(For those coming just for the poll, it’s at the bottom of the page.)

Status Update

I have just been on a roll lately, haven’t I? It’s crazy what happens when the urge to write strikes and for the first time in a long time, I don’t have any commissions pending. A fair bit has happened over the last few weeks, so let’s see:

I had a flare-up of diverticulitis last Tuesday (the 21st), which meant that instead of spending Thanksgiving with my parents, I stayed home and ate as little as humanly possible. Great for weight loss; I think I’ve lost about 6-8 pounds as a result. Not so great for overall comfort, though.

Between frequent trips to the restroom and taking antibiotics (thank goodness I didn’t have to go to the hospital this time!), I was seized with inspiration to write Jack’s Blacks: The Great Dog of the Forest, started it Wednesday night (after spending most of the day sleeping), finished and submitted it on Thanksgiving, and then it was approved the next day.

While I was waiting on that one to be finished, I finally got off my butt and wrote FuckWithMe.com. Amazon approved it (shockingly, given its title), but they have since (as of yesterday) pulled it. You know, I really don’t get their review process. It’s annoying as hell, but it does make me wonder about setting up an alternate marketplace for my “too hot for Amazon” books. More on that later. I finished that story and submitted it Friday, and it was approved and published Saturday.

I was approached by someone that reminded me I had a Fetlife account, and looking through it and remembering my earlier days in pony play filled me with nostalgia—painful in its intensity (seriously, my chest hurt)—and spurred me to write Pony-Boy. I had been shooting for 4–8k words on it, but it became pretty obvious it was gonna go over. Unlike other stories where I’ve gotten stuck, I had a clear idea of where I wanted to go with it, so I decided to let it play out. I’m glad I did; it’s now my 4th-longest Jack’s Blacks story, and I’m thrilled to say that once it was published (that happened Monday morning), it quickly got quite a number of reads, far more than most of my stories do on the opening day or two. So, that was super exciting.

One of my employees and I were talking at work about web hosting yesterday, and that got me wondering about continuing to have WordPress host my website. I have found hosting sites whose terms of service look like they’d accommodate the juicier bits from here and I would be free to build my site from the ground up, unfettered by WordPress and all their limitations. I started poking around at it and trying to remember HTML and CSS, and I have to say that in a few hours, I’ve got a home page with menus and links to other pages (not created, yet), as well as something that I have not been able to achieve on WordPress all this time: a proper modal dialog box alerting to adult content. I really think that I could spend a few more days and put something together pretty quickly that would let me reach parity with what I’ve got here. And, I could do things like set up a storefront for the books that Amazon won’t sell (and most other distributors likely won’t, either).

The question, though, is: should I? Would you guys even use additional features like the storefront or forms if I created them? Experience on here says, “no”, but I wanted to ask you guys. On that note, I’m curious whether I should even keep the site running at all; I do not get much traffic, and I’m fairly convinced that there wouldn’t be too much outcry if it just ceased to exist. I know that people do come and read stories from time to time, but would anybody feel particularly put-out if they weren’t there anymore?

Poll: The Fate of AuthorJackDoe.com

So, I’m gonna take a poll (and we’ll see if I can get it to work right). What should the fate of this site be?

• Should I keep it the way it is?
• Should I create a storefront (and, more importantly, would you guys actually be interested in being able to buy e-books that way) by switching to a non-Wordpress site?
• Should I let the contract lapse and let it fizzle away?

What do you think, guys? If I don’t get much of a response, I think I’ll know that the site won’t be sorely missed.