I haven't posted anything here for a while, but I haven't been idle. I've finished several first drafts recently, and would like to get feedback on them from beta readers before I do final drafts and post them here, or offer them for sale on Smashwords and the Kindle store.

The story that needs beta readers most is a 10,000 word novelette modeled on the English club story, such as Lord Dunsany's Jorkens stories. I need British beta readers to tell me where I've inadvertently used Americanisms in the dialogue or first-person narration, and point out any other geographical or cultural inaccuracies in this story set in London and Manchester. It's a multi-person body-swap story, with age regression and progression, and both cross-sex and same-sex swaps; no sex, and not much violence.

Some months ago I finished the second draft of a 42,000 word novel set in the same world as Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes and When Wasps Make Honey. It's set a generation later and far away, and doesn't directly involve any of the same characters, so you needn't have read either or both of them to understand this one. It's set in a kingdom where the princes used to struggle to the death over the succession after the old king died, and the victorious successor would kill all his brothers in the process. Recently they've adopted a more humane custom, and the prince who succeeds in seizing power has his wizards turn all his surviving brothers into women. The story focuses on one such prince-turned-princess, and follows her for several decades as she becomes a wife, a mother, a ruler, and a revolutionary. There's a little onstage sex in this one, consensual and not very explicit; there's also offstage rape of a non-viewpoint character.

I just recently finished the first draft of a 106,000 word novel set in Morpheus' Twisted universe. Its main character is a boy whose Twist makes him, not physically female, but transsexual. Unfortunately for her, doctors started detecting and correcting transsexuals prenatally decades ago; the medical infrastructure for sex reassignment of teens and adults has gone rusty with disuse, and that will cause her trouble as she transitions. Morpheus has read it and checked it for consistency with his universe, but I'd like one or more beta readers to check it for realism in its portrayal of a TS teen coming out and going through transition; this is the first time I've written at length about a character like this, most of my other stories having featured cisgendered males who get unexpectedly transformed into women.

I also have a 7,300 word story in which (among other fantastic occurrences) a transsexual creatively uses an unspecialized magic artifact to become physically female. That also could use a psychological realism check. There's no sex in either of the above.

I've a 19,600 word novella in which a boy, the scion of a crime family, is kidnapped by his family's enemies, enslaved, and surgically/magically made into a girl. He refuses to adopt a female identity, and after some years he escapes from slavery and seeks a way to resume a masculine appearance, if not to become physically male. There's onstage sex in this one, not too explicit, and some violence, mostly offstage.

I've also a 14,800 word novelette, a bizarre sort of afterlife fantasy. Lots of violence, including offstage rape of non-viewpoint characters, as well as offstage consensual sex.

Why have I finished so many stories in the last ten months or so without posting any of them online? A couple of reasons. One, I've started working on putting together an ebook collection of my earlier stories, and it seemed like a good idea to also include one or more stories that hadn't previously appeared elsewhere. Two, I've been having a very good year creatively, at least in terms of word count (you will have to judge for yourself about the quality); peaking at nine thousand words in one day, averaging over 1600 words a day some months, and averaging 830 words a day for the year so far. When things are going that well with the first-draft writing, I don't want to take time away from it to do revisions on earlier stories, which are better done when the first-draft writing is going more slowly.

Anyway, sometime soon I'm finally going to do final drafts of these stories, and offer some for sale in one or more ebooks, and post others for free here and elsewhere as loss-leaders for the ebooks. Let me know by commenting on this post or by private message if you want to beta-read one or two of them. I don't want to dump two hundred thousand words of fiction on anybody's head all at once.

My current projects in progress include a new story in the Valentine Divergence universe, involving a cultural clash between two telepathic neospecies, and a science fiction story about an alien symbiont (or parasite, depending on who you believe). Neither is near enough finished to show other people yet.

When Wasps Make Honey, the sequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, is now available from Amazon in Kindle format and from Smashwords in EPUB format. See here for more information.