Sabbatical Announcement

Hello everyone. I’ve made the hard decision to take an indefinite, although not quite complete, sabbatical from writing.

First, the why’s. My mood disorder stuff is still really bad and unpredictable and I feel even without the other health issues I’m about to share I’d be struggling to meet expectations over at least the next few months. But even if that stuff was perfect I’d be having to do this. I’ve got some medical issues with my hands that are preventing me from engaging in any typing longer than about a half hour or so, and even that hurts quite a bit. I’m still working with my medical team to figure out what’s going on, but I don’t expect things to get much better any time soon.

It’s clear to me that I just need to take a long, indefinite step back and focus on healing. What does this mean? All of my current/recent projects are in indefinite hold/outright canceled. I have no idea when or even if I’ll be able to/try to go back to full time writing and what’s going to be healthiest for me is to not be thinking about trying for a while.

That being said, it’s going to be REALLY had to not write. I know I won’t be getting much done any time soon, but it’s always been hard for me to create stuff I don’t share in some way. I know I want to have something I can add to a bit here and there and share with people somehow, but any kind of “regular” story is just too much writing to get any realistically satisfying work done.

While mulling over WHAT kind of project to tinker at here and there to scratch my creative itch the last few days I stumbled on something. WAY back when I started writing smut my first few CYOA style stories were written using a webpage called inkle. At the time they could format finished stories into a file that could be published on Amazon, and that’s how I wrote/published my first few interactive stories. This included “The Defeat of Champion Girl” and “Wasteland Slut: Escape From the Bunker”.

At one point they stopped offering this service and I moved on to writing those kinds of books they way I do now: in a word file and using hyperlinks. At the time of the transition away from Inkle I had been pretty bummed as the app allowed you to insert some simple game-like logic into the stories.

I discovered recently Inkle didn’t actually stop being developed and is more functional then ever. So what I’m going to do is take the long unpublished “Wasteland Slut: Escape From the Bunker” interactive story and very slowly rework/update it. Since the entries for these CYOA style stories are very short I should be able to get an entry or two done at a time without further straining my hands.

This will be something I’m doing more for me (I LOVE writing and a big part of me NEEDS to be doing it), but even doing it for me I need to be able to share it for it to be satisfying. The great think about Inkle is I can simply share a link and you all will be able to read the in-progress story. Even partially done this will probably be FAR more satisfying then reading slowly posted read throughs on the discord, and I’ll be able to work some game-like logic the story.

The story/game will be readable HERE.

Now, as I said, this is something I’m doing mostly for me and even the best version of the foreseeable future will see this project going at a REALLY slow pace. Because of that I’m going to keep the Patreon paused (which means no one can sign up and no one will get charged) but hold off on shutting it down completely. Come next month when I need to decide to reactivate or keep it paused I’ll probably throw up some kind of poll to see what backers want.

Main takeaway: for the foreseeable future the ONLY project I’ll be working on is a single interactive story that’s a re-work of something old. There’s a good chance there may be days or even whole weeks I can’t add to it, and even when I can it won’t be much. I probably won’t make too many posts (maybe only to mention when I’ve gotten signification sections posted).

You should expect things to be about the same through at least the new year, and maybe longer. There’s a chance I may never be able to go back to writing like I have the last couple of years. If/when I know details I’ll share them on the Patreon (it it’s still up), my discord, and my personal webpage.