First, I’m happy to announce that Amazon approved the lasted Jack’s Blacks installment, In the Air Tonight. It can be found here.

Synopsis: Roberto has come to Heimville trying to start over after a tragedy. But Heimville has its own problems, and whether he likes it or not, he will be called upon to overcome his past, secure the town, and find his own happily-ever-after.

Keywords: male, female, burro, deer, bird, romance, weaponized_genitalia, genital_mutilation, size_difference, bullying, straight_sex, gore, excessive_cum

Second, following the experiment I started this year to spend more time on Jack’s Blacks, I’ve decided I miss doing writing commissions. The following is the message that I’m posting here, to FA, and to IB.

Hey, all. I experimented with replacing commissions with Jack’s Blacks prompts, and the results are in: I miss doing commissions.
Over the last few months, I’ve been keeping an eye on the competition, and I’ve noticed that some people are charging crazy-high prices for writing commissions. While I’m tempted to join that bandwagon, raising my prices has historically led to a steep drop-off in the number of unique commissioners who can participate and a corresponding reduction in the variety of stories I get commissioned to write. So, I’m experimenting with yet another idea: letting you guys submit both the story idea and a price per word you’re willing and able to pay. That way, I can choose which stories I want to work on based on my interest in writing them and the income to be made. I will be reopening commissions with a minimum $0.01/word rate, but you will be able to specify what you want to pay per word on my newly revamped Commission Form. Please submit all commission requests via this form so I can keep them all organized.

I’ll let you know when I’ve gotten your submission, but I won’t be able to give any estimate of when I’m going to work on it since that’s dependent on a lot of factors like how interesting or lucrative your story is relative to others and how much stuff I’ve got going on in real life. For the record, “real life” has been extremely busy, stressful, and draining for the last year or so, so please don’t expect me to get through these quickly.

When I’m ready to start working on your story, I’ll reach out and ask whether you’re still interested. If so, we’ll work through all the details that we would normally go through with me asking questions to clarify your story goals. The rest of the commission process will be the same as it was before: I’ll get started on the draft, invoice 90%, share the draft, get feedback and make corrections, invoice the remaining amount based the final word count and any applicable change fees, and then share and publish the final version.

For those wanting more details on how I got here, one of my friends suggested auctioning off a limited number of slots, letting people bid on price per word and then taking the highest ones. There’s a lot of merit to that; making it competitive would almost certainly result in making more than I currently am (and possibly even more than the “crazy-high prices” some of my competition is charging), but at the same time, I saw a sharp reduction in the variety of stories I was commissioned to write when I raised from $0.01 to $0.011 per word, and an even sharper drop when I jumped to $0.02 / word. What I don’t want to do is get pigeonholed into just writing the same story over and over for the one or two people who can afford to pay an outrageous price. I am motivated by money—quite so—but also by variety, so I figure doing it this way instead gives me the option to choose from a more varied pool of commissions while still having some highly lucrative ones to drive business.

As with all of my experiments, this policy is subject to change on a whim, but this is the policy for now. You guys can start submitting topics as soon as you like, though it will take a while for my website and various accounts to reflect my newly open status, and since my (day job) company is in the process of launching a product we’ve been working on for over a year now, my availability to write is likely to be limited for a little bit longer. But, I wanted to get the word out since I’ve been looking forward to making this announcement for a while now.