So. One thousand watchers. Even if I’ve been preparing for this milestone for a good while now, it still doesn’t quite feel real. Some part of me still trapped in the late 2000s and early 2010s wants to say doesn’t that make you a popufur, now? (as at one point, 1000 watchers really did seem to be the rough boundary for popufur-dom), even though that boundary has shifted somewhere into the multiple thousands over time (just like how qualifying as a greymuzzle has shifted from merely being 30 or older into actual middle-age as the fandom has both grown older and reached successive generations).

And not just one thousand watchers - we’re also talking about a very, very late 10th anniversary for the start of my writing on FurAffinity - said 10th anniversary falling on the 31st of March earlier this year; which I didn’t realise had happened until a couple of months after.

So, as narcissistic as it might potentially be, I thought the best way to celebrate both of these in tandem - as well as to properly organise and digest my own thoughts on it all - would be to ramble on as I often do in story descriptions. Normally, I’m talking about the creative process for a specific story when doing so… so we’ll consider this rambling on about the creative process for myself? Hah~



FORMATIVE EXPERIENCES

I’m pretty sure I was born somehow pre-programmed to one day be into macro, and I say that with complete seriousness - and I’m fairly certain that a lot of other people will read this and think, you too? About as far back as I can possibly remember - and bearing with me since I have a very bad memory - I was interested in big things. A lot of people can point to a single specific piece of media as their own macro/furry awakening, but I never exactly had anything that specific, so much as a whole bunch of little moments that make an awful lot of sense in retrospect.

In no real order (especially because I have no memory of the age I was for any of them, other than probably under 10 years old for most of them) - I remember being a bit spellbound (and feeling very funny inside somehow) as a little kid when I caught the very ending of Honey I Blew Up The Kid when I got up early one day to watch TV. A scene in a cartoon called Ultimate Book of Spells where a girl outgrows a cage to escape it got lodged in my head for the better part of 20 years after seeing it once while on holiday, until I finally managed to track it down again with a friend’s help. One Christmas time I was annoyed at a family friend’s daughter choosing for us all to watch Barbie and The Nutcracker on the TV right up until the Rat King grew to massive size during the duel with the Nutcracker. The scene in Disney’s Hercules with the hydra made me feel excited in a funny way as a kid, somehow, and I wished the hydra had kept growing more and more and more heads and beaten Hercules - and by the same token I was obsessed with using hydras in Age of Mythology and always carefully micromanaging them to grow as many heads as possible, each.

(And you had better believe I adored the Egyptian and Greek titans in that game, the giant anthro Ra and Cerberus.)

If someone put a gun to my head and told me to pick a single moment as my macro awakening, though, it would definitely be Temdant’s old upload of the Pocket Dragon Adventures episode Attack of The 50 Foot Binky (and I’m probably showing my age a little just by mentioning that YouTube channel). I still have a gigantic soft spot for Binky because of it to this very day because of it, and as far as I can tell it might well have been the first time I watched a cartoon episode where someone grew giant and then got shrunk back down, and explicitly thought to myself that I wished they had kept on growing bigger.

In terms of more general formative media, though, things are probably a bit eclectic. In terms of children’s media, a hodgepodge of whatever you could reasonably expect a British 2000s kid to have watched, coupled with a tonne of old Hanna Barbera cartoons and a smattering of older, more homegrown stuff due to a fairly substantial childhood VHS tape collection (Trumpton, Chigley, Bill and Ben, The Herbs, Captain Pugwash, Ivor the Engine, and so on and so forth). There was also a Digimon Adventure cassette that I adored (and which I somehow managed to forget about until a couple of years back), though anime wasn’t something I really became aware of at all until well into teenagehood (which is probably pretty uncommon, especially nowadays, but at least when I was a kid in the early 2000s anime didn’t seem to have much of a presence in Britain).

There was also a lot of books. A lot. I don’t remember much that’s specific other than being obsessed with Percy Jackson enough that I managed to read the third book in a single sitting on the day it came out, and ravenously devouring every single scrap of Warhammer/Black Library I could get my hands on, to the point I completely wore out the spine of my poor Grey Knights Omnibus from re-reading it so many times.

In terms of video games - Ty The Tasmanian Tiger, Runescape and Age of Mythology formed a sort of obsessive trifecta I only really broke out of sometime towards the middle of secondary school.



MY PATH TO FINDING FURAFFINITY

I’m not quite sure how or when I discovered furries and the furry fandom. I think I was vaguely aware of them both for a very long time beforehand, simply because I managed to stumble my way onto Encyclopedia Dramatica at an age that really wasn’t appropriate, sometime around or after the whole Burned Furs thing went down.

I was actually specifically into giantesses long before I was into macro furries, though - again, due to my generally poor memory, especially of stuff that happened long in the past and that at the time I saw no real need to commit to memory - I’m not quite sure for how long before. At the very least, I can remember an entire smattering of various size-focused websites that I think I used before I found FurAffinity (And I’m also not sure how I found any of them, nor FurAffinity itself):

The Overflowing Bra (overflowingbra.com). Mini-giantess & slow growth story wiki (mg-sg.pbworks.com). Giantess booru (now renamed to Sizebooru) and giantessworld.net. On top of this there was Temdant’s channel on Youtube, and what other stuff passed for size content on the site in the mid-to-late-2000s (I remember a specific vore animation simply called ‘Dragoness’ or something along those lines making the rounds at the time), as well as whatever I could scrounge up through Google.

(I had a specific pet peeve at the time, for people labelling micro/shrink content as giantess, whereas now the difference between the two is much more firmly established.)

I’m not sure what order any of these sites came in, or even if they were before, concurrent with, or after FurAffinity. As for FurAffinity itself, I’m fairly certain I was using it by 2010 at the absolute latest, given my memories of certain specific pictures - Pokémon Master by Sift, and the Amelia’s Growth sequence by Darcell1291 - meaning both that I probably found them relatively soon after upload, and also had a relatively well developed idea of what I liked by then.

From then, it was just a matter of time until I made my account. Initially I created an account with the name Infinity421 - the name I used for my Runescape account, and then everywhere else - before deciding against the idea of being able to be linked to a FurAffinity account, and using some sort of random username generator to come up with something else quickly.

Thank goodness we can change our display names because on some level I regretted and was embarrassed by Rdude90 ever since.

(And for anyone who may have ever wondered, my profile icon comes from a long-abandoned Nationstates account I had named Cesatar - specifically some sort of forum RP thing involving a joint fighter program, which I cropped and used as a profile pic. I made the original flag design very badly in Paint.net with a lot of copy-pasting and the colour fill tool.)



MY PATH TO WRITING FOR FURAFFINITY

Would you believe me if I told you that I did badly on school exams because I was so bad at expressing myself? I almost don’t, and it’s pretty funny in retrospect. But, I first started writing on writing.com, probably somewhere around 2010 and 2011 - I could go and look at my earliest uploaded chapters but with just how many interactives have been deleted over the years it wouldn’t be accurate in any real way.

Needless to say, my early stuff was rough. Very rough, and very bad (though I think the exact same thing about basically everything I’ve ever written before 2022 or so, but they do say artists/writers are their own worst critics). I mostly contributed to a now-deleted interactive called Giant Friendly Animals (though which I managed to mostly save and reupload on my own account, shortly after its deletion), which was definitely where I cut my teeth on writing. I’d say the first signs of improvement came from deliberately trying to emulate Dnapalmhead’s writing style because of how much I loved it, after he began contributing to the interactive himself sometime after I did. There’s a reason why my writing style is so close to his, and, well - it’s because my own much younger self adored his writing and wanted to write something just like it, even if over time I’ve definitely developed my writing style into something I can truly call my own.

I’d say I had a sense of writing.com’s decline even back in 2014/15 or so - and that was when the site regularly rustled up more than two or three thousand visitors a day. As far as I can tell, the exact message or chatlog or whatever is probably lost to time - but it was JamesFoxes who encouraged me to write for FurAffinity instead of writing.com, and I will be eternally grateful to him for that suggestion.

And so, like a rat (or maybe a cat) fleeing a sinking ship, I jumped from one site to the other - and the rest, with some bumpiness and gaps and absences here and there - is history.


EARLY INFLUENCES AND INFLUENCES ON MY FURRY INTERESTS AND WRITING STYLE

Sometimes it can be hard to tell what influenced you to like a certain thing, but even though I’m not exactly sure of the timeframe or order, I’m at least able to pinpoint a decent handful of specific people who influenced me and how. In no particular order - and hopefully without missing out anyone -

NMR is responsible for me liking huskies, thanks to Strength Test, which directly led to Angel and everything associated with her. I’d say that’s pretty damn important.

Aakashi might have introduced me to transformation in general, thanks to Drum Call and Dragon Kiss. It was either them, LunarKeys or Banana of Doom.

Muddyness and MrExilo probably got me interested in more serious/darker size stories (at least relative to what I was interested in at the time), courtesy of the former’s Growth Spurt series and the latter’s general output. Hetzer planted the idea of military sci-fi combining with furry and macro in my mind, and Spam7 offered pretty critical early advice for writing longer stories. Cetas (Rest in Peace) introduced me to inflatables, and DesmondFallout’s Rise of The Mega Horse might well have been my first exposure to feral to anthro transformation. Darcell1291 introduced me to the idea of growth via inflation.

VDO was an appropriately huge influence on me, which you can probably tell by how I’ve made deiphilia a pretty big part of my personal ‘brand’, so to speak. Furry gods and goddesses, massive-massive-massive sizes, and explosive speeds of growth.

Above all else, though, I think Dnapalmhead is probably, by far, the single largest influence on my interests - and, as mentioned before, my own writing style. Off the top of my head, he got me into - male growth (there was a time where I was distinctly uncomfortable with it, which I find genuinely funny in retrospect given basically the entirety of my gallery), muscle, hyper-muscle, huge hyper-muscle and hyper, growing villains/baddies, smug growers, power-hungry growers (and in general every single possible personality type for a growing macro that isn’t a purely sugar-sweet cinnamon roll), too many growth triggers and individual species to list, and - along with VDO - a specific preference for huge sizes. Gigamacro, teramacro, universal and so on - 15 years ago or so it was very hard to find size content that went much bigger than Godzilla-sized; or at least that was how it felt at the time (something I’ve mentioned once or twice in various story descriptions).


WHERE WE ARE NOW

So, where are we now?

That’s a big question. In all honesty, I’m not entirely sure - this year’s had too many hectic/busy periods for my liking, which has thrown things pretty heavily off the rails on a handful of occasions. On top of this, it’s been one of those years where it feels like half of the entire thing simply vanished down the plughole when you weren’t looking. Despite that, though, I’ve managed to keep trucking along with my writing, and I’m happy with the speed of it - even if there’s a few specific stories I wanted to have out much earlier in the year, I’m at least still working on them and getting things done, bit by bit; and it still feels amazing being able to write a thousand words a day, or 2 or 3 thousand if I push things or really get into the zone, compared to how before a year-or-so ago, now, my absolute maximum was 500 words a day. Even if - yes, I write furry porn - there’s a genuine feeling of joy to the creative process and to writing; and - without meaning to jinx things - I doubt I’ll ever see a period of burnout anywhere close to the one that lasted for a few years between 2018/19 and 2021.

While I am very proud of what I’ve managed to accomplish, it still feels strange knowing that it’s been over ten years since I uploaded my first story to this site. That’s a very, very long time, and a lot of things are different now to how they were back then - both the real world and the internet are pretty different places; the furry fandom has seen an entire new generation of members (as well as what I like to think of as an increasing degree of tolerance from those outside it) - and, hell, even I’m different. On some level, I still ‘feel’ the exact same on the inside as I did back then - but at the same time, I know I’m very different to the person I was ten years ago, and not just in terms of writing ability. My circle of friends has changed, too - some I’m still friends with, others not any more. I feel like I have a much better idea of who I am as a person, especially over the past couple/few years in particular - I think getting my fursona really helped, as corny as that might sound.

In all honesty, I’m not quite sure how to finish this journal off - so maybe a thank you to anyone who decides to take the time to read this is the best idea. To anyone who follows me or my work, or who has favourited anything I’ve uploaded, or has even just taken a look at a story I’ve written and liked it - thank you. When I started uploading stories to Furaffinity I never thought I’d get anywhere close to this far - as far as I can tell, the first time I even mentioned or so much as noticed my watcher count was around 650 or so - and even though I love writing so much that I’d probably still do it even if nobody else ever looked at my stories, the fact that there are people out there interested enough in what I create to do so is definitely a big part of the motivation to continue.

So - thank you, all of you. Here’s to another 10 years of writing, and to another ten years of creative pursuits or progress or just general good fortune for everyone.



(And yes, Titanic Life is still coming, for those who are still interested, even if the journal mentioning that is now nearly 3 years old. The first part of the rewritten version would have been uploaded in March, if I’d had my way - which unfortunately, I didn’t. Hopefully it’ll be coming sooner rather than later!)

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