My first TG, for roughly a decade, was "John's Living Nightmare", first posted on ASSM in the late '90s. (It's one of my stories here, with a huge hittage.) I wanted to show what it was like to torment a child and to have everyone out to get him. It was one of several stories on ASSM, and my only TG one. I was writing in a number of -- fetishes, perhaps?

I started writing as the only means of expressing myself as Andrea.

My first story (which became a novel, Missing Without A Trace available from Barnes and Noble as a Nook Book), I'd decided to write a first-person story with a woman as the story teller. I had the notion that my life would have been different (and easier) if I hadn't had all the baggage of being male. So I wanted to see if I could write, first person, as a woman with a woman's personality.

I was pretty successful, creating a personality which--on the surface--was bubbly and outgoing. But underneath, she kept many secrets as to how she was really feeling and all my readers seemed to come back to me and say, "This is really cool, but I get the impression that your character Kelly isn't as brave, happy, and courageous as she pretends to be in her story."

Which was true. I came to the conclusion that my life might have been a little more easy, but the problems I felt about not fitting in and fulfilling what was expected of me would have remained pretty much the same.

charlie

No idea really. I've been writing fiction on and off since my school days, it was a sort of relief valve from the daily grind, i'm quite an avid reader too, SF, Fantasy, crime, biography, humour - well even some romance stuff. When the opportunity to read stuff on the interweb came my way in the late '90's i found more 'niche' stuff, some of which i identified with and this started to influence some of my writing. When i say niche, everything from bizarre body modifications through clothing, bondage and yes, the whole CD/TG spectrum, some i enjoyed, some were so far left of centre i couldn't relate to on any level.

It was probably @ 2003 after reading several stories with similar storylines of male suffers injury with the result of a forced gender change and the, at the time, edgy Tuck series that i decided i could do at least as well. The rest, as they say, is history - I posted a few shorts with Crystal, the feedback was quite positive, Gaby was born and best bit of 20 years later i've written quite a few words with TG/CD themes.

I've known that i'm trans almost my entire life but at the same time i've long had what i now know to be a few interesting 'kinks', some of these have crossed over into my writing, my characters could do things that in RL i couldn't/wouldn't. Wish fulfilment? maybe, some of those ideas that have haunted my dreams have turned to reality as i've become a bit braver with age, just as much will never happen in a million years.

Write what you know is always good advice, obviously if your personal experience is wider you can offer more stuff in a convincing manner, many of my stories combine multiple strands of that knowledge base, cycling, travel, history, models, food, fetish's etc, etc. Writing outside of my box of experience is something i find difficult to do in a convincing way, I get irritated when i see, what are to me, annoying errors in settings/locations/facts, i have often spent longer on the research than on the writing when my storyline takes in locations or subjects i'm not familiar with.

I've had scraps and fragments of TG/CD stories floating around in an ideas folder for decades. It was this damn COVID thing and the extra two hours per day it gave me. Since I was not commuting I spent some of that time working and re-working these scraps. Eventually I thought that one or two were done enough and coherent enough that I might get some constructive feedback from the kind readers here.

After a bit of "just do it " therapy from some of the kind denizens of this site I finally pushed the save button on one. That was last February.

As to why TG/CD subject mater. I guess that's the way I'm bent. I remember playing hide and seek with my sisters in the dress racks at Sears when I was a small child. I remember the dress-up box in our play room. I remember loving the feel of the gowns and dresses. The thought of wearing beautiful clothes and looking smashing in them never seems far from the front of my mind.

As to why publish here and not elsewhere? Have you read commentary and reviews on other sites? Some of those other sites are worse than any old Q-Chan website. The lovey owners and crafters who manage the care and feeding of this site seem unwilling to allow poor behavior to fester. For that I will be forever grateful.

I'm an incompetent author and poor editor. I'm slow and careless mechanic and my sentences are too complex. As some wise person once said: "The way to write a good story is to write a lot of stories." I'm at the very front edge of that process.

Back when the protagonist of my first published work, 'Shadows and Dust' was just a concept for a role playing game character, I went looking for a reason someone would turn to such a life of crime. And I stumbled across TG fiction, so, here I am.