After putting my nose to the grindstone a little bit, Consequences has been fully edited and was released to my patrons today. If you want to find it, look for my most recent Patreon post. If you want to access this story and all of my others, consider supporting me on Patreon.

It hit me as I was posting the finished story that this would be the very last action I would take involving a story that involved Adam and Nicole. It’s a little surreal given they as characters have been with me since the beginning, over a decade ago. The story is… intense. Extremely so. In some ways rereading, especially from a critical lens, was a very emotionally painful thing to do.

I was expecting the editing to be more painful in other ways. I was expecting to hate the story and find it poorly written in hindsight. I don’t think it invites the same feelings as Being More Social did, although I did want the story to be darker and not just become “more of the same.” Even so, I was shocked to find that I actually didn’t find the story to be bad now that I was looking at it having forgotten the writing process. The worst I can say about it was that the later ten chapters are weaker than the first ten, and especially at the end, you could practically visibly see my struggle trying to balance having the spotlight on so many characters at once.

That said, I actually do feel a weird sense of accomplishment upon rereading Consequences. I’m very aware many of you would prefer not to read it again, and that’s your right, although I feel a weird pride as I write this. There are some characters I thought were written worse than they were. Partially because one reader didn’t like her character and dismissed her as having a flat personality, I thought I would cringe rereading Zelda’s character and how she grew in the story. In fact I feel the opposite way: I like Zelda more than I did when writing her. I think a lot of what would become her later personality gets revealed early on, and it’s very clear that her, shall one say, accidentally persuasive side shows in different ways as the book goes on. I’ll always have a sneaking suspicion that some readers simply didn’t like her because she never wanted to have sex with Adam, and they had to fib to themselves and go “well she’s an undeveloped character anyway!” to avoid feeling bad about having a flimsy sex-related reason. Maybe I’m completely wrong and I’m lying to myself. Who knows?

Nicole is always a blast to write. Her sarcastic spunky nature is absolutely inspiring. I know a lot of people are upset and hurt and even angry at the direction Consequences takes, but… that’s the way the story unfolded to me. I didn’t want to be dishonest and lie, and Nicole came with her backstory and baggage. Hell, no one in Consequences really gets to escape a dreary fate, except maybe blissful Athena. I wonder if I’ll ever write a story with her in it in the future. As of now, there are no solid plans, but I’m not ruling it out, neither.

I can’t promise I’m done writing Nicole or even Adam as characters. I do know that they’ll only appear in the stories of others at most from here on in. I suspect other characters won’t completely disappear either. Heck, sometimes some characters come back in other stories and one doesn’t realize it unless they’re looking for it. More of these characters appear in more of my side stories than one thinks. Given some of my readers enjoy being sleuths about that kind of thing, it’s fun to include the occasional Easter egg.

Now that the big edit is done, I’ll focus on releasing .pdf versions of my other previously edited works. The person that does my book covers stepped up their game with this one, and if you’re not planning on becoming a Patron but still want to see what it looks like, I posted a picture in my Discord server, linked below. Even though I’m effectively re-releasing my stories, I won’t ask for their title pages to be redone, but I am going to have that standard followed in my story covers from here on in.

And of course, there’s more stories to uncover! Paul’s story from Dinner Break is unfolding. Jason’s adventure with the Quiz Bowl team is far from over. Even Robyn’s adventure still lingers in my brain. And that’s before talking about the occasional commissioned story I’m asked to write. Hopefully the future is bright. I’ll talk to you all next week.

Click this image to be taken to Bashful Scribe’s Discord server.