Author's note + writer guidlines

Hi all:

I've been considering writing this story since looking through a series of CYOA posts about starting college while taking X-Change pills. It seemed like it would work well with this format and now that I have a few chapters up all seems to be going well.

Also, my apologies that there won't be any sexual content in the early chapters. I get too into world building and character development that I feel it's a disservice to throw a character into a sexual situation without first establishing who they are and their place in the world. This is especially true for the protagonist/narrator. Due to the nature of the story, there are a lot of choices to make about the narrator and since we can only really have one choice per chapter, I structured the story to try and space them out. The big choices to make are the narrator's body, name, roommate, and any side effects from the change. Once those are through, more interesting content can start. I wanted to try to space these choices out so we don't end up with any exceedingly long chapters or laughably short chapters. Since this takes quite a few chapters, I will most likely copy most of the text from already written chapters and only make necessary changes to have a few varying narrators to choose from.

If you want to influence where the story goes, the best way is to start adding your own chapters. Alternatively, you can leave suggestions in the comments and I or someone else may run with the idea.

For potential authors:

Anything goes so long as it follows site rules. The best place to start a character is to add a new chapter after one of the third chapters, but you can branch off of anywhere that you would rather have a different answer. You can also copy most of the text in existing chapters to help speed through the earlier chapters if you're going to follow a similar structure.

2021 Update

For the past year, I haven't written very many new chapters. However, I am hoping to get back into writing more frequently this year. My goal is to put out 2 to 3 decent length chapters each week. As for where I plan to go with the story, I hope to expand the Brian -> Lauren story to the point that the narrator actually begins classes and gets decently into the first semester of classes. Additionally, I want to either expand the Samantha -> Samantha branch to the same point or do the same on a new character depending on what ideas I have to flesh out.

I have also moved the story from Public to Moderated. This shouldn't change much since I am still the only author of the story, but I would prefer the chance to review any added chapters before they become public. As always, any new additions to the story are encouraged, as are any comments suggesting where to take things in successive chapters as well as complaints about grammar, continuity errors, etc.

2021 June Update

I said I would update more frequently then stopped updating. Ironic. Basically, I only write chapters when binge drinking, and I had to stop binge drinking to lose weight. That killed my motivation and anything I did write I was unsatisfied with. I'm still working to get into the headspace I need to write decent chapters sober, but that's definitely a work in progress. I thank you for your patience in this drought of content.

Cheers,

sir oppenheimer