Looking Ahead At 2022 (January/2022 Newsletter)

I’m not even sure where to begin.

A lot happened during 2021.

I guess, to help get it all sorted out, let’s first go over that.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2021

Well, first and foremost, A Warm Place fucking exploded.

When I first posted A Warm Place, I did so with a lot of hope, but also a lot of reservations. I really span the chasm between hopeful and hopeless. For a little while there in January, I was feeling pretty abysmal with the reception the novel was getting, as I’d put a LOT of work into it. And then, abruptly, it took off. And it’s gone strong since. So I got right to work on the sequels. And consequently, this series consumed most of 2021. Which is cool, don’t get me wrong. It was fun enough to write, and people really seemed to like it, and that is awesome. But good lord did it take a toll. After AWP7 I needed a break, and then after AWP8 I needed one even more. I was intending to get AWP9, the final novel in the series, done before now, but that didn’t happen. Mainly because of Raw. Which we’ll get to. Anyway, A Warm Place was a huge success for me, and I’m really happy about that, and I wanted to thank everyone who read it and reviewed it and helped spread the word about it around.

Near the beginning of the year I wrapped up Like A Fine Wine. Not my best project, for a number of reasons, but it got done.

I managed to get Valkyries back up, so yay.

I felt compelled to write sequels to all of my (former) freebie shorts, and so I did. And then I felt compelled to write sequels to those sequels, to make them all trilogies, and managed to get Pink, Blind Date, & The Pale Redhead out. The others are coming and I’ll discuss them more below.

I started writing Our Own Way on a bit of a whim and am very surprised by the reaction it got. I had hoped to get a bit further in it, too, but a number of things really kicked my ass towards the end of the year.

And, finally, the big one. Raw. After realizing I needed to take a break and start something else after A Warm Place 8, I finally sat down and wrote my caveman story I’ve been talking about for like two years now. And it fucking exploded. Raw has changed the course of my whole career.

Looking back over my previous yearlong statement at the beginning of 2021, I’m surprised that I managed to do almost half of what I set out to. I still intend to start a new pen name, but I’ve drifted away from the concept of a website store…for now. At the very least, it’s been boxed up and put away in the metaphorical attic. Not gone, but put away. Maybe someday I’ll pull it back out. I also did indeed make a return to serial fiction, though it wasn’t the idea I first had, but it taught me that serial fiction is a bad idea. For me anyway.

Last but not least, I can reveal that I secretly helped create an EMP disaster survival harem! Back near the beginning of the year, I worked on a 12-part serial fiction with a friend and called it Desperate Times. It did okay. As I learned more, I realized it’d make WAY more sense to re-release them as novels. And so that’s what is being done. More are to come, but here’s the first book. It covers roughly the first four parts of the serial, and has 9,000 new words of content. If you like my stuff, you’ll almost certainly like this series. Also, just to be clear, because there have been questions, Lara X. Lust is not my new pen name, nor is it me. I do not run that name, just do some work with them.

I didn’t get my shit together in 2021. If anything, I fell apart harder than ever before, for a number of reasons, but I did manage to have the most successful year of my life. So that’s pretty cool.

Now, let’s talk about this year.

WHAT I INTEND TO DO IN 2022

Things have changed. Sort of.

I learned a lot last year. Honestly, I learned more in 2021 than I had in all the years combined before that. Consequently, I’d like to explain why I want to make the changes that I’m going to be making.

To explain that, we need a little history lesson.

In the beginning, there was erotica.

I stumbled awkwardly onto the scene in late 2014 with my weird little sci-fi erotic serial fiction Hellcats. It worked. People bought it, I could write more of it, so that’s basically what I did. I experimented here and there with slightly longer works, but I basically just hustled my fucking ass off and wrote erotic serial fiction all the way through 2015, 2016, & 2017. When 2018 hit, something changed in me. I just could not write serial fiction any longer. By then, I’d been wanting to make the change to longer fiction for awhile, and with the success of Demoness, then my longest title ever, both financially and with how much fun I had writing it, I knew I had to make the switch. I did, managing to buy myself some time by re-releasing all my serial fiction as novels with new cover art.

By then, I was beginning to get the idea that there was this type of erotica called harem. The concept seemed simple enough: one dude banging multiple chicks. Technically speaking, the first thing I ever published, Hellcats, was harem. So through 2018, 2019, & 2020, I drifted closer to harem, gaining a dawning awareness of the rules of the genre. Because I am not a social person by nature, it took me quite awhile to begin interacting with the harem community. Finally, in 2021, I did. This is when I began learning a lot.

I learned about a lot of rules, and how I was breaking or bending them, and all about the expectations of the genre.

Probably the biggest thing I learned, and this genuinely fucking blows my mind, is that harem and erotica do not necessarily mix.

I still have a lot of trouble wrapping my head around that.

I don’t want to really get into the rules & regulations of harem, because it’s strangely complex, but also hotly debated, and that’s not really what this is about. What this is about is one of my biggest takeaways from this was: I am at a large disadvantage if I want to be a harem author. And I do want to be a harem author. Harem offers me the most freedom as an author. Quite by accident, I stumbled into almost the perfect genre. I really like writing about action and adventure, I really like writing about sex, I really like writing about a protagonist having multiple girlfriends, I really like writing about monster girls and alien girls and other inhuman girls. All of these are components of the harem genre. Plus, it’s just fun to write.

Unfortunately, it’s obvious that I have some stuff holding me back. Surprisingly, one of the biggest things that has come up again and again is the fact that I have a female pen name. This is one of the reasons I want to start a second pen name. Obviously this time it will be a male one. Another huge thing holding me back is my erotica past.

Now we can finally talk about some of the changes I’ve made recently.

Something really important I learned about being a successful indie writer is that you want to have a lot of ‘entry points’ into your library. Or basically, as many titles, be they novels or shorts or collections, that people can come across in the wild, pick up and read, by themselves. As in, there’s no previous required reading to understand and enjoy the story. Although it sounds counterintuitive, in a roundabout way, this was why I fired up four shared universes. My ‘theme’ as an author wasn’t outer space or fantasy or paranormal romance, it was, among other things, dudes banging inhuman women. So I wanted fans of sci-fi and fans of fantasy and fans of post-apocalyptic and fans of paranormal romance all to be able to find something. Many entry points. That was also why I wrote the Misty Vixen Starter Pack and the freebie short stories, and why I experimented with making some of my novels free. Exposure is everything, discoverability is your biggest obstacle as an author.

However, and this is a thing I have learned harshly: your titles should be representative of your library and what you have on offer. And this is where the problem comes in. In the beginning, I had erotica on offer. But now, I have harem novels on offer. And those two things bump. If some harem reader who has never heard of me before stumbles across, say, Wanderlust, or Desire, and reads it, they’re not going to be happy. And that’s why I removed the subtitles from every book that isn’t harem, that’s why I added ‘This is NOT harem’ in the description of every non-harem novel. It’s why I made the freebies not free anymore, because they became bad advertisements for my library, because they don’t represent what I’m writing nowadays.

Unfortunately, I’m at a bit of an impasse. I’ve been told that if I really want to deal with it in a brutally efficient way, I would just unpublish everything that isn’t harem. But I can’t do that. That’s like…thirty novels. I put a LOT of work into them, and those stories are what a lot of readers got started on. Taking them down just feels wrong. I still like most of them and I’m still glad I wrote most of them. They were fun and I like the characters and stories.

So, instead, I’ve done everything I can to separate them from the harem stories. I think, someday, maybe next year depending on how this year goes, I may take them out of the Kindle Unlimited and instead start also offering them on Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, etc. Maybe, we’ll see. Sometimes it’s better to just keep things simple, though.

So that covers why I’m making all these changes: I’m trying to become a harem author.

Now, I have three more things to discuss: the roundup of where I stand with all my varied projects, and also my new pen name. And finally, we’ll finish this off with a bullet point list of what I hope to accomplish in 2022, as well as a brief section dedicated to specifically January. First the roundup.

I’ve been saying for a little while now that I’m intending to wind down my shared universes, as they have largely run their course and served their purpose. I’m closer than ever to doing that. So here’s a little look.

PARANORMAL UNIVERSE

  • This universe is now officially closed (again). I know I said that before, but then I had to write two more Pink stories. But now I have. And so it’s done for real this time. Honestly, Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy have never truly worked for me. It’s not impossible, but I don’t see myself returning to this scene.

POST-APOCALYPTIC UNIVERSE

  • This is finished. I had intended to write two more series, but I ultimately realized that they would actually be much better combined into one, original series that isn’t part of the universe. I’m not saying it’s impossible that I’ll never return to this universe, as I do have a lot of love for it, but the future is simply too crowded for right now. There’s other Post-Apocalyptic universes I want to explore. But maybe someday, years from now, I’ll return. I do have a few ideas.

SCIENCE FICTION UNIVERSE

  • This one has a bit more to do. One final series. The follow-up to Like A Fine Wine. I’m admittedly feeling iffy on this one. I committed to it, so I’ll do it, but I’m kinda worried. Like A Fine Wine didn’t go as well as I’d originally intended. And I’ve never actually written a sequel series before. I’m extremely reluctant to go back on a promise, but at the same time, it’s next to impossible to force myself to write something I truly don’t want to. And honestly, I think readers would be able to pick up on it. On top of that, it slows down EVERYTHING. While I was writing Like A Fine Wine, writing became a nightmare. I dreaded working on any project. So I just can’t say. The only good news, I suppose, is that I can kick this particular can down the road. I literally don’t have time to think about it right now, and probably won’t be able to actually reexamine it until 2023 because of all the work I have to do on other projects. However, beyond that, there’s nothing left in this universe. I originally intended to write a hurt-comfort story set on an island, but I’ve since realized it would actually make more sense to roll it into a completely separate series in another universe, so that’s what happened to that.

FANTASY UNIVERSE

  • This one has the most work left. I need to write Large & Lovely III and Snakeskin III, both of which I hope to wrap up sometime soon as well. I also need to write the Epilogue novella to Lust & Adventure. And finally, I’m going to reboot Demoness. This universe probably won’t be closed out for awhile, but in reality, it’ll just be focused on Demoness. I want Demoness to be pretty big and epic, and it will pull from all the other stuff I’ve written in this universe, and will likely go on for years and years from now, as it will be a passion project, not a moneymaker, and thus I’ll be able to take more time to write it in the background. And, like, can I just say how fucking excited I am for the Demoness rewrite? I already have the cover for it made. The woman who made the originals drew it for me and I found a fucking cool new font and I’ve got a lot of ideas. The first novel is going to basically cover Books 1 & 2, with some expansion and more coherency in the storytelling, and probably be about as long as Demoness IV (my longest novel ever) was. I’m thinking all of them are going to be 100,000+ words now. Which means they’ll take a lot longer to write, but whatever, it’ll be worth it. Also, this will be a full rewrite, so even though the plot will be similar at first, it’s still all new words. No copy/pasting.

STAND ALONE PROJECTS

  • A WARM PLACE: As mentioned above, A Warm Place 9 will be the final novel in the series, and at some point I’ll release The Complete Series. That being said, I’ve been toying around with an idea or two for another series set in this universe. I’m very on the fence about it. On the one hand, I like these ideas, on the other, I have so many other things to write, and I’ll have just gotten done writing the longest series I’ve ever written when I wrap this one up. Maybe I’ll come back in a few years. That being said, it will not be about Chris. It will be a new protagonist. Probably.

  • OUR OWN WAY: I’m about halfway finished with this series at the moment. I’m looking at eight or nine total novellas and then a Complete Edition. I’m definitely going to wrap this one up this year, and then I’m done, like, forever, with serial fiction. I’m kind of kicking myself because judging by the reaction I got from this, I could have been MUCH more successful if I’d just made these full novels with proper cover art. I think from the outside it looks successful but compared to A Warm Place or Raw, it’s basically making pennies. And don’t get me wrong, not everything is $, but after awhile, you get better about seeing opportunities, and realizing when you fucked an opportunity up. Regardless, I’m happy with this series. It’s been very fun to write, and I really love how much people love it. I’m going to write another series kind of like this, but in a sci-fi setting.

  • RAW: So this is my main focus for 2022. I am positive I will not be able to finish the entire series this year, even pumping out a novel a month. I have a lot of material to work with and a lot of ideas. Basically, expect Raw, Raw, and more Raw all this year.

  • OTHER: I will discuss this below, because it involves the other thing I need to talk about, my pen name.

Okay, so, first of all, I have a name picked out, and no I’m not saying what it is yet. Main reason for that is because I am nowhere near ready to launch it yet. I thought for a long time about how I want to handle this new pen name and this is what I have decided. Once launched, I’m going to basically split my ideas in two. My new pen name will handle my more action-oriented material, whereas Misty Vixen will handle A) Old ideas that need to be written, B) Chill slice-of-life fiction, and C) Weird-ass stuff that might absolutely tank. Some of my ideas are experimental, some of my ideas are, I’ve been told, fucking awful in terms of harem. I still want to write them, but I don’t want them to poison the well, as it were. Instead, I might as well just poison the well that’s already been poisoned, (according to a lot of readers, serious some people fucking hate me over on Reddit). This seems like a nice compromise.

I want to have several novels written and ready to go before I launch my new pen name. I have also been advised by several other authors in the genre that I’m kind of shooting myself in the foot by writing such long series. That’s only really sustainable if I’m, like, Logan Jacobs or Eric Vall. Which hey, apparently I’m not that good of a writer, but oh well. What I need to be doing is writing short stuff, like 3-4 novel series, that can end, or can keep going, depending on if people like it or not. I have to admit, I’m not super fond of this approach, but I can’t argue with the logic.

That being said, I’m taking a slightly similar approach to this new pen name as I did with Misty Vixen, in that I want to have several genres on offer, they just won’t be shared universes. I’ve got a hardcore survival series I really want to write first. It’s sci-fi and, yep, you guessed it, in a winter setting. I’m debating about what I want the second series to be, but I’ve got a couple of really fucking cool Post-Apocalyptic ideas. We shall see.

I honestly don’t know when I will be ready to launch this new name. I can’t even promise it’ll be this year. I sure want it to be, but my mental health took a massive dive in 2021. I’d really like to believe that it will get better in 2022, but even if it does, Raw still takes precedence.

All right, we’re at the end. Let’s wrap this up.

2022 Agenda

  • Write 9 more Raw novels.

  • Finish A Warm Place.

  • Finish Our Own Way.

  • Write Snakeskin III, Large & Lovely III, and Lust & Adventure - Epilogue.

  • Assist with more Desperate Times novels.

  • Write first Demoness reboot novel?

  • Launch new pen name?

  • Rework a lot of cover art. I’ve been in the process of tracking down new artists, and an old one, and I’m working on getting some of my covers redone. This is one of the last things I want to do as part of closing out my old library. I’ve spent years fiddling with my books and I’ve finally admitted to myself that it’s costing me too much time and money. So I’ve decided to give everything one last going-over. Haven is in the process of being re-covered, and I think the covers are amazing. Parasexual and Like A Fine Wine will get the same treatment from the same artist. I also intend to get most of the Collections re-covered by my old cover artist who made most of the covers you see today. I also want to get the Sex & Survival novels, and Amazonian’s Love re-covered.

  • I’m tossing around the idea of having drawings of side and minor characters from my varied series created just for fun. If I do, they’ll be hosted here on the site like the others.

January 2022 Agenda

  • Publish Raw II

  • Publish Large & Lovely - The Complete Trilogy

  • Publish Snakeskin - The Complete Trilogy

  • Publish Our Own Way 6 (Hopefully)

Wish me luck, and I hope you all have a good 2022.

A Change of Plans

Well, this is unexpected.

Raw is, like, exploding in popularity.

Before now, my highest ever ranking in the Kindle Store, which calculates sales data in real time (supposedly) for every title available in the entire store (that isn’t free), so we’re talking literally millions here, was somewhere in the 1200s, and that was A Warm Place 7. It also didn’t last that long. My books tend to peak and then fall off rather quickly after launch.

Certainly my A Warm Place novels have done better than anything I have ever published, but this is unprecedented for me.

Raw has broken my record for roughly the 12th time in a row, reaching a mind-bending #439 in the Kindle Store.

That is fucking insane.

When I launched Raw, I had the hope that it might be able to edge out AWP7 for highest ranking. I had distant hopes that MAYBE it might breach the Top 1000. Something I’ve never actually done before.

Clearly, it shattered those expectations and then some.

I remember stating back near the end of 2019 that I would be very stupid not to focus on Haven, because it was my strongest earner. I felt similarly with A Warm Place in 2021.

CLEARLY, I feel this way about Raw. For whatever reason, people seem to be responding very strongly to it, and my instincts (and some other authors) are basically telling me to just ditch everything else and get to work on RAW II.

I’m somewhat reluctant to change my plans, but I just can’t argue with this. This is a rare opportunity. I have never, in my life, been presented with so obvious an example of ‘strike while the iron is hot’.

My work over the past few weeks has been extraordinarily slow. The reason for this is because I’ve been feeling very poorly. It’s weird, because I’m not sick, but I do have some persistent symptoms. Mostly weakness, like I can’t wake up fully. That has made focusing on writing next to impossible. The good news is that it seems to finally be passing, and I have finally made it to the doctor to get some bloodwork done and maybe determine if there’s a problem.

The change that I’m making is that I will be going full force on Raw II and getting it done as soon as possible. As of this moment, I have the novel planned out, and the cover art is being made. (It’s got Rylee on it.)

I’m more reluctant now to talk about the future of Raw, because when I did that with A Warm Place, I ended up contradicting myself many times. Suffice to say, Raw is the most extensively planned out series I have ever written, by a lot. I’ve got the island mapped out, the tribes and races, and all of the major plot points worked out up to the climax, where the series could stop, or possibly continue. I’ll have to see. I think I can safely say that I can get a dozen novels out of this series, and that’s largely without filler. I see a lot of readers complain about the more popular harem novels being stuffed with filler and I try to avoid that as much as possible nowadays.

I’ll be trying to make regular progress on A Warm Place 9, but I’m no longer sure when I’ll have it done. I do apologize for this, I honestly thought I’d have more time, but not writing Raw II as soon as possible would be like throwing away a winning ticket.

Obviously this is going to push back the free shorts trilogy releases and Lust & Adventure Epilogue.

That’s all I’ve got. Diving into RAW II now.

The Misty Vixen Newsletter (December 2021)

Here we are at the end of another year. Although it feels like the end of a decade after all the shit that’s happened.

So, what happened in November?

It was close, but I publish Raw!

I also managed to get Our Own Way 5 out!

I managed to get most of Pink 3 written. I also took down all five of the freebie stories, which were no longer freebies, and also their sequels. I will be republishing them as Complete Trilogies as I write each third short. I’m hoping to get those done over the next month or two, but A Warm Place 9 and Our Own Way takes priority. That being said, I’m setting Our Own Way aside for a moment. I need a break from it and to just let it settle for a bit. I honestly am still surprised people like it so much. It’s definitely made me reconsider taking a bigger stab at slice-of-life stuff.

As for what’s up in the coming month, I’m very much hoping to get A Warm Place 9 out. I also think now is the time to talk about A Warm Place as a whole.

When I started rewriting it last year, I had a lot of plans. Those plans changed again and again over the course of 2021. Like, this series has gone through more plan changes than literally anything I have ever written for a number of reasons. Some of it is my own personal taste, some of it was logic, some of it was emotional. At one point I was pretty seriously considering hitting 15 novels, and then I trimmed that down to 12. After the difficulties of the last few months, combined with my growing knowledge of what makes sense to do and what doesn’t make sense to do, I’ve finally realized that A Warm Place 9 will be a perfect place to end it.

I was looking over my plans and this just makes the most sense. I’m getting tired of writing it, and I think people are getting tired of reading it. I’m definitely seeing diminishing returns with each book released now. It hit its peak somewhere around Book 6. Writing about Chris and the others has been a lot of fun, but I think it’s time for them all to settle down after one last adventure.

That being said, I don’t know if new content set in the A Warm Place universe is out of the question. I’ve got a couple of ideas for series. I really liked the whole down-to-earth characters and situations and the more realistic gritty survival. Honestly, this has gotten me more into the idea of writing about disaster survival, because there’s a lot of ways that can go and it’s fun to engage with. So yeah, maybe another series or two might not be out of the question in the A Warm Place universe, but it’ll be awhile, because I am going to need a long break from it after writing this next one.

If all goes according to plan, I’ll get A Warm Place 9 published by the end of the month, and then sometime after that I’ll get The Complete Series out. (I am SO not looking forward to formatting that. It’s going to be a nightmare.) Once it’s done, I’ll get to work on RAW II, and somewhere in the background I’ll be working on getting the freebies trilogies out so I can finally call them done and close out a few universes, and I’ll work on Our Own Way 6 once I feel saner.

Also, in case you missed it, I have a SubReddit.

That’s about it. Wish me luck, I have Seasonal Affective Disorder and it has been shaping up to be a really, really bad winter this year.

Raw Chapter I Preview

Okay, here it is, the first look at my long-awaited caveman fantasy series.

If you are a patron, you can also read Chapter II here.

He awoke to the sound of the sea, and the mournful call of carrion birds.

Water, frigid and cruel, washed up beneath him, shocking him awake. He gasped, or tried to, but some liquid had settled in his lungs. The gasp turned quickly to a violent fit of coughing and he rolled over, his body spasming as it attempted to eject the foreign matter. He was vaguely aware of a sharp, irritated caw! as he vomited the seawater out in hard contractions. As he finished, left dry-heaving several times, he opened his eyes.

A bleak desolation awaited him.

He lay upon a cold, rocky beach, the seawater coming in on gray waves, like liquid stone. A few feet from him, a giant black bird rested. It peered at him with shiny dark eyes, head tilted. It cawed at him and hopped from one skinny foot to the next. It had a scar on its large black beak. Seawater beaded on shiny feathers. As he tried to wave it off, he realized just how weak he was. His body felt ancient and withered.

A muffled sound escaped his throat and he swatted at the bird once more, coughing. It let out another irritated caw and hopped back two paces, but otherwise remained. The man slowly sat up. Even this act was torturous in how much it seemed to require from him. Breathing slowly and heavily, he sat on a rocky beach beneath a dull slate sky next to a huge bird that was probably waiting for him to die, and he wondered.

“Where am I?” he asked softly.

His voice sounded strange to him. He surveyed the area around him.

Long, lonely stretches of rocky shoreline to his left and his right. More birds, and other, more uncertain shapes farther away, lurked. Ahead of him, the vast yawning eternity of the sea. Which sea? He could not recall.

Behind him…

He twisted around, and several things popped in his back, along his spine, relieving tension. Behind him was dirt and trees, a dense forest swaying in the winds coming in off the sea. A cold wind gusted across him, and he shivered.

That brought on a great deal of pain.

The pain was faint, numbed by the cold and by…

He returned his attention to the front and looked down at himself. He was naked. Not a scrap of clothing on him at all. All he wore was a mélange of bruises and scratches and cuts. They ached and hurt and stung, and he could tell his suffering ran deeper than that, his muscles and bones hurting, but it was all faraway for now.

Another wave crashed upon the shore, this one more violent than the last, and hit him, snapping him out of his dazed state.

He needed warmth, shelter, a fire.

Or he would die.

The man rose slowly, his legs unsteady, his whole body as uncertain as his mind, but he only lost his balance once before standing. He looked over at the crow, which lingered, staring at him with obvious curiosity.

Another thought occurred to him, one that erupted inside of him and brought on an intense panic. It was so powerful he spoke it, too, aloud.

“Who am I?”

Another wave crashed at his feet more intensely than the last, and in the far distance, thunder cracked the sky, threatening rain. But he could not move, not until he had answered that question. Hugging himself, rubbing his arms, he thought furiously. Images came to him, emotions attached to most of them, but it was all so confused and jumbled. A bewildering proliferation of memories assaulted him as he sorted frantically through, trying to find something familiar, something that meant anything to him.

And then he had it, a single, short word.

A name.

Jak.

That was his name, he was sure of it. Jak let out a sigh of relief, but the feeling was short lived. Lightning split across the stone gray clouds, and almost immediately more thunder cracked and boomed. His heart lurched to match it and he looked as the crow took to flight with another call. He watched the huge thing gain altitude and disappear off to his right, heading deeper inland. It seemed like as good a direction to go as any, so Jak began to follow the bird, though he quickly lost sight of it. He walked away from the rocky beach, the stones painful on his bare feet, and came to a strip of land that was mostly dirt that ran parallel to the shoreline.

Jak walked.

He thought.

He tried to remember, rubbing his arms and looking around as stronger winds gusted off the sea and battered the nearby forest.

Already, the memories were slipping away. Becoming more clouded, more convoluted. Something was wrong, he knew that much.

A bad thing had happened.

Even apart from the obvious situation he now found himself in, that notion persisted. He clung to that, tried to use it as a beacon in the mists of amnesia. There were things he could recall. Impressions, if not specifics.

Jak recalled fighting. Lots of fighting.

Even as he thought of combat, saw images of broken bodies and sprays of blood, his hand ached for some kind of weapon. He felt naked without one, but another thought promised him that he could defend himself, even unarmed, if that particular desperation fell onto him. Still though, he began tracking the dirt and grass around him for some sort of armament. All the stones and sticks he saw were insufficient.

Another thought came to him, one that was as clear to him as his name had been: he was an outcast of his people.

That brought an unexpected jolt of several different emotions, all screaming to him at once. Terror. Rage. Guilt…

But a certainty that he was right. A conviction that he was right.

That one stopped him and Jak stared down at his muddy feet, shivering in the wind, for a moment ignoring all other things.

He hunted fervently for the context. Why was he so certain that he was right to do what he had done...whatever that was? He was an exile of his people, this specific piece of knowledge was available to him, but lacking context, it felt almost meaningless. Why? Whatever he had done to gain their ire, to be punished, to be made into a pariah, he felt strangely certain that it was the right thing to do. Not only that, but it was the only thing to do.

Somewhere too close for comfort, something growled.

That was a sound that forced itself through everything else, and Jak jerked his head to the right. Another person he could probably fight with his bare hands, if it came down to it, but a wolf or one of the big cats or the giant lizards?

No, he would be beyond saving then.

Shelter. He needed shelter.

Rain was coming, and he was already cold from laying on the shore. Jak looked up and tried to take a measure of the light from the sky, but it was difficult. The clouds covered the skies from horizon to horizon. The ones above him were stone gray, but he saw some farther off, some that seemed to be drawing closer quickly, that were the dark gray of flint. Those were the ones swollen with a heavy rain, and they were eager to unleash themselves on the land.

He knew he should be inside, or beneath something before then, given his nude state.

Ahead, the land seemed to dip, while the shoreline rose. Jak began moving forward with greater intent. There was a depression in the land, a trench with a wall of trees to the right and a wall of earth and rock to the left. There might be a cave, or even an overhang in that wall of earth. Some part of his mind whispered to him that there would be risk of flooding this close to the shore, but it was a risk he would have to take.

As he strode towards the trench, finding the pain in his battered body becoming more acute as his blood flowed more freely, something else came to him. A sharp memory, this one felt recent, though hazy. He remembered…

A figure, standing over him, against that same stone-gray sky.

The figure was tall and...blue? Jak pondered over that as he walked on. What species did he know that was blue-skinned? Or that painted themselves blue? He thought of the elves and their light tan skin. He thought of...of...what were they called? Large, green, scaly. They were big and dangerous, with sharp teeth, but not monsters, no, they could talk and build, his memories whispered to him. Jak looked down again at his own flesh.

Marred and bruised though it was, he could see a tawny bronze sheen to his skin. It covered him head to toe, uniformed and smooth. Not the result of time spent in the sun, then, though that thought brought on a cascade of sweaty days toiling beneath an unforgiving ball of flame in the sky. Practicing. Practicing what?

Fighting.

He had a brief but vivid vision of himself swinging a bone-club into a man’s skull and crushing it, blood and pulpy stuff flying out in a vicious spray…

Jak turned back to the original memory. Who was the blue-skinned, tall thing he remembered seeing over him while he lay, nearly dying, on the rocky coast?

After a moment, he let out a soft grunt of frustration and dismissal. Perhaps he was confused, or seeing untruths, his mind clouded by an injury. Perhaps it was an earlier memory, some other shore, some other gray sky.

He didn’t think that was true, but he could not be certain.

Jak made it down into the trench and the natural wall to his left rose until it towered over him to the height of three men. The light was fading, and the winds were coming more quickly now, accompanied by other cracks of thunder that seemed to shake the very earth around him. That shelter needed to happen soon, and then he could see about making a fire. But as he hunted the wall in the fading light, Jak felt a bolt of searing pain tear through his skull. He groaned, coming a halt, grabbing his head.

A fresh bolt of pain came again as his hand touched a particularly sensitive spot. He winced, hissing at the sheer agony of it, and pulled his hand back down in front of his eyes, expecting his fingers to be wet with blood. They weren’t, but the pain persisted. It was getting harder to think, to focus.

Something shifted up ahead of him, farther along the trench, something that garnered his attention reflexively and instantly.

Jak looked up, fear flooding his gut, as a dark gray shape detached itself from the dense treeline a little ways ahead of him.

A wolf.

And not a small wolf either.

A quick survey of his immediate area told him that there weren’t even any stones of any decent size he could grasp and use as a quick weapon. The wolf was coming towards him now, head lowered, teeth bared, growling deep in its throat.

His mind, abused though it was, shifted into survival mode and ran quick calculations.

He didn’t like his odds. Another quick survey of the area yet again turned up nothing, but he did see a cave in the wall to his left.

Shelter! A place to get in out of the encroaching storm.

But this wolf, creeping closer, teeth bared, a primal promise of brutal slaughter…

Jak bunched his hands into fists, considering the best way to take it down. If he could move in just the right way, he’d be able to tear its throat out, or perhaps take an eye. That would dissuade it from attacking him. Either that or enrage it past the point of madness and make it all the more dangerous.

The time to decide was nearly upon him.

Thunder roared almost directly overhead, making him jump and giving the wolf pause. That was when the rain opened up, a curtain of droplets plummeting across the land with a nearly imperceptible speed, racing towards him from the seaside.

He and the wolf were drenched in seconds.

Jak prepared to fight. Even though he was wounded and his head felt like it had met with a cloud, he wanted to kill the wolf.

That was meat.

That was food.

Beneath the layers of encroaching numbness and pain, he knew he was hungry. Food was fuel and he would need it.

As he tensed, shifted his weight so that he had a more stable stance, his mind filling with thoughts, visions of blood and death, his own hands covered in–dripping with–blood, all that bravado abruptly collapsed like an old log deep in the forest as three more wolves slunk out of the treeline to his right.

One wolf, he might be able to fight.

But four? Unarmed and injured? No.

Certain death now approached him on large paws, all teeth and shaggy gray fur and black, black eyes.

Jak ran.

He sprinted into the forest with all that he was.

The forest was much darker now as the rain began to fall. Jak grunted as he bumped into a tree, his head spinning from whatever injury had stolen his memory, stomach roiling like the sea he fled from. He rebounded off another tree, stumbled.

His foot caught on an exposed root and he nearly went sprawling, instead managing to wrench his shoulder as he caught himself painfully on an outstretched branch.

Behind him, a wolf howled.

Something shifted within him, something fundamental and crucial at the core of his being. Something important. The world seemed to slide around him for a brief sliver of time, everything growing brighter, sharper, and then everything slammed back into place and he could see. More than that, he seemed to know.

When he began running again, Jak didn’t bump into anything, even as he picked up speed. He cold sprinted through the woods, dodged a tree, ducked beneath a heavy branch, shifted so that his foot wouldn’t hit that rock sticking up out of the ground.

The air carried a hundred different scents.

Flowers, creatures, the sea and the rain, the earth…

Living things that surrounded him in all directions. Trees and plants and four-legged beasts, birds flying overhead, seeking shelter. Small furry things and insects burrowing in the loose earth beneath his feet.

His mind sorted through it like a flash of lightning.

Wolves behind him, closing in.

Something large and dangerous off to his right.

A potential threat somewhere above and to the left, among the branches.

Nothing ahead that he could sense. Jak ran faster, his motion through the darkening forest becoming fluid, smoother. He vaulted over a fallen log, slipped between a pair of trees, raced up a hill, slid down the other side, kept on pushing…

Jak could sense it was burning some reserve in his body, some crucial source of energy, something that was already drastically low.

He couldn’t keep this up for much longer.

But he didn’t have to. The wolves were behind him, the other things he had sensed gone too, and nothing new had appeared on his periphery of awareness. Slowing to a stop, he came into a tiny clearing and looked around.

Abruptly, the heightened awareness dropped away, and he staggered. Almost falling to his knees, Jak looked around, knowing that he needed to get in out of the cold and right now. There. At the edge of the little clearing, he saw a huge, hollowed-out fallen tree. It would have to do. He walked over, breathing heavily, his body hurting everywhere, his movements sluggish. Sleep was coming, whether he wanted it to or not.

In the wan light from the dim skies above, Jak looked into the hollow log. He’d have to duck to get inside and it leaked in a few places, but overall, it was shelter. Not ideal shelter, but shelter nonetheless.

There was the problem of security, though.

He ducked in and walked the length of the log. It was maybe twice his height lengthwise, and it was open at both ends. Coming out the other end, Jak looked around. His gaze fell on a good-sized rock not too far away.

Overburdened mind working, he judged the size of the rock against the size of the opening on this end of the log. They were roughly similar. It would have to do. Jak walked over, got a grip on the rock, and grunted with effort. His muscles strained as he liberated the rock from its home in the mud and rolled it towards the opening.

It took some doing, but he managed to fit it into the rear exit. Once he got it lodged into place as much as he could, Jak walked back around and in through the front. He gave it a few experimental pushes, then studied the edges.

It wasn’t perfect, but it would do. Nothing big could get in without him noticing, at least.

There was more to do. He should build a fire, make even the most rudimentary bed, look for something to eat, but his body was shutting down.

Even as he thought this, the last vestiges of his strength slipped away, and he sat down in the driest spot, towards the back. Away from the front entrance, but far enough from the rock that it would not crush him if it fell over.

Jak stared at the ring of space the entrance showed, the dark clearing and the trees around it. The plants that hung down. The rain as it fell from the skies. It was very dark now, growing darker with each passing minute, it seemed.

He watched the entrance for as long as he could.

And then he tumbled headlong into unconsciousness.

The Misty Vixen Newsletter (November 2021)

TL;DR VERSION: Our Own Way 4 and A Warm Place 8 came out last month. Our Own Way 5 and Raw should be out this month. Lust & Adventure is getting an epilogue at some point soon, and all the freebies are getting another sequel each and being republished as cheap collections.

So I published a few things last month.

OUR OWN WAY 4

A WARM PLACE 8

I was hoping to have more done on the Our Own Way front, and I did get it about 1/3 written, but between Raw and other stuff, it just didn’t happen.

October wasn’t as tough as September, but it was tough.

I’m not sure what it is, but I think I may be more burned out than I realized. I’m beginning to worry something might be physically wrong, but that’s a problem for behind the scenes.

I’ve been taking inventory of…well just about everything. Anyone paying attention to my backlog (probably no one lol) might notice a few minor tweaks at this point. I’m slowly updating them again partially for the sake of consistency, but mostly because it occurred to me that I do have to be careful in balancing maximizing my career, but also ensuring that I keep my fanbase in mind, (and also my sanity). It’s a difficult process and sometimes I don’t even realize that it’s gotten out of balance for awhile. And things seem to be changing faster than ever before, and that’s been consistent for the past several months, so at this point I’m just rolling with the punches as best I can.

So there’s a lot of stuff cooking behind the scenes now, is what I’m trying to say. I made some decisions based on making my fans happy.

I don’t really want to go over, like, everything, until we hit 2022 and I have my yearly address. Both because I’d just like to wait to make a comprehensive update on all things related to my writing until it makes sense, and also because more time to make things happen would be nice. Not everything I’m doing relies on myself at this point.

But here’s what’s on the horizon.

  • I’m really, really aiming to get the first novel in Raw finished and out before the end of November. However, I am also taking a bit more time on it, both for my sanity and also because I’m in new territory, so I’m less sure of myself. I’ve never done caveman fantasy before, and although I’ve been thinking about it for a few years now, I’m finding that it’s a bit different than what I expected now that I’m actually doing it.

  • I’m also going to get Our Own Way 5 out this month. But I’m going to pump the breaks a bit on that series because I have a few other minor projects that I want to take care of and get written. Which I will talk about below.

  • Once the first Raw novel is finished, I’m going to go right into A Warm Place 9. I have a solid idea of what I want to do. I’m not sure if I can manage it, but I am going to try very hard to get it written and out before 2022. I’ve got the cover for it at least.

  • The little projects. So ever since I went ahead and wrote sequels to all my five free shorts, the notion to make them into trilogies has been nagging at me. For reasons that I’ll get into during the 2022 address, I’ve decided to take them down, all 10 of the stories, and instead replace them with Complete Trilogies. They will be 99c and enrolled in the KU. If you’re looking for a quick explanation now: it no longer quite makes sense to have these free shorts up, but I also don’t want to just abandon the fans who enjoy these. So instead of just taking them down and retiring them, I figured I’d instead reward people with a third story for each of them and seal each together in complete packages. I’m hoping to get them written and out before the end of the year, but we’ll see how that goes.

  • If, by some miracle, I find extra time, another loose thread that I really want to tie up is Lust & Adventure. [SPOILERS] So L&A has been a thorn in my side for years now. It ends on a very bittersweet note, and the entire reason I did it was because I thought people were getting sick of the same happy ending. I didn’t realize I was wrong. A lot of people told me how unhappy the ending made them. I considered several options. The first was to just delete the trilogy, but that’s an entire trilogy of novels I wrote, I don’t want to just get rid of them. The second is to ret-con the ending, but that seems somehow wrong. Ultimately I decided on fixing it via Demoness, which I began doing in Demoness V, and it would have been wrapped up in Demoness VI. But now Demoness is getting rebooted [SPOILERS]. So my solution to this whole thing is to write an epilogue to the trilogy. It doesn’t ret-con the ending so much as have another ending further along. Although I felt justified in writing it originally, I’ve since come to regret it. Ultimately, I just want to write about people being happy. So I’ll be writing that sometime soon too.

There’s other, bigger things I’ve decided on, but again, later.

For now, back to writing.

A Warm Place 8 Preview

Okay, sorry this is taking so long. Here’s the first chapter.

As per usual, you can also check out the second chapter if you’re a 1$/month patron. Find it here.

“Do you see the trail?” I asked after Susan and I had brought the ATVs to a complete halt and killed the engines.

The immense silence that always fell after riding around on them for long stretches of time always felt heavy, somehow intense.

“...maybe,” Susan replied.

“Look slowly.”

“How do you look slowly?” she asked, and I could hear the annoyance creeping into her voice.

“I mean move your eyeballs slowly, don’t dart your gaze around,” I replied evenly. She was walking that razor’s edge where she was sliding towards a bad mood but was still far away enough that she could be brought back from it.

Honestly, I was amazed at how much I had managed to learn when it came to reading the women I now shared my life with.

“Okay yeah,” she said suddenly, perking up. “I see it. Them. Two trails of boots. It looks like they’re going up to that hill.”

“Let’s walk up there,” I replied, getting off the ATV and looking around, taking stock of the area surrounding us.

A whole lot of frozen Kansas desolation and not a lot else.

I popped the little hood and detached the starter from the engine. I was lucky these things didn’t run hot.

“We’re gonna be like right there, do we really gotta take them out every time we’re gonna go more than five feet away?” Susan asked as she stood and stretched.

I stared at her from behind the darkened goggles I’d taken to wearing while riding.

She heaved a sigh. “Yeah, yeah. Risks are stupid, playing it safe is playing it smart. All right,” she said, walking around and repeating my action on her ATV.

“You’re learning,” I replied. “As stubborn as you are about it. Remember: you asked for this. You asked me to take you out here. You were adamant about it, actually.”

“I know,” she muttered, pocketing the starter.

The ATVs were an absolute game-changer when it came to getting around. They were a bit dangerous to drive around in the snow, but if you were careful, and with a bit of luck, they were mostly just fantastic to have.

I could cover so much more distance so easily.

And they were solar powered. The way the panels worked meant that they were pretty much always passively gaining energy so long as they were in the sun.

I looked up and around.

Today was a bright sunshine kind of day.

It felt like a good omen.

“Come on,” I said, heading off towards the hill, “let’s see if there’s anything obvious.”

Susan followed after me, our boots crunching in the snow.

A week. I’d been working for a solid week now.

After all the shit with the bunker, getting it back home, and helping give Pine Lake a reprieve from our impending doom, I’d taken a break for two days because I’d been so physically and mentally exhausted, and battered, that my body had almost given out. I probably should have taken three or four days off, but there was too much to do, and I was getting restless.

I had at least agreed to light duty for the first few days.

That largely meant bouncing between meeting with Lisa and Melanie and Hannah actually, (Lisa had partially taken her on as an assistant because she seemed to have a mind for organization on top of being just generally sharp), figuring out precisely how fucked we were, and doing smaller things like gathering firewood or helping the people hunt through the ruins of the township. Lisa was getting a little desperate and had most of the population going over the fire-gutted ruins of the buildings that remained for anything useful.

We had found a few things so far, but we were over halfway done and didn’t have much to show for it.

After that, I’d personally gone out to visit both the junkyard outpost and Brandy’s inn to make sure that had our agreements were ironed out and actually get our operations flowing.

The ‘contract’ with the junkyard was simple: they dedicated themselves to hunting game and picking any eatable plants they could find and gave us the excess, and in return we helped them with any problems that might crop up, but mostly we promised to absorb them into our population once we had a permanent solution for our ‘staying alive longer than a month’ problem.

Right now, that was looking like resettlement.

To where, no one knew.

There were options, but moving an entire population of people across the snowy wastelands of the Midwest was a risky proposition at best.

Our deal with the inn-owner Brandy was a little bit different.

She and her crew were happy where they were, and happy to amass a store of stuff to trade. And because she had an odd fondness for me, (I think I was the only guy to have sex with her who actually got off on her general badass attitude and facial scar), she gave us a sweet deal: we brought her shit to trade, they gave us any excess food they could scrounge up and would start dedicating more time to hunting game and foraging as well.

So that was another thing we were trawling the ruined town for: anything worth trading.

I had learned over the past two and a half years that this could mean so very much. There was obvious stuff: guns, bullets, medicine, food, tech. But there was other stuff like jewelry and scrap metal and even money.

Yeah, some people still used it. Or wanted it, at least.

Although I was wondering if that was beginning to fade. Even though she liked me, Brandy hadn’t seemed too impressed with the five grand we’d managed to come up with, saying fewer and fewer people seemed to give a crap.

Couldn’t blame them. Personally I’d just use the stuff as fuel for a fire.

My trip up to see Brandy had been solo and I’d ended up spending an extra hour out there making good on a promise I’d made her.

I had to do that again sometime soon. And bring one of my girlfriends with me this time.

After those initial two trips, others had taken over the ATVs and the jobs of going out and hauling back food once every three days.

When that was out of the way, I was still recovering, (I was bruised and battered and cut from all the falls and fights I’d had going after Megan and that stash, even now I still ached), but I had energy to burn so I ended up spending time with the girls on their jobs because for now, Lisa didn’t really have an immediate use for me.

Everyone was pitching in, somehow, someway.

Lara, Susan, Delilah, and Lindsay tended to go on foraging expeditions. Lisa had begun systematically having teams search the areas for traces of life that had survived the storm. Not all the plants had died, we’d found, but too many of them had, and all that was left was to find the survivors and harvest them in the hope of extending our lifeline a bit longer.

Every little bit helped…

But I was still worried.

I’d gotten good at hiding it, I think a lot of us had, but this really sucked.

Susan and I made our way up the hill. I glanced back briefly at the ATVs out of habit, reassuring myself they were still there, and no one was creeping up on them.

While having those ATVs was indeed an absolute game-changer, it also painted a huge potential target on your back.

A lot of people would most definitely kill to get their hands on even one of them.

Or at least try to take off with it. Taking the starter out was my little insurance policy. Couldn’t even hot-wire the damn thing without a starter.

“Okay, that looks like a place they might go,” Susan said as we finally got up to the top of the hill.

It gave on a large snowbound field that was covered in big lumps about as tall as I was, things buried in snow that I recognized as bales of hay. A farmhouse, a decent and expensive one by the looks of it, even from this distance, sat within the boundaries of a wooden fence that had long since lost its integrity to time, weather, or desperate hands looking for fire food.

I took a long, sweeping look around the area.

At the moment, we were tracking a pair of wayward people who’d gotten lost during a storm.

Just yesterday, a group of about a dozen had shown up out of the blue. They were hungry and in poor health and low on supplies. Apparently they were the only survivors of another settlement dozens of miles away that had suffered a fate not too dissimilar from Pine Lake’s, although their fire had been an accident it seemed.

They’d been wandering, desperately looking for a place to live ever since.

Lisa was reluctant to accept them, and even more reluctant to send out a search party, but in the end she did both.

Especially when she learned that one of the missing people was a nurse, and that two of the new arrivals were veteran hunters.

Hannah and I had gone out on the ATVs, trying to pick up a trail, but hadn’t had any luck last night.

This morning, Susan asked to go, and Hannah had taken a little convincing, but she’d relented when she saw how much Susan wanted to and I’d asked her to say yes.

She was still learning about compromise, something she was taking a furiously fast crash course in given the fact that she was sharing me with six other women.

I was still wrapping my head around that, so I could just imagine how she felt.

She wasn’t really in a relationship with any of the others in the same way I was, except for Megan. There was something there, but I wasn’t sure what yet.

I think they weren’t either.

Right now, there was too much shit going on anyway.

I brought my binoculars up after raising my goggles and studied the farmhouse. I didn’t see anyone moving around, but the front door was hanging open.

Don’t know why but that pinged my radar.

“All right, yeah, let’s check it out,” I said, heading back to the ATVs.

Susan followed after me and after reattaching the starters, we fired the vehicles back up and drove up over the hill, down the other side, and crossed the big field separating it from the farmhouse. Personally, I was eager to find these people and get back home. We’d been using these ATVs for hunting expeditions during the off days, driving out past the perimeter of the dead territory we were now at the center of to try and do some hunting of our own. I wanted to go on one of these expeditions and I was finally feeling up to it.

I subconsciously clenched most of my muscles as we got through the fencing and headed for the house.

I was expecting a gunshot to ring out.

The ATVs weren’t exactly what you’d call subtle. Their engines weren’t overwhelmingly loud, but certainly they were kind of annoying, and with snow blanketing everything, they announced you from a fucking long way off.

We got up to the front lawn without a problem though, and I saw no activity in the windows or the open front door.

No one peeking out at us, from what I could tell.

When we’d started out again today, I didn’t like our chances of tracking them down. But we’d gotten lucky, found a shack that showed clear signs of occupation not that far from where they’d last been seen.

Susan had climbed a nearby tree and spotted a half-collapsed cabin in the distance.

It was enough of a trail to go on.

Now it had led us here.

We killed the engines as we parked near the porch, making sure to turn them around first so they were facing back the way we had come, (in case we needed a quick getaway, yeah, I know, the starters, but even the few seconds of having to reverse and turn around could be the difference between life and death), took out the starters, and then pulled out our pistols and set to work. We made a quick perimeter sweep, finding more evidence they were here, or had been here. So that was what prompted me to do what I did next.

I cleared my throat as we walked in through the front door. “Is anyone in here?”

I waited, listening. Couldn’t hear a thing, but that didn’t always mean it was empty.

“My name is Chris, I’m looking for two people named Marty and Opal! Your friends sent us to find you!”

I waited and listened again.

Still nothing.

“What do you wanna do?” Susan asked.

“Stay here and watch the door and the ATVs. If they are here they might be freaked and stressed. Don’t want them to try and run while I’m searching.”

“I’ll yell if I see anything,” she replied.

I nodded and then headed into the house. It looked like it had once been pretty decent, but the environment had not been kind to it. Or maybe just passing people. A lot of windows were broken out, and there were holes in the wall.

Snow had gathered in piles in most of the rooms.

I definitely found evidence that people had been through recently. Disturbed stuff, bootprints in the snow.

Frozen blood.

Not a good sign.

I searched the first floor, then moved up to the second story. Both of them looked pretty damn ransacked, and both of them revealed no hiding or dead people.

There was some evidence that they had begun setting up camp, but had abruptly stopped in the middle of it.

Why?

Two ideas came to mind: someone or something dangerous had abruptly arrived, or they found a better place to make camp.

Since I couldn’t find any corpses, they obviously hadn’t died in the middle of making camp. But all that was left was a shed out back.

I mean, it was a nice shed, obviously a lot of work had gone into it, but I didn’t think it would be that much of a better place to stay than where they’d initially set up. The living room had a fireplace and its window had been boarded over pretty firmly, keeping out the cold for the most part. Well, no other choice.

“Nothing,” I said as I rejoined Susan and began leading her to the back of the house. “They might be in the shed, though.”

“Why?” she asked.

“No idea, but it’s the only place left to search.”

We got up to the shed. It looked like one of those you could buy from the bigger industrial stores, have shipped out and put together. The kind of thing made of durable material. Given we were now in permanent winter, it had held up pretty well.

I peered cautiously in the single window, but I couldn’t see much. It hadn’t broken, but it had iced over.

Walking up to the door, I knocked on it a few times. “Anyone in there? I’m here to help! Jay sent me!” I waited.

No response.

I had Susan back up and carefully opened the door. Moving cautiously inside, I cleared the shed. There wasn’t a lot in it, not a lot of places to hide, but something immediately leaped out at me: there was a cellar door built into the floor at the back.

If that led to what I thought it did, then yeah, this would be a way better place to camp out.

There was blood on the floor, and faint prints of snow heading towards the door. I quickly checked any potential hiding places, then had Susan come in.

Just in case someone was standing on the other side with a gun, I made sure we were out of the way as I pulled open the cellar door.

It wasn’t locked, but I could tell the lock had been broken.

“Anyone down there? I’m looking for Marty and Opal! Jay sent me!”

This time, I was almost positive I heard something. Harsh whispering. Peering cautiously over the edge, I saw a stairwell leading down into the earth.

Something shifted deeper in.

“Seriously, I’m here to help. Your group found me and sent me to find you. And if you have no idea what I’m talking about, just tell me so and I’ll go away. I don’t want problems.”

After a pause so long I began to try again, a reply finally came.

“How do I know you aren’t full of it?” a man asked.

His voice was hoarse and tired.

I had actually prepared for this.

“Your name is Marty Sanders. Your group leader, Jay Peterson, sent me. He’s got a scar on his forehead. He says your favorite food is sardines and to prove he sent us, to remind you about that one time the two of you found that pink cellphone.”

I had no idea what the fuck that meant, but Jay had seemed sure it would work.

It did. I heard a faint laugh, then a groan. “Shit, that’s Jay...what’s your name?”

“Chris. I’ve got a friend named Susan here with me.”

“Me and Opal are in bad shape, how far away is it?” he asked.

“About forty five minutes. We’ve got rides. ATVs.”

“...for real?”

“For real.”

“All right, we’re coming up.”

“Okay.”

I stepped back and we waited for them to come up. I had to admit, I was intrigued by whatever was down there. Either a storm shelter or a prepper bunker. If the lock was broken, then there was a good chance it had already been plundered, like the house, but people missed things. Or one man’s trash was another’s treasure.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to search it, our priority here was these two.

After a lot of shuffling, two people finally emerged. A tall, decently built, dark-skinned man appeared, supporting a pale woman who did not look good. I knew fever delirium when I saw it. I’d been through that shit before.

“She’s sick?” I asked as they came up.

“Yeah. Fever. And we don’t have any medicine. I think I’ve got an infection now, too. Wolf got me on the run,” he replied. “Cleaned it best I could.”

“All right, you trust us to help?” I asked. “Because we have supplies and knowledge.”

He eyed the MP5 slung across my chest nervously, but finally nodded. I think he just knew it was this or death for both of them, which was a shit situation to be in.

“Yeah,” he said finally.

I helped ease Opal down into a sitting position against the nearest wall, and then Marty sat down, wincing. The bite was obviously on his leg, as his right pant leg had a fair amount of blood on it. He pulled up the jeans he was wearing.

“Fucker got me on the calf, hurts like hell,” he muttered.

“I can do a decent patch job,” I said as I set my pack down and dug out the medical supplies. Susan was doing the same, looking at Opal.

“Is she hurt?” she asked.

“No, just sick. Caught a bug a few days ago, but it’s gotten a lot worse,” Marty replied.

“Okay. I’ve got a few things for that,” Susan muttered.

“We’ve got an actual doctor that can look at you,” I said.

“So you have a settlement?” he replied.

“Technically yes. Your people made it there.”

“Why technically?”

“It’s no longer sustainable. Storm came in and froze everything to death. The plants, the animals, some of the people. We can’t hunt or forage enough to realistically sustain even a relatively small population right now. We’re working on a more permanent solution. But try not to worry about it. For now, just know that we’ve got a secure location with reasonable people and decent supplies, and we’re working on the problem.”

“Fine by me,” he muttered, then winced as I worked.

“Quick question, what did it look like down there? Were there still supplies or was it looted?” I asked.

“Looted pretty thoroughly from what I could tell, but it was dark,” he replied.

I nodded and kept working.

It took another ten minutes to patch them up and get them onto the ATVs, but we did it.

As we drove away, I was already formulating how I was going to word coming back here to more thoroughly check the bunker to Lisa.

The Misty Vixen Newsletter (October 2021)

OMFG. I was not ready for September.

I was really not ready for September.

What did I get done in September? Uh, like, nothing.

I published OUR OWN WAY 3.

That’s it, in terms of actual production.

It wasn’t a total loss, though. I’m basically done with OUR OWN WAY 4, which is the longest one yet. People kept asking for them to be longer, so this one is larger. Not like crazy longer or anything, but longer. I hope to get it out soon.

I wrote about 2/3 of A WARM PLACE 8. I have the cover totally ready to go. So that’s good at least.

But oh my God, September hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s not like anything actually seriously bad happened, so don’t worry I’m hurt or lost a loved one or anything. It was more just…my mental health has become a lot more precarious over the last year. And all of a sudden a bunch of real life shit showed up all at once, just a bunch of separate issues that all happened to fall on September, and it was all stuff that I couldn’t delegate. I had to personally deal with each one. I don’t really want to go into anymore detail than that because I’m sure everyone reading this would be like ‘OMFG are you kidding me? That’s not a real problem', because it’s such simple stuff. It’s just that my ability to deal with stuff has eroded so much.

Like fuck, I just want to write stories about people fucking, can life just leave me alone?

And then, in the middle of all that, my laptop royally fucked itself. I brought it to some repair people and they were like ‘Fuck we can’t even turn it on’. So it had to get shipped out. I had to use a backup laptop and it was SUUUUUPER slow, and then even more shit happened with the laptop, but the good news is that I have a functioning fast laptop, but now I need to reorganize everything. Like all my files and shit. I’m actually in the middle of it right now so yeah. It’s a whole project. Also, I have to update all my titles AGAIN because of a few more changes I learned about. Fuck.

So once that’s done, then what?

Well, first I get out Our Own Way 4.

Then I bust ass and get out A Warm Place 8.

And then I’m shifting focus away from A Warm Place for a little bit. Like, it’s been fun, but oh fuck, I’m getting sick of it. Basically seven whole entire novels back-to-back since January. I know I took a break after A Warm Place 7 but like fuck, I need another one or I’m gonna lose it.

I’ve decided to go ahead and launch my fantasy caveman series! That’s what I’ll be working on next. And I’ll still be doing Our Own Way in the background. I’m not sure how long that’s going to go on for, but I’ve got a basic skeletal layout for it and I feel pretty safe saying there will be less than ten episodes. Sorry if that’s disappointing. When I first started it, I didn’t have much of a plan, but I realized how stupid that was, and now that I’m gearing up for this new pen name for real, I need to scale things back a bit in other departments.

The only thing I know for sure after that are two things: I’ll write the next A Warm Place novel after the first caveman novel, and I’ll be working on my pen name. I want to launch a pair of trilogies that could expand into more, or could just stay trilogies. I feel pretty confident about what those first two trilogies will be, but I’m just gonna shut up about it until we get closer to roll-out.

For now, it’s time to just put my head down, nose to the grindstone, and fucking write, write, write.

The Misty Vixen Newsletter (September 2021)

It’s been a long, strange, stressful, enlightening month.

A lot has changed.

I know I keep saying that but I swear to God it’s like attempting to assemble a puzzle while the shape of the pieces, and the puzzle itself, changes.

So, first all, shit I actually got done in August.

  • I published A Warm Place 7.

  • I published Our Own Way 2.

  • Paranormal Passions, Desire, & Wanderlust are no longer free. In short: the data revealed it didn’t help.

  • I removed the Collections for A Warm Place because I don’t like doing them and they don’t really help much. I’ll be releasing a Complete Edition when A Warm Place is finished. If you missed out on the shorts and want to read them, e-mail me.

  • I published all the sequels to each of my 5 free shorts. They are all 99 cents and in the KU.

  • I got new cover art for A Warm Place, as well as that new banner up there, courtesy Kirk Mason.

  • I made a shitload of little changes that can be viewed here.

  • I removed my Dragon Age fan fiction for reasons I’ll get into below but basically: I don’t have time for it.

That’s about it. Those background changes are actually ongoing because I learned YET MORE after completing all the changes I wanted to make, but it shouldn’t be anything the readers actually notice. It’s all back-end stuff.

So what’s happening in the immediate future?

I’m writing A Warm Place 8. That’s mainly what’s happening in September. I am writing A Warm Place 8 as fast as I can. I have it planned and I feel good about it. I’m also going to try and get an Our Own Way or two out before October. Maybe even three, we’ll see how it goes.

How about the less immediate future?

Well let’s talk about that.

I’ve been learning so many things. Technical behind-the-scenes stuff and stuff about cover art and how I should be structuring my stories and more. Most of it I’ll incorporate into my writing career, some of it I won’t as it doesn’t gel with how I do things or what I personally feel about some subjects. The short of it is: I’ve learned how to do what I’ve been doing before, but better. So it’s not like I’m switching over to angsty vampire romance or whatever is popular today. (I’m showing my age by saying that, I’m sure.)

While a lot of things are in a state of flux right now as I let the dust settle, which is taking longer and longer because I keep learning new things and then it all gets shaken up again, I at least know what the way ahead looks like for now. Kind of. Here’s some pertinent facts.

  • I’m going to finish A Warm Place and it’s almost certainly going to cap off at 12 novels. I have a very decent conclusion in mind and I think it will feel like a good stopping point. That’s as close to set-in-stone as it gets with me. I’ll try to have A Warm Place finished before mid-2022.

  • I’m going to continue with Our Own Way. I’ve got a vague idea of where it will end, but basically I’m going to just write it until it feels done.

  • My next big series is still going to be the fantasy caveman one.

  • I’ve set aside any ideas of fan fiction and also I’ve put aside the incest erotica for now (as much as I loathe to do that, I really wanna write it.) But the good news about the incest erotica is that I’ve got a lot of ideas, and at this point I’m doing well enough that when I do get around to writing it, I can just host it all for free on its own website. Yay! Tons of free incest erotica!

  • I have decided I’m almost certainly going to reboot Demoness, however, it’ll be awhile. Like a year or two. Maybe longer. Not sure. If you want to know why, please refer to this post where I explain the problem in detail. In short, I am extremely excited about this reboot…when I can get to it.

  • One of the biggest changes I think is that it was pointed out to me that I need to have more potentially shorter series. Like more trilogies. They’re less risky. On the one hand, that sounds like stupid corporate bullshit and yeah, I get that. On the other hand: it makes sense. Imagine if A Warm Place 1 had flopped. I’d be stuck writing 12 novels that don’t sell jack shit. That would tank my writing career. Now I don’t want to give up my big epic long series, but I also need to have a few more things going that are more, I guess you could sane mentally sound. Now again, I would like to note, this doesn’t mean I’m going to just jump onto whatever bandwagon is popular and pump out something I don’t give a shit about. What this means is that basically I’ll be augmenting my serial fiction idea. I’m still toying around with precisely what I want to do next, it’s up in the air between monster girls and more winter survival, this time in a sci-fi setting. (Shockingly, I haven’t had my fill of winter survival.) So basically, instead of it being a serial, it’s going to be a trilogy that has a natural conclusion point at the end of the third book, BUT it could also continue if people like it enough. This is really more of an experiment than anything else and I don’t want to wander into the territory of holding sequels hostage or just abandoning series because they don’t sell. Basically, as always, I’m looking to strike a balance between my bank account and my readership (and my own sanity). Personally, I’m looking forward to it, because it will let me write a new thing, and writing a new thing just about always makes me happy!

  • So what all this means is that I’m going to keep on writing A Warm Place, and Our Own Way, I’ll also be working on this new harem trilogy idea in the background.

  • I may also use this method to gauge reception to some of the other series that I want to write in my shared universes because at this point, I do have to admit that I feel like there’s been a shift in what I can do. Ironically, before when I was scraping by, I could kind of just write whatever and selling well wasn’t all that much different than selling poorly. I could afford to commit to finishing something, like Parasexual for example, even if it wasn’t all that popular. I really can’t do that now. I can’t go off and write a 10 novel series that’s only going to sell 1/10 as well as A Warm Place for example, I just can’t. And some of these series are quite old, ideas I came up with years ago. I’ve been finding that there are some ideas I outgrow. I’ll actually sit down and try to plan them and realize I don’t care anymore. I don’t want to do that to the fans, but I also know what happens when I make myself write something I don’t care about: it’s torture and it slows down everything.

Anyway, that’s about the size of it. Although it keeps growing.

The Demoness Problem

For at least a year now, I’ve had a bit of a problem with Demoness.

I don’t know what to do with it.

You’d think the answer would be simple and straightforward: write Demoness VI.

But it’s not.

Let me explain.

I think I first came up with the idea of Demoness in late 2016 or so. In its original incarnation, I envisioned basically another Exploration or My Undead Lover. A novella. Hell, the first time I thought about it, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to come up with enough words to fill the 12,000 word goal I’d set for myself. But when I actually got to writing Demoness, it grew. And then it kept growing.

I had a rough deadline in mind, and I wasn’t done as it approached. I could have wrapped it up quick, or let the story keep going. I decided to let the story keep going and wound up with what was at the time the longest single title I’d ever written. I really liked it, and I really liked the characters, and the ending was clearly left wide open for a sequel.

I published Demoness June 8th, 2017.

Even as I pressed on with other titles in my serial fiction series, the idea of Demoness II wouldn’t leave me alone. By then, I was already wanting to move on to novel length material. Over the second half of 2017 I experimented with my first full-length novel, Women of the Wild, which I felt good about. But as 2018 started up and I struggled through the third season of Sex & Survival, it occurred to me that I simply could not go on writing serial fiction. I couldn’t. It was driving me nuts. And so in early 2018 I made the decision to start writing Demoness II, because I had a lot of ideas.

I tracked down a real cover artist and had her make covers for Demoness I & II. I went back and touched up Demoness.

The first real novel I ever released was Demoness II, on April 3rd, 2018. It was very well-received, and people seemed very happy about the longer format. I know I was.

And it sold well, really well.

Although all the shit that went down in Mid-2018 happened, I knew I wanted and needed to write Demoness III. So I did, and I got it out by August 18th, 2018.

It was around this time that I was beginning to realize that while I was seeing a bit more success overall, Demoness was my big earner then. I needed to invest in it more. I added in about 15,000 words to Demoness I, and I wrote a pair of short stories taking place in between the novels, all while working on Demoness IV. That one was huge. It remains the single longest novel I have ever written, at about 102,000 words.

I loved writing it so much. I loved the plot and the characters and the locations and the events. It was all so fantastic.

I published it February 15th, 2019.

Unfortunately, that was when the change began. Although at first it sold decently and was well-received, it didn’t do nearly as well as I had hoped. And it was obvious to me that doing something like Demoness IV again was not sustainable. I had put a tremendous amount of work into it, and while I don’t regret writing it, clearly interest in Demoness had fallen off.

So I shifted my focus to Haven and Parasexual.

But I wrote and got out a little collection of sexy shorts by April 20th, 2019. And then I set aside Demoness for awhile. I knew exactly what I wanted to do for the sequel, but I also knew it would have to wait.

Finally, as 2019 came to an end, I set aside time and got to work on Demoness V. I loved the idea, and although my execution of the novel didn’t quite hit the way I had hoped it would, I did like it, and I got it out April 21st, 2020, almost exactly a year after the last Demoness release.

This reaction was even more underwhelming. It seemed that few people read it, and fewer still reviewed it.

After that, I knew I wanted to write more, as John and Yelena are my favorite characters, and Demoness is my favorite series, but I also realized that it would have to be relegated to a passion project, something worked on only when I had the time. For awhile, I had an idea of what I was going to do for the rest of the series. That changed and the series took on even more responsibilities overall as I realized that I no longer wanted to add to my Fantasy Universe, but I didn’t want to abandon several cool ideas I had, so I decided I would roll them into future Demoness titles.

And this is where the problem came in. The problem that I recognized even back in 2018.

Something I’ve learned the hard way is that a series is only as strong as its first book. And although there are parts I like about Demoness I, it’s clearly the weakest entry in the series. The biggest problem is that when I first started writing Demoness, I had no idea it was going to be a series of novels. I had never even written a series of novels at that point.

And so my conundrum became: every cool idea that I want to pin to Demoness brings me back to this problem. The simplest way I can put it is: It doesn’t matter how cool Book 7 is if Book 1 sucks, because basically no one is going to show up for Book 7.

Now don’t get me wrong, I know there are fans of the Demoness series out there that love John and Yelena, and would keep reading the books. And that’s really appreciated. I’m right there with you, honestly. I want to see them more, watch their relationship evolve more, write about them fucking hot monster chicks more. That’s why I keep coming back to what I now call The Demoness Problem over and over.

At this point, it’s become obvious to me that basically all my older series are done with. I can update the cover art, change the descriptions, pretty it up a dozen subtle different ways, but nothing I wrote before 2018 is ever going to be a bestseller, or even a decent earner.

Hell, probably nothing I wrote before 2020 will be.

Now, I’m not in this JUST to be a bestseller. And that’s why while I’m willing to let just about everything else lie where it has fallen, I can’t leave Demoness behind.

I’ve thought about this problem a lot. I mean, in one form or another, I’ve thought about it for years.

There’s been a solution that I haven’t allowed myself to seriously consider for a long time. And, well, I finally actually let myself consider it recently, and I realized maybe the solution isn’t as impossible or wrong as I thought.

The idea is: I want to reboot Demoness.

Delete everything and start from scratch.

I’m still mulling over it. It would be a lot of work, but the potential to make it much, much better than it already is becomes high. I’m a much better writer now than I was in early 2017. I’ve got a ton of ideas. I could actually use it as a vehicle for not just John and Yelena’s relationship, but that massive ultra epic idea I keep referencing. I could weave more of the already established characters and events into the series. Honestly, I could make the series more coherent. It’s a bit all over the place.

Right now, it’s kind of a moot point. Although I’m leaning towards doing this, I know that even if I decided to do it literally this moment, I simply have too much to do. Way too much. Beyond A Warm Place and my fantasy caveman series coming up…well, let’s just say there are other projects on the horizon that are really big.

I’d say, as I’m writing this, I’m pretty confident that this is the decision I want to make. So I guess I’d say: be prepared for Demoness to get rebooted. I may change my mind, (I’ve been doing that a lot lately as new data comes in), but I doubt I will on this one.

I would, however, like to hear from you. What do you think about this?