One of the most perplexing habits readers of erotic stories have shown repeatedly is a delusional assumption of the sheer dedication the writer has to their online persona. I remember a time when it was actually uncommon for me to go a few weeks without adding a chapter and I took a break for about two months. I came back to find someone had, in the comments, created this story about how I had been hit by a car and died, and that’s why I wasn’t publishing. Of course, he/she was right. I forgot to mention to you all, I died a few years ago. My bad.
This is already a bizarre situation. Add to this, the abundance of it. Myself and Tweed were looking up ‘cringe smut’ (reading horribly written erotica for the fun of laughing at it). I’m a sucker for schadenfreude, and I love finding a story that just leaves me shaking my head and asking why. It’s all in good fun as long as we can understand why we think the story is bad and how we can improve it, and never turn it into bullying the creator itself. Tweed started it by showing me a fanfic of Harry Potter called My Immortal’ (easily the hardest thing to read any human has created, look it up). Tweed himself isn’t really into schadenfreude but he still likes laughing at the wording, he’s just a lot more hesitant about laughing *at* something as opposed to with it. Maybe I’m a bad person.
Well, that got off-topic. So, we were looking at this cringe smut piece called ‘Taking Over the School Part One’ found on sexstories dot com (if you look it up, be considerate and don’t leave a hateful comment). It was written in a very pro-goth kids ‘fuck the preps and the rich kids and da haterz’ way. The thing that struck me the most about it was the ending, even though the whole piece was hilarious in the same way My Immortal was, to a smaller extent. The series never went beyond part one, and the comments had a few confused/saddened readers asking for a part two, as most seemingly abandoned projects do (cough cough I should know cough cough Molly). However, one comment stood out to me.
“I think he’s dead cause he hasn’t posted anything in months almost a year…”
It’s so interesting to me that this type of assumption pops up so frequently. It’s happened with me and with a few erotica writers I’ve had the pleasure of communicating with. I can’t help but feel this is the result of a much bigger assumption, that the writer is doing nothing but writing erotica for free. This, of course, is naive, and it makes me think that more young people (as in, under 18) view sex stories than we think, because this kind of naivety reminds me of a child (or a pre-teen). .
Which, frankly, is fair enough. Heck, I’ll admit it – I started reading smut at 12. Come to think of it, I don’t know the demographics of my readers well. Maybe you’re below 18, maybe you’re old enough to be my mom/dad. Whatever your age, remember that even if their stories are gone forever and not on a several year-long haitus, it’s more likely your erotica writer just stopped writing erotica. Not because they died, but because of the opposite reason – they had a life that needed advancing.
Luckily for you all, I have no such life, so back to BMS 18 it is. That said, I’d love to make this my life. Tweed is now tweaking the Patreon specifics and trying to come up with some kind of gimmicky name for our partnership. I’m simultaneously rolling my eyes at him and weirdly grateful that he’s giving me some avenue to possibly make this writing a career. That said, choosing the Patreon perks is difficult. I never want to gate content behind a paywall for you all, and my stories are destined to be free.
Still, it needs to be free. Otherwise I’ve have been even more despicable for not finishing my first story within two and a half flipping years. Thanks for reading this, and have a happy whatever-the-heck-you-celebrate. Christmas… Hannukah? Do I have any Jewish readers? That would be awesome. Kwanza… I dunno. Have a happy that. I’ll try to have chapter 18 out as soon as possible.
Bashful Scribe 
It’s funny that you write about this now. I just finished a series on sexstories called 3 evil sisters. The original author stopped writing after part 6. It was then picked up by someone who did a decent job copying the original author’s style before being dropped again. Since then I haven’t been able to find an author of that caliber who picked the series back up. Have you ever consider continuing someone else’s series that was dropped for one reason or another. A la Brandon Sanderson with Wheel of Tom? Is there a series that you were really into that just sort of stopped that you’ve always wanted to see come to fruition
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I remember the story well, I didn’t know someone else picked up the slack to finish it. Frankly, I would never want to do that, mostly because I’d want permissionand if they dropped off the face of the planet as far as the site was concerned, they wouldn’t respond to forum messages asking permission to pick up the story. As well, at this point I feel confident in saying I’ve developed my own ‘voice’ in my stories and I don’t think I would be very good at emulating another style. I also don’t have intimate knowledge of motives, desires, angers etc of other characters like I do of my own. I can’t think of a story I really liked for the story that never continued, the few that I actively enjoyed wrapped up well. The closest I can come to answering is Chris and Christie’s spinoff story, Making it Work (also on sexstories). Chris and Christie was my favorite story on the site and I was hopeful about the spinoff but after two frankly ‘meh’ installments the project was abandoned. I could never think of picking it up myself, though.
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