Eros and Personal Update, Part II · 8:31pm Jun 20th, 2023
To make a long story short, I continue to get slowly better while the new Eros chapter is at 8300 words and being written only incrementally. Its likely size is 12k or more words before all is said and done, with probably another week before it's draft complete. For the record, that's longer than I usually make clop chapters, unless they're climactic ones—in the story sense, not the sexual one. But as it happens, we're approaching the climax here, of both the story arc and the Midway movie.
Writing clop seems to proceed in one of two manners for me. The far more common one is fits and starts simply because I usually can't write that much of it at a time, in part for reasons I'm sure you can guess. Under that mode, it's rare for me to be able to write more than, say, 1.5k words per day, and usually less. Sometimes it's just a few hundred words, like yesterday.
It isn't just because it's a turn on; it's because turning clop into coherent chapters that include plot and character development can be surprisingly tricky, especially when we're deep into the story and engaging in wire-to-wire action. There's often a whole lot of little things I want to do and finding places for them all (or finally figuring out they don't belong there) can take a while.
As a result, the chapter only materializes slowly, especially at first, though it tends to accelerate towards the end I see the chapter finally take shape and find an angle/progression that works. Unfortunately, we're not at that point yet with the new chapter.
The second manner is far more rare. It's when a strong muse grabs hold of me with a desire to write sex and doesn't let go, enabling me to produce massive amounts of erotic output (I mean the writing kind!) almost effortlessly. It's happened to me twice that I can remember. Once was with Unleash the Magic: Nightmare Night a few years back, where I ended up writing four large and very M-rated chapters within a month and released them all in the leadup to Halloween. I believe AJ_Aficionado will remember that sequence, which was some of the most inspired stuff I've done.
The second occasion actually did occur with Eros, at the very beginning. When I decided I wanted to write this anthology of M-rated griffon/human action based on Feathered Hearts back in 2021, I set out to do it with a will and ended up generating a whopping ten chapters in the space of six weeks, releasing five at the start and then rest over the next several days to try to space them out and get the story on the feature board. Didn't quite work, sadly, but it was still an incredible output for me as I enjoyed writing them the entire way. Unfortunately—and part of the problem might be that I'm not working on more than one chapter at time now—that performance has not been repeated, for this or any other story I had.
Muses are fickle things. They're not always around, and even when they are, they often want to work on something other than what you think you need to or have otherwise promised to do. Best you can do is just go with them, even if they pull you away to work on something else.
As for my recuperation from this bout of severe bronchitis, there's not much else to say except that it continues. Coughing has almost vanished and my blood pressure seems to be slowly settling back down. I'm still feeling abnormally low energy (cue Jeb Bush joke) and have a lack of stamina, though. Starting trying to run again, and I had dropped from being able to run 10k to only 4k. I've got it back up to 5k and it will probably take weeks to regain the rest. I've also resumed weightlifting, which is a lot more draining than it should be, but the longer I'm away from that, the more muscle I lose.
Anyway, just wanted to let folks know where things stood. I'm half-considering releasing a teaser later for non-Eros fans of Feathered Hearts, only because something materialized in the chapter that isn't clop—a rather surprising parallel between Earth and Tellus that our heroes discuss while watching the movie, that *might* end up being something I can incorporate into the main story later. For now, let's just say that some mythical figures of even the modern Earth might find far more real parallels on Tellus. If so, it would only be fair to the non-clop readers to show that (sanitized) scene to them to give them some idea of what might be coming.
Get healthy and stay happy
It's good that you are recovering.
Happy to see that you are starting to recover, even if slowly.
Continuing my catchup of old blog comments...
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Do my best! And I appreciate the well-wishes, as always.
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Thanks. It was an agonizingly slow process.
But it finally happened.
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Too slowly. But it’s finally done. I don’t have all my stamina back yet, which I’m defining as being able to run a 10k. I can only do about 7.5k right now. Then again, that’s probably asking a lot in this summertime heat and humidity. Might have to wait for fall to restore my full running range.