The time has finally come. It’s time to talk about Our Own Way.
For those of you who do not know what it is, Our Own Way is, at present, a finished haremlit series of 7 novellas about regular people living in a regular city doing regular things. It is 100% real life in the sense that there are no fantasy elements. No paranormal elements, no sci-fi elements, no nothing. Just real life in modern day 2020s America.
I wrote it on a whim July 2021 and wrapped it up in March 2022.
It was about a struggling writer named Gabe hooking up with a more mature, somewhat older woman named Ellen after her life falls apart and she discovers that their brief yet deep friendship from a few years back has resulted in him being the only person she can really trust. As they start falling in love, they decide that society is bullshit and that the only way they’re really going to be happy is to be free of bullshit jobs doling out bullshit wages and go their own way.
It was a really strange project, and a really fun one.
For those who are curious, you can, at present, get all seven episodes for free, today and tomorrow, and the Complete Collection is 99 cents.
I will be taking down this series June 15th.
Looking back on it, I realized that I had something with a lot more potential on my hands. When I first started writing it, I didn’t really think people would be all that interested in it. Consequently, I wrote the story in a serialized format averaging around 20-25,000 words apiece and initially gave it my original pink silhouette cover art, given I can make those myself and fairly easily nowadays. But it started to get some attention, and though it didn’t earn anywhere near as much as my other works, the people who did read it reacted very strongly.
There was an intense sentiment of ‘I didn’t know I needed this’. For a reason that I can guess at, the story really struck a chord with a lot of people.
Once I realized people were actually invested, I began trying to make the works longer and invested in some better, though still simple, cover art. Which is the art it has presently. Near the end, I was getting bogged down with finishing up A Warm Place, continuing Raw, and preparing for Monster Girl Inn. So I wrapped it up a bit quickly and then set it aside, not thinking much more of it.
But then it came back.
I kept getting ideas, and then even more ideas. I realized at some point that I could’ve made entire novels out of the story. And I also realized that a huge portion of the haremlit readership probably missed out on it because of the triple threat I saddled the series with: giving it…untraditional cover art, making it novella-length, and, the big one, putting it in the erotica category. (I now realize that this is basically a death sentence for the majority of all fiction on Amazon.) I also realized that people were still really liking it, and it was being recommended for people looking for a pure slice-of-life experience. Which led me to realizing that could actually be a thing.
I’ve had at least a few authors tell me that my writing of Our Own Way was, if not an opening of the door and paving of the way for haremlit slice-of-life, it at least was a significant step in that direction.
So, eventually, I began realizing I could do for it what I had done for A Warm Place, which was also initially a collection of serialized novellas with a weird concept, and rewrite it as novels.
Since that realization, I’ve been piecing it together, planning it out, and getting some real writing done. As of right now, I’m somewhere over a third finished with the actual writing. I have what I consider to be fucking awesome cover art and I’ve got a decent grasp of the overall story, the characters, where it starts and where it ends, and the many, many things that are going to happen between those two events.
For those of you interested, I’ve posted the first two chapters of the new version right here on my site. The third chapter is here, on my Patreon, if you are a 1$/month Patron. The rest of the chapters will start posting on my Patreon tomorrow for 3$/month Patrons.
I am hoping that sometime in July I will have it ready, and then I intend to put it up for pre-order, since everyone tells me I really need to try that.
It will probably be among the longest books I’ve ever written. A Warm Place 1 came in at 92,000 words and Demoness IV, my longest ever, came in at 102,000 words. I’m hoping to make it my longest book ever, but we’ll see how that turns out. I don’t like to pad my stories unnecessarily just to reach an arbitrary word or page count.
Now I’ve got to get back to work on the book and start planning the final Raw novel and then write them both simultaneously.