Post-Mortem: Give Yourself to Me

I wrote an entire god-dang novel! 96,000 some words of slow-size-theft-mommydom smut!

That feels like a big enough accomplishment that it warrants a little bit of reflection. This is long, and a little navel-gazey, but after writing so much porn I think I've earned that! It's first and foremost for my own benefit, to organize my thoughts, but hopefully at least some of y'all find this interesting to read!

I have gotten a lot of very flattering praise over the past 5-6 month as I've been writing this story. I mean, this Patreon is currently sitting at 60 paying subscribers, and a handful of people have enjoyed my work enough that they've approached me about doing paid commissions for them! That's huge. From pretty much the very beginning I have had folks posting comments congratulating me on a job well-done, telling me that I've produced some truly excellent size fiction.

Those comments have been extremely encouraging, and I truly appreciate that people have enjoyed my work so much. But to tell you the truth, I don't think I can agree that this story is truly "great!"

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying this out of self-deprecation, or to fish for even more compliments; folks have been plenty generous with those as-is. I'm also not about to say that the story is bad; it is self-evidently accomplishing what I set out to accomplish with it just based on audience response, and there's scenes in it that I do think are really good. It's just that, taking a sober look at the story as a whole, I do think that it's riddled with flaws. If was a teacher, grading this story for some kind of... smut-based creative writing class, I'd probably give it a C, and would've run multiple red-ink pens dry marking it up.

Lemme start from the lowest level, and work up from here: mechanical errors. There's typos in this thing. That's not all that surprising when I've been cranking out an average of 4,000 words a week, and it's also far and away the most fixable issue; I find at least one or two to correct every time I open the story up to a random chapter. Still, these things bug me! They bug me when I read them in other folks' writing, and they bug me when I read them in my own!

One level above that, I don't always love the word choices used in the story; it doesn't always read as well as I'd like it to, or I'll mistakenly use the same word multiple times in the same paragraph in a way that doesn't read well. I also have a terrible habit of over-using semicolons; I'm pretty sure I've even thrown two in one sentence in a couple places; that's how legal documents should read, not erotic novels. It's a bad habit I'm well aware of, and I've tried to improve it a little by occasionally subbing in an em dash instead—but that doesn't really address the issue. I also use way, way, way too much italics, relying on it far too much to convey the emphasis in my sentences instead of simply constructing them in a way that makes the intended emphasis read through.

I also use a few too many one-sentence paragraphs, for similar reasons.

There isn't anything wrong with using semicolons, or em dashes, or italics, or short, punchy paragraphs, but if they're used so heavily that they draw attention to themselves, that's a problem.

Related to the above, on a deeper level I just don't think there's much... poetry to my prose (more unnecessary italics!). It's not like it reads badly, but it also doesn't really excite me to read it back. It's... workmanlike. It gets the ideas across, sometimes in very blunt, flat terms, but the writing itself isn't all that aesthetically pleasing very often. At least, not to me. As just one example, to get back to the idea of repetition that reads poorly, I'm pretty sure Lily calls herself some variation of "your big, strong, sexy Mommy" a good 3 or 4 times throughout the story. It's a turn of phrase that definitely gets my motor running so it's not hard to see why I'd keep returning to it, but it loses power as it gets re-used.

That last point does sort of brush up against one of the core tensions here, one that will start to matter more as I continue running through these various issues: this is a work of erotic fiction. The intended audience is, ideally, reading this story with one hand down their pants. There's an argument to be made that flatter, simpler language makes sense in that context, because the goal isn't to write a beautiful piece of prose, it's to convey some basic fetishistic ideas that get the reader's imagination sparking enough to get them off. I can't say that this argument is without merit; I've read a lot of size fics, and God knows I've loved some truly abysmal pieces of writing over the years, because of the images they conjure in my head. If you're reading this, I have to imagine you've experienced similar.

But on the other hand, that kind of comes off like an excuse to me. Bad writing can still be good smut; I have to believe that good or great writing can be great smut. Sure, I wouldn't want to write the Infinite Jest or Ulysses of erotic fiction. Anything that dense would be counterproductive to the thing we're all here for. But smooth, flowing prose has the power to be sexy and enticing all on its own, which can then interweave and amplify the erotic content of the words, and I think that's a department in which I've got a lot of room for improvement.

Moving up from the use of language into the story itself... I still see lots of flaws and issues! Give Yourself to Me feels... unbalanced. It's extremely long for a piece of erotic fiction, and on one hand, I'm not convinced it really earns that length. I think a lot of it feels like wheel-spinning, which is a pitfall that slow-shrink stories, or really any kind of slow-burn, has the danger to fall into. But then, on the other hand, it sometimes feels like there just needs to be more going on in it? Like, do Tom and Lily have any friends or family? These mfs never talk to anyone but each other and never do anything except fuck! Does Lily never have a night where she's bored of the mommydom schtick and just wants to chill and watch some Office reruns or something?

One of my goals at the outset was to try and make my characters feel like real people, and while I think I was doing a passable job at the outset, that completely falls away somewhere around the time Lily starts insisting on being called "Mommy," and part of that is that these people have no relationships to speak of other than each other. They don't even have hobbies outside of Lily's photography, which was a detail I added only to lead into the twist in Chapter 14. I sat down to every chapter with the thought of, "okay, there has to be some kind of erotic conceit here, even if there isn't any explicit sex." So this chapter has Lily giving Tom chores while she edges him, this one is about how shrinking has affected Tom's ability to do simple things like go grocery shoping, this one's about how Lily's strength and weight is slowly demolishing their house, etc. But in a proper novel, not every single scene would revolve around eroticism; not every part of a horror novel is scary, and not every part of a comedic novel is funny.

But, then that gets back to what I was saying earlier. This is pornography. Does it really make sense to dilute the sexy scenes with non-sexy ones for the purpose of making a better story, when the only metric this story is truly graded on is how hot it is? I think the argument I'd like to make is that, done well, the non-horny parts would enhance the horny parts, because they would create greater emotional investment in the narrative, which would make the erotic bits hit all the harder, but I'd also concede that there's a tension to balance here. But that's exactly what I mean when I call the story "unbalanced;" it swings way too hard in the direction of EVERY SCENE MUST BE SEXY, ALWAYS, and that limits what the storytelling is capable of.

Let's talk about the eroticism for a moment. To take a break from criticizing myself, I think there's some pretty hot stuff in this story, some scenes that really do just knock it out of the park on the fetish/erotic level.... but even here, I do think there's room for improvement. The most glaring thing to me is the Mommy of it all. I think that dimension of the story feels like it comes out of fuckin' nowhere. It was a planned turn from the start, I've had this story marked with a "maternal" tag on GTSWorld from Chapter 1. But if you got to Chapter 9 and thought that I just spontaneously developed a Mommy kink and decided to start incorporating it into the story I already had in progress... I couldn't really blame you! It sort of reads that way to me.

This was actually, partially, by design. One of the ideas I had going into this was that Tom and Lily were going to start off as normal, realistic people, and as the magic started to influence their bodies and minds, they would start to act and feel more and more like fetish characters; after all, the idea was that they were supposed to be transforming into each other's deepest sexual desires. That... sort of comes through for Tom, I think. He gets progressively subbier as the story goes on in a way that at least kind of accomplishes what I was going for. We'll get back to Tom. In Lily's case, I don't really think it works at all. It's more just like a switch gets flipped in Chapter 9 and from that point on she's a completely different character. There's no gradual shift into her being more maternal. From the beginning she starts harboring more dominating thoughts, then she hears the word "Mommy" one time and it activates her like a Manchurian Candidate, changing her from a regular domme into a mommy domme.

I'm mixed on whether that personality transformation was even a good idea in the first place. I think it might've felt a little better if, for instance, Lily had always had sort of a doting, nurturing side, and that the size-changery just brought it out of her more and more. I don't know, I'm not ready to totally throw the personality shift out as a bad idea, but I don't think it was executed well.

It worked out a little bit better for Tom... except that it sort of runs out of steam around Chapter 16. Once he fully gives into Lily, there isn't really anywhere for his character to go anymore, which is kind of a problem when the story is only about 2/3rds of the way finished. I didn't write down a firm outline at any point, but the very broad big-picture idea I had was that the first act of the story would be the two of them navigating the ways their size changing impacted their relationship, the second act would be about Lily ascending as Tom's Mommy, ending with her fully breaking him, and the third act would just be lots and lots of sexy fluff.

And... I don't know that the sexy fluff fully works! There's no more dramatic tension to drive the story, which I think makes it a little boring. I said a few weeks ago that the rate of updates had slowed down a bit because I'd been busy with real life stuff, and that wasn't untrue... but another contributing factor was that I was having a somewhat hard time finding the motivation to write when the story felt like it had become kind of rudderless. That's part of where the mind-control-ish stuff came from; it's an idea I had on the shelf from the beginning, and I do think it's a pretty hot idea... but what the heck is it doing showing up in Chapter 21 of a 23-chapter story? Beetlebomb in the comments called it out for being a weird left turn that didn't really match what had happened up to that point, and I think it was a fair criticism! I'll fully cop to the fact that I was starting to run out of steam on how to keep this engine moving, and threw something weird in there to try to spark some momentum to get things over the finish line.

Another thing I'm not really happy with about the third act is the way Tom completely loses the ability to refer to Lily as anything other than Mommy, even in the narration. I do think this is a good idea... but I think seven straight chapters of it gets to be a little much. It loses its power when it hangs around that long. I can't speak for any of you, but for me I just sort of got numb to the use of the word "mommy" in this story at some point. It doesn't help either that Tom gets turned into Tommy, which rhymes with Mommy. That leads to there being lots of awkward rhymes that make the prose read clunkily. It's a problem I clocked around Chapter 9, well after it was too late to really do anything about it. Maybe I should've just left Tom as Tom, who knows!

One tricky part I'm sort of wrestling with about GYtM is that it contains lots and lots of moments where Tom or Lily (usually Tom) internally monologues for multiple paragraphs or even multiple pages, thinking about the changing dynamics of the marriage and their place in the world as their size changes. I think I lean on these a little too heavily, and I think they are a pretty direct example of telling instead of showing; the Robot Devil's famous rule that "you can't just have the characters say what they feel! That makes me angry!" is one that I broke a lot when writing this thing. But here's the thing. I wrote so many of those because I find them fuckin' hot. Probably hotter than most of the actual sex scenes! So, I don't really know where that leaves me. We're right back to the "good story vs. erotic story" tension, and I don't entirely know how best to resolve that tension in cases like this going forward.

I could keep going here. There's lots and lots to criticize in this story, but I do want to circle back and emphasize that none of this is to say that I dislike it or that I'm just ragging on myself for the sake of it. Even if every single word of it was dogshit (and it isn't), the mere fact that I had the perserverence to write a 96,000 word story is in and of itself praiseworthy! I've never written anything even half that long before! That's a level of dedication that's hard to work up for any project, and even if I'm unhappy with many aspects of the results, I'm still proud of the work I've done here. And to be honest, I think in a lot of ways all the flaws I'm pointing out make perfect sense, because, technically, I haven't written a novel. I've written a first draft of a novel. Every single one of these flaws are things that could be ironed out through revisions, but, the format in which I've released this story isn't all that "revision-friendly." I doubt many of you would keep kickin' me five bucks a month to watch me tinker with word choice and plot structure for the next year!

Which, honestly, is fine by me, because I don't particularly want to do that anyway! I am ready to put this story behind me and move on to something new. But whatever I do next is also going to really just exist as a first draft, released serially as quickly as I can write it, and that makes sitting down to reflect and self-criticize like this all the more important. If I'm not applying any of the lessons learned from writing GYtM back to GYtM, then I need to make sure I'm codifying those lessons so that I can bring them forward into what I do next.

The hope, then, is that Give Yourself to Me will end up being the worst story I'll have ever written. Or, to put that in more positive terms, if you've enjoyed Give Yourself to Me, if you're one of those folks who have offered me extremely kind praise over the past several months, then I have great news: t's only gonna get better from here!

(Dammit, a typo on the last sentence? Are you kidding me?)