Nah, just kidding.

Nothing substantive happened this week, so I thought I’d bring up the weirdness of comment sections for slower erotica writers, like myself. This does not apply to the comment sections on this blog – you all are actually super civil and kind. The criticism I receive here is always constructive and well-worded, and I can understand and apply it well – on last week’s blog, someone told me that their main criticism with Being More Social was that I laid it on too thick with the drama and they hoped this story doesn’t take those same turns. That’s constructive and well-reasoned. I like that. And I always love hearing your opinions on things, whether they be explaining what you already like, criticisms, or even your opinions on where the stories will go.

The “weirdness” I’m referring to is reserved for public websites, especially with anonymous commenting. I got my start posting Being More Social on sexstories.com and somehow, the story took off. (I had to re-upload them since sexstories has had inconsistent views over the past 8 years on depictions of high school.) When I started out, I just graduated from high school and was bored at home, so after I thought a popular writer deleted my scathing review of his story (which, it turns out, never happened, and the site just bugged out or something), I went, “Oh yeah? Think I’m a nobody? I guess I’ll write something and become a somebody!”

Being an unemployed bored kid at 18 and being petty as all hell is a powerful combination. I basically only wrote for a solid week, and pumped out the first three chapters of Being More Social. It was a minor hit, and the rest was history.

After the first three chapters, I got a chapter out once every 1-2 weeks. I got into university around the time chapter 6 or 7 came out, and I had to slow my output to once a month due to the sudden workload. At that point, some of the readers got upset, asking me why I’m taking longer and longer for each chapter when they’ll all just as long. I remember one chapter that read something like, “When you start a story, you’re making a promise to the reader that you will finish this story. When you take longer than a week to finish a chapter, you’re disobeying this contract. You clearly don’t give a shit about your own readers, and if I knew where you lived I would come to your house and set it on fucking fire.”

I really wish I copied this comment while I could, because I want the exact way it was phrased by its original author, and I want it framed in my room. You can hear the smolder behind the words of a person trying to appeal to their rational side before it gives away to comical amounts of anger.

I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting the conspiracy theories. The first time I took longer than a full month to finish a chapter, three different comments appeared on my stories talking about how “I know Bashful Scribe in real life, he died, that’s why there’s no more chapters.” Unless they were banking off of me never returning and wanted their 2 minutes of fame, I don’t get how they could possibly get anything from writing that. I had to make a post that wasn’t a sex story (a bit of a faux pas) to explain that I was not, in fact, dead. I think I’ve brought this up in a blog before, and the sentiment was definitely fresher then, but I still can’t believe how ridiculously quickly anonymous people online can go from “hope to see the next chapter posted soon :)” to “he’s fucking dead.” I wonder how that commenter felt when I posted the next chapter. He posted anonymously, so I guess it doesn’t matter.

Literotica is a very hungry, frankly impatient audience, and that’s okay. That shows passion and care about stories, and on its face, I like that. I really hope they don’t devolve to conspiracy theories about me, but if they do, you have my permission here and now to comment increasingly ridiculous things about me (like “bash got eaten by a crocodile, F in the chat :(” or “Bashful Scribe can’t write anymore, he had to go to space, godspeed soldier” or something). God knows I’m slow enough at outputting chapters that it’s not completely impossible for them to think this.

Every so often, I get an email going, “Hey, I was wondering if you’re going to continue Mutual Benefits?” I will finish it or suddenly die. Those are the only two outcomes. There is no ‘sudden retirement’ for me, there’s no stopping, and there’s no premature ending. Like that one commenter said, I’ve written a contract, and I don’t want my house to burn down, so for my own sake as well as our mutual love of stories, I’m finishing it. I’ll talk to you all next week.