Hello, all, and chag sameach!
I am sorry I haven’t been writing much, replying to messages, or doing anything in general. I obviously had to go home from the Manchester Queer Market early the week before last, and wasn’t even able to make it along to the Queer Affaires one in York.
I am currently experiencing the most agonising EDS flare-up of my life, and basically every day at the moment I’m going between sleeping for hours at a time and then sitting as stationary as possible in my chair before going back to bed, interspersed between pain pills and abortive meals.
My new GP has started fucking my testosterone around by text, but also not making clear notes on their system about appointments, so I haven’t yet had the opportunity to argue my case or even understand the hows and whys behind why they’re fucking this medication around. I have, however, been diagnosed with a sprained ankle which sucks, and I have specifically asked for a referral to a pain clinic, which was recommended by my PIP surveyor when I was doing my phone assessment for it.
My award of PIP (only the standard living rate, no mobility rate) is definitely making my life a lot easier, though, especially given that with my pain where it’s currently at, it’s virtually impossible to leave the house, let alone to go anywhere by bus or by walking.
I will be writing when I can – part of the reason I was doing work on the kink survey is because it’s non-creative work and I’m able to tip away at it whilst still being in considerable pain.
For the 2025 Indie Ink Awards, four of my books have been nominated across a dozen or so categories – An Uncommon Betrothal, Heart of Stone, Strange Liberty, and Historic Brotherhood.
I would very much appreciate your votes for these books if you feel they best suit in their respective nominated categories, especially for An Uncommon Betrothal in the Disability Representation by a disabled author category!
Secondly, it is the Smashwords Annual Sale until January 1st! You can pick up Heart of Stone, Powder and Feathers, and An Uncommon Betrothal for less than $2 apiece, and everything else is currently completely free!
Smashwords is a really great site for eBooks and I absolutely recommend browsing the rest of the sale for more free and discounted books – including from friends and associates of mine like Achilles King, CM Rosens, Magen Cubed, and more! – especially because Smashwords makes it extremely easy to send gift copies by email, which is great if you want to send a horny Hanukkah gift or ring in the Gregorian new year for a friend or loved one with some great fiction!
I have tried to look into the process of making it easier to gift subscriptions and eBooks for my website to people, and unfortunately, it looks like there’s no easy automated way to do so, but I will continue to look into it and see if I can get it sorted.
Thank you so much to those of you who’ve taken part in the kink survey so far – I accidentally sent it out a good while before it was finished, and while it’s still in need of some tweaks and adjustments, it’s now in a much more serviceable state!
I am thinking that I might later on add Locations & Settings as a category and specifically add some more particular romance tropes – stuff like There Was Only One Bed – as well as adding quite a lot more roles tropes, but there’s about 270 questions in place at the moment.
I have 129 pie charts of results currently live, and they’re set to auto-update with new results every few minutes – I’m going to add more pie charts to the Google Slideshow when I’m a little more alive, and my plan is to include a link to the related tag page on my website for every kink or trope that I tag for on my website.
The kink survey is going to stay live in perpetuity, and once I have all the pie charts live and I’m able to edit them so that the colours are consistent and more legible across the charts, I’ll be advertising the survey and its results more widely, such as on Reddit and so forth.
I’m also going to revive my old kink dictionary project now that I have my own website to host it on, and I’ll probably link that to the survey and vice versa, just because I really enjoy this sort of discussion around fictional kinks and tropes and what makes them appealing to different people and in different works!
Thank you so much again for your patience, everybody, in me getting back to emails and getting on top of things. As I was saying to someone earlier this week, the unfortunate flip side of a disabled man writing so candidly about disability and chronic illness is that you also get horrible quiet periods when the disability and chronic illness is absolutely kicking that man’s ass.
Please enjoy in lieu of the fiction and essays you are used to receiving from me these pictures of my horrible beasts (and my beautiful boyfriend):
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