t'Sade's Blog

Current State for March 2026

2026-03-10T05:00:00Z

The short version: Still moving forward. I had hoped I would have it by the end of February but now it looks like end of March or the beginning of April for opening the door.

If you want a little more context for this post, the following links might be useful:

It's been two months since I last posted, though I really intended to post every month until my sites are up again. It doesn't help that Patreon keeps letting people subscribe (and apparently charging) even though I paused it. SubscribeStar, on the other hand, is much better behaved (I wrote that before they changed their Terms of Service without notice on the 12th). And I also thought I was posting these chapters at the end of the month, not the beginning since usually the last two weeks are my “writing phase.”

On the subscribers front, I know the software will be “done when it's done” and it will be a work in progress that will improve in the following months but it is getting so close and I'm getting so impatient to get it set up properly.

There are a few usability things that need to be solved before I can do that, but I got to see it pull down Patreon subscribers last week which was awesome and by the end of next, you should be able to claim your account by logging into Patreon which will wire everything together and you'll be able to browse my sites. SubscribeStar should also be done by the end of the week after that. After that, there is a punch list of things I need that the developer is prioritizing and then I'll set it up, wire everything together, and let everyone try it out.

... and then fix all the issues that pop up.

My intent is also to wait a full month after I open up the site again before I turn on payments. Mostly a thanks for being so patient.

I also need to finish switching my site over to using basic authentication again, which is mostly ripping out a bunch of logic and replacing it with the old version from Git.

Speaking of writing, I have a new Urotsukidōji story called If No One Was There that will be available for everyone (sharp tiers and higher) once the site goes live again. It is in the same vein of That Poor Nurse and based on scenes from the first move in a “what if” scenario. I think it's pretty hot, so I'm looking forward to everyone reading it.

Rodo will take longer since it is 4-5 iterations of my website behind. On the other hand, I also have 10-20 more stories I need to clean up and post on that site, so maybe redoing Rodo will encourage me to do that.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me or post on the various subscriber sites.

Thank you for everything.

Current State for January 2026

2026-01-09T06:00:00Z

The short version: I'm still working on this. I hoped I would have it by the end of 2025 but now it looks like February 2026 for a bare-bones implementation.

It's been a while since changes in the legal landscape caused me to lock down my various websites. If you want a little more context, the following links might be useful.

During that time, I got quite a few emails encouraging me, giving their sympathies and understanding, but also a lot of “is it up yet?” Now that we are through the holiday season and we passed the date I gave, I owe everyone a status.

First of all, I'm still working toward opening up my sites. It might be a few more months but I'm seeing rapid progress now.

I wanted to code something that worked. And I tried for quite a few months but got overwhelmed. It was frustrating because while I'm a fairly good coder, I'm also going through a lot of crap with Fluffy, Spawn, and Fork (medical issues, so many F grades, therapy, and other struggles) not to mention family drama, a prescription that creatively knocked me out for three months, and my day job basically taking me hard without even a hint of foreplay.

Somewhere near the beginning of December, I realized I couldn't do it. I keep looking to see if someone else has the right combination of age verification, geo blocking, linking to various patronage sites, and linking to static websites and haven't found one (imagine that).

Fortunately, I have a “not really a friend but an associate” that is a better coder than me and is willing to put the effort into writing something I need for my sites. For the low cost of writing them a private novel, they are going blow their free time and write what I obviously can't. Fortunately, writing porn is something I can do and hopefully I'll be able to post the results to subscribers.

It is promising that after two weeks, they are already way past how far I've gotten. So I think we are on track on getting my sites worked on, but there are going to be a couple rough points along the way. Also, they are a bazaar-style coder whereas I'm more cathedral, so that means changes are coming out faster than my effort to do everything at once. As it currently stands, the initial version will be:

There will be a dedicated site under curiouscabbit.com where you'll be able to sign up. It will be something creative like “members.curiouscabbit.com” but it doesn't exist yet.
From there, you should be able to link your subscriber with your account. That is going to let me use Patreon and SubscribeStar act as the age verification to start with and covers my bases there.
The site will use your IP address to figure out where you are. If you are in a state that requires hourly reverification, you won't be able to use it but you'll be told before you link the patronage site. I understand if you unsubscribe or disable subscriptions until that changes.
My sites are going to switch back to basic authentication (the dialog box from 2-3 years ago) for login instead of the form. On the membership site, you'll be able to pick your password (which will be different than the one you log into the membership site itself).
With an hour, your user name and chosen password will work on my websites.

It isn't pretty but we're going to focus on getting “something” working first, then work on polish. In specific, there are a couple caveats:

Rodo will require subscribers to access until we can implement a separate age verification.
Email and verifications aren't going to be working, so chances are, if you lose your password, you're going to have to email me from the email you have on the subscriber site to change your password. It will not be a pretty one, something closer to “n68gpbcdB3g8Hx&ATjII6lO.”
Any geo blocks will be based on location of every IP request in the last thirty days.

Clearly, there is a lot more work after this to make it easier to create accounts directly from the subscriber sites, implement the hourly reverification, and generally making it easier to use. It's also going to be rough, but it looks like it will cover my ass from most reasonable legal threats, give the auditing and backing to do so, and lets us introduce more usable features over time.

On the writing side, I did get a trio of commissions (including the one for barter). So I'm going to work on those over the next month or so when I do unlock the subscriber sites again, they will have fresh content queued up for weekly posting.

Some of this is complicated by Patreon who really hates pausing subscriptions. I can only disable billing for a month and they give no notice of when they turn it billing back on, but I can't also extend by a month without it being open again. Which means occasionally someone slips in, subscribes, and gets charged when I'm trying to get things done. There is also a lot of red tape involved with getting APIs set up, but I do have a manual alternative if that doesn't work.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me or post on the various subscriber sites.

I know that this optimal, but it's the best way I have of getting you back to my stories at the moment.

At the moment, it looks like I should have the minimal, duct-taped version working by the end of February 2026. I'll post again at the end of the month with where we are with this.

And thank you.

Please Wait

2025-08-13T05:00:00Z

I said I would give patrons enough time to download an archive of my stories before I closed the doors for a while. I've done that, so when this post goes up, the secret link to the archives is going away.

That isn't to say I'm closing up shop. I have some plans on how to make age verification work for me, at least to the point I'm comfortable I'm following the letter of the law (and, for the most part, the spirit). It's going to take me a while and I'm going to guess it's going to take me to the end of the year to see if it works.

I don't want to commit any details and there are a few folks out there who are doing much of the same thing, so I'm going to see we can work together and come up with something. Hopefully I'll have more useful news in the future.

If life was easier, I would have started on them already but… I had a couple family obligations to manage also, which means I've been chomping at the gag to start playing but haven't been able to until next week.

A Fork in the Road

2025-07-15T05:00:00Z

In the last two weeks, I realized I'm at a fork in the road.

The recent SCOTUS decision opened a flood gates of possibilities and even since my last post, I'm seeing multiple states (including the one I live in) racing to come up with the most restrictive and unreasonable “reasonable” they can come up with regards to porn sites. It doesn't help that I was looking into my options and seeing what was already there. That includes Tennessee with the “you must do an age check every hour” or South Dakota's a year in prison for the first offense and a felony for the second for even a single reference to a nipple or genitalia. I didn't mind Texas' verification that much (though it is neither reasonable or financially possible at my level), but the more recent ones are pushing the limit of what is acceptable as the various conservative governments.

Many of these laws are set up to use the bounty pattern than Texas used for the anti-abortion bills, intentionally set up to allow anyone to sue anyone in the union and drag the lawsuit back to the state is more favorable for getting rid of porn. That way, they can crowd-source the anti-porn movement to folks looking to cash in on a quick buck. Naturally, there are law firms that are more than willing to advertise that like ambulance chasing injury firms.

What that means is that there is a proliferation of laws in states that each have their own rules and I have to now worry about every single one. Some of them say a third of the site has to be porn (mine is well over that) and other say even a single sentence about a woman's nipple is enough to be corrupting the youth and grounds for lawsuits or felonies (Ohio, South Dakota).

None of this makes me feel safe. All I wanted to do is turn people on. I don't make much for it, but it is something I've enjoyed doing since the early nineties. Most of my writing is free, at least in terms of words, and I love posting it.

But now I feel unsafe.

That is point. These laws are a war on porn and designed to scare people like me away.

And it's going to work, at least for a little while.

I don't have a lot of faith that the US is going see that I'm not hurting anyone. I don't think I can hope it changes soon. Too many people are already on a rampage for hurting as many others as possible, as long as they aren't white and male and straight. There are going to be a lot of tears because they clearly don't care about collateral damage and they get off on knowing that they've ruined people's lives.

So that leads me to the fork in the road. Right now, I don't feel safe. There is a non-zero chance someone is going to decide to make a quick $50k dollars (Texas) by claiming their kid read my stuff.

That means I'm going to suspend my patronage and I'm going to lock the doors. I don't intend on stop writing, but until I can come up with a safe way of sharing it, I need to be safe. I need not to have nightmares or worry about every time someone rings the doorbell. I'm not being brave here, but I'm not giving up. Of course, it feels like that and the future will tell if I do fold, but I need to not be exposed as much as I am. At least not while things are moving so fast in the middle of a massacre that we're currently in (I'm including trans, brown- and black-skinned folks, and fascism in this because it's all the same thing).

My intent is this, I'm going to put Patron and SubscribeStar both on vacation mode (or whatever they call it). I'll let folks join in but they aren't going to be charged.

I'm going to create a zip archive of my stories, at least the PDFs and EPUBs I've generated, and I'm going to give my patrons a link to those. That way, they get a single point in time of every story I've published.

Two weeks after that, I'm going to lock the passwords to the sites. The chapters will still be there, the password pages will remain, but no one is going to have the keys. There will still be links to the physical books, the rest of Curious Cabbit. My contact page will still be there in case you do want to chat. Basically, all the bling without the naughty content.

I will probably lock out categories on the discussion forum or shut it down, I don't know. I don't want to lose the story ideas but Discourse is a pig when it comes to resources.

Then, I'm going to work toward making it safe for me. I don't know the form or method that will be. I don't know how long will take. The laws in the US may gain some sanity, the administration may change over and politics will swing the other way, or the US may come up with a unified system of age verification that allows me to post.

If I can find a safe way to publish from another country, I'll look into that. If I find a system that only works for one region, I'll make that work and keep working toward opening everything for every adult who finds my writing appealing.

(Immigrating out of the US really isn't a choice for me, though I wished it was.)

I'm sorry I'm not brave enough. I'm sorry that my own personal anxieties and fears have pushed me to this. I'm sorry that I'm cowering in my cave.

When it safe again, I'll come back. I'll bring porn, erotica, and iced tea (I don't drink alcohol).

Until then, be good to each other and please don't hate me too much.

Age Verification

2025-07-02T05:00:00Z

Well, this is something I didn't want to do. At the end of June 2025, the Supreme Court of the United States made a ruling in favor of Texas' Age Verification law. At the same time, we have various other countries (UK comes to mind) has been steadily moving forward on limiting the access of pornography (erotica or whatever you want to call what I write).

There is a lot of issues with the law, but I have to follow the laws of the country and failured to abide by them is expensive. In more generic terms, I bring in an average of $80/month from subscribers. The fee for failing to lock adult content is $10,000/day or roughly 125 month of subscribers per day that access is given. And, if you read the laws, even having a Patron or SubscribeStar link could qualify as a “commercial site”.

(I would need a lawyer to find out, but since most of them start at $300/hour to talk, we are saying 4-12 months of subscriptions just to find out if I quality.)

So, I'm going to cover my ass. To do that, I need to age verification on readers of erotic content. Since a proper age verification service costs money per viewer, I can't really afford to stand up a service of my own. Not to mention, it is extra maintenance to keep that going.

(If you can't guess, money coming in verses money to conform to these laws is a major thing. This is the aspect I hate the most about these laws. They might be “reasonable” to large places like PornHub or larger places, I'm a tiny little fish in a very big ocean. And these laws are specifically designed to take out small shops, the mommy and daddy sites like mine.)

I'm going to “fake” age verification. Both Patreon and SubscribeStar both have age verification of their own, and you can't subscribe without passing that. Which means, I can comfortably assume if you are a member, then you are of age and that gives me the defense I need to say I'm obeying the law. It isn't a great solution and I hate it, mainly because I don't want to know who you are. I don't want to know what turns you on, only that it does. But, we are in a place where I have to do something if I want to keep this site alive.

What's Going to Happen

The blogs, table of contents, and series pages will remain free. There will be a little user icon (much like the lock and key icons) that indicate when you'll have to log in. To do that, go to the applicable subscription page, sign up, and look at the latest email. At the bottom, you'll see something like:

This also means the EPUB downloads are going to disappear again until I can find a way of filtering those out. Which also means the OPML feed for getting the books.

Alternatives

The alternative is I tear everything down and just disappear. I'd rather not do that.

It does mean that Rodo is going away. I haven't been really maintaining it for a while now, and the site has bit-rotted, but I'll try to bring it up later once I figure out a good solution. Ethically, I can't use my subscription for that site since it is specifically everyone but me.

Book Downloads

2025-02-18T06:00:00Z

I'm not going to say I make posts very often, but it has been almost eighteen months since my last post. In my defense, I do post chapters once or twice a month, just not formal thoughts like this.

For those who remember my old site, I used to have downloads for EPUB and PDF versions of my stories. Recently, I was requested to put them back so here they are. I'm only doing this for the stories that are completed and entirely public, that way I don't have to figure out how to secure the books for the different tiers.

Later, I'll see about creating an OPDS feed so readers can subscribe to that and get a list of every story direct to their tablets (or whatever). But not for today.

Tier Changes

2023-09-12T05:00:00Z

To handle some of the changes needed by Patreon and SubscribeStar, I'm rearranging my tiers (and bumping up the prices for new subscribers). The biggest change is that I'm splitting my monthly batch of (8-10k words into two batches of 4-5k words each). This is so I can focus one on being “sweet” (D. Sadie) and one being “sharp” (t'Sade).

Sweet Words ($1/month)

Access to all the finished content on my sweet websites: https://dsadie.com, https://ddancer.com, and https://katiesebastian.com
A batch (4-5k words) worth of sweet stories (or chapters) every month

Sharp Words ($2/month)

Everything in the Sweet Words tier
Access to all finished dark stories on https://tsade.com
A second batch (4-5k words) worth of darker stories or chapters every month

Sly Suggestions ($5/month)

Everything in the Sweet Words tier
Everything in the Sharp Words tier
Access to works in progress
Votes at https://discuss.tsade.com for both sweet and sharp content

Site Redesigns

2023-09-10T05:00:00Z

Earlier this year, this website was revamped with a new responsive style that handled dark mode as well as light, added better Atom feeds, and had a consistent password system that was slightly easier to maintain.

This weekend, I've updated and done the same to all the Curious Cabbit sites (excluding Rodo).

At the same time, there are links across the sites so if you click on the D. Sadie stories, it once again sends you over to that site (which has very few links back to this one). Also, Curious Cabbit has links to all the published and for-pay stories.

Patron Tiers

After a few years of not changing my patron tiers, I decided to make a few changes. This is related to splitting out D. Sadie and wanting to provide a steady stream of content for that byline in addition to this one. I'm not quite up the point of writing two batches a month so I'm going to aim for at least every other month being a “sweet” story.

This also means that I'm going to make the “Naughty Words” $2/month going forward but leave the current subscribers in a legacy tier for now. The main difference between the two is that the $2/month gets https://tsade.com along with https://dsadie.com, https://ddancer.com, and https://katiesebastian.com. The $1/month tier only has the last three sites.

Rodo

The one exception to the site redesign is Rodo. Rodo was always my archive site of topics that were of interest or authors who have left the communities. The site has bit-rotted (to say the least), but I still have a vague idea of maintaining it but I'm also inclined to shutter it. I'm not really sure.

Suspensions

2023-07-28T05:00:00Z

A couple days ago, I got a “lovely” set of messages from Patreon saying that my account was suspended because I was describing my plans for Ultimate Weight Loss Program. I wasn't upset, sooner or later I knew I would trigger their (banking partner's) sensibilities (toward the high charge-back rate of the porn industry).

Thankful, I was able to remove (most) of the posts I've made on that platform and they enabled my account in time for the end-of-month processing (and the bulk of my non-commission income).

But that also means that I need to change how I announce chapters and arrange my writing.

Decomposition

No, I'm not talking about compost (but it is a great way of reusing food and not wasting it) but breaking apart some of my writing. I have a number of bylines I use, mainly because t'Sade is “too much” for many people: D. Sadie, Katie Sebastian, and D. Dancer all come to mind. They also have their own websites which I have sadly not been maintaining for quite a while.

So, I'm going to resurrect those websites and then spread this site out across all of them. The bulk of the writing will be here, since I wrote them mostly as t'Sade, but the ones that are more sanitized and vanilla will be moved over and I'll create “pointers” to them (so the stories won't be on this site but this site will still list them in the various categories with an obvious link that they are “off site”).

I'm also not going to create any custom site formatting, maybe just change the colors because a good color scheme is almost as good as a good tentacle scene. But I will not have those sites point back to tsade.com. It's a one way trip to the safer places.

Monthly Batches

The second part is that I'm going to stop enumerating all the chapters on my announcement posts to Patreon and SubscribeStar. Those are probably going to be a boiler plate with just a brief paragraph of what is going on (to get past the teaser length on Patreon) and then links to the new tier 1 and tier 5 pages which list all the chapters in the batch in reverse chronological order (newest on top).

This also means that the higher tier will be able to see the chapters as they are being written so those folks will shamefully know how much I do in the last week of the month while jerking off the rest of the time (actually, I have a lot of obligations so I have a tendency to only focus on the chapters in the last week or so of the month).

I've also set up Atom feeds for both tier 1 and tier 5 for those who want up-to-date changes. Neither will update if I edit the chapter, but it will announce as soon as the first version of that chapter is available (usually when I consider it “feature complete”).

I might later produce a full content feed but I need the per-user logins working first.

Dolcett Girls Forum

For those who know, I've been the absent administrator for Dolcett Girls Forum for a decade or so. While I haven't drifted away from that community for years, I still kept the software up to date and things running. Last week, I breached the topic with some of the internal folks that I intend to step away from those duties now that Perro has died.

I like to explore new ideas. For a while, Dolcett was fun but it didn't last for me. I mean, I'm still going to write Welcome to Doclett and other stories, but that is “my” version of the world and less about others. I also plan on writing about the cheerleaders who were abducted in Dolcett Girls, but again it is exploring the world I created with that stories and less about Dolcett as a whole.

New Website and Subscriber Changes

2023-02-05T06:00:00Z

It's been a while since I posted a blog post as opposed to a chapter. According to my site, July 2021. Blogging isn't really my strongest strength, mainly because I don't have any deep thoughts or words beyond writing erotica. Well, I do, but this doesn't really seem like the forum for it. I used to say Twitter was the best place to find me, but that has also turned into a dumpster fire so I've pretty much moved my off-the-cuff thoughts to my Fediverse account, @tsade@curiouscabbit.com.

Of course, there is also the other ways of contacting me, if you ever want to ask questions, tell me something has gone wrong, or even just say what you think about what I write.

Site Redesign

For the last few years, I've gradually switched my preferences from light to dark mode. Sadly, the website didn't handle it so I would go from lovely dark sites to the blinding purple of the old tsade.com. I've been hesitating to do anything because there were some technical complexities involved, but I finally sat down and redid the website. It is now phone friendly and handles light and dark modes. Not to mention, it regenerates in about a minute on my laptop instead of ten minutes like the old one. And I'm able to make changes again without the entire thing exploding into flames.

With the redesign comes a different way of handling passwords. I'm not sure if it will work, but I got rid of the basic authentication (the pop-up dialog) and switched to a form-based one. This will allow things like password managers to work. In keeping with my privacy goals, security is done client-side with each page password-protected with some JavaScript that does not talk to my host. Instead, logging in downloads the encryption keys and uses those; this does mean you might see a flash of content when going to a password page, but if you are logged in, you should see the full text after less than a tenth of a second.

This version also introduces Atom feeds! I made three of them:

A stories only that has the full chapters as they are released.
A blog only one.
A combined one that puts the two together.

This will also lead to me eventually having a mailing list which basically just emails the feeds as they are posted. That way, you'll be able to visit the page, use a feed reader, or check your inbox all from the same source. Eventually I'll create a subscriber-only one but there are a few steps before that can happen, so I'm putting a needle in that.

Things Remaining

There are a few things I haven't finished, but I wanted to get this redesign out and then work on them with a more sedate pace. Not to mention I need to work on this month's story.

The book covers for my published books are missing.
Not to mention a couple stories need to be hunted down also.
Figure out what I'm going to do with my other bylines: D. Sadie, D. Dancer, and Katie Sebastian. I'm thinking about either pulling them out entirely or making them dedicated “settings”. Not sure, this is kind of a hard one because I do like the “one stop shopping” for reading my works but D. Dancer and Katie are so mild compared to t'Sade.
I had to take out the Nine Sisters codex (wiki) and the map.
The Jiropag map also got removed.
I would have to have keyboard shortcuts for going next and previous on chapters.
Show the number of stories, word count, and estimated time to read for a series.
Show the number of stories and series in a setting. Possibly show the number of words to get a good idea of my “big” ones.

Ganondorf's Triumph

As a minor note, I was feeling a bit low, so I decided to start putting some of my fan-fiction over on Archive of Our Own. The first one was Ganondorf's Triump but I noticed the last four chapters were not public, so I opened them up while posting.

Maintenance

One thing that became obvious is that I need to seriously go through the stories, one by one, and clean them up. Many are missing descriptions, use section breaks instead of chapters (which I prefer now), and proper ASSM codes or tagging. This is a huge undertaking since there are 174 stories/novels on the piece that come up to 3,413,678 words available on this site. At the “average” reading speed of 260 words per minute, it would take the so-called average person ten days of reading without a break to read everything. I'm a little faster than that, but I'm going to aim for fixing 5-10 stories a month until I get them done.

Conclusion

So, if you see any problems with the site, let me know. Or if you want to just talk, you can do the same. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy the changes.

Derik's Luck Book, Contest, and Polls

2021-07-28T05:00:00Z

On August 17th, I'm planning on releasing my third major book, Derik's Luck. I don't do this often, but some books just cry for the full treatment and this is one of them.

Pre-orders are set up at the following:

Patrons have access to the ebooks with their login, but this post applies to non-patrons also. Once I get the print versions up, I'll link them here.

I want to do something special for this beefy book, so I'm going to run a contest. Also in here are a few questions to judge how much else I want to do, mainly to see who is interested.

Forum

All of these refer to a single source of the contest, a link on my discussion forum. I'm doing this for a number of reasons, but the main one is that it gives me the information I need to get answers while still covering everyone who contributes to me, it is gated behind a signing that requires you to say you are old enough to read my stuff, and also because (ultimately) most places aren't emotionally invested in me.

Also, because I use the discussion forum like a mailing list since you can hit the notification icon on announcements and (almost) never come back again.

The Contest

I'm going to run a simple raffle contest. It won't require you to buy anything or even be a patron. I'm going to with a simple entry because I fucking hate the “tweet for a vote” and “sell your left arm for five votes”. All you have to do head to my forum and check the box that says “Enter me into the contest” and you're entered! (Remember, you can use your Patreon login to automatically get your tiers.)

(There is a poll here.)

There are three primary prizes, basically the winner gets to choose which one of the three they want:

A signed copy of Derik's Luck. The caveat is that shipping a big book internationally is expensive. I'll cover the first $10 of any shipping costs (enough to get anywhere in the US in a small flat rate box), but if you need more, I'll ask you to the cover the difference.
First Alternative: A year of the $5 tier benefits.
Second Alternative: An unsigned copy from a local Ingram printer. Since Ingram has multiple international printers, this lowers the shipping costs significantly but doesn't give the nifty signature experience (but, maybe book plates).

I'm not automatically including my patrons into the contest because not all of them are interested in giving me their personal information, they don't want books (or free memberships), or another reason. So even if you are a patron, you still have to enter.

Stretch Goals

Let's be honest, I haven't had a lot of luck with contests and sales in general. But, I like the possibility that things will blow up, so let's set up some stretch goals. Since this is in the middle of August, I get reports from various ebook retailers and Ingram in the second week of September. So, I'll total up all the sales (including Patreon and SubscribeStar) and use those against the following stretch goals:

Every $100, I'll add a prize of one year of $5 tier.
At $250 and every $500 after that, I'll add a second primary prize.
At $1000 (and every $1000 after that), I will add a new grand prize:
- First Prize: A signed copy of all three of my printed books (The Mummy's Girl, Eliza and the Raptor, and Derik's Luck). This is expensive to ship, so I'll cover the first $25 (flat rate large box) for anything that requires more.
- First Alternative: Five years of the $5 tier benefits including suggesting and voting for new stories.
- Second Alternative: An unsigned copy of all three books from an Ingram printer (there are European and Australian printers, so the expense is much cheaper).
At $5000, I will write a winner a novella of their choice of (legal) topics, settings, or anything else they want.

At-Cost Books

I've said that patrons can get my books cheaper. What this means any patron can order a book “at cost” (which is defined as the cost for me to get it printed and shipped, shipped twice if you want it signed) as long as you have a lifetime total of more than $25. I'll be glad to send you a copy of the paperwork to cover that, but it's about as cheap as I can make it.

(There is a poll for this.)

Book Plates

I've never tried this, but I know some authors have signed book plates. Basically stickers that I can sign and send out in the mail. I haven't tried to do that before. If I did, would you be interested? Since they are relatively flat and cheap, there wouldn't be any shipping costs associated with it (unless you ask for lots).

(There is a poll for this.)

Naturally, all the winners of the prizes would get stickers if I have enough of a demand for them (say more than 25 folks ask).

Puppy Mill 2: From the Shadows is done!

2021-06-25T05:00:00Z

This weekend and after a flurry of writing almost fifty thousand words, I finished the draft of Puppy Mill 2, a commissioned sequel to my fantasy epic story of sex and submission (and creatively named), Puppy Mill.

Of everything I have written, Derik's Luck would have be my most successful in terms of fan mail and requests for the story. That is one reason I've been pushing to get it published this years. I'll have more about that later, but not this post because I want to talk about my favorite amputee, Merrie.

When I started Puppy Mill on Gurochan, I announced that it wasn't going to be a long piece (coming off Derik's Luck) and it should be a short series. It took me almost eighteen months to write that epic and it went in directions I wasn't planning. It ended up being my second most popular piece was one of only two pieces that have ever gotten fan art (the other being From the Cold).

Fans and Requests

I say Puppy Mill has been a success since I've had requests to make leather-bound versions, to pay to get it professionally edited, typo suggestions, and a request to go back and smooth out some scenes.

But then, out of the blue, I got a fan mail that requested more, to see what would happen next. They were very persuasive.

I also had some vague ideas if I continued, including Merrie alternating between being a madam for an exclusive brothel in Franome City (in accordance to the Whore's Guild) and spending her summers at the mill to enjoy a bit of training. I liked the idea of changing the mill to require consent, the spit-muffins and puppies of the world who craved what the mill gave instead of kidnapping them off the streets (how Puppy Mill started). A lot of it was tied into Bass and the others realizing they really were terrible villains and the paladin's desire to be a “good guy” again. Well, a good guy who enjoyed breaking submissive sluts.

I wasn't sure if I could pull this off, but I agreed for a periodic amount of money which made Puppy Mill 2 my largest commission also. But, it would be a low-keyed one, one that I made a point they could stop at any time. At the point, it was also my first commission where I got paid while writing it instead of everything at the end.

I write using Git and everything is in a text file. I can show the entire history of writing Puppy Mill 2: From the Shadows (well, almost any story written after 2012 which is when I moved from Subversion to Git and lost most of the history).

So, on August, I write a few chapters of Merrie's trials before the epilogue of Puppy Mill. From there, the story took a life of its own and I've finally come to almost exactly the scene that I was aiming for in 2016.

Finishing

I really look forward to seeing what readers think about the story as a whole and the ending. It's hard to top the ending of Puppy Mill, but I think I came close and can't wait to find out if I pulled it off.

Now that Puppy Mill 2 is done, I'll probably set up a once-every-four-week posting of the chapters which should take us into next year. If you want to read all of it (or get it in ebook form) while support my writing, please subscribe.

For the $1 tier, you'll also get a story or batch of chapters every month (minimum 8k words but has gotten into the six digits).

The $5 tier gets everything plus you get to choose what I work on next, typically on a month-to-month basis and also my longer-term “big” project (on the order of Derik's Luck or Monsters Under Her Bed).

Spoilers

The rest of the post has some spoilers for both Puppy Mill and Puppy Mill 2.

Transitions

A lot happened between August 2016 and June 2021. Five years of life had countless little interruptions, flaws, and changing plans.

I think that shows in Puppy Mill 2. Merrie struggles with her identity, which I thought was a logical conclusion at the end of the first piece. She was already overwhelming powers (she did kill a goddess with her bare teeth in the first one), but she needed a challenge. She needed something to grind her down so she could shine.

In D&D 3.5e terms, she ended Puppy Mill as basically a 20th level character, which meant this story was the struggles of being an epic character in the world. In other words, The Superman Problem, when the world is cardboard and you have to struggle not to break it.

This is probably was the hardest sequel I had ever written because of that. Most of the other sequels are riffs on the first one: girl gets fucked by a tentacle in the bathtub, part two is a girl getting fucked by a tentacle in the bathroom, part three is a boy being fucked by tentacles in the bathroom, all before part four where a girl gets fucked by tentacles under the bathroom.

Plaguehound said it well, Puppy Mill was two novels. And that bifurcation meant I couldn't just copy/paste the story. I couldn't do that to Puppy Mill 2 because Merrie could never go back to the innocence of that first part that made it such “boner inducing”.

So, Puppy Mill 2 isn't as much stroke material (though I really hope it turns you on), but I decide to delve into the transition into something else. Those points in your life when your old role becomes starkly different than your own: the transition from coder to manager, from bachelor to father, that point where you realize you are transgender, or the world before and after being sent to prison. In effect, the point of no return where one's old cannot be returned to but it remains a longing memory of something “better” yet wasn't.

A lot of this novel is about transitions, moving into bigger arenas of power, making an oath that couldn't be broken, and facing consequences for something you didn't do or deserve.

Compulsions and Oaths

Along the way, and I had no idea it would happen, I realized that the characters in my story were using geasa, oaths, and compulsions as a crutch. It was a major theme in Puppy Mill but it was also turning into Superman's kryponite. Have a problem, throw a suggestion at her and she's screwed!

I ended up exploring those a lot more than I thought I would. It became a major plot in the story, working with compulsions, and I think it worked out well.

This also ties a lot into the idea of consent. I think when it comes to Merrie's story, it makes a lot of sense given that she started by being kidnapped and raped but ended with her being her own woman.

Voice

This is also about finding one's voice through influences of others. As you grow up (even now as an adult), you find things that change how you think but they don't always work. You have to work with them, play with it, maul the concepts, and then they become part of you. You cease to think of yourself as straight, goth, a loner, or any other attributes and come down to “I'm just me and that is fucking awesome.”

This is an important to both me and the person who commissioned this piece. Because they are fucking awesome, but they don't always realize it. And I cherish the time I've have become friend with them over these five years and hope to see it continue.

Struggle for self brings power, never forget that.

Future Plans

Not sure. I'd like to say I'm never going to write a piece that is over two hundred thousand words, but let's be honest. I'm going to. Sooner or later, I'm going to find some story that calls me. When that happens, I'm going to write it because I write until the story ends. I don't like to put in filler to cover space, only chapters to convey the sense of time or struggle. Some get long, some remain short.

But I know I'm going to keep writing.

I have monsters under a bed to chase down next.

May Status

2021-05-29T05:00:00Z

I'm obsessing about things right now, which is why I haven't updated the schedules for found a new serial to post.

Derik's Luck is almost complete, including getting a cover and seeing a print version.

Puppy Mill 2 is probably a month away from being complete. This one deserves a big post when it happens.

I also had to take on a commission (and finish a second) because of some unexpected expenses (car engine died in the middle of a trip). So this month is to finish the new commission, then to work on Derik's Luck and then stop obsessing.

I love big projects, but they also take a lot of bandwidth at certain points (mostly near the end). When I wrote Puppy Mill, the last 60k words were written in six weeks. The last 50k words of Derik's Luck was the week before I moved to another state.

Also, I need to rework the website. This is a big project and I'm getting stuck on it, but I'm finding it hard to expand certain things without doing those changes. However, as my boss says, that is not a “value-added” activity in that it does anything other than quality-of-life changes, so it hangs over me like a guillotine blade.

In short, I'm still alive, I'm still creating stuff, I'm just head's down. New chapters and stories are still coming out for patrons every month (8-30k words) but I still need to schedule the freebies.