Oh to be able to do that, without then needing 27,453,412 drafts.
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Ok, Iāve been enjoying this thread, but staying out of it until this. But now I am genuinely curious what I would be considered. I get inspired by concepts, I just start writing based on the concept. After I write the first chapter or two, I sit down and think about where Iām going, and very loosely figure out my ending and any key road markers I need to hit to get there. And then improvise everything in between. I guess that makes me a āpancerā?
I guess I should also add my 2 cents to the overall conversion, but its what everyone has already said. I donāt think authorās should feel obligated to finish any stories anywhere. I donāt think GRR Martin is obligated to finish Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones), even if he is getting paid. Sometimes inspiration fades, and your audience can write the rest of the stories in their minds even if you never finish.
Sometimes I enjoy unfinished stories (Here and in mainstream fiction), because my fantasies take the story in twenty different directions, and then the story never ends. Sometimes the bad guys win, sometimes the good guys, sometimes tragedy, sometimes comedy. And the ending changes every time I revisit the unfinished story in my head.
Donāt get me wrong, I love a story that finishes strong, and I encourage authorās to finish their work for themselves, but it is not a tragedy if they never do. It is an opportunity for you to finish the story in your own mind.
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Just looked up the term and itās usually spelled āpantserā, as in āseat of your pantsā, as youād said.
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I was just about to correct this. āPantserā
Iām usually an outliner before I write, but as an exercise, I decided to āpantsā my Pholus, Book 3. I thought I knew the characters well enough that theyād ātell me what they wanted to do.ā
I have to say, I hated it! It slowed me down by months ā took me over a year to write the 1st draft. In summation, I usually say, āI spent more time in my head than on the page.ā
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Hi , I was there when the old magic wad written. When the connection was a dial up and i had to upload my text doc to the MCSTORIES.com site while praying my parents didnāt come home or my college roommate got back from his date.
Do authors have an obligation to finish their stories.
YES. TO THEMSELVES. Sadly many of us fail.
25 years ago I started a series i finished twice and reopened twice and sadly remains unfinished.
25 years. Iāve been through college, grad school, relationships, traumas, health issues, 20 years of bodybuilding, marriage, throuplehood, 4 dogs, home ownership, social commitments and a very intense career. Many authors write, as I did to escape or imagine the life we arenāt living. When you wakeup and find yourself in that life however, it is very difficult to find space for the writing of it.
Do i wish every day that i had time to give Damien and Gino their happy ending and to tie all my loose plot threads together in a nice bowā¦ YES!.. but i donāt have the time and my heart and libido are otherwise occupied now.
We stay at the fair as long as we can but sadly it isnāt a space that we need forever as authors.
I guess my thesis is this: Itās not just a space for readers. for some authors like myself it was a labor of love to reach out to other gay men, searching for a community. We as authors are as invested as the readers. The idea that any author would share something so personal at their sexual fantasies and casually walk away without completing their task is somewhat insensitive.
Authors are prisoners of our own ambition. There are stories that are too big to finish or to personal to leave. My only hope is that we can all appreciate the bravery it takes to express ourselves and the patience to accept what is given without feeling that more is required.
IF you have no idea who I am, or not read any of my work, just think of me as the fairy godfather of the Himbo Genre. When it was the 90ās and every gay fantasy looked like the opening nightclub scene of queer as folk.
And thank you for to the readers, to collaborators, to the moderators and the organizers. The real heroes of open space internet erotica are the men who run and love the Fair, making sure every generation has an easy a time to get in as we who built it did.
Love always - ONIX
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I didnāt know quite how to script the final conversation in Monster Act, so I had the idea of just beginning the conversation and seeing. Iād spent several weeks with both of them in my head, and by then they both had their own voice.
It was just maybe like 50 ~ 60 words of dialogue, but I consciously decided not it edit it too much and just let them talk.
I felt all lovely and artsy for trying something like that.
Maybe I was āpantsing.ā
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Yep, thatās the problem of working without an outline, although I find that even pantsers work with an outline that is either in their head, or they outline as they go along, only really winging it for the first chapter or two. They move back-and-forth between pantsing (drafting for discovery) and plotting (writing from an outline). But I think a writer is far more likely to finish a story if he writes from an outline than he is if heās a pantser.
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I have to admit, most of my erotic stories have come out of pantsing. My other work has been a hybrid of pantsing and plotting. Increasingly, I have to know how the story will end, which pushes me more and more toward plotting. I also believe that most pantsers, if they a good at it, have a strong sense of story structure in their heads. They know they have to introduce the story-world and they have to get their protagonist from the ordinary world into the āstrange world.ā They know there will be a series of tests, trials, and mini-crises, that follow culminating in introspection after a major upset. They know they will have to build toward a climax; then, at the end of the story, they will have to show how their main character has been transformed.
So this allows them to pace their stories as they pants along, ultimately making them plotters to a certain degree. But the plotting is done in their heads.
For most of my erotic fiction, mostly on Nifty, I have been more interested in exploring a concept that I have found arousing rather than writing a proper story. Only lately have I started to try to shape even my erotic fiction into a plot. Some of my readers, however, have told me they wish I would go back to my pantsing, which tends to be done in first-person and therefore has a āconfessionalā tone to it that makes them feel I am disclosing something that I have really done or that has really happened to me. It feels, to them, as though I am sharing a secret.
But for the foreseeable future I think I will rely more on plotting and that means, in a serial story, actually building toward a climax and bringing it to resolution rather than merely being a series of different events that often arenāt even related to one another.
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Iām unfortunately delinquent in finishing several of my series, and even though finishing them was a goal for myself last year ā¦ last year rather sucked for me. I feel bad as a writer because I know thereās a constituency out there interested and invested in those stories! My productivity style is not great at finishing projects like this, or at least itās not nicely matched with the follow-through necessary to execute an end as cleanly as Iād like. So Iāve mostly tried to stop making promises that I might not be able to fulfill given the other obligations in my life.
That said, erotica has the benefit of giving readers a happy ending even if it doesnāt give us a literary conclusion.
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Well now I want to write a story about pantsing men. The other meaning.
But it will likely wind up as many of my other stories, on an indeterminate hiatus until inspiration strikes randomly, sometimes years down the track.
And I do tend to agree with the statement that most of the time a story isnāt actively abandoned, and definitely no one starts a story with the intent of not finishing it, itās just put on the backburner, and will be dealt with at some point. I know Iād probably benefit from more active planning of my stories, but I think a part of it is that for work I wind up needing to do actively planned out writing, so for a hobby/for fun, itās just so much more enjoyable to write as I go, usually with only a vague scenario (or a request, or a scene, or even just a pun) for guidance.
There is also, occasionally, the situation where the story is finished. It may be open ended, it may leave questions for the reader, but sometimes itās just done, with or without a āand they boned happily ever afterā epilogue. Certainly it can be expanded upon later, in most stories you can always tell more, expand on a concept, etc. But it doesnāt mean the original story was unfinished.
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āPancer and Prancer and Donder and Blitzenā¦ā
or, in mangled Ogden Nash:
āIf called by a Pancer,
donāt Ancer!ā
ā¦ Iāll see myself out.
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@ONIX What a beautiful post, thank you so much! Iāve read your work over the years and enjoyed your stories very much. Itās great to know that you maintain your connection to the erotic hypnosis community.
Really appreciate your insight and thoughts on this topic - folks have not been shy or lukewarm in expressing where they stand, People are passionate about it in ways I had thought might be present, but the level of intensity has been a bit surprising (although not unwelcome).
@ All -
Iām reminded of two legendary stories that, while unfinished, have anchored themselves in the center of my kinky MC-obsessed heart:
-āChristopher and Craig/Campus Case Study/Christopher, Craig, & Co.ā, by Soxnties. I saw it on MCStories in 2000 at the beginning, and I followed it for its entire run spanning 19 years (itās still live on the site).
With all due respect to the brilliant writers on this thread, this is the story against which I measure all others. Itās unfinished, and ends on a cliffhanger, which has kept the story and my interest alive.
Iāve corresponded with the author a few times, and heās said that although he knows the rest of the story, heās prioritized other things in his life (marriage will do that), but he may return to it one day. Heās active on Tumblr with a photo account (sadly for me, not MC related).
-āWaiting For Rossā, by Anonymous. This has been described as the best rubber story ever, and I agree. Not a hypno/MC story per se, but the psychological control and manipulation on display is a thing of beauty. The Google Books edition is incomplete; several additional chapters came to light recently (will have to check but I think theyāre on GayDemon), all brilliant ā but the story is left open-ended at a turning point in the saga.
Sufficient for some, I suppose, but both of these classic stories have left me slavering for more, insatiable hypno slut mutt that Iāve become thanks to these two authors - and, of course, thanks to you. My gleeful descent into the depths of depraved dark hypnosis and deviant mind control accelerates each time you drop a fresh story, with every succulent chapter propelling me further down the path to perditionā¦ you truly break the wind beneath my wings 
Well, if you tease us about these stories, Iām sure weād all appreciate some links 
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Thereās a Raindeer called āPantserā but heās very slap dash and doesnāt know how he got the job.
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Then one err prone Christmas Eve,
Santaās sat-nav failed
Pantser, with the stakes so high
Chartered for them, on the fly
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Then all the reindeer loved him
New recruits are always green
But cagy and cool quick-thinking,
Is valuable in any team
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Nice! These two are coincidentally also some of my favourite series in my early days of online kink fiction reading (I first came across āWaiting for Rossā on the story forum of the Rubbermen/Rubberzone site, I believe some or most of it could still be found there).
āChristopher & Craigā is probably one of the first gay hypno stories that got me curious about erotic hypno fiction (even though sex action was not too heavy in that story). It combines foot fetish, some subtle sex, and that oblivious/clueless controlā¦all of which got me intrigued and interested about what erotic hypno fiction could realize in terms of expressing my fantasies in a form of āalteredā reality.
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applause Brilliant as always, Spiders! Bravo! A welcome laugh at the end of a long day
If your Pantser too long, Yule have a bad trip 
Sure! Hereās the authorās home page at MCStories:
Christopher & Craig - Campus Case Study - Christopher, Craig & Co.
Waiting For Ross is a harder get - I have the first part of it in a Google book, and the āfoundā chapters are linked through MetalbondNYC.com (which site everyone should visit frequently; Metalbond has curated that venerable site into one of the finest erotic repositories on Earth).
Iāll dig through my browser history and post links when I find them, but if you donāt want to wait and if youāre skilled on The Google machine itās a good excuse to have some one-handed fun with your keyboardā¦ (send pics pls)
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