Post-Mortem: Field Research

I have, once again, written a novel! Just like with Give Yourself to Me, it feels worthwhile to take a moment and reflect on what I've done here. I think that's an especially important part of this process when I'm writing serially and largely not doing much editing; I said it when I posted my reflection on GYtM, but taking a moment to really think about what I've done is the only way I can take lessons forward into future work. I know this isn't, y'know, sexy, and I also know that the rate of updates has been pretty sluggish around here for a while now, which might make this all the more disappointing to see. I hope it's interesting to read anyway! And if not, well, I've got the next chapter of PIP cookin' and I'll talk at the end about what I'm planning to get started next.

I think the first thing to discuss here is that this story was a commissioned work. In fact, it was the first commissioned work I've ever done! I was really taken by surprise when I had a DM sitting in my inbox last summer asking if I'd be willing to write something for money. The offer alone was flattering beyond belief!

The comissioner has requested to remain anonymous so I won't be shouting them out directly, but what I want to say up front is that they were a fantastic person to work with. They suggested a very generous pay rate, and consistently paid me early. They were full of well-thought-out, specific ideas, they gave timely, in-depth answers to questions I had, and their feedback did a ton to help me deliver them what they were looking for. I could not have asked for a better first client, and I would love nothing more than to write for them again in the future. Seriously, if you commission writers, or any kind of artist for that matter, take a page out of the commissioner for Field Research. They are an absolute mensch and I'm glad that I was able to deliver a story they were happy with.

Moving onto the story itself. I'm actually very proud of it; I think it is the single best piece of long-form writing I've managed so far. I like the dynamic between the central characters, I think there's lots of really hot scenes and descriptions, the first-person narration helped to add a lot of characterization to the prose, and it has enough of a supporting cast that the main couple doesn't feel like they're in a hermetic bubble, which was a big self-criticism I had of GYtM. I'm overall very happy with how it turned out!

If I'm going to critique it, I think the biggest issue is that there's some pacing issues in the final act. Things feel a little rushed in the last few chapters; a lot of plot starts happening very quickly, and I'm not sure if the emotions flow as organically as they do for the first two thirds. I think the basic plot beats—Dr. Walker kidnaps Sean, which leads to Jenny killing him, which puts enough tension on the relationship and suspicion in Sean's mind that he thinks she's really going to eat him, only for that to defuse, I think that all basically works, but in an ideal world I would've filled it out with a couple more chapters to let those shifts in the relationship transition a little more neatly. I was well aware of this issue as I was writing. It's actually a consequence of this being a commission. My original pitch was for the story to go for ten chapters, and then as Chapter 10 started approaching, that got amended to fifteen. As it became clear that I was going to overshoot that too, it became really important to me to bring the story in for a landing; like I said, the commissioner here was extremely generous, but I didn't want to take advantage of that generosity by extending the story indefinitely. But I dunno, maybe at some point in the future when I don't have other ideas for new stories, I might tweak things a little bit, add another chapter or three into the ending to just smooth out the curve of the dramatic arc a bit. I like the story enough that I'm invested in it beyond it being a work for someone else's enjoyment, so touching up the ending might be worth looking into.

I think the other main point of critique I'd have is that the beginning is slightly clunky. Not in a big way, I think the individual chapters work, but it takes a little bit for the story to really settle onto what it's going to be about. The initial logline for the story was just that a guy reconnects with his high school sweetheart, who shared his giantess and BBW fetish, and she's grown up to be a scientist that can make their fantasies come true. The eat-to-grow stuff is an element that wasn't there at all initially, and came about from conversations with the commissioner. If I had known from the start that there was gonna be this feeder angle to the narrative, I would've seeded it a little earlier, introduced Sean as having lots of culinary skills from the beginning instead of revealing it five or six chapters in. It's a nitpick, but I think it's a very visible artifact from the way the story was written, and if I were to write a second draft it would definitely be something I'd want to address.

One negative piece of feedback I've received from a couple of readers is that Jenny is sort of an inaccessible character; we don't get any direct insight into her psychology and none of the story is written from her POV. This is a really interesting criticism to receive. It's definitely true; this is a first-person story and we never leave the protagonist's perspective. When I was first deciding to take a crack at writing size porn, I decided right away that it was important to me to give the women in my stories lots of interiority; this being smut, it would be very easy to make them one-dimensional fetish material, and I wanted to give them enough personality that they weren't reduced to an object of fantasy. That's why GYtM has it's ping-ponging structure, and why Performance Improvement Plan frankly has way more text in its female characters' heads than it does in the male character's.

I opted to go for a locked first-person perspective in Field Research for a couple reasons. The first was that, this was a commission based on someone else's fantasy, and that POV made the most sense to me as the window into that fantasy. The second was just for variety's sake; I was cranking out a ton of material for GYtM in the third person, and giving Field Research a different POV felt like a good early way to make it feel unique. Given that decision, I tried to play a little bit with the fact that we don't see into Jenny's brain, making her motivations a little mysterious and opening up the possibility that she's more malicious than Sean assumes. I don't know if that's a consistent enough throughline to really shine, but that was certainly the intent. All that said, I'm honestly kind of happy to get the criticism that we don't get enough in her headspace; it means that that's something that readers of my work want to see, and hopefully it means that I'm doing right by it in my other stories. It's maybe a little silly, but I don't want these porn stories to feel excessively objectifying! I want the characters to feel like people, even as they engage in a bunch of horny fantastical nonsense.

Other than that... I think I'm about tapped on criticisms! Like I said, I'm overall very high on the final product here, and while I think there's room for improvement, I think it is much closer to its full potential than Give Yourself to Me is. Oh, you know what, here's something I'll knock: the title. I just sort of picked a science term early on with the hope that it would come to mean something later, and it doesn't really. The early plan was that the trip to the cabin was going to be the "field research" in question, and there was going to be more of a psychological angle to the science with Jenny and Sean's relationship being studied as their sizes changed, but that angle never ended up coming to fruition, so the title is just sort of empty and meaningless. About as small a thing to complain about as anything, but it does bug me a little bit every time I open the file to work on it :p

But, yeah, that's Field Research! I liked writing it and I hope y'all liked reading it! Now that it's finished... well, the main thing is to get my nose to the grindstone on PIP. Or, really, the main thing is to just get back into the swing of having my nose to the grindstone at all! The past three months have been... rough. Busy at work, busy with online classes I'm taking, lotta difficulty with a few different relationships, and a fun lil' flare-up of my old pal Clinical Depression. It has not been an especially conducive environment to cranking out chapters of size smut! Especially not when, like I've said before, PIP is kind of a complex story that is a lot more mentally taxing to write than anything I've done previously.

But the thing is, I like cranking out chapters of size smut. I really wanna get back into the swing of things, and I'd love to get myself back on-track to top my output from last year, which totaled up to something like 230,000 words. Hashtag Macro March starts in just a couple days here, and that feels like as good a time as any to really try and get back in the saddle properly. With Field Research complete, it's a great time to try and blow out some short stories again, things which should write a lot easier than PIP. Once I've cleared off that shelf-space in my brain, it'll be time to start planning the next long-term story to write. I want it to be something smooth that comes easy, and that works well as a complement to PIP. I have a few ideas, and I'll probably throw up another poll in the near future.

On the other hand: if anyone out there would like to commission me, now is an excellent time to do so! I'd love nothing more than to write something for you! Shoot me a DM!