Afterword.

If you count my branch story in Wet Dreams, this is the third story I finish. However, it is the second with my own idea.

The Book of Eros and the Curse of the Gifted is over 270.000 words long. It took me a little over a year to finish, and I’m glad I did for various reasons.

I’m proud I was able to get this done. No matter how long things are, I believe they all should have a proper ending instead of getting dropped and forgotten. The stories I’ve myself left unfinished haunt me, and I want to eventually go back to them and finish them or rework them into something different.

Once more I learned a lot from writing this, mostly about my own creative process. I tried very hard to outline and have a good plan, but it made a lot of it feel stiff for me, like it was artificial (Which it is, since it’s fiction, but I don’t mean it in that sense).

It was a weird premise to start an erotic story, wasn’t it?

“Hey. Want to read an erotic story about people who CAN’T have sex?” Great hook, huh? Even so I squeezed over 270K words out of it somehow, hahaha.

I feel like I should address the ending a little bit. I’m personally not a fan of stories with supernatural elements that get rid of said supernatural elements in the end. I usually want to read them BECAUSE it has something weird in it, not because I want to see it gone. But when I started thinking about how it should all end, I could see no way to get the themes across while also letting everyone be supernaturally Gifted. Their powers were never the key to their happiness, and in most cases were the cause of their problems. I knew it would disappoint some people the moment I decided to go that route, but I flet it was for the best.

My writing should do the speaking for itself, which is why I don’t often answer to criticism. You, the reader, have the right to form your own opinion on what’s there. Whether I was able to make my intentions clear through the text or not, once it’s out there, it’s yours to interpret. That’s actually a fucking scary thought, but I wouldn’t like the authors of the things I like to come and tell me I was wrong in my interpretations, so you do you.

That said, I’ll allow myself to feel some pride about what I did with the themes and how they’re reflected in the characters here. Might have been a little too blatant, but I want to believe they came across.

I think I’ve said it before, but the idea for this story was basically “What if six people each had one D&D stat maxed out?” Angela was Strength, Valerie was Dexterity, Leonardo was Constitution, Kaede was Intelligence, Lucia was Wisdom, and Seina was Charisma. As always, though, as I wrote I started running into troubles I needed to think hard on how to fix, and honestly, a lot of the times it wasn’t fun.

I made the decision to finish this story because it was getting very, very difficult. I could have taken a break and written something else, but I think I wouldn’t have returned to this, leaving people hanging.

Because people kept reading. Lots of people kept supporting me in Patreon, lots of people kept reading and commenting on Chyoa. Book of Eros didn’t have the numbers The Affection Multiplier did, but even so some people gave it a chance and stuck with it till the end. How could I turn my back on that trust? Of course, I worry the ending doesn’t meet expectations, but I owe everyone to at the very least see it through.

When I sit down to write my thoughts I always end up forgetting something to say, and there are some things better left unsaid. In fact, I still don’t think I should admit at all that there were times when I wasn’t enjoying writing this, since it may taint opinions on the work itself. But hey, the things is I’m truly proud of having finished a second story, and despite it being difficult, I still love writing more than anything else. It would have been impossible to write this much if I didn’t find fulfillment in it.

I see these as First Drafts, manuscripts to get done so that one day I can come back to them, edit them, fix them, shorten them and pack into true books. Pros usually say to not worry about first drafts because no one will ever see them. Well… not true in my case, haha.

I will be taking a break from uploading things the month of May, both here on Chyoa and on Patreon. I'll be taking my time writing something else, which I'm still unsure what will be. I'm working on a new branch of Spirit of Lust that's far more lighthearted than the William one, but I'm also considering resuming the Simon Sinclair branch of The Affection Multiplier. I want to write for both and see which one calls to me the most. So yeah, I can't promise anything yet. If you're interested, either go to my chyoa page and follow me to get and update for whatever I do next, or check my Patreon. Updates concerning shcedule, uploads and such are usualy public posts.

Thank you all for your support so far. Thank you for reading, thank you for leaving comments, thank you for pressing that (motherfukin') like button. Most of all, thank you for sticking with this story if you read it all. I'm hoping whatever I do next will be even better.