer, the creation of the piece by the composer. That is to say, overall, the misconception is that people wrongly assume that the creation of art is analogous to the way that people consume art, when that simply isn’t the case. Ever. Not at all.

Here’s the reality of my process. I am usually writing anywhere from ten to fifteen stories at any one time. About a third of those are rolling commissions for Patreon. Another third are massive stories I work on when I have free time, usually all of them novel or novella length. The final third are all tumblr stories, usually intended to be posted episodically over one to two weeks, aiming for a bit of a “sweet spot” between three and six entries, or three to six thousand words. That’s often the best length to allow for a good amount of development without readers losing interest over time. This number, the ten to fifteen stories, doesn’t even include the sizable backlog of incomplete stories which I would like to finish at some point, but which all stalled for one reason or another. That doesn’t even include essays like this one, or writing I might be doing under my real name at the time. This tumblr is like an iceberg–I only end up posting a small chunk of what I might be writing at the moment, and in this mess, there are always bits of writing that end up being unusable, or lead to dead ends, or which I don’t care to develop for one reason or another. These, I call sketches.

It’s a bit like an artist and a sketchbook, I suppose, though the analogy is nowhere near perfect. In the same way an artist sketches ideas over and over in preparation for taking on a “final” version of that piece of art (I use quotes because, quite simply, no piece of art is ever final in a meaningful sense) I begin a massive number of stories at the same time, develop the ones that seem the most promising, and end up posting the ones that end up bearing reasonably decent fruit. But a lot of those stories are false starts. Usually, the false starts don’t even get out of my head–I have an idea, and I don’t even bother writing it down, either because I can see it’s a dead end, or stupid, or something I’ve already written too much of lately, or all of the above. Other times, they get farther, usually to the size of a tumblr entry. I take a second look and see nowhere for it to go, and so sketches are born.

I firmly believe that every author has sketches like this–at the very least, every writer I’ve met has something similar. It might be a side blog, where they post ideas and short posts. It might be a private journal where they simply talk about their day. Sometimes these sketches don’t even make it to paper or screen, they just remain daydreams. The important part is that writers write and tell stories–constantly. We have to. It’s the only way we can practice, it’s the only way we can develop new ideas and pieces of writing. There’s no shortcut. Goodness, I wish there was, it would make the entire process so much easier, to simply be able to invest every single word into a final story, to be completely efficient in the act of writing, in the same way artists might wish they never made a line they have to erase, and musicians wish they could never miss a note. But it simply isn’t possible.

The issue with writing is that our sketches aren’t a) as visible as other forms of art, often because they aren’t made public or are erased and thrown away, and b) when they are made public, people often tend to simple think of them as finished pieces of writing, even though they’re nothing of the sort. People know what a visual sketch looks like. They know what a musician practicing sounds like. But can you tell, by looking at a piece of writing, if it’s a sketch as I’ve described it? As the asker mentioned above, the post that set off this essay, “Coach Ray Gets Trained”, looked, for all intents and purposes, like a finished story, or rather, looked like a story that should be continued; it appeared to be a “finished” product. If I hadn’t added the word sketch there, no one would have known. The only reason I add that designation at all is in the interest of transparency–to signal that something cut this story short, for whatever reason that might be.

There’s nothing wrong with the question asked, of course. But this is important to keep in mind, when you’re reading stories–the vast amount of effort, which brought that bit of writing to life, is usually utterly invisible, like layers of paint hidden on a canvas. That’s just how art works–the constant practice of a useless skill, in the attempt to turn a moment into a bit of magic.

I got a couple of interesting questions over the last week, which I wanted to take some time to respond to in detail: 

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anonymous asked:

How can an online community give the kind of constructive criticism that writers give writers? It’s too late after the story has been posted.

Hold on, slow this down a bit, you’ve got a whole bunch of assumptions rolled up in this question that I don’t necessarily agree with, that I want to parse out before we go any further. Here are the big ones:

1. I assume that when you use the term “online communities” here, you’re talking about story collections like the NCMC, CYOC, and the like, but here’s the thing–I’m not necessarily convinced that these sorts of communities are the best place for writers to receive “““““Constructive Criticism””””” (see number two) at all. These sorts of collections ought to be designed to deliver stories to readers first and foremost. This isn’t to say that writers don’t need a place to get feedback; merely that sites which are focused primarily on readers’ needs are never going to be able to prioritize writer feedback in the first place.
2. Ugh…. “““““Constructive Criticism””””” is a pair of words I’ve given up using. I too, in the past was an avid defender of constructive feedback, but the last writing group I was a member of demonstrated to me that what we tend to think of as constructive is actually some of the least helpful criticism writers can receive. But first, what is constructive criticism, for those who aren’t familiar with the term? In general, it means that critics in a writing group ought to focus on ways the story could have been better, and minimize feedback about what the story does badly. This sounds nice, sure, but the reasons we want to focus on “““““constructive””””” comments are not because they are inherently better feedback, but because so called negative or destructive feedback tends to “hurt peoples’ feelings.” It’s true that no writer wants to be told that their story is a piece of shit. But the fact is, sometimes you write stories that are pieces of shit (fuck knows I have entire folders of them). Part of becoming a better writer is about taste. Its about knowing when the core of a story works and when it doesn’t. If one has to treat every story as though it is inherently redeemable, then suddenly nothing a writer produces can actually be bad by necessity. What good does that serve? If I write something bad, the most important feedback I could receive from someone would be telling me to scrap it and start over. This, however, isn’t at all  “““““constructive””””” and I know many, many critics who would go through all sorts of contortions to avoid saying anything like that to a writer, and that’s just a shame.
3. Leapfrogging off of that, writer’s don’t give very good criticism for the reasons above. Critics give good criticism (or rather, good critics give good criticism). I am not someone who thinks that, in order to critique something, you have to be versed in that particular art–that is, I hate hearing someone say, “What do you even know? Have you even written a story before?” Criticism is an art in and of itself. You don’t have to be a writer in order to know what a good story is–think about it, if that were true, then literally *every* story would be critically successful, because they would all be crafted by writers, who necessarily know what good stories are by virtue of being writers. It’s nothing but a circular defense of ego. The best criticism I’ve gotten has come from readers who have never written anything. Often, the most useless feedback comes from writers hoping I will turn around and compliment their work in return. Of course, this isn’t to say someone can’t be both a good writer *and also* a good critic, simply that such a creature is relatively rare, and even then, their skill as a critic has little to do with their skill as a writer.
4. Is it really too late after a story is posted? When is a story ever finished, anyway? I’ve written the same story numerous times, all in different forms, whether it be City of Bears or Pigtown, and I doubt I will ever actually be finished, and the criticism I received after each attempt generally fueled the direction for future versions. It is true that criticism can only ever be received and given after a work is “posted”, “published” or “finished”, but if the assumption above is correct, that would mean that all criticism necessarily arrives too late to be of any use, which wouldn’t make much sense unless you think of criticism as some sort of intervention–as the attempt to guide a writer’s fingers as they are in the process of writing, as some kind of divine guidance. If that’s your conception of criticism, I’d suggest you turn to religion. Criticism is hindsight, “should have done,” and “will do in the future.” It isn’t something that, if applied like a balm, will make a story magically better if applied at the right time. But even then, stories are never finished–though writers at some point have to be finished with the stories they write. We give up on them–they never force us to stop.

So, with those four assumptions interrogated, why should I bother answering this question? Because, at the heart of it, it is a really, really good question. Dispensing with the problems above, we’re essentially left with, “How can we form an online community which is designed to encourage and nurture writing?” I don’t really have an answer to this question, as good as it is, but I can point to some things it would have to have. For one thing, it would have to have a system for giving feedback, though not necessarily ratings (which are only really useful for an audience) and also not necessarily open ended comment fields (which are prime feeding for trolls). It would have to allow for stories to be edited, extended, rewritten, erased, and co-authored. It would have to attract people who are less interested in passive consuption of content, and more interested in giving criticism. Perhaps most important, it would have to have a place for people to post pieces of criticism (i.e. reviews, commentary, etc.) and give that sort of content prominence along with stories themselves. In fact, the sort of site which might be most helpful for writers might not be designed for writers themselves–it will actually be designed for critics. That, of course, is only a broad sketch, but does demonstrate the problems involved, and the amount of work and thought that would have to go into such a design. It also should show that no existing website (that I know of) is up to the task.

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anonymous asked:

If cyoc, ncmc and mcstories added ratings for a) quality of writing and b) quality of story wouldn’t that be adding more restrictions to the type of stories posted?

A few points of clarification. First, when I offered up the suggestion of those two categories, that was referring only to the NCMC, not to those other two sites. Second, I was advocating for a replacement of categories, rather than an addition. That is, instead of all eight or something dominant categories (those across the top of the page) which are in some cases vague and overlapping (what, exactly, is the difference between ‘hypnosis’ and ‘mind control’?) or under used (when’s the last time there was a ‘statue/robot’ story written anyway?) it would make more sense to streamline the number and type of categories. I suggested those two you mentioned because those are, I think, what a lot of the audience at the NCMC cares about, that is, “is the story well constructed?” and “is it written well enough that the story can be enjoyed without grammar/spelling getting in the way?” This is not to say that these are things I myself necessarily care about, of course, but given the audience of the NCMC, I think it would be appreciated.

Alright, now onto the bigger issue, the question of restrictions. I don’t think restrictions are bad things. If someone wants to make a site where the only stories allowed are those featuring father/son incest, or those involving revenge fantasies, or any other possible restrictions you might imagine, then that’s all fine and good. That said, restrictions are simply one component of a larger topic we might call “community design,” that is, the various tools the architect of a site provides to users that control what content people can create for the site and what sorts of communication is allowed between individuals. No site or community can avoid this question of what sorts of interactions it wants to enable and what sorts it wants to hinder

(and keep in mind much of what I say here applies not only to online communities by real life ones as well). For example, by hindering any sort of communication with the moderator, the NCMC effectively structures itself in a dictatorial fashion (again, not necessarily a “bad” choice, but it is what it is). Enabling the audience to give ratings and comments allows that audience to select out and discourage the kinds of stories it wants to see as well, which means that we can even have two different kinds of restrictions on content–explicit and emergent. Explicit restrictions are those built into the site by the architect, like the “ban” on copyrighted characters. Emergent restrictions are enforced through social standards–if something is downvoted, that means the audience doesn’t want to see that anymore. Neither of these restrictions can really be avoided, in the grand scheme of things, because in order to generate a particular kind of content, a community must necessarily try and exclude the kinds of content it doesn’t want to see.

All that said, my general stance is that sites like this ought to try to restrict content less, and curate content more. That is, rather than trying to keep out content the community doesn’t want, it should instead create good design which helps readers find the content they want and avoid content they don’t want to see without the site having to ban the content in question. The CYOC does a better job at this, in my opinion, especially with their new search engine and the recent upgrades to the interactive system, which allow readers to find content they want, while avoiding the content they don’t want to see. It isn’t perfect of course, but no community ever will be. You either have to over-restrict and cut away content you don’t want to see from the community entirely, or you have to under restrict and live with the fact that you’ll be seeing stuff you don’t want to see. Good curation can ease the issues of under restriction, but takes more work. I hope that clarifies things somewhat.

At the end of the day, the MC/TF genre is very, very small, and lacks any sort of foothold in any sort of broader publishing industry. As such, I want to state, first, how thankful I am for the various people who run sites like the NCMC, CYOC, and all the rest of the sites I mentioned, because without them, there most certainly wouldn’t be any of these stories on this here blog of mine at all. That said, these various sites also exert tremendous influence on the kinds of stories that tend to proliferate in the genre, because of how they are structured. I spent a moment talking about various ways these sites might be “improved”, but because I don’t necessarily value the sorts of stories and approaches some of these sites use, it’s difficult for me to be very objective here. More than anything, I’m a relativist, which puts me in a contradiction. On one hand, I think it’s vital to this genre that we be open to as many kinds and forms of story as we possibly can, which puts me directly at odds with a site like the NCMC, which is structurally designed to inhibit certain kinds of work. But at the same time, the moderator of the NCMC ought to be able to do with their site what they want–if they want to focus the stories towards a certain format, that should be their prerogative. More than anything, what I wish for is a larger, more neutral archive of the size of something like MCStories, but with a better system of curation and organization like some of the features of the NCMC. But as always, if wishes were horses, etc. etc. etc. I might have a bit of a radical solution, however, but first, onto the main topic–newness.

In this sea of repetition superficial and thematic, purposeful and accidental, between authors and within one’s own work, how is anything new possible? Certainly one easy way of thinking about newness is simply a new story, but it seems that the main problem we have is that not every new addition to a collection is necessarily “new”. After all, if a story simply retreads the same themes and superficial features of hundreds of stories that have come before, what is really new about it? For lack of a better term I’m going to term this a “conservative story”, a story which fits neatly within the themes and features of stories that have come before it. It treads no particularly innovative ground, it doesn’t stretch the genre in a different direction, all it does is reinforce the themes and superficial features which are already prominent within a genre. Conservative writing isn’t necessarily politically conservative of course, but I merely mean that it sits comfortably within the confines of a space already defined. There’s also nothing necessarily wrong with writing and enjoying a conservative story–I would say the vast majority of stories put out, especially by new authors, are conservative in form and substance. If we don’t bother cutting our teeth on the writing that’s come before us, then we’ll never understand the genre well enough to produce anything original at all. I would also say that people who complain about the fact that these types of stories are prominent aren’t really complaining about the fact that they are conservative in nature–they’re complaining that the current conservative form doesn’t cater to their particular desires, both thematic and superficial, in the same way that people who ask for more of the same want more of the same precisely because all of their boxes are being sufficiently ticked.

So then what exactly is newness? Obviously it stands in opposition to conservatism, but I think it’s more complicated than an either-or. After all, a story which might be radically new in superficial qualities might be perfectly conservative in terms of its thematic undertones, like, say, someone like Pericedskin writing a story not about skinheads but perhaps twinks, but with the same fundamental story structure as his other work. Would that story really be new? New to Peircedskin’s work, certainly, but new to the NCMC, where stories like that are posted on a daily basis? How new would it be then? It could also occur in the reverse–a story might appear to be, on the surface, very similar to previous stories, and yet on a thematic level diverge wildly, which is the best description I can give of my own anti-porn posts. So how do we go about trying to define the new at all? The best definition I can give is a story which bucks the conservative norms of the canon that it is placed within, but this creates a few kinks.

First, it means that a whether or not something is “new” relies on the context of the other stories it is being placed with. This might seem a bit odd–shouldn’t newness be rather objective?–but it actually helps explain how some stories can be received wildly differently in different communities. For example, “Daddy’s Little Man”, in the context of my own work, was not particularly new–perhaps in the extremeness of it, but nothing that I hadn’t tread before in previous work. But as soon as I placed that story in the context of the canon at the NCMC, it was deemed radical–too radical, in fact–and it was removed. If we tried to understand newness as an objective fact, this response would be impossible to understand. Second, it means that newness isn’t a static feature, but rather a sliding scale, depending on how much the story pushes back against the established norms of a context. A story can be just a little new, say, if it just introduces a new wrinkle or variation in an established trope, or it can be extremely new, it it bears no resemblance to anything in the canon that came before it. Similarly, this means that no story can be entirely new–there will always lie at least some conservatism within any story, or else it would simply be incomprehensible. Third, it means that newness is necessarily disruptive. No story can be new without upsetting expectations and the status quo, and it is this disruption which I find most fascinating of all.

Because stories are always judged against a prior context, “newness” is really outside of the author’s control. Once they make the choice to insert their work into a given context through the act of publishing, what sort of reception it receives depends entirely on its audience, and it is here that the structure of communities as I discussed before becomes so important. Communities built like the NCMC can’t tolerate newness in the same way a site like CYOC can. This isn’t necessarily because the audience doesn’t have an open mind, because the audience at the NCMC is so larger I doubt any broad statement like that could ever apply. Rather, what it means is that the vocal minority who use the rating systems and leave comments have an outsized influence on what sorts of stories and authors are encouraged to keep contributing or not, and it is much more likely that these sorts of active users are going to prefer more conservative stories. CYOC has a different structural problem–while the new is able to proliferate easily, this is largely because these stories don’t receive enough of an audience to spread widely and gain momentum. As such, it falls victim to what might be called enclaves–small groups of devotees to a certain kind of story who exist in their own interactive universes. These universes possess the same weakness at the NCMC—stories that don’t fit their conservative vision are squashed and ignored.

The original question then, that began all of this was, “Why aren’t there more ‘new’ stories?” Here we have a bit of an answer–most of our communities have no real support system for new authors or new ideas, meaning they are either crushed by conservative trolls, or buried underneath a steady stream of conservative fiction. This is the core problem–not that there aren’t people who want to produce new stories, both radical and conservative, but that the communities we rely on as publishing platforms provide no real support for new authors or their visions. So, what’s the radical change I mentioned at the beginning? If we could find a way to use these platforms to better encourage and highlight new authors and new ideas, in order to counteract the natural advantage conservative repetition holds over the genre. I don’t have any particular ideas how to do this, unfortunately. I doubt a site like the NCMC could ever change itself to prioritize this, nor do I think the moderator would have much interest in doing so. CYOC might be more capable, by finding a better way to highlight and encourage the growth of younger story branches written by new authors. Until then, newness is simply going to rely on the courage of new and established authors to challenge the conventions and conservatism latent in these communities, and on those communities to be open minded to other sorts of themes and ideas which might not cater to their established desires.

Over the years, I have been a member of any number of writing communities, and by and large, I have always been struck by how all of them are generally unhealthy environments for encouraging writers to produce good writing and improve their craft. My concerns have roots beyond erotica, and are perhaps more inspired by various writing groups I have led and attended during college and the years after. Generally, I have been disappointed in these sorts of groups for any number of reasons, although by far the greatest reason is that spectre of “constructive criticism”, which tends to force everyone in the room to praise pieces of writing which are exceedingly poor, leading to what essentially becomes a system of providing critical blowjobs for every writer present, whether they want to or not. Generally, the greatest sin someone can commit is being too critical–all writing is redeemable, any act of writing is fundamentally good. Online communities, on the other hand, have a distinctly different problem. The ease and pleasure of trolling allows online communities to effectively police, discourage, and even outright censor stories and writing which they deem offensive to their particular desires. I am convinced that there must be some needle hole to thread in the middle, but it eludes me, and I doubt such a perfect middle-ground actually exists anyway. Still, it presents a problem–what exactly is the role of these sorts of online communities and collections? Is it to help authors improve and encourage them to write more? Is it to provide an audience with a particular kind of story? What exactly are they designed to accomplish? I believe the phenomenon of inter-authorial thematic repetition I presented before can shed a bit of light on these questions.

Of course, there aren’t exactly a bevy of collections to discuss in this genre, so some of these conclusions will by necessity be based on a rather small sample size. In particular, I will be discussing the NCMC, CYOC, MCStories, the Nifty Archive, and both of Maelstrom’s now defunct archives focused on TF fiction and tobacco fetish fiction respectively. This, I think, is a large enough base to draw a few broad conclusions about the various techniques these communities are based on, and how they affect the sorts of stories and themes these collections accumulate.

I want to begin with the NCMC, which I’m sure surprises no one. There’s more reason to this than one might think, however. The NCMC is unique among the various sites I just mentioned for a number of, what I consider to be, very illustrative reasons. In particular because, more than any other collection still operating, it possesses a collection with a much more cohesive theme than any other. Now, as a bit of disclaimer, because the NCMC is a constantly evolving community and collection, the ideas and themes it tends to accumulate are always in a state of flux. Anything I say now could very well no longer be true six months from now, or even sooner. One particularly good story can spawn a bevy of imitators, old ruts which fell out of fashion years ago can suddenly reappear stronger than ever, so I hesitate to say say that the NCMC possesses a “defined” theme or set of ideas, but loosely examined, there are a few ideas which can be drawn from the kinds of stories the NCMC tends to attract. More often than not, the stories are driven by wish fulfillment rather than revenge. They are stories which are interested in making men more “typically desirable” (i.e. muscular, twinkish but not necessarily femme, sexually promiscuous bottoms, etc.) If a revenge fantasy is a plot point, it is less about punishing someone by turning them into what they hate, and more about turning them into something which will bring pleasure to the person correcting the injustice. When I say that the NCMC is generally not receptive to the kinds of stories I write, that’s because most of my story arcs tend to aim in the exact opposite directions. On the other hand, MaelstromX’s TF site possess themes more similar to mine, where revenge is more often about punishment than pleasure, where men become “atypically desirable,” though the site also possess a strong line of wish fulfillment as well. His old site focusing on smoke TF stories is different from the other two as well, with a stronger focus on cross generational nurturing relationships more than anything else. All of this might seem rather unimportant, or merely academic in nature, but what I want to point out is that the reason these sites possess any sort of specific focus in their themes is because of how these communities and collections are structured.

As a counterexample, let’s look at CYOC, the Nifty Archive and MCStories. All three of these are sizable archives, all of them possessing much more content than the NCMC, however none of these sites possesses anything like the strong thematic consistency the NCMC. Part of this is because these sites allow a much broader range of submissions, and thereby deal with a greater volume of stories in general. Themes then, multiply. This is especially obvious on CYOC, where this repetition is made even more direct through the continuation of another person’s story, or through the lengthening of your own work with the addition of further chapters. Thus, because there are so many threads, it makes more sense to start looking at subsections of these sites, where themes become clearer. the CYOC interactive “Ty’s Power”, for example, tends to be revenge focused, but also examines themes of puberty and becoming an adult, as well as what it means to be a part of family–especially in terms of siblings. The Nifty Archive possesses some themes once the site is divided into various genres, but these become harder to trace without the interactive structure of CYOC. MCStories is perhaps the most difficult, because stories are treated more as isolated chunks than as part of a larger system of categories. The site does possess fetish tags, but these are largely underutilized and deal more with superficial elements than anything else. As such, finding a story of a similar deep theme quickly becomes the task of finding needles in haystacks.

So what’s the difference? Why does the NCMC possess a clear set of themes, while CYOC, Nifty, and MCStories do not? The biggest difference between these two sets of sites is that the NCMC is the only one with any sort of numerical rating system, and it also possesses the most robust comment system. The NCMC is really the only website that provides an author with immediate feedback on their story, both quantitative and qualitative. I would argue this does little for the author–because these numbers and comments aren’t generally feedback an author can use to improve their work–but it does show that the audience possesses a great deal of power at the NCMC. The power to rate a story means that if an audience finds the themes, ideas, and content of a story distasteful, they can immediately communicate that with poor scores and trollish comments. This more than anything is what determines whether or not an author will keep contributing to the site. In this way, the NCMC doesn’t necessarily encourage authors to express a particular viewpoint, rather it’s structure allows the site’s audience to quickly discourage and downrate content which does not reflect the themes and ideas they want to see. It also possesses silent moderation, who can strip stories from the site without appeal. If anyone has the most power to shape the NCMC, it would be them.

Nifty and MCStories possess no such system at all. The stories are simply posted, with a link to an email if you’d like to send a comment (assuming the author allowed it to be accessible). Feedback is very inconsistent and not very meaningful; trolls are sparse and easily ignored. As such, no one is actively discouraged from posting, allowing the number of stories it hosts to grow rapidly. CYOC is somewhat different from the others, in that it does provide a means of giving feedback, but in a very different way than the NCMC. The most meaningful feedback that someone on CYOC can give a story is validation by continuing it. As such, rather than discouraging authors from contributing, CYOC’s structure encourages readers to become writers, to provide feedback on their favorite ideas and themes by adding to them and amplifying them. It does possess a rather robust forum, of course, but rarely is it used to discuss and rate particular chapters and threads. This, in my opinion, is what makes CYOC so fantastic as a collection–its design encourages both participation and proliferation, in a way the NCMC will never be able to do as it’s currently structured.

I’m sure that, at this point, it sounds like I detest the NCMC with all passion. In fact, the NCMC’s ability to hone down their thematic focus allows a range of stories there which are highly creative which no other site could produce, such as this odd postmodern work, “Too Meta”. While CYOC is capable of a wide range of stories with disparate themes, without any moderation it quickly can devolve in poorly written, overly short chapters with no development at all. Each tool has its place, and CYOC could use more moderation, while the NCMC, in my opinion, could use less (or simply moderation wielded equally). The question, I think, is who do we want these sites to serve? The readers and audience, or the authors themselves? The NCMC is firmly in the audience camp–everything about the site’s design is focused on providing its audience with the kinds of thematic content they desire, and making it easy for the reader to find stories similar one’s they’ve liked before. Whether or not this model helps writer’s improve or encourages more submissions is completely secondary. On the other hand, CYOC is much more author-focused. It urges readers to stop being passive consumers of content and instead generate their own. Feedback is less concerned with how well a story is written or whether it fits the desired theme of an audience, and more about whether it contains ideas and themes that inspire other people to continue the story further. Is one model better than the other? It depends on what you value more than anything else.  

There is one more aspect of this discussion I want to address in a third post (sorry, not sorry) which is what it means to say that we wish there were more “new” stories in the context of this repetition. An author’s constant foe is the threat of stagnation, of retreading the same old theme without any sort of development and nuance, and I want to talk about how I, as an author, do my best to avoid ruts. Further, when an author does do something “new”, how various communities deal with this newness is also something worth examining. Then I’ll be done with this for now.

In the last few weeks, since I wrote that short rant about some of my issues with the NCMC, I’ve had a few people send me notes and asks commenting on repetition–either complaining about how some sites and authors tend to produce the same stories over and over again, or noting that I myself tend to fall into a rut on occasion, something I can be as bad about as any other author. I think everyone sort of knows what is meant by repetition here, and I’ve touched on the subject before in previous metawriting posts. Many stories in this genre can feel like they are retreading the same old ground over and over again, an endless parade of men becoming whores, twinks, bears, chubs, slobs, etc., and readers can become frustrated by the lack of “newness”, though what this newness entails is usually something difficult to describe. I want to argue here that not all forms of repetition are bad for writers, and further, some of it is simply unavoidable, and it is this form of repetition I want to discuss further.

I want to start off with a short point about something I might call “surface level” repetition–which would be the repetition of fetishes and other superficial tropes across stories. This repetition is very common–after all, how many stories have been written involving things like leather and bondage play, or involving bears, chubs, and cubs? All authors have fetishes–it would be silly to expect that authors wouldn’t repeat these sorts of things, but these kinds of similarities actually tell us very little about the stories themselves. As I’ve discussed before, fetish and character tropes are actually fairly superficial aspects of stories–what lies beneath are deeper structures largely concerning the power relations between character archetypes. Some stories are about wish fulfillment, others are about revenge, others are about masochism and self-degradation. Two stories can share a large number of surface level similarities, and yet be very different at a deeper level of story, and it is these sorts of similarities that I want to discuss. I would say that some of the asks I’ve received have been talking more about these surface level concerns than something much deeper, and I would say a writer ought to avoid falling into trope and fetish ruts whenever possible, but “deep story” repetition, what I might also call “thematic” repetition, is unavoidable, and in my opinion, is something which a strong author ought to develop over time.

When I say theme, I’m talking about the deeper, central concerns of the story and author. For example, regardless of what kinds of characters and fetishes I choose to write about, it’s highly likely that the story I end up writing is going to be a revenge fantasy–whether it’s about twinks or bears, or involves rubber transformations or no kink at all. Other authors tend to focus on other themes–Onix, I would say, writes especially about hubris and the problems men face when dealing with power they can’t completely control. Peircedskin writes about skinheads, sure–but his stories, at a deeper level, are also about ordinary men being forced into lifestyles and personas completely alien to their prior lives, and how they adjust to these new selves. These themes are present in every story, and they tend to be repeated. This deep repetition is unavoidable–it simply occurs as stories accumulate. It can also provide a better understanding of an author’s work both in general and in the particular.

I can only speak with any real authority about my own work, so I’ll start there before attempting to extrapolating anything out further. For me, thematic repetition tends to most often signalled through the repetition of setting. Pigtown, Louisiana Acres, the stories involving the Special Investigations Bureau, and City of Bears of course, are all linked up by the superficial repetition of place, and the characters who inhabit those places, but more than anything else, the stories in these settings are tied together by deeper themes. As such, it can happen that some stories in these settings are not always planned to happen there–for example, I didn’t start writing “The Wrong Side of Pigtown” intending for the bar they visit to be Pigtown–I simply realized that there was no other place that the story could take place about halfway through the story. Similarly, I only realized as I was finishing this vignette that the narrator was the ringleader of Louisiana Acres, popping up once more. These repetitions occur because particular kinds of stories tend to gravitate towards ideas and story structures these various places represent for me. For example, Louisiana Acres is about class conflict, whether the trailer park is attacking suburbanites, frat houses, or businessmen in bars. Pigtown stories are about temptation, escapism and death. SIB stories have varying settings, but the larger scope is a world filled with magic and artifacts that men attempt to wield out of hubris, and fail to control. City of Bears is about even larger questions–‘What would a world of bears look like?’; ‘Would such a world be just, or would it have it’s own systemic problems?’; ‘How do we understand the terms ‘birth’ and ‘death’ in a world without children?’. Furthermore, many stories that don’t obviously exist in any of these settings in fact do belong to one of these categories. “Rick and the Beast” and “The Power of Belief” might as well be outtakes from City of Bears, while “Mr. Drake’s Games” is an instance of Louisiana Acres situated in a cul-de-sac instead of in a trailer park.

It’s my theory that most authors function in similar ways–we begin with these larger questions and themes, and reiterate them across stories that may not, on the surface, have much to do with each other at all. The notion that writing in this genre is driven by themes, and not simply by the desire to get off, will probably be difficult for some people to swallow. I’ll admit that some writing is less idea driven than others, certainly. Newer authors in particular are less guided by these sorts of drives than more established writers, not necessarily because people who write more are more inclined to have ideas, but rather because the sheer accumulation of content forces relations to appear between stories regardless of whether the author intended to put them there or not. Even newer writers aren’t immune to thematic connections, because their writing certainly doesn’t exist within a vacuum. Authors can and often do repeat and reiterate themes from each other’s work as well. In the past, I have noted that the two biggest inspirations for me were stories written by Onix and Peircedskin. In fact, I would say that my first story, “Losing Control”, essentially reads as a mash-up of those two authors in a single story, and some of the fundamental themes of both authors are present. Thematic repetition then, is more than a single author reiterating their own thoughts into the world, it is a collective act of reiteration and amplification, taking ideas from other people and building on them, and someone else taking your work and pushing it in their own direction. A new author then, rather than being taken as some sort of clean slate, is simply borrowing and stealing thematic content, characters, settings and tropes from other authors, and generally continue to do so until they develop their own distinct viewpoint and style.

And so, we come to my real interest in this discussion. If we take seriously the notion that thematic repetition occurs at not only within an author’s own canon, but between authors as well, that means that larger collections of the work of multiple authors, particularly story collections like the NCMC or MaelstromX’s old archives, also possess these same sorts of thematic currents running through them. I’ll have more to say on this Thursday. Yes, Thursday. This is going to be a long one, but I’ll get back to porn soon enough–I think this is important.

Alright, so I got this anonymous question in my inbox the other day:

“I love your work, but recently it feels like your stories have been too short to have much story, but have too much story to have porn. It’s not that the two are mutually exclusive, but that it feels like you’re taking an interesting scenario, doing some setup for a longer story, but then just cutting it off with ‘And then they all became pigs and lots of gay sex, the end’ rather than fleshing it out.”

And because I’m a tacky bastard my instinctive response was something like,

“Well fuck you too.”

but that was only because I suck at taking criticism. So I thought for a bit, and realized,

“Hey, didn’t I write a metawriting essay on this very topic?”

and sure enough, I had, and I’d failed to take my own advice. Or rather, I felt like the advice I’d given in that entry was good, but it had oversimplified the problem of narrative and the erotic to an either-or, when that doesn’t really capture the actual scope of possible stories. It also failed to grapple with the actual problem. The issue isn’t whether or not you want any given story to be more or less focused on story of sex, rather, the issue is that any given scene, regardless of whether it is focused on sex or story, can either cheat the reader, or overload them. This is a related, but different issue.

Readers are, in general, pretty forgiving in this genre. If you can manage to help them get off, they’ll give you a pass. However, the quickest way to make sure someone doesn’t get off, is to either cheat or overload them. To cheat is to do what the asker above describes, to reach a section of the story, slip in a quick summary of what happened, and then jet off into the next scene. If the reader really wanted more of a description of what had just happened, (say a super-duper hot ass sex scene of one thousand potential orgasms), then they are going to feel cheated. On the other hand, if you go so in depth into a scene that the reader loses interest entirely in what you might have to say, you have just overloaded them, which can be just as bad. So how, exactly, does one strike a good balance?

I tend to err on the side of cheating, especially on tumblr. These captions and vignettes, to me, aren’t really meant to be taken as finalized “stories”. This is more like an artist showing you pages from their sketch book, and like a sketch, I tend to focus on the aspects of any given story that attract my attention. In the same way that a sketch might draw one aspect of a scene in intricate detail, while only implying or omitting other parts, I use these captions to elaborate one or two aspects that I find intriguing–a MacGuffin, a sex act, a particular transformation–and I generally minimize and leave vague everything else around it.

I fully understand that this can be frustrating for readers of my tumblr. The aspects of a vignette I choose to focus on may or may not be the aspect of the story you are most interested in. I’m sympathetic, but not really that much, sorry not sorry. I don’t spend a lot of time editing these captions, and they are largely springboards to other ideas and projects that I would spend more time on (provided “more time” was a thing that existed in my life at the moment). If I were extending these sketches into longer stories, one of the first things I’d do is sketch out how these scenes are structured, but the only way to learn to gauge length is to read other people’s stories, see how they construct their scenes, sexy and otherwise. Find authors you like, and mimic their pace and description. That said, there are a couple signs that you can watch out for in your stories, to make sure you aren’t cheating or overloading the reader.

Keep an eye on your level of detail. There is a sweet spot, where you provide enough detail to prompt a scene in the reader’s mind, while leaving enough mystery to allow them to fill in some of the erotic details with their own imagination. Detail is crucial; I’m not trying to undersell them. Details are erotic triggers, the only aspect of stories that have the power to directly arouse the reader. However, the more details you put in, the more readers you risk leaving disappointed and overloaded. All it takes is one erotic trigger that the reader has no interest in for the entire scene to disappoint. MacGuffins are another choke point. If they become so complicated that you have to spend paragraph after paragraph describing how and why they work, you are wasting so much time on exposition that the vast majority of readers have no interest in (Although I’m certain there are people turned on my elaborate exposition and unnecessary exposition. After all, Tolkien is still a popular author.)

Also be aware of your own boredom. Do you feel yourself, as you’re working on a scene, wishing you were writing something else? If so, there’s a very good chance that your reader is going to be thinking about reading something else when you deliver it to them. If you’re bored, the person making it, then what chance does a reader have? Just be careful that you don’t overcompensate, and go from overloading a scene to cheating it. It’s just as bad to skip over something with a few sentences of rushed exposition as it is to slog through it with too much detail. Better is to reformulate the scene entirely, and start from scratch. Find some way to inject more action into it, to generate excitement, rather than just ignoring the problem. When in doubt, rewrite it.

Of course, the best way to check for cheating or overloading is to give a draft to a reader you trust, and ask them what they wanted more of, and what they felt dragged on too long. Believe them, don’t challenge them, and be willing to rewrite sections and murder your darlings. And in response to your question, Anonymous, I’ll keep a better lid on my tendency to summarize–thanks for pointing it out.

Someone asked me to put up my metawriting article over in the NCMC’s new “Theory” section, but as I was reading through them, I realized that a lot of them were kind of shitty. So, I’m going to rewrite them, and the first one is up there now, here. You can’t find it from the main page yet, so follow the link. It covers the topics of my first three entries in more detail. Have a look if you’re interested. I won’t post it here, mostly because it’s really long and I’d have to reformat it all over again.