Charles Jeffries: Blog

I stopped myself from writing this a few weeks ago, because I didn't want to post it on April First, also known as "Avoid the Internet Day".

Anyway, things are trucking along in the Jeffries household. Life stuff is starting to calm down and it's been easier to find time to write over the last few weeks. I picked the novel up again and have been chipping away at it in pieces, but I also got distracted when someone gave me an idea for a completely new story.

The muse, she is fickle, and sometimes when she decides to strike it's best to just roll with it.

So I'm now 10,000 words into writing that, and I'm expecting it to turn into at least twice that. Once that's done there are two more follow-up volumes in the works, and eventually the whole thing will probably turn into its own book. It's neither in the Two Vines universe nor related in any way to the novel I'm theoretically working on right now.

What's got me so fascinated is that it's such a departure for me. Volume 1 (they're too big to be 'chapters', although that's probably how they'll get posted) is seriously slow-burn, and it's kind of a creepy ghost story in places. I don't love the suspense/horror genre, and I don't think this goes too far in that direction, but it's more like that than anything else I've ever written. We'll see how it turns out; you'll be the first to read it.

As a final note, I've been thinking about starting a Discord server. Several authors seem to be doing that as a way of building a community of readers. I suspect I'm neither popular enough nor prolific enough to warrant such a thing, but if you feel otherwise, drop me a note and let me know.

As always, thanks for reading. – chuck

A March update for you...

Careful (Best BDSM) and Two Vines (Best short) made it to the final round for Clitorides Awards. I'd obviously appreciate your vote, if you're so inclined, but I'm also sure you're sick to death of your favorite authors begging for votes. I've put in my votes in the categories where I've read enough of the stories to feel comfortable doing so. And just to say it, I am fairly proud of both stories, and it would be an incredible honor for either of them to win a fan-choice award.

Dominance and Shrubmission went up a few weeks ago. It was a fun one to write, because it subverts several of the usual tentacle tropes, and in case you haven't noticed, I am occasionally into subverting tropes in my writing :) I suspect I'm going to write a few more stories in this universe, and probably pull them together into a book collection, so if I've done enough worldbuilding to intrigue you and you've got some outstanding questions you'd like me to answer in a future story, my inbox is always open.

I had to put the novel down for a while in order to finish up D&S, and unfortunately I've got some life stuff going on that's made it harder to focus on writing. I'm slowly trying to pick it back up again and remember where I was so I can make more progress on it.

I'm also on the lookout for ideas for my next short. I have a couple of thoughts floating around in my ideas doc, but I haven't picked one.

As always, thanks for reading. I always appreciate the feedback, whether it's through comments or DMs. – chuck

Careful What You Wish For is officially on-sale as of today. You can go buy it at Bookapy: https://bookapy.com/a/134/charles-jeffries

This is a huge milestone for me! And I have to admit it's kind of wild to have reached the point where self-publishing really is this easy. Not to undersell the amount of work that goes into writing a damn book in the first place, but when I (re)started doing this I did not really think I'd be sitting here crowing about the fact that I actually published a book this year.

Me, and approximately one million other erotica authors, just to be clear.

Anyway, it's pretty cool. Go buy it. ;)

Writing updates: the new novel is going to take me a while. I'm struggling to strike the right blend of sex and story, and finding that it's harder to do that in a longer piece.

The good news is that I've also been making progress on a new Two Vines story, and I hope to get that into shape in order to publish it some time in February.

Thanks for reading. --chuck

Big news: I'm self-publishing Careful What You Wish For! The e-book drops Feb 1, and as soon as it's up on Bookapy I'll drop a link here. (It's my first publication, so I think my author page doesn't exist until then.) If you were looking for a way to drop me a couple of bucks, I'd love it if you'd buy a copy of the book instead.

Progress on the new novel continues... it's slow going, but I've got most of it storyboarded at this point. Now, if I could just magically wave my hands and turn a storyboard into a finished novel, I'd really be on to something!

I know I haven't published anything for a while. It's mostly because the new novel has been eating my brain. But I've got a couple of other story ideas rolling around in my head, and I think I'm close to starting to put words down on a new Two Vines story. Not exactly a sequel, but kind of a followup. I should probably name that universe...

Finally: it's nomination time for the Clitorides (there's probably a link at the top of this screen, unless you cleared it already). It's also nomination time for the Golden Pigtails (http://alexasommers.com/2021-golden-pigtails/). If you were thinking of, y'know, nominating me for something, today's the day! :D

... my old enemy. We meet again.

I'm slowly making progress on the new novel. It's definitely shaping up to be longer and slower than CWYWF. It's got me thinking about chapter lengths; I see longer books out there with 10k+ words per chapter (on average, it's hard to tell on SOL), which is a longer 'story unit' than I tend to write. So I might play around with that in my current draft.

If you've got a strong preference on how long a 'chapter' should be, feel free to drop me a note.