I touched on it in my last journal entry, in regards to the accounts that seemed suspiciously like sock puppet accounts of someone trying to avoid punishment from the admins; since that journal entry there has been new developments on it. In particular, I found out after not realizing for a good while that the account of Winterfull, who requested my Noivern anthro story, "Odd Shiny Hunting Tactics," had been suspended, but not deleted. This was also as I noticed that one of the suspiciously new accounts had been active for around three days without being deleted yet; since most of them had been deleted within one day, I thought either the situation was over, or that this latest suspiciously new account genuinely was a different person by coincidence. Right after that, I got a message from Winterfull, whose suspension had ended. I was feeling fairly certain at that point that the sock puppet accounts were Winterfull the entire time, but I didn't technically have any proof, and besides, I still don't know what they did to get in trouble in the first place, so I was just continuing on as normal.

Well, then the latest new account got deleted after all, and so did the account of Winterfull. To my surprise though, the account of Moglo1997, who requested my Bakugan story, "A Most Annoying Companion," also got deleted. I knew that Moglo1997 was an account belonging to a Polish person, as they messaged me in Polish when we discussed the Bakugan story; I did also suspect that Winterfull was also possibly Polish, for while they didn't message me in Polish, it was fairly evident that they were probably using a translator program from another language to English, especially from a couple times they had a sentence oddly identically repeated, like they accidentally hit ctrl-v twice. There was even one message with one word that wasn't translated, but the two translation programs I pasted it into to see what it was disagreed about what the language was; one program said it was Polish, while the other said it was Croatian. I also know that the last suspiciously new account messaging me was also a Polish person, as they too messaged me in Polish.

All this development has led to one somewhat unfortunate possibility: That the entire time, Winterfull and Moglo1997 were in fact the same person. I hadn't suspected it before because, to me, it did seem like they wrote their messages in different ways, even though they were both definitely Polish/probably Polish; whereas all the new accounts seemed to write their messages like Winterfull, but not like Moglo1997. Alternatively, they are two different people, and it's by some coincidence that Moglo1997 also did something that got their account deleted.

The reason I say that the first possibility is somewhat unfortunate though, is that since I'm not currently charging any money for my requests, the process that seemed most fair to me when it came to the requests was that it's first come first serve, and everyone gets one story at a time, then has to return to the back of the line if they want another one. Yet it has been revealed that there is a non-zero possibility that someone circumvented that, literally with my first two requested stories, by using a sock puppet account without my knowledge; which would be awfully unfair to the other people that have been waiting on their turns for requests. The next person in line (who I am confident is not yet another sock puppet of the same person who got in trouble) could have already had their requested story written by now. =(

Of course, what am I to do about it? Let's say I've got suspicions that another account is a sock puppet of someone else requesting stories from me, because they write very similarly, have similar interests and kinks, and the second account is suspiciously brand new; even though that's all fairly compelling evidence, it's still all circumstantial, and doesn't actually prove anything. It could be hypothetically possible, if unlikely, that the new account really is a different person; so if I denied them their request based on my suspicions, that wouldn't be fair to them. Do I bug the admins every time I think there's some shenanigans going on and ask them if they can check for me?

I think then that really, the only thing I can do about it for now at least is just ask politely, please don't do that. It's not fair, and it's not cool. =/ Please adhere to an honor system and take your turn like everyone else.

As for what I'm going to do about this particular situation, I'm considering skipping what would be my next personal story after I finish (Un)Fair Wager part 5, and doing the next two requests back to back before returning to my usual pattern; to somewhat make up to those who have been waiting. (Though technically it doesn't do anything for the person who is currently first in line, which I apologize for.) It's also good news in a way for the person who was fourth in line for a request, because they've been bumped up to third in line, since obviously Moglo1997 won't be in that spot anymore.

Also a little update that sadly, my work schedule has yet to improve when it comes to giving me more free time to work on my writing. In fact, it's actually probably going to be worse during this coming week, and after tonight I don't expect to be getting any long writing sessions in until at least next Thursday night.

There's something I couldn't help but notice, looking around the site at some of the other stories uploaded here; when it comes to spelling, punctuation, and grammar, the standards here seem fairly low. Now I know that statement alone already probably makes me sound like an elitist prick, so I want to be clear that I don't mean anything bad by it. After all, enjoyment is subjective; if you read a story and enjoy it even though it has writing errors in it, that is fine, and good on the author for making something that you enjoyed. Even I've enjoyed multiple stories here that I saw numerous errors in. The only reason I bring it up is that I just can't help but hold myself to a higher standard; and once again, I know that makes me sound like an elitist prick, so again to be clear, I don't mean to say nor do I think that I'm better than any other author here. I also don't expect or intend to hold anyone except myself to my standard; it's just something I do with myself, and I can't help it.

If I know something I've written has an error in it, I feel compelled to go in and correct it. Every single one of the stories I've uploaded, I've re-uploaded the source file at least once, because I read through it on the site and noticed an error I didn't catch before. I don't think that I'm better than anyone else because I do this; it's just something I can't help but do.

I've figured that it's probably a combination of a low barrier to entry; basically anyone can make an account here, after all. Along with the fact that it's furry erotica; it's not exactly the most mainstream thing, so people here take what they can get. Again, I do not think that's a bad thing. I think anyone who feels the desire to creatively express themselves should have a chance to do so; if they want to strive themselves towards perfection and improve their work, that is fine, but if they don't care about perfection at all and just want to create without worry, that is also fine. This is why I only care about whether there are errors in my own stories, and I don't care about errors in anyone else's writing, unless they ask for that kind of feedback. I myself am always willing to get that kind of feedback. So if you ever spot an error in my writing, feel free to point it out to me. If it's a real error, I'll most likely go in and fix it. If it's a matter of opinion though, like, "I think this scene should've had this other thing happen instead," I'll still read that feedback, though I might not change anything in response to it.

To close this ramble of thoughts away, I'll just say that if you also happen to be an author here, or are aspiring to be one, then I don't think you need to worry about a lot of errors. If you made a typo, but the word is still close to the word you meant to write, then the reader will probably pick up on what you meant, and the same goes with grammar. Improper punctuation can be a bit disorienting at times to understand, but it also does not usually ruin the reading experience.

There's just one error I would seriously suggest avoiding, and that's having multiple characters speaking dialogue in the same paragraph; apparently a lot of people don't know that you're not supposed to do that in writing English, and it can be very confusing to keep up with which character is actually talking. Especially if you start having them speaking lines without attaching any dialogue tags. (If you don't know what those are, it's the things like, '[character's name] said,' that goes before or after their spoken dialogue.)



... On a completely unrelated note, there's something funny to me going on here lately. I keep getting comments and a couple of direct messages from brand new accounts, like one that messaged me about ten minutes after the account was created, if I understood the timestamp correctly. All of these comments and messages seem to be written in very similar ways, and the accounts along with the messages are getting deleted by admins within a day. Now, I'm not saying for sure that it's all the same person who must have got in some kind of trouble, and has been attempting to circumvent punishment by making new accounts; as the saying goes though, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then well, it's probably a duck. Honestly the situation just makes me laugh, though assuming that is what's going on, I have no idea what they did to originally get in trouble, so I can't really weigh in on it. I feel a little flattered that seemingly this person would be willing to go through the trouble of making new accounts over and over to attempt to make requests to me, but I don't really feel like it's worth it. I would only do requests for people who respond to me in my follow up messages about working through the details of said request, so leaving me one vague message and then never responding to me again because your account got deleted won't successfully make me write something for you, sorry.

Anyway, it's about time I finally start actually writing words for my next story instead of sitting on the complete outline and not writing any more on it, again. I've been trying not to do that, but my life schedule has still not been very cooperative, unfortunately.

Well, it's the start of 2022, and the hectic nature of my life due to the holidays seems to be finally calming down. It's why I made no journal entry last week, and why I've gone about a week now with almost no progress on the next story. Only the outline has been done, and no words in the actual story have been written; though I intend to change that right after I upload this journal entry, as I still have plenty of time tonight with the next two days off of work.

Speaking of my part time job, I recently just got a nice raise, which is pretty cool. The scheduling of my shifts still leaves me with little time to do much on nights when I have work and also work the next day, unfortunately, but I've been trying to ask about the possibility of getting three days off a week instead of just two, which I can now survive thanks to that raise. My manager is trying to see if she can make it happen, but she needs to get at least one more person hired on first, apparently.

Oh well though, enough about my life, it's about time I picked this hobby back up; a whole week without doing any real writing for it feels like too long. Of course next up is a requested story; I'm not sure how long it will take, but it shouldn't be a super long story, so I'm hoping I can maybe have it done before next weekend. After that will be part 5 of The (Un)Fair Wager, then one of the other requests after that, then after that I'm thinking of doing an epilogue for The (Un)Fair Wager, then the next waiting request; I haven't decided what story of my own I'll write next after (Un)Fair Wager is all finished, but I've got plenty of ideas.

Sorry to anyone who's been waiting for me to upload again. Here's hoping for a good 2022! =)

Yep, I decided to write another long, rambling journal entry. I'm thinking I might do this every weekend, if I've got something to write about. Don't worry though, I'm not going to be talking about money and number of watchers again. Instead I was thinking I'd talk about things I've written before, and how I ended up writing here.

Now, my memory's kind of bad; I'm certain everything I remember here did happen, but I can't actually be certain on the order of the events in question. I think maybe some of them were kind of going on simultaneously, but anyway, this is how I remember it.

Back when I was young, my mom would read a lot to me; it was always our favorite activity together. Fictional novels like the Hank The Cowdog series, the Discworld series, the Harry Potter series, (This was back before everything got weird with J.K. Rowling mind you, and I never did care much about behind the scenes things with the authors, just the books themselves.) and The Vorkosigan Saga series were our favorites. Being an author and writing fictional novels like that was what I wanted to do when I grew up, but it never quite worked out. I remember once I did try to write a novel; I got like a page or two into it before the task became too daunting to me and I abandoned it. I don't even remember now exactly what the novel was going to be about, except that it was some Dungeons and Dragons style adventure and the main character was a young woman setting off to make a name for herself. Even now I'm not sure if I could write a full length novel; I think anything longer than a short story would be too much for me.

The first time I remember writing something fictional on the internet was on the Steam Left 4 Dead 1 forums. Someone had made a thread talking about ideas of playable back story levels for the four main characters. Something compelled me to write a back story for Zoey; it was pretty cringe from what I recall, and I don't know if it still exists there somewhere, but I'm not inclined to go looking for it. Interestingly though, I remember that there ended up being a couple of parallels between what I wrote and what ended up being Zoey's canon back story that later came out in The Sacrifice webcomic; I also had Zoey's mom become a zombie and Zoey to shoot one of her parents while saying she loved them. The difference was I had Zoey shooting her mom, and her dad wasn't in the story I wrote.

The first time I wrote something that wasn't my own idea, but rather a request from someone else that I wrote for them, was on a fan forum website for the then-still-in-alpha video game Cube World. As a way to get writing practice, I advertised myself there as willing to write stories for player guilds, and I remember that two guilds took me up on the offer. The second guild I don't remember the name of and I don't really remember what I wrote for them either; I just remember the response was kind of lukewarm from them. The first guild though, was a guild called The Savages, and they LOVED what I wrote for them; it was a story told as a writing from an in-universe historian that had visited the Savages nation, and it told a bit about their culture, but more importantly it told about the history of their founding and their initial conflict with a neighboring kingdom. Sadly though, the forums ended up going under, and I didn't save any backups of those writings; so unless any of the guild members did, I don't think they exist anymore except in memory.

The main bulk of writing I've done online has been in the roleplaying subforums of TvTropes. In fact you can still find me over there now, but I'm not as active there as I used to be a few years back. The biggest thing I've done there is a massive multi-fandom crossover game I ran called City of Lost Characters. (Well, I'm technically still running it, but we're at the end of it now and not accepting new players.) So if you really want to see more stuff that I've written, that would be the main thing to look for, but know that it's TvTropes forums so none of it is erotic. I suppose it's also worth mentioning that in some of the roleplays there, I ended up reusing the Savages' name for a race of space faring catgirls that behave kind of like Orks from Warhammer 40k, but explaining them in full detail would take a long while here so I'll leave that as the short version.

As for the first time I've written something explicitly erotic, well, click on my gallery and there it is. I've technically had instances where it was like, yes these two characters are definitely banging each other, but always as an off-screen thing, never going into the actual NSFW details. 'Becoming More Than Friends' is the first thing I've written where I actually went all in on the NSFW. I never really imagined before that I would end up writing furry smut; even when I made this account back in February of 2019, it was just so I could view NSFW content, and I had no plan at the time to do any more than that with it. Now I had thought before about the idea of maybe trying to write something erotic, but it was an idea I'd always quickly brushed off; I couldn't think of a good sexy idea that I thought I could actually flesh out into a whole short story, and I couldn't think of anywhere I could post it online. I don't really write stuff just for my own personal viewing alone, so that's why I wouldn't. Yes, even when I made this account, even when I had first found other erotic stories other people had posted here, it hadn't clicked in my mind that I could post stuff here. I only fully made that realization maybe a month or two before I posted 'Becoming More Than Friends'.

Now that I'm doing it though, I can hardly imagine not doing it. I didn't mean to give the wrong impression with my last journal entry; I'm not unhappy about how things are now. In fact I'm perfectly happy with things as they are now; I just wish I had more time to write. Even after I started there were a couple more realizations I hadn't yet made about things I can do now that I'm considering; like, maybe canonize the homebrew tabletop RPG settings my friends have made in R34 by making erotic stories of my own set in them. If there's a character online that hardly has any R34 of, that I would like to see more of, I can make it myself! So know that sometime in the future I will make a short story about a certain innkeeper squirrel lady from The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. I even have thoughts of reworking the Savages once again for some medieval fantasy style setting short stories.

All in all, I'm looking forward to the future and doing more writing; I'm just sorry that it takes me as long as it does for them.

I wonder how many people actually read these journals, or I suppose more importantly, will read this one. I might just be spitting my thoughts into the empty void for nobody but myself to see, but I think I'm alright with that.

So, I've written six stories on here so far. I'm already in the early process of a seventh, and between my own plans and the requests I've now got waiting, I'm going to be writing at least six more after that. I'm having a blast with it; it's quickly becoming one of my favorite hobbies to be doing in my free time. I've spent more time doing it lately than playing video games, which was previously my main hobby in life. It makes me want to be able to spend more time doing it... But of course, that conflicts with reality, and the fact that I need a job.

Which in turn brings about an obvious question: Could I make this my job?

Hypothetically, yes. Realistically, however... I feel like the answer is no; at least right now.

Obviously, if I were to make this my job, the foremost issue is money. As much as I'd love to just stay home and write furry smut all the time, if I'm not making money off of it, I can't. Especially since I live in the United States, where capitalism is everything. So I would need to make money off of it, and that would have to be a minimum amount of money, or else I would still need a job on top of it.

Now thankfully, I'm in a fairly privileged position in life; I still live with family, and while I still have financial responsibilities and don't just live as a freeloader, I certainly don't need to be making as much money as I would if I were living alone. It's because of that that I only have a part time job instead of a full time job, which is what gives me the free time to spend on this hobby. I won't say what the exact number is that my monthly expenses usually come to, but I'll say for the purposes of this that, oh... About $800 a month would be enough; actually just $700 a month would still be enough, but would be cutting the margins fairly close, leaving me with little spending money and little money to put into savings, which would mean that any sudden problem like a medical emergency or my computer breaking down would be an enormous pain to deal with. So, $800 is the minimum number I would say I would need to go for in order to possibly quit my part time job and just write furry smut on the internet.

How could I possibly make that money? Well, the most obvious and straight forward answer would be commissioned writing, but that faces two problems that are intermingled with each other. Namely, could I get enough commissions done every month, and how much would I charge for them? Even assuming I could double my most optimistic writing output if I didn't have to worry about a job, and put out 2 stories every week, that's still only about 8 stories a month; that means I've got to find 8 people willing to pay at least $100 each for a story, every month. Is anybody even willing to pay that much for an erotic furry story online? I'm certainly not... Well, that's not a fair comparison since I'd just write my own instead; I suppose I should imagine possibly paying $100 for an erotic drawing instead. I could imagine myself possibly doing it, if I knew the artist would do a really good job and I liked their style, but only as a rare occasion thing, maybe once a year at most, and certainly not once a month. Also however, if I'm charging $100 or more for story commissions, how do I make sure the pricing is fair for each commissioner? Guarantee a minimum number of words in each story? Would I have to start compromising on writing certain things I don't want to write, like rape or bestiality? Lastly, even assuming it all worked out, that would leave me no time to work on stories of my own, which is the main thing I want to do here.

So overall, no, I don't think commissioned stories are the answer now or will be the answer at any point in the future.

So what does that leave? Well, I could imagine setting up a Patreon; it's a model I certainly like when it comes to artists. For instance with my favorite artist, Melon Heart, I alone as a single patron pay $5 a month and get access to three/five sets of exclusive artwork every month. I pay less than I would if I was commissioning him, but since I'm just one of many patrons, Melon is probably making more from us than he would if he only did commissions. (I know he does commissions too, but he mainly does Patreon.) Now, I don't know exactly how much Melon makes from it; I know he has a $1 tier and a $5 tier, and has 797 patrons in total, and though it doesn't tell me how many of those are in which tier, I can confirm that at least 69 (nice) of them are in the $5 tier. Even assuming that every other patron outside of those 69 is only paying $1 a month, that still works out to at least $1,073 a month. Well, that would be enough money for me!

... But I'm not Melon Heart. I shouldn't even pretend that my erotica can possibly pull as much interest as his drawings do; yeah, my latest work pulled in over 200 views in less than 48 hours, which I'm happy about, but his latest work pulled in 1,972 views in less than five days, and has 800 favorites versus my measly 4. Besides, what would I offer to patrons? I don't like the idea of locking my stories behind a paywall, and I'm not sure how well that would work anyway when my work can simply be ctrl+c and crtl+v into a pastebin online for anyone and everyone to see; besides, if I'm not putting out some content free for anyone to see, I wouldn't be drawing in potential new patrons. As lofty as it would be to expect strangers online to pay at least $800 a month in total just towards a, "help me not have a real job," fund, that's most certainly a completely unrealistic expectation. So I would still have to offer SOMETHING to patrons. It couldn't be that each patron gets a story written by me for them every month; even if I set a minimum payment of $10 every month, it would still take at least 80 patrons for me to make enough. There's no way I can write more than 2 stories every day.

As I said towards the start of this though, I do think it is, hypothetically at least, possible. As I have thought of a few things I could possibly offer to patrons in exchange for their money. First, I could make a discord server for them to have exclusive access to; however I don't think anybody would pay for just that alone, so really it would be a little, "cherry on top," offering of the other things. Second, I could let the patrons see the story outlines I've written for each story; I've been considering uploading those into my scraps folder anyway, for anyone curious to see what part of the creative process for me behind the scenes is like, but in this idea, patrons would be able to see the outline as soon as I'm done with it, rather than only after the story is complete. Third, I could let the patrons see the work in progress version of my stories, every time I'm done with a writing session rather than wait for the whole thing to be complete. Fourth, and the one I could see being the highest draw for potential patrons so in the highest tier of either $5 or $10 a month: A chance at a monthly story raffle/poll. The way I'm imagining the potential idea, is that every month I would put up a post on Patreon asking for my patrons to comment with a story they'd like to see me write. Then I'd take a certain number of the comments that I like and put them together into a poll for the patrons to vote on, (probably all the patrons, not just the patrons of the highest tier,) and write the story that gets the most votes. Then maybe to keep things a bit more fair and against bias, I'd also write a second story from the same poll selection, chosen via RNG.

... Of course, then it all comes back to a really big question towards the start of this journal entry. Is this at all realistic? Would you pay $5 or $10 a month for a CHANCE that I would MAYBE write the story idea you want me to write? I don't know. Would you even pay just $1 a month if the only thing you got was access to a discord server and early viewing of a cliff notes version of my stories? I kinda doubt it. Am I thinking about all this stuff way too early considering I only have 10 followers, and my most viewed story has only 318 views, of which I think I'm technically one of? Probably yes.

Thankfully though, this is all just ideas that have been floating around in my head, and they don't need to be any more than that; for now this is still just a hobby of mine. Maybe someday I'll still set up a patreon anyway, to see if I can make a little extra from this on the side, but not yet. If you actually read through this whole mess of rambling thoughts from my head, thank you.