The Good, the Bad and the Molly Chapter 13 is slated for a release next week. I’m hoping to have the full story out in 2019, but we’ll see what happens there.

I think it’s safe to say that virtually all of my consistent readers have read Breathe by now. Either that or they have made the decision to not read it, a decision I can’t blame them for. Whenever I release a piece or chapter, I usually get a decent trickle of emails and messages with feedback from readers (which I greatly enjoy, for those that apologize for ‘wasting my time’ in emails, know that it never feels annoying). The most interesting thing about the majority of feedback for Breathe was that people always felt it necessary after talking about how dark and twisted it was to immediately clarify that it was also good.

Is it? By whose standards? I’m going to go ahead and guess that a single-digit number of people at most actually got off to the sex scenes of Breathe in particular. It’s not exactly a sexy story by a lot of definitions. The psychological horror kind of ruins any chance at traditional risk-free lust. So, for a sex story, it kind of blows chunks. A lot of viewers were mildly disturbed by it, with one reader even engaging in a conversation with me where they (maturely) revealed they were kind of angry at the story for even existing, it upset them so much. It doesn’t exactly spark joy. So it blows chunks as a fun story too.

One could argue that as an experience it was something unique or possibly new or even that it made the reader feel something. I’m not ready to equate that with it being good. I didn’t even write Breathe with the intention of it being known as a ‘good’ story. What makes a story good to you, especially if you were expecting something else? I peddle sex stories, no one can tell me Breathe was what they were expecting/hoping.

I get the nervous feeling people protest that despite the dark themes they totally thought it was good to not hurt my feelings or to not make me feel bad about writing something that was clearly born out of my darker insecurities. Either that or people genuinely follow me for my style and unexpected style of writing at this point. The latter is flattering and kind but the former is more likely. Either way, it’s made me start to think about what “good” even is when someone’s describing a sex story, and it’s really fascinating to conclude that no matter what, depending on how you view sex stories most definitions of “good” are just bullshit. No wonder a lot of readers on mainstream sites think I’m a hack. Oh well. It’s not like I’ll be stopping with my writing anytime soon. I’ll talk to you all next week.