November already?!

The Halloween Special ate up most of October and paused everything else; I don’t know if that’s a good or popular way to do things. Particularly since it wasn’t the most lewd-dense VFU story. It was light and hopefully not stressful, which is (I think) the direction that readers want SSS to go in. I’m open to feedback, but I’m thinking we’ll make the Xmas Special this year a little shorter. Like, instead of 12 days of Christmas, maybe we do fewer. I’ve already promised one pairing, so if we want to do a couple of light little vignettes, let’s say I need two more. So, if you read this and you care, DM me with a nomination, for example: “AlicexGlynda” or “ReyxSally” or “RileyxAki”—you know, whoever. I’ll pick ones that I like, and we’ll have a few little Christmas-themed stories around the holiday. They don’t have to be canon.

PSA for anyone reading SS: TIE. You may have noticed it’s a little light on the lewdness at the moment, but it should still have a horny epilogue. Obviously, the details are going to be dependent on the next few chapters and how things shake out with the final choices. As for the movie format, it seems to have pros and cons. If I don’t do a good enough job planning lewdness distribution, it gets all lopsided. On the other hand, by following a framework laid out by better storytellers than me, we end up with a much more interesting story. It’s been an interesting experiment.

On HS, we’ve only just started Part 2, but it seems like people like HS in general. I wish I knew if that was because it’s M/F or because it’s family-friendly. Because I’d like to do a sandboxy Gurlberg story with a doofus himbo protagonist like Raf, but it wouldn’t be family-focused. Would people still read it? Anyway, now that the Halloween thing is over, we’ll be back with HS on Fridays. I personally think Thrill of the Hunt will be pretty neat with some spicy lewd scenes and an interesting premise.

Then there’s FF1. It’ll almost certainly wrap up in 2026, although I have no idea exactly when. There’s still a bit more story, especially with how easily I get distracted into adding new material. That’s got me thinking about what comes next. First there was FSC, and now we’ve had FF1. These have been our two ‘big’ projects, and they turned into different products. I guess BAE stealthily got pretty big too.

I think that FF1 and SEL show us something slightly profound. We all have this idea of real interactivity to give us control; there are games that try to make choices matter. Obviously, something super interactive but also lewd is the dream, right? Super complex VNs come closest to hitting this mark, and there seem to be a lot of pretty well-done ones—but they’re still very much on rails in their own way. Well, with readers making the choices, SEL and FF1 end up in places I never imagined. It’s “Anything is possible” in a way that real games can’t deliver (yet). SEL/BAE especially. But it takes some commitment. Big lewd scenes, like Riley/Adella/Annette/Viv have literally hundreds of chapters of development lending them juice, and to me that lets them feel earned and like they work. And a situation like “Mayor Barbara Gordon tries to maintain order and an affair with Poison Ivy while Spoiler balances her fling with Zatanna with being Gotham’s primary protector and the consequences of her recent adventure with Constantine,” is something that we only get after walking a long and interesting road. Which is to say, it seems to be worth it to dig in and commit to powering through a rocky or underwhelming start to hit the good stuff once things are established. Still, I like having an off-ramp, so pretty much everything I do now is planned in episodes so that if not enough people seem interested, we can move on without abandoning it in the middle. But BAE and FF1 ended up in such wildly different places from where I planned that I see it as proof of concept: if I put readers in the car, they will drive the car to somewhere interesting. So the next ‘big’ story will have to be designed with going long in mind, and while the voter format is imperfect, it has taken us on some pretty interesting rides.

I have several ideas that I think would make good “Next big futa story” material, but I want to know what the people want. There are so many promising premises and ideas, but not everyone thinks like I do. There has to be something to drive conflict; it can’t just be “Protagonist is surrounded by attractive women.” What do you think? We’ve done two sports stories now. There’s one more sport that I like, but is it time to move away from sports? I’m not especially good at writing the actual sport parts of sports stories, but sports is a good backdrop. Zero conflict/zero stakes doesn’t work, but bloody action or horror—stuff that’s too plot-driven—isn’t optimal either—we see this with things like the OG SSS, SS:TIE, and other stories we’ve done along the way. The problem there might be my execution, not the premise, but I’m still trying to learn from mistakes and misfires. We can still use those premises; we just have to be clever about it. If we set the new story in the world of John Wick, we don’t *have* to make the protagonist an assassin, we can make her one of the office ladies or the gunsmith or something. And so forth.

Or we can get away from sports and action, but that means we need more interpersonal intrigue and conflict to drive things forward—the potential pitfall there is that we don’t want the story to be fundamentally a romance, or we end up paired off and we have to look to the supporting cast to diversify the lewdness (like FF1). I’m personally drawn to those types of stories more than genre stories, but I’m not confident that I can do it well without a genre crutch to lean on. If you have opinions about this stuff, please comment on the FF1 chapters; I want suggestions to be visible, so if one person says: “I think X would be cool,” another person can say: “Yeah, I second that,” I know it’s a tiny sample size, but I want to do something that people will enjoy. It’s time to start thinking about it because the checkered flag is still months away for FF1, but time flies and I want the next thing to have some time in the oven.