Once again, I would like to say that I am incredibly grateful to the new surge of readers, Patrons, and emails. You all have been so amazing to me in the past couple of weeks and I can only hope that I continue to bring you all joy with my stories. Kind of funny that I use phrases like ‘bring you joy’ when often times my stories are so dark and sad, but hey, that’s life. Plus, I find it hilarious that so many new viewers are coming by and seeing my very recent blog posts on how I’m going through a dark time right now. No better way to get acquainted with me, I guess.

So, the people have spoken, and wow, a lot of you (or at least a lot of my patrons) want more of my main story. This makes a lot of sense, of course – I fell like most writers would want their readers to mostly want more of a main story. It’s a sign that the readers are getting what they want and like what they have, it’s definitely a good thing. I will admit that I’m almost a bit bummed that I need to work on a continuous story more than, say, Only If You Want. Number one, that story heavily involves a character from Being More Social’s story, and given that’s the story that got me a lot of recent attention, I’d love to use this opportunity to expand that window into my little writing universe. Number two, I’m more than halfway into it, and it’s a longer story. I feel like, or at least hope, people will like it.

But the people voted, and I set up that system knowing that I had to give up total control of what I get to write next. To an extent it’s become an obligation. GBM8 got more than twice as many votes as any other contender for what I write next. People like it. I’m obliged to give the readers what they want. After all, I already got the choice of putting down which 5 choices I’d give people, then they voted. I got my say.

This makes me wonder how often I’ll truly get to experiment. Let’s say I want to try my hand at writing a gay story, despite me being straight myself, for the sake of “can I do this”. Do I subject that to be one of the five choices to vote on? What’re the chances my readers, who stay for my straight stories, will vote for that? Not high. So stylistically, there’s a possibility I may accidentally use my voting system to write myself into a corner.

That said, I like the voting system. It gives you all a say, and gives a good reward to those that back me, especially given the process of editing Being More Social has been a slow one. To tackle my immediate concern, what I’ll do is this: I;ll be working on Only if You Want and GBM Chapter 8 concurrently, and I’ll be releasing GBM 8 first, but perhaps down the line, if I release chapter 8 and then 9, maybe on the next poll I’ll include another option instead of GBM so that I get to take a break. If Only If You Want is done by then, then it’ll take less time after posting GBM to post a new story. That would be cool.

If you have any thought on the process, as always, feel free to leave a comment here or eamil me at bashfulscribe@gmail.com. You all are the best readers on the planet, I can’t thank you enough for being so supportive and great. I’ll talk to you all next week.