Boo! Happy Halloween. Nothing’s scarier than the unexpected, so what could be scarier than me actually finishing a chapter that I promised I’d finish?

It’s finally here! Mutual Benefits, chapter one. As is the case with a lot of multi-chapter stories, especially from me, this one has a lot of buildup in it, so ye be warned; if you’re going into this story hoping to get to the sex immediately, you might be disappointed.

I’ll get into the actual themes and thought behind the story in future blog posts (partially so I have some idea of what to talk about in them) but for now I’ll say that chapter one comes in at around 8200 words. I plan for future chapters to be around 10k each, and honestly, I planned to have this chapter be 10k words as well, but once I wrote the final sentence and sat back, I realized that I had nothing more to say, and for a first chapter, anything extra would have felt like padding. Maybe I’m getting worse as a writer, or maybe I’m getting better at writing the same stuff in less words, apparently that can also be a good thing. I wouldn’t know, I took this whole paragraph to say “8k words this chapter with 10k expected of future chapters.”

I’ll keep this blog brief and let the chapter speak for itself. Suffice to say, I tried a few new things as usual with this story, and I’m willing to hear all feedback, positive and negative, though the usual channels (email, twitter, etc). If you’re worried that it starts slow with little sex, that will not reflect the whole story and like with Being More Social, it’s going to go to a few hopefully unexpected places. I hope you enjoy the chapter, and the full story when it comes out.

Speaking of, if you enjoy this story on other sites, specifically sexstories.com, because of how slow the pacing is, I’m going to strategically not publish this story to sexstories until I have five full chapters of it done. Otherwise, knowing their voting system, it’ll be pretty heavily downvoted due to the heavy buildup of non-sexual material. Just trying to cover my own butt.

Lastly, I’ll be publishing an update to my Patreon, and subsequently, a poll for my next piece tomorrow (also on Patreon). If you’re a Patron, you’ll get to vote on what piece I write next. That goes for all tiers, $1 and up. As well, if you’re on the fence about being a Patron, I have a goal in November to not only publish another full chapter/piece, but also to release two full edits of my past work (likely GBM and When in Toronto) for my $5 patrons. I hope you all enjoy the new stuff, both today, and what’s to come. I’ll talk to you all next week.