• fae/faer or they/them

fae otherkin in the streets, anthro red chocobo in the sheets


so, once upon a time, I wrote a certain brand of smut.

I don't feel like elaborating-it's behind me, and I don't need folks tracking it down. Some things are still up and I try to avoid the connection to old usernames. Not necessarily because I'm ashamed of the content-it ventured into kink, sure. No; I just don't think I wrote that good in those days. Honestly, though, what it was isn't super important here: just know that I have done pornographic writing, and some weird kinks. This is all we need to establish for the scene.

Well, in that era, I hung out in chatrooms and forums dedicated to the craft: writers, ERP, porn game devs, etc. One night, I was kicking around in one such chatroom. Not doin' much-the night was still young, and people hadn't started logging in en masse yet. A few quiet lurkers.

One of them sent me a whisper.

"Hey, I've seen you around a few times. Do you take writing commissions?" I didn't, and I said so, and I thanked them for their interest. I didn't take comms! I didn't hold my writings in high enough regard to ask for money of 'em, but still, a compliment's a compliment. It did not deter them.

"I have this idea I've been trying to get written for years. I'll pay a good amount!" I wished them the best of luck, but again: I didn't take comms. And then they said the price.

TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS

so I, of course, said again, not taking comms:

"well, I think I have one slot for commissions left this month, actually, what story did you want written?"

I ain't proud. This was in the early 2010s. 20K would buy me close to two years' worth of rent of a decent apartment in my town ('bout half that lately), or the majority of a new car. I will write you porn if you buy me a car.

They send me the prompt, and immediately it is clear why they have been trying for years. It's a decent premise, it covers a lot of fetish ground. It'd probably have been fun to write! But it was a lot. Like, you'd have to be the damn Kink Avatar, the one born once every one hundred years to master every fetish on deviantart. The honest fact is, I'd have earned that twenty grand. There would've been a lot of honest-to-goodness research involved. I wrote some stuff, but I didn't write blueberry and vore and hypno and several other things. There are approaches and details to make things actually hot and appeal to those audiences. This would've been fifty pages minimum to cover everything. That price was, ultimately, reasonable.

But, I said no, in the long run. It was not a thing I felt confident I could do successfully. I couldn't take that money for a thing that either would've taken a long, long time or that I couldn't do sexily. They were cool about it, I wished them luck on finding someone, and we went off, our separate ways, two ships crossing in a horny ocean.

Fast forward a few weeks. It's later at night, it's a bit more active. I see my potential client in a chat channel list, talking to another people. I shrug, figuring I'll check in. Maybe they found someone to tell their tale.

I enter that channel. The first thing out of his mouth. Within a minute of my entering the channel.

"look just because I own a SS uniform and wear it sometimes doesn't necessarily mean I'm a Nazi, there's a whole thing on my Flist about this"

I have never felt a dodged bullet so hard in my life. Time slowed down and I heard that figurative bullet whoosh past me. Suddenly a lot of questions arose: would I have been paid? would the revisions have been horrifying once I was on the hook? was there something troubling in the prompt I overlooked?

it's been about twelve years. I've never seen anything resembling the original prompt surface anywhere. I don't know if that dude is still trying.

the moral of the story: vet your clients!


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