Wow, can you believe the calendar is turning over once again on this blog? I may go a long time between material, but writing as Liam still remains a vital part of my week.
At the beginning of the year, I laid out a slate of objectives for 2023, what I’d hoped to accomplish as a writer. I was pretty optimistic in setting goals for myself, but also kept it within reason. That I didn’t quite hit all of those goals is not a disappointment since I know I spent the entire year working toward things.
The only publishing (so far) done under my name was for the novella Both and the Author’s Edition of Kristi’s Mom. I was very excited to get the latter off my To-do list. I had so many ideas to revisit that world but I needed to give it some time after I first published in September 2021. It took longer than expected to find time to sit down with it but once I did it poured out relatively quickly and I hope people enjoyed it. It definitely interested a lot of people, both on Kindle and at a special discount price on Smashwords (the discount code can be found in the back of the regular edition of the ebook, but I also passed it around some of my favourite sites.)
I was also very proud of Both, both a lot of reasons. When I first got the idea, it excited me and touched on things I had wanted to do in the TG/transformation space for a while: a story about a willing transformee who reveled in their body, rather than disliking one or the other. I was so taken with the idea that I had to write it as quickly as I could, and wanted to invest a lot of emotion and thought into it. To some degree, it acknowledges non-binary identities although both of Shawn’s identities are binary themselves. The story was originally called They/Them, but I realized that I didn’t take any of the characters off the binary of male and female so it didn’t feel fair to market it in any way that suggested a non-binary identity. That’s something I would still like to work with someday, and have ideas to do so.
I recently received a glowing e-mail from a reader who enjoyed Both, saying they had to force themselves to savor it and that the end made them feel “gooey,” which warmed my heart. When you’re writing something you’re really just thinking about what works for you and what you feel capable of, and you never know how people are going to relate to it. That kind of feedback is the best gift of all (although I’d also love a few more star reviews on Amazon!) I love the ending of that story — it was not the exact ending I thought I was working toward, but it felt very good when I got there. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, please give it a look!
There were a few other objectives that I openly declared that have not ended up materializing for 2023. It’s a good time to check in on them:
Short Stories
I have a longstanding idea to publish at least one or two collections of short stories. These would all be new stories, not currently linked on this blog, but hopefully hitting the same niches as stores like “Cat Fisher” and “The Writer’s Dilemma” that I know my readers have enjoyed. I’m trying to focus on content that is explicitly TG (by which I mean outwardly, not “sexually explicit” per se — although that’s allowed too) so as to best serve my audience. A lot of this year has gone to the writing and revising of these stories, which you can’t rush: I probably labor over the short stories disproportionately because each bit of them means more than a novella. I want to make sure that every part of them contributes to what I think is the overall meaning of the story, even if that meaning is just to set some characters loose and have fun. Some of the stories are thinky and conceptual and don’t reveal themselves until the end, and some are more conventional and straightforward. I hope that mix is good for people and that they don’t regret buying the collection.
I intend for the collection to be about the length of one of my novellas — 30-40K, about 7 stories. The trick is to hit every beat I want to and not get too repetitive (I critique myself like “Do I have too many stories about high schoolers, too many stories about people’s jobs?” It’s possible I’m too hard on myself.) For my plans to be realized I need to finish 2 more stories, which seems like an easy ask, but you can never tell when those particular stories are going to get written. I’ve spent some time lately working on stories I have no intention of including in this collection just because they were what I wanted to write!
With the holidays, and life being what it is, it doesn’t seem likely that I will have a lot of time to work on things. I’m a lot more “active” than I was last year around this time, when I wrote A Holiday Wish, so I can’t count on myself to magically pull out a new work on December 18… that said, you never know!
Series
Early in 2023 I indicated that I was working on what I hoped would be a “series” that was available on Kindle Unlimited. This series would not be my usual fare. It would not be the sort of thing where I would expect to get glowing responses about how resonant the story is. I want to give myself permission to be “quick and dirty,” offering cheap thrills. Trying to come up with the next Both or I Changes Sexes With My Wife is a bit taxing, and I still like the opportunity to goof off. The idea is for it to be a fun thing that people will enjoy.
The good news is that it’s still on my mind. I’m not really much closer to having it ready for the world yet but I like my chances of it hitting the “shelves” soon in early 2024. The plans overall are pretty grandiose.
Another Novella
I quite like the feeling of putting novellas out, even though they vary wildly in response. A Holiday Wish seems to have hit for a lot of people, but Both was perhaps more of an acquired taste. In 2022 I thought I might put out four, and I just barely managed to get three in the calendar year, with Partsexchange coming out first thing in January and A Holiday Wish late in December, and The Princess Awakening somewhere in between. Decreasing my self-imposed expectation to 2 in a year seemed reasonable even with everything else I wanted to do.
Usually they don’t take too long to write, and seem like the ideal length to explore my ideas without overstaying my welcome. But a lot of it depends on circumstance. Sometimes the idea you think is a winner just doesn’t coalesce, and it takes a long time into the creative process to realize that. I wrote virtually an entire novella in 2022 that I simply shelved because I got to the end and decided it wasn’t something I wanted to put out there. In fact there was even another novella I got very far into developing that I decided wasn’t right for the time. Sometimes the projects just don’t hit, and I know enough not to try to force myself.
This year, I worked on another novella all through the summer that showed promise but I fell out of love with. Sometimes the idea you think you like ends up maybe not translating to an entire story. And that’s ok! The important thing to me isn’t that I produce, only that the goals I set lead to me writing consistently (or hopefully, constantly) throughout the year. as long as I am writing I am happy, and hopefully I get to show you some of what I do along the way.
I should also note that being shelved does not mean I have scrapped an idea altogether. I never throw anything away and there is a good chance that some of these ideas will come to you in some way, shape or form down the line. I had set Partsexchange aside for nearly 2 years before returning to it and finishing it, and it ended up being one of my most-liked stories! Perhaps one day, if I can’t think of any way to fix these stories up, I can do some kind of “Stuff I almost did” feature on the site that gives you the highlights while underlining that I left these out of the canon for a reason.
At this point in the blog post, I can see I’m getting a little full of myself, that people are that interested in me as a writer and all of my minutiae.
Off the beaten track
While I may not have crossed everything off my to-do list from the beginning of 2023, there were also things I did that I hadn’t anticipated. I made a little bit of time to try my hand at screenwriting by writing, purely as an exercise, a pilot for a TG transformation show that would be called “Boymom.” The gag is that it’s a TG version of Party of Five: a single mom is in a car accident and goes into a coma, so her eldest son must use a transformation device to live as her in order to support his younger siblings. I had a fun time writing it and would love to share it with you, but I’m not entirely sure when or under what circumstances I would do that. Stay tuned, I guess!
You also never know when I’m going to want to start doing more captions for DeviantArt, and I sometimes think that they might make a nice basis for another short story collection!
2024 and beyond
Right now I’m not setting myself any hard goals, except to spend 2024 working toward finishing off what I thought I would do in 2023 — my secret quick and dirty series, my short story collection (assuming they don’t get done by the end of this year.) That’s pretty tangible, but I also know what my next-next projects will be. I have a concept for at least one story or possibly a series that would be very, very different from anything you’ve seen from me before. And in the long term, there’s one idea that has lived with me for a very long time, which I always felt would make a good novel, but I needed the energy to go back to writing a novel.
That might take us all the way into 2025 — I’ve never had a shortage of ideas that I want to pursue, it’s just a matter of getting it all done. Luckily, I’ve been happy with the pace I’ve been working at and proud of everything I’ve put out. I hope you’ll continue to enjoy it, and if you don’t hear from me, I hope you have a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and a great new year!
As always, be kind,
Liam