For the past little bit, I teased that a one-off story was complete and just needed the commissioner’s seal of approval, and it’s finally ready to show off. This piece has been on my backburner for a while, and now I can finally release Where’s the Free Use?, a story I began writing before I released my last two other commission pieces.

If you’ve been on the Internet in certain circles for a long time, you might be able to tell nominally what the story is about, even from the title. I really hope the references aren’t lost on all readers, but as well, the story should hopefully be just as good to those who don’t get the references. As much of a luddite as I am, I have my “chronically online” moments too, as this piece reflects.

Mainly, the piece is a character story though. It doesn’t really follow a clear plot-driven structure, nor does it have a clear problem and resolution. To be frank, a lot of erotica, especially free online erotica, doesn’t. A strength and weakness of online erotica is that they’re often devoid of plot and meant to cover a character in-depth, often so that readers can enjoy fantasizing either being with that character or being the character. Truth be told, I don’t mind plotless stories, as long as it’s more than just “look at this character, they’re so hot.”

I like character pieces. Sometimes I like to write certain characters. Ariel was an enjoyable character to write. Adam and Nicole are similarly fun to write. And yes, I loved writing Allistair’s character, so if you didn’t like him, tough.

(As well, Allistair is based on an over-the-top friend of mine that happens to be from London. I’m quite aware most people from the UK are not remotely like him.)

Character pieces are a good way to communicate the character without needing things to happen to them. It sounds boring from a story standpoint and sometimes, depending on what you want out of a story, it is. But some people are looking for a deep dive into a person’s goals, motivations, interests, and mannerisms. Character pieces can allow us to explore this without bogging them down with the prom being tomorrow or something. Sometimes in some stories, you want to communicate a character by how they respond to events, and sometimes, they’re just banging other people and making YouTube reviews. Plus, there’s a few mini-plots in the story, hopefully enough to satisfy plot hunters in my audience.

Speaking of both communication and how much of a luddite I am, with Twitter doing… not so hot right now, I’m going to put effort and energy into revamping my Discord server. I haven’t decided what Patreon benefits I’ll be able to implement, but that’ll be step two. For now, step one is just to get it working again. I don’t really want anyone who can access my site to immediately get a button to be let in to the server, and I’m too much of a luddite to know how to vet newcomers to a Discord server, so I’m going to include links to the Discord serve at the bottom of these blog posts and make the links last a week. That way, only people in the community – the types of people who are reading these – will see the links, and there’s security by not making the links last forever. I’m hoping this works as an apt solution.

So if you were hoping for the Discord server to be fruitful and were disappointed a few years ago, congratulations, Twitter crashing and burning has made me decide to give it another go. (Though I will keep people updates of new stories etc. on Twitter as well.) Here’s hoping I do better this time. I hope you enjoy the story, and the new mode of communicating. I appreciate you all, and I’ll talk to you all next week.

Click on this image to get access to the site’s Discord channel.