It may surprise no-one to learn that I’m occasionally (okay, often) guilty of writing chapters of my stories without really giving it a huge amount of thought as to where I’m eventually going to end up. I wrote my first Dress Off story: Sasha vs Tara – introducing the heroine whose name I eventually took as my pseudonym – basically on the back of a stray thought about a possible game concept, that bounced into my head one spring morning back in 2013. Now I’m writing the eleventh story in that series having bounced backwards and forwards in the timeline, adding recurring antagonists, bringing in new characters, and generally going wherever my imagination took me. Not a lot of that had even begun to occur to me upon hitting submit on that first chapter, way back when.
And all these stories remained published on LitErotica – a fantastic free site by the way, if you haven’t visited there before – as first published in a rush of early enthusiasm, with the established background provided by past stories now being twisted to fit the needs of future stories. That twisting is definitely beginning to create some pretty serious creaking and cracking.
It also doesn’t help that I wrote the first story in 2013, and the eleventh story is supposed to take part barely two years later in-world, and yet I’m going to be publishing it in 2021!
So in preparation for combining up the chapters into volumes so that they can be distributed more easily as e-books, I’m going to be doing some further editing of the first four chapters (volume one) and making some fairly minor updates and changes. My hope is that they actually tie together better now.
It’s actually fun to revisit those earlier stories, which were the first stories I ever wrote and published. Not only to see how my writing style has changed and (hopefully!) improved over the past eight years, but also because it reminds me of why I wanted to write in the first place. Having the opportunity to improve them further – and bring them more into line with where the story is now heading – feels strangely cathartic after a sometimes challenging six years where I haven’t created anywhere near as much as I’d have liked.
It’s been a long time now since I started down this journey, and being honest with myself, there have been plenty of false dawns in terms of returning back to full productivity. However, I’m very happy to report that something feels quite a bit different this time around. I’m enjoying writing again, and feeling more confident about it.
