This week, on my Patreon, I have released the fully edited version of Follow the Leader! As with all of my edits, it comes with a functional table of contents with buttons for each chapter, a swanky title page made as always by my website editor, and spelling, grammar, and flow fixes. Given the state of The Divine Creamery and how it might end up becoming a multi-chapter story (depending on commissioning variables), this means I am, for now, caught up on my edits.

Spoilers for Follow the Leader and minor spoilers for other stories follow.

Realistically, I was probably unconsciously holding off on editing this one for a while. It’s not my favorite story, but I’ve only given vague reasonings as to why. I realize it’s not fantastic advertising to talk at length about what I don’t like about a story I want people to read, so instead, I want to talk about what I did end up liking about the story. Just be aware that if you read this blog and then read the story, and come away going, “I have some criticisms,” me too. I’m just choosing to avoid talking about them altogether here.

First and foremost, anyone who’s read Mutual Benefits can plainly see that I came up with the idea for both stories around the same time. As has become abundantly clear, my stories largely take place in the same universe, which also means that anything that happens in one story will affect things that happen in another. This created a very interesting and fun-to-write double effect for my story: On the one hand, if you read Mutual Benefits first and then Follow the Leader, some events in the former will be further contextualized by the latter. On the other hand, if you read MB first, you’re already privy to knowing a minor spoiler that gets revealed halfway through FtL. But if you happened to read Follow the Leader first, you get to see a convoluted plot in the first story then see how different its plot looked in another perspective in MB. I love playing with perspective a lot – I got to play around with it a lot in Only If You Want by exploring a scene from Being More Social word-for-word from another character’s perspective. For those that care about how one event can mean different things to different people, it’s a lot of fun to read the story for that reason.

I also really like how genuinely awful Jordan is. Sometimes I can’t help myself and tend to write characters that are in some kind of realm of “redeemable no matter what.” Jordan isn’t this. He’s selfish, manipulative, and holds awful opinions openly. He doesn’t just happen to hold a sketchy view on age gaps – he revels in it, and leverages his own attractiveness to pressure others into at least pretending his opinions are okay. Awful people do this, all the time. Attractive awful people aren’t satisfied to merely hold unpopular and potentially harmful opinions; they seek to normalize these opinions for their own benefit. I’ve toyed with people being okay with age gaps in my stories before, but pretty much always, I’ve had the characters be redeemable. But Jordan speaks simply, speaks bluntly, and looks out only for himself. Asking consent is seen by him as a favor. Anything bad he does is seen as something others can forgive, and should. Other people are property to him. As much as I don’t like a lot of what I handle in the story, the premise of Follow the Leader was that if an outsider looked at a nosy person like Kevin and a manipulative people-user like Jordan, it wouldn’t take much to convince them as members of a secret society. I really like that concept.

Plus, to be blunt, the idea of a secret society of all things being operated by high schoolers is goofy fun. Teenagers love to act, pretend, and even believe that everything they do is huge and important. They love to act like full adults but almost definitionally, don’t know how. Sex is one way that teenagers learn to act like adults, and fail along the way in awkward fashion. But another oft-unreported way they imitate adults is by assuming responsibilities and jobs in a superficial way. “Teens pretend to run the school” is a time-honored and exciting trope for this reason, and it was exciting to enter into that kind of trope, hopefully not for the last time.

Lastly, I also have a strong guilty pleasure for overcomplicating matters then revealing them to be less complicated the whole time. Way too many of my protagonists are overthinkers, and it’s fun on occasion to “punish” the overthinkers by revealing that their overthinking was, at times, the source of their problems. Keen readers may realize the parallels between the literal crashing down of an overthought world in this story and what Mr. Salvador tells Adam near the end of Consequences.

So, Follow the Leader’s book is closed, pretty firmly. I have a lot of hangups and criticisms for this work, but I still think there’s value in looking at what did work about the story too, and seeing what lessons I can take from this, as well as patterns I can keep polishing and honing as time goes on. For now, I have way too many commissions I need to catch up on, so I should dedicate less time to writing this blog and more time to writing that story. I’ll talk to you all again soon.

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