Out_Of_Custody

Golden retriever firefighter and black-cat paramedic

firefighter tripping over themselves to "be strong(TM)"

I hope they prove helpful, and please feel free to share them with others you know who might use them and to ask questions or leave comments about things I didn’t address!

Writing with a Zero Draft – My latest post is a guide to steady productivity for writers using a low-pressure and fluid approach that’s less formal than outlines but more ambitious than the “messy first draft”: the Zero Draft, notes to myself that I rewrite into something story-shaped. Maybe it will work for you too!

Supporting the Small Presses and Authors You Want to Read More From: A Guide That Sometimes Gets Ranty – This is part 1 of a series I always intended to write, a guided tour of my experience publishing and selling books as an independent author and micro-press publisher (with the New Smut Project). It became a bit of a vent post about censorship, because most of the sales platforms I’ve used and enjoyed in the past turned out unworkable with policy changes around erotic content. (As an update from months down the line: one platform I’ve considered for future NSP anthologies, Kickstarter, recently had its own controversy around mature content guidelines – which it updated under pressure from the payment processor Stripe, then rescinded in response to concern from the creative community it serves. Now mature content on Kickstarter is in a kind of limbo, where you can run a Kickstarter to fund an adult project…so long as Stripe doesn’t stop you. Another platform I’m looking at, Payhip, has been good for many erotica and romance authors, but it processes payments through Stripe, too. I’ve set up a Ko-fi and am using it to offer editing services as commissions, and I’ve put some of my ebooks up in a store on my page, but Ko-fi has incredibly restrictive mature content guidelines – even fuzzy padded handcuffs are too extreme for them.)

My letter to payment processors – A slightly too long and polite template to payment processors asking them to adopt more reasonable policies around sales of “adult” content. Feel free to use it as a base for your own complaints and demands! I also share links to other resources around this campaign.

Where to Publish and Buy Books in 2026: Options for Indie Authors, Small Publishers, and Their Fans – Part 2 of my guide to publishing and selling books, this summarizes my experience with various ebook and paperback distributors and shares advice for writers who’d like to get started in self-publishing.

Bad writing means you took the time to write something, you, a real human being. It means you created something! And you have the awareness to see that there's room for improvement, too!!!

Bad writing is wonderful!!! Bad writing is a platform from which you can build your masterpiece! Bad writing is the backbone of good writing!

Give yourself permission to write badly. No, actually- give yourself permission to write something TERRIBLE. Give yourself permission to write such drivel that you can barely read it.

Nothing comes out a masterpiece the first time!! You think Isaac Asimov never wrote a total stinker he had to rebuild from the ground up? You think Jules Verne never wrote utter slop for a first draft?

A medieval European knight who's asexual, and being a product of his time, place and station, is also a complete dickhead. Being well-educated and passably good-looking, he has made a hobby out of the ideals of courtly love, charming and seducing impressionable noblewomen with absolutely zero intention to ever actually consummate the relationships, instead using them as excuses to also not engage in any other sexual activities. While the other knights think it's weird, it's not undignified or the wrong kind of weird to refuse to visit brothels because he's remaining pure and loyal to this one random bored and lonely married woman whose husband cannot prove anything that'd justify killing this guy.

I swear to.... they're so close to understanding the problem with the Rear Palace with that, but they are so hung up on the need for the issue to be 'Man Evil' that they can't see the forest for the one single tree.

Like, yes, Gyokuyou and Lihua and many other young ladies sent to the Rear Palace were, in fact, explicitly and knowingly groomed from childhood to be consort and bed-mate to the Emperor of the nation - but not by the Emperor (who likely didn't know any of them before they entered the Palace - but by their families. As a political play.

Because the problem's systematic. Because it's not an absolute monarchy - it's a bureaucracy centered around a royal family. There are certain things that the royal family members are just not able to do because of the politics inherent to their actions and free love is one of them. Especially when it comes to who gets to be the Empress.

And the Rear Palace is all the worse for having been stewing for centuries - being constantly pushed and pulled by those politics and sometimes fully warped by selfish, incompetent, actual groomer pedophiles like the Former Emperor.

It's not even clear if the Emperor's even all that jazzed about having to have sex with women half his age (teenagers by our own value - recently entered adulthood ladies with a questionable, but not unheard of age gap by Li's society's value). They're just who gets thrown at him.

Wrote a thing.

Have fun.

45: Cuì - Gathering Together

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: 薬屋のひとりごと | Kusuriya no Hitorigoto | The Apothecary Diaries (Anime), 薬屋のひとりごと - 日向夏 | Kusuriya no Hitorigoto | The Apothecary Diaries - Hyuuga Natsu, 薬屋のひとりごと | Kusuriya no Hitorigoto | The Apothecary Diaries (Manga) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Emperor/Gyokuyou (Kusuriya no Hitorigoto), Emperor/Lihua (Kusuriya no Hitorigoto), Ah Duo/Emperor (Kusuriya no Hitorigoto) Characters: Emperor (Kusuriya no Hitorigoto) Additional Tags: Character Study, Polyamorous Character, Polyamory, Exploration of a Headcanon, No Beta Summary:

"Gathering Together is a hexagram that shows interdependency and people coming together because of a shared ideal. "

Yoh knows that there are children beyond the walls of the Rear Palace, who learn early which wells run dry first, who wear the same robe through three seasons because cloth is dear and bodies grow whether one wishes them to or not. Children who grow up hungry, empty-bellied. Thin-limbed, gangly persons who learn early how to make a meal last one bite longer than it should have to.

(The knoweldge makes his silks itch sometimes. Makes the gold of his halls feel heavy and false. He cannot fix all problems, even though he wishes he could. If he truly has the power of Heaven as his ministers claim then he should be able to fix at least such trifles. Or if Heaven truly favors him the way they say it does then, at the very least, it could spare him this one cruelty: to see too clearly the limits of his own reach.)

From the outside, the palace and the throne must look wonderful. Must seem like unattainable paradise; like the end of want.

Still.