The new chapter of Consequences has been posted! Normally I would spent this blog post talking about its contents in a very spoiler-heavy way, but today of all days, I don’t want to do that, especially since this chapter feels like too much of a turning point to be summarized in a blog post. I’d rather leave it be and talk instead about an internal debate I’ve been having about the story lately.

A fascinating criticism that I don’t disagree with on its face has stuck with me. One reader has read Consequences and noted that Being More Social, its predecessor, felt very much like a coming-of-age novel that happens to have sex in it. They humbly asked for me to put more school events in Consequences because to them, Consequences felt like a sex story that happened to have plot (not their words) in contrast to the first story. This is an interesting piece of criticism because it makes me wonder where the line is.

To most authors that write sex stories, I am very plot-heavy. Almost ridiculously plot-heavy. I don’t claim to write the best stories or hottest sex, but I’m definitely in a decidedly niche, almost unique position. To me, a story is a situation where characters I create are released into a place of my imagination, then they interact, and then I write it down. Essentially, that’s how I write. Consequences has continued my tradition of preplanning shockingly little in my stories, even if characters will do things that seem to pay of plot arcs started chapters before. It’s rarely intentional; I just do my best to remember those events I guess, and the characters take it from there.

Because of this, that criticism comes across interestingly to me, because it’s not telling me that my priorities have changed, but rather, that my subconscious has changed. If this sequel is more obsessed with sex and its… well, its consequences… What’s changed?

One explanation could be that this is a sequel. In the first fourish chapters of Being More Social, Adam is a virgin, if you only count penetrative sex as losing one’s virginity. Using that point of view, he’s a virgin for a fifth of the whole book, and it’s not a short book. School is more prominent in Adam’s mind because that’s what he knows and what he cares about. Even with his crush on May, he was kind of swept into a sexual relationship.

In the sequel, Adam is a lot more conscious of both sex and his own responsibilities. In the first book he doesn’t really have much in the way of responsibilities, even when he’s on Council. He just sort of does as he pleases. In the sequel, he’s – and here’s a theme for you – as bound to the Council as he is to Nicole. His next assignment isn’t the most important thing in his mind anymore, it’s this notion of appeasing the school and keeping up with his growing number of relationships.

Another explanation is that I wrote Being More Social in 2014. I think I finished it around… 2018? Maybe 2017. That’s a maximum of six years ago, and human beings change in that long a time. I certainly have, and it would be naive to assume my writing style and its priorities haven’t shifted too. In the earlier days, I cared a lot about events as galvanizing forces – school dances, assignments, big conspiracies in the school – possibly because my mind went, “how else could I explain how these two characters met/talked/changed their dynamic?” Nowadays, I have more experience writing and I’d like to believe I can accomplish that without making every event huge. Consequences is still a cartoonified version of reality, but it’s a little reigned in. Even the cartoony aspects seem a tad more real, unless I’m imagining it. I notice that about writing novices – they can’t resist making a dramatic high school story include some bizarre school shooter event or something (a topic I plan to never cover – it’s too high-stakes and too cartoonishly awful).

This is not to say cartoony is bad – say what you will about A Miraculous Affair, but that one is actually still one of my favorites, even though I’m aware my readers didn’t like it too much – but it can be done well, and it needs to be grounded in something. For example, it’s obvious Nicole has depression. I never wanted to just show her being sad, or include something about suicide as a mere hypothetical as if to suggest that’s the extent of the seriousness. Even in BMS, I wanted to make it clear how serious that stuff could be.

In a weird way, that desire to be grounded has made me less attracted to events. To me, the interesting parts of life lie in the smaller events – that one discussion during class, that one moment shared with a lover, etc. Given sex is a more prominent part of Adam’s life and events are downplayed, I don’t doubt Consequences is different from Being More Social, but, from the start, I wanted it to be different. I didn’t set out for it to be different in this exact way, but… that is a part of what makes writing so special to me. I know as little as you do. I’ll talk to you all next week.

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