March 2025 -- What Should I Write Next?
Added 2025-03-15 11:00:11 +0000 UTCGreetings, paid Readers!
As mentioned, I'm planning to publish every Monday for the forseeable future. Good start so far this month:
The Thaumaturge Chapter 7 is out.
A Summer Obsession is also out, one of my first sponsored stories!
The plan for the rest of the month:
Dungeon Mistress: Session 3 will be posted Monday. These are convoluted and definitely harder to write than some of my other fare, but fun! It's another 14k word behemoth. So you're aware, I think this initial series has five parts total (with possibly a second arc ahead of us sometime in the future.) So three down, two parts to go!
I'll release The Thaumaturge Chapter 8 at a minimum.
There'll be one more release after that, still kind of TBD -- possibly Thaumaturge Chapter 9, and possibly something else. (it depends on where Chapter 8 ends).
April will have four planned releases, not necessarily in this order:
Release at least one sponsored story -- possibly the sponsored chapter of The Thaumaturge if that doesn't end up being ready for release at the end of March.
Dungeon Mistress: Session 4 (in which the party storms the Arcanatrix's Sanctum for a second time. This won't mean anything to you until you read Session 3 in a few days!)
At least one more chapter of the Thaumaturge beyond that.
...That leaves one Monday slot to fill. And, of course, you all are going to pick what fills it!
This month, I'm gonna go back to just letting people pick one choice (the multiple choice approach turned out to look like most of the other polls anyway, so why mess with simplicity!)
And since Dungeon Mistress was the top choice two months in a row now, so I'm just taking it off the table by planning to write Session 4 next month from the get-go, thus letting you all vote on other things. I've pulled in some of the runner up choices from last month as well as one new option that bears further explanation: I've been mulling over an erotic LitRPG series.
Here's the pitch.
---
When Chloe hears about the open call for applications to star in the world's first AI-run, VR reality-TV competition, it sounds right up her alley. Cutting edge VR technology, AI-created system and rules of competition with human producers overseeing it....what's not to love?
And, most importantly: it's a game, and chat wants her to play in it. So Chloe applied. She's always been good at games. It's what fueled her rise to popularity. She's known for speedrunning video games by finding clever unintended uses of mechanics, winning power combinations, glitches, and exploits.
But the show attracts a ton of applicants, and she's admittedly surprised when she gets picked to compete. She's even more surprised -- as are the producers of the show -- when the AI creates a game world that turns out to be based on accruing power through sex. It's not what she expected, but it's no surprise to anyone that she immediately starts figuring out how to finish the game as fast as she can.
And that means figuring out how to finish monsters -- and other players -- as fast as she can.
---
Working title: Speedrun or Speedrunner...but honestly, what I really want is a gaming pun based on the name of a reality TV dating show. I just need to find the right one. Love is Grind and Carried at First Sight are kind of amusing...The Glitchelorette doesn't exactly roll off the tongue...but really it'd be great to land on one that gets at the speedrunning/quick finish theme. (If you've got an amazing pun I could use, drop it in the comments; I'm happy to credit you if I go with it as a title!)
The tone, as I hope all of this indicates, will probably be humorous, irreverent, and lighthearted, with some satire of modern reality television included. And yes, as the overview indicates, I'm either gonna try this from a female protagonist's point of view, or possibly utilize multiple POVs. Not 100% confident on that yet, but I figured I'd give something experimental a shot.
To be clear, I will write this at some point, so you'll see it eventually as part of my planned writing; if you like other things better, vote for them instead! I'd write any of these.
So -- what should I write next?
JF
Usual disclaimer: obviously this is all bandwidth- and burnout- dependent; eventually, I'm sure, life will get in the way and I'll have an off-month, writing wise. But thus far I've delivered on every single poll choice so far, and my plan is always do that!
