Hey Tasties!

's been a while since I've done one of these. My bad...

Today I thought I would come clean about a smol lie of omission I carried out a while back.

You guys remember Unless? The serial story about gay otter twins lusting after each other that I posted in ten chapters between July 2017 and April 2018?

Of course you do, it was my entire output for an embarrassingly long time. :P

Well I wasn't entirely honest about that story. I never actually lied about it, per se, I just didn't explain the whole truth. See, when that first chapter went up, the, ah... the entire story was already written. I didn't need to wait that long to put it up.

"Unless" was originally written for the A Family Affair story bundle (Available now! #ShamelessSelfPlug), and at the time it was the longest story I'd ever written, so the plan was to break it up into pieces and spread it throughout the body of the collected version of the bundle, between the other stories. I hadn't actually gotten around to the separation part, since I put off proofing the entire bundle until all of the stories had been written (Sidenote: do not do this. The Proofening nearly destroyed me) but the vague plan was to break it up into individual days in the story.

Then Inheritance, also in the bundle, turned out to blow Unless' wordcount right out of the water, so I shrugged and decided not to break it up after all... except that I realized that when it was one continuous story, it felt really repetitive to me, since it was basically the same scenario - the brothers long to bang, do some mental gymnastics to justify edging closer to banging, and then fool around that way - over and over again. :P

So at the advice of my editing partner, I excised Unless from the bundle and came up with a replacement M/M story, Burning Desire, to take its place. Then, since I had this big-ass story lying around, I thought I might as well do something with it, so I started breaking it up into pieces and then proofing those pieces on the side while I continued to finish off the bundle, which let me put up a bunch of content while I focused the lion's share of my attention on The Proofening.

Honestly, I thought it worked really well, the story broke down into pieces really smoothly, and the only part where I regretted the way I'd done it was when I realized that James' love confession to Nigel came right at the beginning of Part Eight, so I fear that it lost some of its impact because of it. I did see a comment or two suggesting that people thought it was going to be another sexy dream fakeout, too. Maybe I should have planned out the segments a little better... <_<;

I also have to admit, embarrassingly, that since each of the chapters was done before Part One was even uploaded, that means my 'Year in Review' journals were actually a little misleading: I only wrote two original stories each in 2017 and 2018. Ouch, my pride...

But there you have it, the unvarnished truth. I figure since the full story has been out for ages and the bundle is available now, this shouldn't actually annoy anyone, and I thought it might be neat to give you guys a peek behind the curtain, as well as reminding y'all that I'm still alive after all this silence. Sorry again about that...

With any luck, I can get my head in gear, and get back to the halcyon days of putting out romantic furry smut left and right so I don't need to resort to such things to get uploads, hehe. n_n

JOURNAL OVER.