Recently, I got into contact with a charming reader who plans to write their own sex stories, and it filled me with a lot of warm fuzzies. Honestly, chiefly because they’re beginning to write, which means I’m not just preaching into an empty hallway and listening to my own echoes as far as this site is concerned.

There have been one or two of my readers that have pointed out in the past that since I used to write ten-thousand-word chapters in the space of literally two days, I could definitely make it big if I quit my job and dedicated all of my time to erotica. Frankly, I don’t disagree, and there is definitely a selfish part of me that would like to risk it all and attempt to make erotica my main source of income. It would definitely increase the number of people reading these blog posts. With this being said, it’s very difficult, even for myself, to understand the scope of such a risk.

Scope is hugely important. In… everything. In terms of the game project I’m working on, the creator tried to make about 6 games before, and gave up on all of those projects. Then he spent a year making pac-man and mario clones to learn coding, and at this point he’s like a completely different person. He now understands the scope of his old projects was too big. He was expecting to make whole games by himself, create every asset, write out each of the thousands of lines of code. True, some have done it, but it requires years of focus, and interestingly, none report having a good social life during that period.

Enter me and taking the safe way out. Again, looking at the scope of everything I do, I’d lose a lot more if I worked full-time on erotica. Quite frankly, I wrote Being More Social’s first three chapters over the course of about eight days chiefly because I had a terrible summer job where I just sat around monitoring stuff, so I decided that if I was going to be paid just to sit and be bored (but couldn’t play games or go on the internet unless I was off hours) I might as well entertain myself. That and the fact that I got enraged over what I thought was someone deleting my scathing comment on their erotica story spurred me to write. (I get passionate easily, so I was filled with an attitude of, ‘Oh, you think you’re better than me? Well, let me show you just what I can do!’)

I was already in a state of social deprivation when I created Being More Social. I wrote Panopticon over the course of fifteen days. Especially odd, considering Panopticon was about a socially deprived person who was in charge of monitoring, written during a period where I’m surrounded by friends and their dramas, and the work about friends and their dramas was written when I was socially deprived working as a monitor. Ah, irony.

At this point, if I were to create any model of efficiency for writing erotica, I would have to modify my life a lot. The work I do now is very social. I deal with people a lot. If I quit to work on erotica, that social aspect disappears. I lose not only the work, but the social opportunities that come as a result of work. It’s one big trail of dominoes. I lose a lot of financial security – Yeah, I might make patreon money in the future, but I’m not very good at it right now, am I? I’m going on two months without writing anything, three if you count it as length of time and not a binary yes-no system in terms of whether I’ve finished something this month. I’m alone with myself a lot, writing in a frankly dim-lit and depressing room. (I should probably change that…) I also lose the ability to talk about my life. Outside of m writing, I’m not Bashful Scribe. But if that’s all I am for a living, I lose the ability to tell my parents, my friends, anyone I’m talking to, about what I do and how I think. Another social difficulty that would arise.

Don’t get me wrong, nothing brings me more joy than to release a story or chapter and have people comment saying things from, “I really liked this!” to “I think your story would have been better if you…” All of these comments tell me you care, and it’s a wonderful feeling. I’m intensely grateful. However, to be blunt, I have a life outside of erotica, and as I’ve grown up from being 18 when I started (being 21 now), I have to accept that my life has taken off while my erotica persona has lagged behind.

Will the erotica writer catch up? There’s a distinct possibility. If that happens, I’ll have to make a difficult choice. For instance, should the game I’m writing for take off, I don’t know if I wanted to be credited under my real name or under Bashful Scribe. If I credit it under my real name, can I advertise it here? If I credit it under Bashful Scribe, can I tell my friends/parents I made a successful product? Especially considering what I do for a living and my aspiration to become a teacher, I’ve put myself in quite a pickle, so perhaps it’s best I live in the shadow of what I could have been. Perhaps that’s a blessing.

That said, there are too many ideas of stories in my head for me to not share them. I always plan on telling stories, and I plan on keeping them free for you all as long as I feasibly can. This isn’t me letting you know I’m stopping – nothing is going to change beyond this blog post. If anything, this blog post is an explanation for my lack of existence on the internet, and an apology for such. If I had it my way I’d write continuously for you all, but I don’t think I could do that full-time every day and keep myself sane. This, for now, will have to be a compromise. With this being said, I’ll try really hard to have something out for all of you soon. I appreciate you all, and I’ll talk to you next week.