What Women Want

Once upon an age ago, when I still had a proofreader to get feedback from, I asked her about a story I was working on. My friend - let's call her Susan - had read my stories and enjoyed them for years and offered me a lot of helpful feedback. So I asked her about an idea I'd had for a story set in a high school. The basic idea was an insensitive guy leaves a girl for a prettier, more popular young woman. She comes into possession of a device that lets her transform anyone in any way she wants. Pretty good setup for a TG story, right? I thought so too. I asked her to think about the situation and tell honestly what she thought she as a young woman that had graduated from high school not so many years before would do in that given situation.

Her answer surprised me. Actually, to be honest, she gave me several answers / scenarios. All of them left me confused and disappointed.

In one, she used the device to make herself better looking and joined the cheerleading squad to drive her ex mad with jealousy, so she could turn him down when he wanted her back. In another, she turned herself into a duplicate of the other girl so that the ex would have to choose between them based on personality instead of appearance. In another, she made all of the nice girls pretty and all of the mean girls ugly. Then there was the one where she turned herself into a copy of the girl so she could act out and get the girl her ex had chosen in trouble.

I think you get the idea. None of her ideas was in any way involved turning her ex into a girl.

When I asked her why, and this is the point, she said something that has stuck with me. I don't remember the actual words she used, but the idea she communicated to me was pretty potent. It boiled down to the idea that for the ex to pay, he still had to be her ex. If the girl in the story turned him into a girl, he would be too focused on his own predicament and not focused enough on her and how he had hurt her. She didn't want to change his body; she wanted to change his mind and mend his ways. Or put another way, the only revenge she wanted was emotional, and in her view a physical transformation could only get in the way of that.

Susan's feedback made me feel ashamed that I hadn't done a good enough job imagining the inner life of the women I was writing in my stories. What did they want? Why did they want it? Were the motives I gave to them realistic, or simply opportunistic attempts to move the story in the direction I wanted it to go?

While Susan's feedback hasn't stopped me from writing stories where the antagonist is a woman seeking revenge for ill treatment (The Birthday Girl is a great example of this), it has made me hyper-aware that the reasons a woman might transform someone are more complicated than a simple desire to make a guy "pay" for his bad behavior. In The Birthday Girl, for example, a transformation that first appears to be revenge for ill-treatment is revealed to be more about a desire to do whatever it takes to break a cycle of abuse. Punishment has very little to do with it. Preventing other women from being subjected to a cruel man's emotional abuse is the point. Katrina makes a huge personal sacrifice, giving up her very identity in exchange for one that is less than ideal, all so she can protect other women from a man she views as a menace. The man's transformation and potential redemption are secondary to Katrina. She doesn't transform him to punish him, or to save him; she transforms him to save herself and other women from him. If the way she goes about doing that seems like revenge, it's only because her goal is to force him to open his eyes and accept the reality that he is a woman and the world will see him and treat him that way. That's a story that I never would have told if it hadn't been for my proofreader's feedback.

All of which is prelude to my point. The story I'm currently working on - CJ, a Halloween story - is about a group of college students, most of which are female. While my own college experiences inform the story, Susan's feedback about her perceptions of motive have led to a story where the women relate to each other on an personal and emotional level, while the men in the story are focused so hard on the physical that they almost can't see the emotional impact of what they say and do. The main character, who is of course transformed, becomes torn between these two perspectives. That leads to an epiphany about how they see the world, and a choice about how that revelation informs their sense of self-identity. I owe that element of the story to Susan's perspective.

Damn, I miss having a proofreader.

Going Slow

New blog post! I know it's been a while, but it's been a lot less newsworthy year than last year. I'm sorry to the few fans I have for my silence.

So, what's up, you ask? Writing. The difference this year is that almost none of it is in service to one project. I've had bursts of creativity all year that lead to very productive outpourings of story content, but never on the same story, and never on any of the projects that I feel are the most important to complete. All of my ideas for more mainstream TG novels are percolating. The sequels to "Alien Body Suit: Under Her Skin" are still plotted and outlined but not started. (OK, maybe part of the first chapter of ABS:IM has been worked on, but that's it.) There's a story for a Topside Press collection that has a deadline of December 1st that is only half written.

What I have been working on are two 100+ page stories that are only getting warmed up. One starts off in a way that reads like standard TG transformation fiction but evolves into a family drama. The other has a similar hook at the beginning that's becoming an identity crisis for the main character. I've also worked on maybe a dozen other stories that are 20 - 50 pages long with a variety of themes and transformation methods.

It's very frustrating professionally to find myself wanting to play instead of doing the work that's needed to move my career forward. In terms of pages written, this might actually be my most productive year ever. In terms of projects completed, it's among my worst. The only real silver lining I can see is that if these longer works ever get put up on Amazon, the large page counts will mean more pages read and more revenue for me. I'm also hoping that a longer work at a reasonable price will result in more direct purchases. All of that will - I hope - put me closer to being financially independent as an author.

That's the real goal: to make enough per month to quit my day job. Once I'm my own boss, I'll have an extra forty hours a week to write. Writing at a rate of about a page an hour, that's about 160 pages a month. More if you figure in an extra five hours a week saved by eliminating my commute (20 extra pages a month) and that I'm likely to eat and write at the same time through my lunch (5 hours a week, 20 pages a month). That's a full length novel every three months figuring in editing and rewriting of drafts. Four novels a year. At shorter lengths, that would be two stories a month, or twenty-four stories a year. With those kinds of numbers, I might actually have a body of work I could be proud of before I'm ready to retire.

Next Up

Now that ABS: Under Her Skin is up, I've been fleshing out the outline for the first of the two sequels, ABS:IM. I'd like to have outlines for both sequels done ASAP. My goal is to have both sequels written by the end of the summer so that they can go up fairly close together when they do eventually get illustrated and come out.

Avocation

I'm at my day job (customer service for the local cable company) and wishing I was at home writing. I can't write at work. 1) My employer wants me to focus on the customers, which is as it should be. 2) If I break that rule and write anyway, it goes at something like a sentence or two an hour. 3) The end result suffers from being written in micro-chunks.

The story that I'm currently (trying) to work on  - let's call it MNC - is on the verge of becoming a much longer work. It started as a TG idea, but I had an idea to make it a more serious work. It will still have those TG elements, but it may become the launching point for the story, rather than the reason for its existence.