I'm working on some new stories right now. I don't usually have writer's block - for me it's more like writer's lethargy. I feel like I can write the story, but...I'm not sure I will just now. I like to let a story gel in my mind for a while before I type it up, so that way I can focus on one thing at a time (what I will write, or how I will write it) instead of trying to come up with both at once. This method, while usually serving me well, does tend to make it hard to do as much writing as I'd like in a short time. If there are other writers out there, what are your thoughts on the creative process and how to overcome problems like writer's block or lethargy?
I also wanted to discuss this site's story sorting. Right now, there are dozens of stories with tag-like descriptions and broad categories, but no real way to sort the stories. How do you feel about the way the stories are displayed? Do you feel like each TF type ought to be its own page or own sortable tag, or do you feel like the current system with a few tweaks is just fine? Let me know if improving this would be helpful for you.
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I wanted to share a little bit more about myself, what motivates my writing, and what to expect in the near future.
I first started writing stories online when I was 16 years old. I had no friends at the time. In fact, I'd never had any friends - I'd gone through school feeling hopelessly outcast. What's more, at the time, I didn't feel like I was particularly intelligent. Sure, I had a sharp mind, but I didn't feel like my intellect was capable of helping me in any meaningful ways: I couldn't make friends, perform well academically, or connect with others who understood me. When I posted my first story (which was fan fiction) I received positive reinforcement (in the form of favorable reviews) within hours. My story was admired and appreciated, with one person calling it "the best ever." I suddenly felt like I had a way to connect with people in a way that was punishingly elusive in my interpersonal life. What's more, as I wrote and read more, I felt like there were elements of myself (issues related to fetish, gender, sexuality, ect) that I was able to explore with like-minded people. These were topics that I simply couldn't talk about with other people in person - at least, not in the same way. Writing allows me to connect with other unique people and to tell stories I feel need to be told because nobody else is telling them. Over the next decade, my personal life has improved, but my passion for writing (both fiction and non-fiction) never abated. Sadly, one defining feature of writing online is how fragile web infrastructure can be. My first account (on fanfiction.net) was deleted, along with my stories. I then started a Yahoo group, which was difficult to manage and attracted few people. I then tried to post my stories to a series of forums, many of which seemed to arbitrarily shut down after about a year or two, and then restart somewhere else. When I started this site in 2011, it was with the goal of finding a place I could manage all my stories that would not be shut down or deleted. I noticed other writers on a forum I frequented offering to do commissions and I decided I'd give it a shot as well. I liked the idea of making money doing something I love and that I felt like my stories seemed to be generally well received. One aspect of writing commissions that I particularly enjoy is figuring out what motivates people's interests, and writing a "perfect story" from their perspective, hopefully hitting on elements that even they didn't know they appreciated. I've been more and less productive during different periods, mostly because of work or (more recently) being in grad school at double the full time pace (I'm done with my program, as of a few weeks ago.) I've been juggling a lot of commissions and term papers, so that's probably why I've posted a little less frequently over the past few months. While what drew me to writing had nothing to do with making money, I can't deny that I'd love to be a professional writer. I'd love the opportunity to focus exclusively on writing, rather than splitting my focus between a main job and relegating writing to just a hobby. So part of my goal with this site is trying to realize that dream, and now that I have more free time, I can spend more energy on it. So in the future, expect more frequent blog posts, more of a presence from me online in a few other locations (I'm trying to discover new forums, so let me know if you have a favorite,) more stories posted here, more commissions, and more Ebooks. Hopefully, something for everyone. Let me know what you are liking the best, and I'll try to do more of it. Let me know what I can improve on, and I'll try my best to incorporate that feedback as well. Also, last week I was able to announce some new Ebooks and new stories posted here, so please check those out if you haven't already. I've finished two new stories! One is New Game, which is a short gender/race change story. The other is Awakening, a body part expansion story, which is a bit new for this site. I also have a special announcement. Very soon, I will be publishing ebooks on Amazon! Ebooks are a fantastic way to reach a wider audience and help promote and explore transformation ideas. I will continue taking commissions (in fact, I have a couple that I'm working on right now), and I'll continue to post stories on this site. If you are excited about the ebook idea, please leave me a comment letting me know what kinds of ideas you'd like to see. I take the opinion of my readers very seriously and I'll try my best to incorporate your comments and suggestions into upcoming ebook projects. Writing short story commissions is usually a very interesting process, and there are many rewarding aspects to such projects. One is the fact that I'm often asked to create something new out of a familiar transformation motif. I view this as a fun challenge, and although I often touch upon similar themes, I hope overall I've succeeded at making each story a unique and innovative narrative. Another is that I often hear lots of fantastic ideas. It's very rewarding to bring to life such compelling concepts. Perhaps the most rewarding for me is that in learning about an idea, I often feel like I can understand why people enjoy it. My goal in every commission to to understand the very essence of the idea, so I can create it in a way that is exactly what the person who commissioned it wanted. For those of you that have commissioned stories from myself or other authors, what was your favorite and/or most challenging part of the process? For those of you who haven't yet commissioned a story, which idea would you like to see brought to life? If you are interested in commissioning me fora story, send an email to [email protected] Romance and sexuality are key to many types of erotic writing, but they are curiously absent or underdeveloped in many forms of transformation stories. I want to explore the place these themes have in fiction, what makes them work and what makes them fail. Warning! This is going to be a very long, complicated discussion. In many transformation stories, the transformation is the erotic element. That doesn't meant that there is no sex, but sex acts aren't often the focus. Instead, the process of the transformation becomes the most-described part of the story. In just about every commission I've done, a laser-like focus on the transformation has been a request, which is understandable. What's a transformation story without a vivid transformation? Typically, romance and sexuality - if they are present at all - serve to highlight consequences and implications of the transformation. I'll discuss Matt L's stories as an example, because he's written a great deal of stories and I've read them all. Generally, they follow a pattern: either romance and sex are entirely absent, or the transformation causes the male love interest to lose interest in female because she's no longer conventionally attractive. After the transformation, the female might meet an unconventional man and fall in love. But this is described usually in a brief way, serving mainly to highlight the degree in social hierarchy change that has befallen the character. Other types of transformation stories tend to follow the same pattern: in age progression stories, for example, sex and romance are typically included as a 'mirror,' to show to differences between the characters post transformation. Gender change stories are more likely to include vivid sex scenes, but I've found most of these are based on exploring the concept that the gender change allows for a new expression of sexuality or a new kind of humiliation. Either way, they are done to show the effects of the transformation, not as an independent plot point. Though I'm by no means unique, I do feel that my stories are often a bit out of sync with this trend. A few of my stories focus almost exclusively on romance and sexuality. In The Concert, for example, there is no transformation element. In Embers in the Frost, the transformation element exists, but it is a small part of a story which is ultimately driven by a romance. Why do I write like this? That's a question that needs a lengthy answer. I've enjoyed transformation stories longer than erotic stories, but that's possibly because I was exposed to transformation stories far earlier in my life (in 'choose your own adventure' books, as a child). But when I first was exposed to erotic writing, I enjoyed depictions of unconventional or taboo relationships. When I first started writing, transformations become an end to creating those types of relationships, rather than ends in and of themselves. This is essentially an inversion of the gender transformation focus I mentioned earlier. Instead of showing how exciting the transformation is by describing it leading to sexuality or romance, I like to show how exciting the romance and sexuality are through the transformation. I'm a romantic at heart so I tend to enjoy sexuality being connected to some type of romantic feelings. I'm also a sex-positivist, so I don't understand why sex is often depicted as depraved or dirty in stories or in porn. Even when I write taboo stories, I still usually lean to the sexuality itself being very loving and affectionate. I know a lot of people tend to avoid romance and sexuality in stories because they are often written very poorly and with certain gender expectations. In other words, they are often written as gross, predictable, un-romantic, and always male-dominant. Read my takedown of the BBW 'Romance' genre to learn more about this trend. My first erotic story ever was a gender change story in which a man became a woman and a lesbian, written because I wanted a male character to have access to sexuality that didn't comport with the traditional model. So I actually started writing by creating a gender change story to avoid norms, but I ended up conforming to different norms. I created a story in which access to alternative sexuality was the product of the gender change, which I said is the focus of most gender change stories. Over the years I started to shift away from describing two female characters doing what I wanted a man and a woman to do, and just started writing the man and the woman directly. It was a bit difficult as there really isn't a good genre or even a good label for my style, and not a lot of good stories out there like it. I can't really describe my stories as 'female dominant,' because women in my stories always wield a loving/nurturing kind of power, and are never cruel or humiliating, as is often in the case in stories that are labelled as 'female dominant.' Perhaps it is my passion for describing alternative relationships that lead me to place heavy emphasis on them in my writing. Yet I have to admit I've never written about my ideal relationship in any one story. The romance in Embers in the Frost is sweet, but it was written ten years ago, and doesn't reflect exactly how I see things today (specifically, I don't think of myself as a self-esteem rescuer.) The erotic element of Relationship Realignment is still great, but it's too fantastical to serve as an outline for a relationship. Other stories, like The Princes and Graduation Day, are very close but aren't it exactly. I'd like to think that my thoughts on relationships are obvious from reading many of my stories, but given the fact that my thoughts do evolve over the years and the fact that most of my stories don't have super-well developed male characters (exceptions include the stories mentioned in the previous paragraph,) I can understand if I've been less than clear. That's about all I have to say on this topic for now. As for what I'm writing, I'm working on the last part of a six-part commission currently and a story swap. I have another commission that I'm likely to start soon after that. Then I'll be starting grad school, which well take up some of my time, but I'll try to keep writing when I can. I'm working on several projects a the moment, and one person who is commissioning me to do a story asked me to describe my writing process. I decided to answer that question with this blog post. In part this is because I find writing fascinating and I thought some of you might as well. My writing process begins when I first get an idea. Generally, I come across ideas in three ways. I see an idea in popular culture or a website and think about modifying it in some way, I receive an idea as a suggestion from another (which can be a commission), or I come up with the idea organically. After I have the idea, I usually spend several days playing around with the idea in my head. On rare occasion, I sit down for hours with a notepad planning it, though usually I just let the idea bounce around in my mind when I have a free moment. Once the idea has developed, I progress from conceptualizing the plot to writing out key scenes in my mind, which is also usually done in an undisciplined manner. Finally, when I feel comfortable with the idea, I type it. By the time I type, I want most of the creative work to be over, so I can focus my mind exclusively on tasks like creating quality sentence structure. If possible, I like to type a story all at once, or at least to create individual chapters all at once and treat them in my mind as if they are stand alone stories. This is difficult if I don't feel I've creatively fleshed out what I want to do beforehand. I've found writing a bit here and there without a predetermined plan tends to make for a poor, unfocused story, so I'll wait until the last minute if needed before starting the typing phase. After I've finished typing, I try to get a fresh pair of eyes to check it for typos when possible, and wait a bit to see if I want to make any tweaks. Generally, though, I try to limit my tweaks to things like avoiding using the same word over and over. Trying to second guess content can lead to lengthy and complex revisions, especially with short stories, which often don't even improve things and can even make things worse. Here's a common example of how a post-typing content edit can sabotage writing. Let's just say you want to describe a character as getting more and more angry over time. You have two good examples of character's buildup, and then an explosion. Upon re-reading, you feel the need to add a third example. This one doesn't quite fit into the plot, so you have to add in some 'explanation' to make it gel with the rest of your plot. The result? The story either bores the reader or leaves them confused. They start to wonder why the scene was added, and the focus and momentum from the two good scenes is squandered, which in turn limits the effectiveness of the climax. If you are a fellow writer, let me know how your creative process differs from mine in the comments section. I look forward to hearing from you. I've finished a new story, Owl Eyes, which features a race and gender transformation. I wanted to talk a little bit about the dynamics of this transformation type. Both probably merit a full "in depth" analysis and more, and both will probably get that in the future. But for now I wanted to give my brief thoughts. I feel like gender change is popular because of the restrictive gender roles and gender expectations in our society. Specifically, I feel that male to female transformations are popular because of the restrictions we place on men's gender roles. While the feminist revolution helped broaden women's gender roles - which is a good thing - we have not seen any movement comparable for men. Women can wear men's clothing without raising an eyebrow, but not the other way around. Boys are still teased for crying or acting feminine. I see a bit of hope with the new anti-bullying movement but I still feel like we are a long way off. Many men who don't feel manly can feel very out of place, especially socially and romantically. (I also feel like in subtle ways, our culture says that men are gross and women are pretty and sexy, but that's a topic for another time). There are a few ways to resolve these conflicts of an unmanly man in the fiction setting. The standard way, which is employed over and over again in coming of age stories like Harry Potter, is for the man to 'become a man,' usually by turning into a warrior or an achiever of some kind. This in turn makes others respect him and women want him. Another way these conflicts can be resolved in fiction is if the man becomes gay, which frees him from the constraints and expectations of heterosexuality. Or he could turn into a woman, which frees him from the constraints of being a man altogether. None of these options are bad per se but I feel like there ought to be more available to the non-manly man, both in literature and in real life. There is a fourth option - for the man to accept himself as is, and be in a relationship with a woman who is also atypical in terms of gender roles. In both our broader culture and in the online story community this option is depicted only rarely. (If you know of one you like in particular, please lave a comment sharing it) You may have noticed many of my stories contain elements of what might be described as role reversal among the couples. This is partly because I happen to really enjoy that dynamic and also to do my part to show that this is a viable option for men who feel like they do not fit into the 'normal' mode for relationships. I do not yet have a single story that I can point to that describes exactly what I'm talking about in terms of this flip. I may never, in part because gender roles are so complicated that there is no one pure way to flip them completely. My story Relationship Realignment flips some aspects, while Graduation Day flips others. This is getting a bit long so I'll stop for now. I just didn't want to post this story without explaining part of my perspective on the underlying dynamic. I've finished a new story, "Roll Model." It is the first story I've written in a while that focuses exclusively on weight gain as a transformation. Please leave a comment letting me know what you think of it. Coming up, I've got another gender/race change story similar to "Quantum Flux." If you liked that one, you'll love what I'll be posting very soon. I'm also working on my Ogre-themed story swap. I also wanted to share with you some thoughts I had about writing stories, some of which stemmed from watching a documentary about the board game "Monopoly." In the documentary, I learned that the game was originally called "The Landlord's Game," and was meant to essentially be an interactive parable about the evils of capitalism. As the game changed over the decades and was modified by several people, the explicit political message was lost. Today, the same dynamic that the original game wanted to promote is still there - the game ends when one person amasses all the wealth and forces everyone else to live with nothing. But in a twist, this ending is celebrated (as least by the winner), as it feels good to 'win' at capitalism. This interesting dynamic - having a radical message become something that celebrates the status quo - led me to wonder if there are any parallels to transformation stories. Few transformation stories offer an explicitly radical message, but often they involve concepts that are a bit taboo. I've argued before that the taboo nature of many transformations, like weight gain, is part of what make them exciting. But what's fascinating to me is that many taboo ideas can be actually used to validate, rather than challenge, the status quo. In most weight gain stories I've read, and in most requests I've received, weight gain is more of a punishment than a reward, and the characters are very rarely happy to be fatter, especially at first. For those of us who are writers and who have a genuinely radical agenda - and I could myself among them - this raises and interesting question. Should we accent that stories are a form of entertainment, or should we try to imbue our tales with a subtle message? I'm not entirely sure myself, and I've tried both approaches. I don't know if any messages I've 'sent' have been received, or if they've been perceived as ham-handed or unnecessary. So I suppose I have a few questions for you: Do you feel stories ought to carry the message of their authors, and what messages, if any, do you feel have been contained in my stories? I've been writing short stories for about ten years. I enjoy it as a medium for several disparate reasons. Here are just 3 of them: 1. Writing creates a new world When writing, an entire universe is created, completely under the control of the writer, which is both exciting and challenging. It allows for both total freedom and total accountability. 2. Writing allows for the expression of secret thoughts Outside of an academic setting, it is hard to find a venue for new and unpopular ideas. The creative process allows a kind of outlet for whatever ideas can't quite be expressed in everyday conversation. And because most fiction isn't advocacy, an idea can be considered simply as a part of a story, instead of being debated and analyzed on its merits. This allows for writers to play with ideas purely for their aesthetic appeal instead of their utilitarian purposes. 3. Writing can bring joy to others Writing is my art and I like the fact that I can brighten up someone's day with it on occasion. I always enjoy feedback because I like the connection with others. Even negative feedback has its place - informing me what I ought to do better next time around. I'm currently engaged in several projects at once. I'm working on a collaboration, a story swap, two new commissions, and our contest winner (no, I have not forgotten about it! Thanks so much again for your patience.) I'll be providing updates and posting a lot of new material in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that. I've also re-organized the story section. In the coming weeks hopefully I'll be able to make more updates to the site, including rolling out some new features, including new types of writing I'll be doing. To those of you who are writers, let me close by asking you what is your favorite part about writing? I've just finished a story, The Concert. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, this is more of a romantic/erotic meeting, rather than a transformation themed story. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Today's beautiful person is Christina Schmidt. I also have a special announcement. I'm going to be making some exciting changes to this site very soon. This includes better organizing my stories and offering some new features. Stay tuned! |
AboutT.F. Wright is a game developer and bestselling author. They focus on topics like magical transformations, celebrating alternative forms of beauty, flipping traditional gender roles, and LGBT themes. T.F. is also available for commissions. Categories
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