Commissions Open: An Autobiography · 3:53pm Nov 4th, 2023
Commission rates $20USD per 1,000 words. Story ideas expected between 4K-20K preferable. Just as a heads up, I’m trying to put as much of my focus as I can into original work for publication, so I might close slots quickly or be selective with the ideas I take. Does not have to be pony, but obviously I’m going to be better or more interested in either original fiction or franchises I’m familiar with. My DMs are open to requests.
Turnaround will be completely erratic, I may go out of contact for short periods because I simply cannot be woken up for days at a time, I will do porn, I will discuss your request or pitch with you to try and find a story we’re both going to like. Actually, I just love learning why people like what they want. Know that I will take working with you seriously, and I’ll take your work seriously, but I am medically incapable of professionalism.
If that's all you're here for, fantastic. People interested in the explanation on what changed that I can do this again, the rest comes after the break. Don't worry, it's not financial issues, it's positive mental and physical health stuff... kind of. I'm trying to work out how to say that learning I'm never getting better and that treatment is impossible for me was fantastic news without sounding sarcastic.
I was godawful the last time I tried at this, back when I was desperate. Commissions were a thing I couldn’t afford not to do even though I was not healthy enough to do them. A lot has changed over the last two years, culminating in the fact that I can regularly write 10,000 words in a day, on good days. My estimate for how much I’ve written this year is around 500,000 words, spread between projects.
Which is fucking insane right? My baseline is a NaNoWriMo sprint. That’s as much as the last three years combined easily, easily. Writing 300 words in a day used to be excruciating to me, it was just less excruciating than not writing.
It’s not that I got better at writing is the thing; I’m just, it’s just that I’m so much healthier in my approach and my attitudes and my functioning. It’s also not that my health itself got better because I have been a shambolic corpse for a lot of it, it’s that I’m a lot more efficient with the energy I do have.
What I’m about to go into here is just me writing for an audience to keep my internal thoughts honest. Consider this like an attempt at priestly confession as performed through a message in a bottle.
See, I just got fired for medical reasons from the hospital job that I loved, and it was the only job I’ve ever found that catered to my chronic illnesses. My chronic illnesses just became more than the job was capable of catering to. It’s a no-fault severance essentially, it’s just that the medical certificate explaining my absence says this will always happen and I’m incapable of getting better.
This festers if it’s left in my own head. See, I got a lot of self esteem from this job and that got me through the transition process of being able to untangle my writing from my self-worth. Actually pulling that off is a big reason I can actually write all the time now. There’s no longer the pressure on writing as the means through which I justify my own existence, which is part of why I just had to bail out on fanfiction. If writing defined my self worth, and My Little Pony fanfiction defined my writing, then that’s just a bit awkward, isn’t it?
Except now I’m left without that job, without the ability to work a different one, and I’m not getting self-worth from my writing. Which is good for the writing, bluntly, so while it’s tempting to try and connect my writing to my self-worth again, doing that will only kill my ability to write.
Really, this is just a transition into the next stage of my life. I was thinking… how many times have I written about getting better and healthier? And the thing is that it’s a lot, every year, and it’s been true every year. I’ve had a lot to get better from.
Well, I think this could be it. Last call, we’ve hit the limits of how much better I can get. There’ll always be the incremental improvements, learning ways to be a better person and a better friend, I’m not saying anything as ridiculous as I have no room to grow. It’s just that I’ve hit the outer bounds on how good my mental and physical health can be, and it is still catastrophic.
I still had an entire seven-day week this year where every thought in my head was replaced with a reason to kill myself, not as a form of depression, but as a hallucination like a bad shrooms trip. I went six weeks just now where I didn’t have a day shorter than 30 hours, most went for 40, a few went for 50. Now I’m incapable of sleeping longer than 2 hours at a time again. Regularly this causes the complete obliteration of my muscle mass, so every time I finally get happy with my physical appearance it just melts. I don’t really notice or feel my chronic pain except when I take painkillers; the amount of sensation that just disappears actually makes it impossible to function, because so many of the operations of my brain need that level of pain to work anymore.
I actually slept with a sadist recently and what she needed to do to trigger a pain reaction scared the shit out of her so bad she didn’t want to do sadism on me anymore.
My recent diagnosis confirms this is as good as it gets, and I won’t get better than this, and I finally qualify for an actual disability pension; Previously I haven’t been allowed one because here in Australia, you can’t get one if you could theoretically get better within two years. You’d think, given everything I said, I’d be kind of broken up about this. The day I got the news I was. It’s just, after that it’s been totally liberating.
I’m not scared of being like this, I’m scared that it’s my fault for still being like this.
I can live with this, and I can live like this, because God knows I’ve gotten used to worse. For twelve years? Like, I’m cool with that. It’s just, this is permission to finally… stop.
I can stop seeing my life as a holding pattern towards a day I can finally be something closer to normal, functional. If I can get better, then everything I do that isn’t fixing this feels like drowning. I’m still trying to earn what my real life is going to be like, and the longer I take the less time I’ll have to live that instead of this.
This job was something I could actually do around my disability, and I still lost it because I got too sick to do it. If my life is still upwardly trending, then it feels like the problem has to be me. This was something I needed to keep doing and getting better at to keep getting better, and I’m a fuck up and a failure for losing that. The biggest thing that ate at me was that if this was something I was supposed to be able to do with this disability and I still couldn’t do it, then if I woke up fully cured of everything tomorrow I would still be incapable of holding it. The illness is just a convenient excuse to be a worthless piece of useless lazy human garbage [sic].
That hinges on the idea I was capable of getting better. So it’s like, nah, actually, maybe it’s kind of a miracle that given all this I was able to hold it as long as I did. I had to try insanely hard to keep showing up even as rarely as I did, and I just had a bout of chronic illness flaring up that meant I was incapable of it. I can’t keep treating my illness as a moral failing, doing things like pushing chronic fatigue as if it’s just laziness I need to motivate myself through.
“Duh”, right? Except that works sometimes, so being able to push yourself through like that becomes its own evidence it’s a personality thing. And pushing through is the only thing that works sometimes, so it’s the only thing you can do to do anything. That’s how it gets you.
Anyway.
End of the line. There is nothing that comes after this. I think I’m ready to call this the win, the finish line. I am having two different specialists sign off on the fact that there is no medical up from here, and I have won at recovery. My prize is being able to write like a machine, but still being relegated to a position in society that I have been conditioned to think of as worthless. What some very cool Germans have called ‘useless eater’, living off a pension that caps off at juuuuust 10% above the poverty line.
You can see why this is fucking with my self-worth a bit, right? As nice as it is to now be able to figure out how to make the best life I can from the pieces I have available to me, I’m feeling pretty worthless right now.
So yeah, fuck it, commissions again. This time I don’t strictly need the money whereas last time I was skipping meals, and I’m not so over-invested in the work. And God knows I don’t want to tie my self-worth into the writing itself. But I think right now, while I’m still in the process of having enough polished work to make it worth reaching out to agents and come what may on those longer term projects… Yeah, it might be nice to do some one-on-one stories for people like this. Just, the personal confirmation my writing was worth it to a specific person I can put a name and a face to, right?
Honestly that appeals to me in a way that trying for a larger, popular audience doesn’t right now. The cynical take is that’s pretty convenient because it’s the way that I get to ask for money, but like, yeah? The flipside is just, the headspace I’m in, writing something for the views and comments but knowing the audience only engaged with the piece because it was free is going to fuck with my sense of worth. (Likewise if the money were its own ends to me I’d just be working on publishing my fantasy erotica backlog. Ha.)
Which is the point of coming back here, right? Site’s pretty dead these days, but this has always been a place I’ve felt valued for my work. The fact the site’s pretty dead makes it easier to ask, honestly, less pressure, less buzzing at my brain to make the view numbers as big as possible. Just makes things more intimate with the people still here. All the brain gremlins defeated, all the stakes on the integrity of the userbase gone with the userbase itself.
I can’t think of a better thing to do than this new parlour trick of being able to write 10,000 words in a day (some days (and I can’t always choose which word document they go in)) than using it for fic requests. The trick’s easiest when I can do it as one unbroken train of thought, and pony’s a thing I can do that with.
Seriously though for real I hooked up with someone who had a fetish for sticking needles in people and when she realized what it took to make me say 'ow' she went 'ick'.
5753663
Yeah that was a wild anecdote to just slap into the middle of this. While I'm trying to save money for my own ventures at the moment, I wish you the best of luck.
Glad that you've found yourself in a good mental state at least, and that you're financially stable for now. I probably won't take you up on a commission right now, but maybe later.
Sounds like equilibrium to me, which can be a blessing in a lot of ways. PMing you for a commish!
EDIT: BTW, please keep us posted on your non-MLP work as well!
As someone currently dealing with their own chronic illness, (super long story) your blog post gives me hope. It made me realize that I'm at the starting line, that there is still hope and reasonably good odds that with my upcoming surgery and treatment plan to follow my condition will improve. It would hopefully allow me to get back to my life. I had to drop my studies, my placement, and my passions. Now I feel like a shadow of my former self, but it is through this difficult ordeal that I feel myself growing and finding new wisdoms in the slower pace with which I must now live my life. The last couple of months have been hard, the constant fatigue leaves me sleeping in until 11 a.m. and the constant pain leaves me without much energy, I've been feeling really depressed about my situation but at least for now, it's temporary.
All that to say I'm glad that you've finally got some kind of ultimatum, closure even, regarding your condition and where it leaves you. It's shitty that the government wouldn't allow you onto the DSP sooner or that it's barely scraping the poverty line. As if people with life-long disabilities or conditions that leave them without the capability to work don't deserve dignity, a life that is comfortable and worth living.
I found a lot of what you wrote to be rather poignant and I even relate to some of it. I think about how burnt-out I was before I got sick, how like you said chronic illness is the permission to finally stop. It made me realize that my self-worth isn't tied to my productivity, my accomplishments, or anything else. That its okay to finally take the time I need to rest, my body is literally forcing me to.
I hope you're able to keep on living a life that is at least in your eyes a life worth living. I'm glad you're able to come to terms with everything and still maintain a rather positive outlook towards your situation. I'm not so sure that someone else in your circumstances would be able to honestly.
I hope this all makes sense, if you had posted this blog even a few months ago I'm not so sure I would've connected with it the way I do now. As a fellow traveler on what is the long road to recovery, both mental and physical I'm glad your journey is at its end and that you can see it as a win, not a personal or moral failing.
Your post also made me realize how long it's been since we spoke or saw each other face-to-face
Anyhoo, I wish you all the best