Future's Past - A Restrospective & Next Steps

Future's Past is a somewhat unique tale for me, as it is the rare story that wasn't developed from a dream. I was asked recently if I would consider writing a tale similar to 'Adaptation,' and that's where the germ of the idea for this came from.

I've wanted to write a story about icky alien parasite thingies for awhile, but nothing was really gelling until I came up with the idea of a time loop. This idea was so exciting I decided (wrongly) that I could finish the whole story in time for Halloween. This was on October 20th, and I did manage to get the first chapter released on time for Halloween - 10 K written and proofread in a week and a half.

I had no idea how massive a story it would eventually become. I was hoping that the time loop parts I could skim through quickly by summarizing and pushing for new, more interesting events. It didn't quite work that way.

In fact, the way I wrote it, I'm not sure it works as well as I'd like, since there's a lot of repeated material, simply from different points of view. This certainly did speed up the writing process somewhat, but I was still slowed down trying to search for new and interesting things the characters could do while waiting for the action to proceed.

The end result I think hangs together logically, but some parts might be a bore to read. I don't think I'd do it this way again. As an experiment, however, I think it was fairly successful.

Feedback, though, as usual, remains sparse, which means there isn't a lot of motivation to write more free stuff at the moment. There have, however, been a few comments, which I always treasure!

Future Plans

The Rubber Order has been moderately successful for me on Amazon, and has earned at least enough for me to pay for the stock photos I used to make the cover for it. I'm at the tail end of that revenue, however, which means I need to put something new together for sale.

I'm close to 23K words into writing a new story I've titled 'Vanished,' about a fantasy kingdom where a queen and a prince's fiancée get caught up in political intrigue, coupled with rubber slave suits, and a dreamscape where clown girls cavort at a mysterious carnival and have sexy times. A lot of people are going to be enslaved and fucked; it should be quite the romp.

I'm tentatively hoping to get that done by the end of the year, but I really don't know if I'll be able to keep up the pace. Since October 20th, I've been writing 1-2K words per day. I've just reached my goal of writing 50,000 words within a month (NanoWriMo style), which I've accomplished in 24 days.

I consider this an impressive feat, but I don't really know if I can sustain that level of intensity. I may be able to keep a goal of 1000 words a day for the foreseeable future to get this story done, after which I will need to take a pause to figure out what's next.

I don't really have anything in the pipeline after that, except for some random ideas drifting around:

Dampest Dungeon: Flower Bed

A woman visits the fourth floor of the dungeon and is captured by mobile flowers, which swallow and convert her, turning her into a seed bed to create more of them. Highly influenced by zxc's work with Latex Dungeon.

Queen of Chains: Forged Anew

This is a weird one. A proud warrior is caught by slavers, who then run afoul of the mysterious and powerful Queen of Chains. Those who enter her service have their bodies altered in strange ways to serve her better. Breast enlargement, lactation, enslavement, blobby tentacle creatures, etc. I have a partial outline, but I can't figure out the proper ending yet, so I'm not going to be starting this any time soon.

Another Rubber Order Tale (Untitled)

This is even more vaguely defined. I want to write a tale about a woman who failed at her first chance to become a rubber nun and ended up in an abusive relationship. The story is supposed to be about her redemption and encounters with the good people of the order to resolve her life problems.

I don't even have the barest outline written for this yet, though I think this is likely to be the next serious project I want to work on. That being the case, everything is still subject to change.

Conclusion

Vanished will be on my radar for at least the new few months, and it is currently shaping up to be a 50-60K novella at the moment. I'll post again with the cover once I get close to publishing, but I probably won't provide intermediate updates on that project.

Unless I get the sudden urge to write something short, I likely won't be posting anything new for free until after I finish this project. I find that earning revenue from my writing is far more validating of my time than producing it for a faceless audience which provides no feedback - it's impossible to know which stories are hits or misses!