Liam’s Updated Bucket List

Seven or eight years ago, I was creatively frustrated.

I was working full-time in an office, which was fine. I was living with the woman who would eventually become my wife, which was great. And I had one ongoing creative project under my own name, which was reasonably satisfying (and still exists, but you’ll never know.) I dreamed of making my way into the world of professional writing somehow, but I knew that was a big leap to make. Somewhat less intimidating was, well… this.

Prior to 2020 you knew me — or more accurately didn’t know me — as one of the contributors to the Trading Post Blog. Although you could probably sense the presence of different hands at work there, I don’t know that anyone reading it put much thought into which specific people were guiding which specific characters. Indeed, it helps the reading experience if you don’t; while I’ve benefitted from peeling back the curtain and talking to people openly about my work there, I’m happy to keep the pretense mostly intact that those are real people really giving their thoughts about their situation. To the point where I barely talk about it here, even though it comprises hundreds of thousands of words written over the course of two decades.

In those pre-pandemic days, my writing there mostly concerned the character of Valerie, who had begun life as Tyler. Through a series of visits to the magical Inn, Ty had experienced life as a variety of different people, and grown beyond the original limitations of that role. By 2020, as Valerie, she had settled into the persona she would keep for the rest of her life. Indeed, there were several years’ worth of posts that simply comprised Valerie living her life, without any intention of exchanging it for a new one.

I really liked the Val character. I had been writing on the blog for several years when she came along; I had written some memorable people, but after my initial burst of inspiration had run its course I was in the woods for a while before Tyler introduced himself to me. I liked Tyler-now-Val a lot, and that was a problem.

It was a problem because as much as I had envisioned myself branching out and telling more eclectic stories — ones I could own and sell in a way that is not possible with the Trading Post — all of my creative juices were being spent on Val. I thought of everything in terms of what Val was thinking and doing and feeling at a given time, and if I wanted to write, I wrote that. Which was great — a lot of people want an outlet, and can’t even get that, let alone one that so many people will see — but I needed to move on. I was finally able to reach the last wind-down moments of Val’s story, something approximating a ride into the sunset, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was sweeping the world. I stepped back from the blog for a long while after that.

My efforts to launch a writing career as Liam had begun tentatively about a year earlier as I tried to write what I had thought would be my first book (still unfinished but recently exhumed.) I set that one aside to begin writing Partsexchange in summer of 2019, but it was a slow, frustrating trickle trying to find time to write and being happy with what I had written, and the story was shelved something like 90% of the way through in early 2020. I’ve said this before, but I had never wanted Partsexchange to be the world’s introduction to Liam Slade anyway, I wanted to get something more conventional out first, so leaving it unfinished wasn’t a matter of surrender, it was part of the plan.

As devastating as the pandemic was, it will always be part of my origin story, because it was literally in March-April 2020, when I had a bit of time to myself, that I was able to put enough effort into writing the first stories that appeared on this site and, between those, my first novel Kristi’s Mom.

I never knew how far my writing career would take me or how long it was last. I only knew that I came into it with a huge backlog of ideas (most of which have been dismissed or set aside) and a fairly decent ability to generate new ideas. If I found there was an audience for my work, I would simply keep going until I couldn’t do it any more.

As far as I know, there isn’t any definitive way to tell that it’s time to stop. I still have a lot of ideas for books, and if I were to work on all of them, at a rate of three books per year, without even generating any new ideas, I would still be publishing into the next decade. Or, my life could change drastically and I have no time to write ever again. Who knows. All I know is that I’m still writing today because I want to.

Secretly, in the recesses of my mind, never written down or codified in any particular way, there has always been a list of goals, things I knew I absolutely had to do before I stopped writing. This list has evolved over time, but I feel it is reaching its final form. These were the things that I knew had to happen before I could say I would be happy to stop writing.

1. Novellas

I always saw myself writing at least a few brisk works of about 30,000 words, which would be a good middle ground between a complete story and reading experience, and the feasibility of being written in a reasonable time span. With I Changed Sexes With My Wife, Partsexchange, The Princess Awakening, A Holiday Wish and Both, I have obviously satisfied that desire. That doesn’t mean I won’t do more, only that I’ve done enough to feel satisfied. In particular, publishing Both left me feeling like I had made the big statement I had always yearned for, and though it’s not my most popular work, it’s the one people have most often reached out to me about. It would be a hard one to top, and there’s probably a reason why I haven’t done a novella as Liam since. Check.

2. A Novel

I started writing Kristi’s Mom shortly after launching this site, and worked on it for 18 months. There was a brief moment when I thought it might be more satisfying to cut it to 30,000 words and release it as my first novella, but I knew that if any idea I ever had was going to sustain for an entire novel’s length (at 85,000 words it’s a fairly short novel, but a real one), it would be that, so I pressed on and put every idea I could think of into it. It was worth the effort: as I noted on Bluesky a few days ago, Kristi’s Mom is by far my most popular and lucrative work, and I think being as big and fulsome as it is had something to do with that. As much as I would love to duplicate that success, for a long time I was fairly certain that Kristi’s Mom would be the only novel I ever write, at least under the name Liam Slade (or any associated pseudonym.) Having completed this and knowing what was possible for it, I’m happy. Check.

2a. Kristi’s Mom: Author’s Edition

Before I had even published Kristi’s Mom, I had this kooky idea of coming back to it with a selection of add-ons, including a novella set between chapters, an exclusive epilogue (which I conceived of fairly early in the writing process but did not include in the book proper because it would not fit the first-person voice of the book) and more. It took me nearly two years to get around to it, but it was worth it. not only did I have fun doing it, but it put the spotlight back on my most popular (and most expensive) work. The fact that I sold multiple copies of Kristi’s Mom: Author’s Edition just this past month (in the wake of my most recent pub) confirms that this was the right thing to do. Check.

3. Short Story Collection

At one point, I envisioned simply repackaging the free short stories I offer on this site, for anyone who hadn’t already stumbled on them, but I was reticent. Then in early 2023, I wrote “I Woke Up Like This,” and thought it was so good it should anchor an entire collection. I combed through ideas that I had set aside, scraps I had already written, and fostered new ideas to cover things I had never attempted yet. Being able to show a multitude of sides to my writing was appealing, and I needed to know if it would resonate with people. Certainly, if I could convince people to buy a short story collection — in the proper bookselling world, collections of short fiction rarely capture audiences — it would feel like I had a fresh new avenue, and wouldn’t have to work so hard to come up with a single idea that sustains for an entire novella. I needed to know. Now, in practice, it wasn’t quite so easy — Beyond Ourselves ended up taking about a year to marinate thanks to a lot of creative frustration with one particular story. And it seemed to go nowhere when it was first released. But as time went on, people kept buying it in a way they didn’t with other works like Holiday Wish, Princess Awakening and Both. I had my answer: short stories are doable. Check.

4. Poles Reversed

I like to think a lot of care and meaning goes into most of what I write. But I’m also envious of writers who can turn out a lot of different stories from the same premise. The point of ‘Poles Reversed‘ isn’t exactly to be slop, but the Liam Slade version of slop. Something easy and simple — at least as much as my brain would allow — and voluminous. I wanted to be able to write several of these per year. At one point I envisioned turning out one every other month, but that would mean I was probably constantly writing them and they’d be the only thing I could do.

The idea for Poles Reversed came about as I tried to come up with a universal premise that could be applied to a wide variety of people. It was a modification of an old story premise I had generated where bodyswaps were randomly occurring. But for simplicity, I decided to have all of these stories take place simultaneously: a small portion of the population is swapped on one night. And of course, there’s the twist: it’s a one-way swap. The narrator is in a new body “with” the original helping to guide them (as is somewhat established in the fist installment) while their body lies comatose and vacant. This is because, in any bodyswap story, there’s always one side that is just less interesting; or at least, I’ve found giving equal real estate to both is not appealing to me most of the time (see: Kristi’s Mom, where the occupant of Kyle’s body simply takes off.)

Part of the Poles Reversed experiment was to use Kindle’s ‘Excusive ‘Select’ program. People would read one for “free” and I would get pennies per page, but the more they were read, them ore visible they would become, thus snowballing in sales as they attracted readers who weren’t signed up for that program. It was a premise that was to challenge me both creatively and from a business standpoint (as I am fond of reminding people, I was a bookseller for a decade, until recently, so the biz side of all this enthuses me nearly as much as the creative.) I actually released the first edition, How I Became a Bikini Babe, quietly, in December of 2023, without telling anybody. It barely did anything, but when I finally released #2, the Sitter, the following May, both of them exploded, thus providing proof of concept.

Unfortunately, I was unable to keep the momentum going past #3. It took over a year to come back with #’s 4 and 5, and by that time, interest had decreased to a trickle. I do wonder if that has to do with the abundance of AI-generated slop in this space, crowding out hard-working degenerates like myself. Nevertheless, I have ideas for a variety more stories, some of which are actively in production. A few of these I would really like to get done before I hang it up for good, but if it never happens, I can be satisfied that I pulled it off once. Check.

5. Trapped in Tina!

It wasn’t my lifelong dream to publish a pastiche of middle-grade chapter books from the 90’s, but when the idea occurred to me in early 2025, I knew it was a must. that I would never truly feel fulfilled as a writer until this one was out there. The idea felt like such a clear winner, even if I knew the high concept nature of it wouldn’t exactly make it the next I Changed Sexes With My Wife (probably the most durable of my novellas in terms of popularity.) To capitalize on my enthusiasm, I commissioned a cover from the one artist I knew would be able to capture the exact madcap spirit I was looking for, Z. Crockett. Normally, I do my own covers, but I knew that packaging would be of the utmost importance in selling this work. The investment proved sound, so even when I felt stymied by the plot mechanics I was working with (by necessity, this one was more of a “Back to the Future” than my other works) I knew I was absolutely committed to finishing it one day. It would be one of my most unique works yet, a blast to write, and above all else, I needed the world to see that cover. Check.

6. A Fantasy Epic

And so we come to the last item on the list. The first document preparing what was then called “Radonus” dates to January 2024, but the idea started to take shape well before that. I have been noodling with this idea for years, wadding up everything I know about the medieval fantasy genre — which isn’t much — into my own little pet project. What I envision as Book 1 of a series that may be three to five installments in length (though the latter ones may end up being novellas) is currently 36,000 words long and likely less than halfway done. In fact, the first key transformation does not even occur until 25,000 words in, after much time has been spent exploring the world and the characters.

Above, I had said I did not think I would write another novel, and here I am plotting out a massive series. Funny how that goes. The writing process for this story has been everything turned up to 11: all the joy and fun of creation, all the frustration of second-guessing and contradicting yourself as you try to navigate the narrative. The good news is, within a medieval-magical setting, I have a lot more leeway to define the rules as I see fit. The drawback is… I have to define the rules.

Production on Radonus Book I (which Bluesky friends will know as “My Big WIP”) is not fast and not constant. I go months without looking at it, often because I am busy with something else. But I keep coming back to it. Putting out at least the first volume is the last “absolute must” for my writing career. Liam Slade’s work will be incomplete until that has happened. Once upon a time, I targeted September 2026 as a release date, but the time has come and I’m still quite far off. It happens.

A while back, I uploaded some sample chapters and distributed them to a few fellow writers in the scene. You can read them here, if you’re curious how things are, at the very least, starting.

Stretch Goals

To date, the above are the only things I felt I have to do as a writer, and all but one of them have been completed. That doesn’t mean I’ll be ready to pack it in, only that I would be psychologically prepared to, should I feel the need.

I have ideas for more short story collections, some of which are similar odds-and-ends pieces, and some of which are themed around a particular person or incident. As discussed, there will likely be more Poles Reversed installments sooner or later. And as of today I am already hip-deep in what I intend to be my next novella, my first as Liam in years. (Bluesky followers know it is not coming easily!)

There are a ton of ideas to explore. Earlier this year I started what I thought would be a simple novella that ballooned to full novel proportions before my very eyes: would I finish it as my second full novel (outside of the Radonus world?) or trim it back to novella length? I would love to write a Choose Your Own Adventure-style book. There’s always the possibility of writing “Both 2” (sorry for constantly teasing it) or “Partsexchange 2” or “I Also Changed Sexes With My Wife.” There are a ton of things I could be doing, and the only really important thing is that I keep working at something. whether that means focusing on something I “think” would be popular or something that probably only I would like (ideally, whatever I do would fall between those two extremes — my ultimate goal as a writer is to satisfy myself while also reaching others.)

Once I’ve knocked the last item off my to-do list, that doesn’t mean the end at all. It simply means we’re going to find a new world to conquer.

Be kind

-Liam