A big thanks to any readers who happen to still be around, and good news: barring unforeseen catastrophe, I'll be posting the next story in the spider series soon. The title is Separation Anxiety; look for it some time within the week.

It weighs in at around 25k words, comes to a bit over 50 pages in the PDF version, and features some familiar characters as well as one we haven't seen in a long, long time. I hope you'll enjoy it.

(Unrelated: I also now have a Bluesky account, which is presently barren, but if I'm feeling unusually vigorous perhaps I'll post a preview or two there during the editing process.)

- teddy sloth

Exciting news, dear readers: the next spider story, entitled Needs From Below, is finally done except for the formatting and some minor finishing touches. It came in at around 40k words and I'm hoping to have it ready to post by this weekend.

If you've read the prior stories you may remember the Huntsmen, the clandestine organization of spiders with a religious devotion to kidnapping and transforming humans. In Needs From Below, you'll get to meet one of them as she embarks on a trip to Midway in order to get a human of her very own. The big city can be an intimidating place for a simple country spider from the deep underground warrens, but luckily she's got a friend to help her—and this tour guide has her trip all planned out, right down to the unlucky human they plan to claim.

As I said, I'm still wrapping it up... but you can already read a sneak preview at sloth.land! Just click on "Read the preview" to see the first chapter. Check back around Friday for the full story!

Update: It's posted! Go read it!

— Teddy Sloth

After much too long a delay—just squeaking in under seven years here—I'm glad to be able to say I've finished Turn on the News, the next chapter in the story of the Midway spiders. I'm excited to finally share it with you, and I'm grateful to those out there that have encouraged me to keep at it. Without the occasional reminder that I'm not just heaving words into the abyss Turn on the News might not exist. And if you're reading it then I'm grateful to you too, whether you're a new reader or you remember my previous stories from way back when.

One note about the content of the story: the previous installment, Lockdown, was published all the way back in 2014, long before pandemic-related lockdowns became an unfortunate reality in various polities here in the actual world. I've been working on Turn on the News for a long time; at least the first half was written before the first COVID virion ever folded its nasty little proteins. Circumstances in the story are fairly different—Midway's lockdown is a kind of travel embargo enacted because of a bombing and not a pandemic, yet an uncomfortable similarity remains. With mixed feelings, I changed a few things to leaven the story a bit (nobody wants to be reminded about a plague when reading porn, after all) but the whole thing is pretty central to the plot and, to paraphrase a wise cat, sometimes you just have to let your art live or die as it is. So I just wanted to make it clear to all concerned that nothing in the story should be read as sympathetic to anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, COVID denialists, or any other group of atavistic yahoos.

Probably this disclaimer is unnecessary for a goofy story about spiders that turn people into their dicks, but just in case, there you are. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story, and I'm already embarking on the next one. I'm going to try very hard not to take as long this time, and I'm going to try even harder not to write any global catastrophes into existence.

— Teddy Sloth

It's been distressingly long since I've posted anything, and a few kind people have been curious enough to ask if maybe I'd died or something in the meantime, and I not only happen to still be working on my next story but—but!—the finish line is in sight. It's not done, but it's close enough that it feels safe to talk about. I figured this warranted a kind of status update for any interested parties.

The story is the next part of the spider saga, focusing on Skeila and Sid and picking up right where Lockdown ended. A couple minutes before, technically. This is liable to change but right now it's split into ten chapters, and nine are done or mostly done. (It's a terrible practice, but I don't write linearly.) The whole thing feels like it's going to weigh in around 35k words. My ambition is to finish it over December and release it in early January. I'm toying with the idea of splitting it into two, three, or even four parts and posting it piecemeal over the course of a week or two. I think the length justifies it, but I should probably focus on actually finishing it first.

I imagine I'm not spoiling anything if I reveal it has a lot of CTF and CTF-adjacent material.

I don't know why the story's taken this long. I don't have any good excuses for you; no personal crises, injuries, illnesses, losses, or traumas. I'd like to write more than I do, I just don't. I want to change that. That said, I'm pretty proud of the story so far and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you.

Oh, and lastly, I started a Twitter account a while back. I haven't actually had cause to post anything there, but I nevertheless invite you to follow me at @SlothfulTeddy.

—Teddy Sloth

I'm on Weasyl now. I don't plan to stop posting my stuff here too, but it rarely hurts to diversify:

https://www.weasyl.com/~terrible

And keep an eye out for the next spider story in the near future, in case you remember them. Has it really been a year? I should write faster.

My stories are now available at my new site: cockify.me. Heck of a domain name, right?

Some people said that they're having trouble downloading them from FA and I've noticed the download links occasionally don't work for me either, so if you're having that problem then you can read them there. Currently there's only the same PDF versions available here; I know some of you can't stand PDFs, so plain ol' HTML versions are planned, eventually.