It’s the last day of 2018, precisely a year since I started writing these semi-regular “Infernal Dispatches.” You know what that means: a recap of 2018, and a look ahead to 2019!
The Numbers
Inspired by Misty, I kept a meticulous breakdown of my writing numbers over the past year:
The columns are pretty straightforward: the name of the story, the date completed, the final word count, the number of writing days it took to complete the story, and the average number of words written per day. The last column, cost, was intended to keep track of how much I earned from commissions. That column ultimately went unused, as every commission I wrote this year was a collaborative effort with my friend Jill, and all proceeds went toward helping her replace stolen art equipment.
Fleshing out the numbers a little more, I wrote a grand total of 51,165 words this year, an average of almost 4,700 words per story, with a median word count of 3,655.. That only includes the above eleven stories, and not the text of these Infernal Dispatches, or of the (now lost) reviews and commentary I posted on Tumblr.
Looking at how my word counts are clumped, I appear to write three “kinds” of stories:
- a 1,500- to 2,000-word transformation “scene,” tightly focused on one person’s mental and physical transformation
- a 4,000- to 6,000-word story that explores the relationship of two people, usually in the context of them having kinky transformation sex
- a 9,000- to 10,000-word multi-scene beast with extensive world and/or character building and multiple transformations (and probably also kinky transformation sex)
This intuitively lines up with my own writing self-assessment. The two things I enjoy most in my stories are:
- detailed transformation sequences, which require a certain amount of build-up to establish a pre-transformation identity that the transformation and post-transformation can be juxtaposed against
- meaningful conversations between characters, which require careful (and word-consuming) characterization
In both cases, I need a little more than a 500-word drabble to write what I like to write!
Finally, eight of the eleven stories were commissions, and of the remaining three, two were fan fiction. Only the very first story, Idol Hands, could be construed as a completely original work, and even that was a “novelization” of a transformation sequence by c_san!
So those are the raw numbers, folks. But the numbers, Mason! What do they mean?!
The Good
First things first: this was my most productive writing year, ever! I wrote nearly ten times as much in 2018 as I did in 2017.
More importantly to me, I continued to write, throughout the year. I wrote eleven stories! I produced twenty writing updates!
2018 also marked the first time I embarked on taking commissions, and it was very gratifying to find so many people willing to pay me to write a bespoke story. Bouncing ideas off commissioners also helped me grow as a writer, as I had an invested audience who both wanted me to succeed and pushed me to the best writer I could be.
Finally, 2018 saw the creation of this website! While I think there is still some room for improvement—particularly as relates to story access and organization—I’m very happy with the site’s aesthetic and its ease-of-use. Creating my own website had been a medium- to long-term goal of mine, and now it has happened!
The Bad
Guys, I’m going to be honest here: I may never again take any commissions.
Looking at the dates of completion, you can see I started the year off very strong, and then there’s a four-and-a-half month lull between March and August. The twin commissions of Good Judgement and Devil’s Diner took the absolute snot out of me. I’m very, very proud of those stories, but writing two 10,000 word commissions back-to-back really burned me out.
(That’s not entirely fair to commissioned writing, though. That eighteen-week sabbatical between published stories also corresponded to a time of personal turmoil in my life, and my writing output and confidence picked back up as things became more stable.)
However, the most pernicious effect of commissioned work is that I ultimately spent much of 2018 having really great ideas for “personal” stories that guilt would not allow me to pursue.
Last but not least: the Tumblr Purge has affected my engagement with and access to my audience, in ways that I don’t have the tools to quantify. I fortuitously made this website the day before my Tumblr account was obliterated. That gave me the opportunity to migrate over my precious writing updates, but not the chance to announce my new site to my 1,000+ followers. I’ll never know just how engaged those followers were with my writing, but losing them, and without the ability to point them to my new site, rankles.
The Future
At least for the first part of 2019, my writing is going to me about me and my wants. Like I said a year ago, I really want to make a shared universe for much of my original fiction. I made some early headway into that project; the world is called Azuras, and some of my commissioners were kind enough to allow me to set their stories in my shared world. I am sitting on a year’s worth of denied brainstorming and plot mapping that will now have a chance to bear fruit.
I also continue to flirt with the idea of setting up a Patreon. My intent wouldn’t be to monetize my writing, not really; I want my online stories to be freely accessible. Mostly, I’d just like a little money to cover the cost of this new website and the coffee that makes my writing possible. A Patreon would also give me another venue to reach out to and talk with my readers; even if I’m not soliciting story prompts or running commissions, I still have thoughts and plotlines that I’d like feedback and input on. Running Patreon-only polls on what ideas I should focus on, and reciprocating donors’ kindness by giving them early access to my stories, seems like a win-win situation. But I also discussed this a year ago, and ultimately did not make a Patreon. Who knows what the future might bring?
And that brings me to my final thought of the year:
The Present
Friends, the world is tough. 2017 was a bad year for a lot of people. 2018 doubled down on that awfulness. There is little reason to think that 2019 will be an improvement. We live in a time of increasing radicalization, of executive dysfunction, of immiseration and violence and evil.
I am… ambivalent… about the effectiveness of “textual resistance,” and I am deeply uncertain that my stories are meaningful in any sense of the word. Words are just words; they’re not action.
But words are what I have, and writing is what I do. I can’t promise you that my writing will always be what you want it to be, or what you need it to be. But I’ll try.
Thank you for reading in 2018, and I hope you stick around for 2019.