OratorFreeman

I'm stealing this idea from CaptainTremor (here's the original below)

because I believe all artists and writers deserve this kind of thing once in a while.

Here's the deal: critique me in the comments of this journal! You probably have feedback, I'd like to hear it! I've done this sort of thing for years, and sure I get a lot of praise for being a...wait do I count as OG? I'm like...second gen...I dunno, something like that. Point is, I've been around a while, and I'd imagine lots of people have stuff they want to say...constructively, ideally.

I'm borrowing some stuff below as little prompts - you can answer all of them, you can focus on a couple, you could even just put your own thoughts down and say what you want! That's the idea!

1. What is your favorite part about how I write?

2. What parts of my stories do you think I could improve?

3. What part of my stories do you like the least?

4. What fetishes do you wish I gave more spotlight too?

5. What fetishes do you wish I gave less spotlight too?

6. Do you want my stories to be shorter? Longer?

7. What about my OCs do you wish I did more to describe them?

8. What sort of stories do you wish I did more of?

9. What parts of my stories do you find hard to visualize?

10. What parts of my stories consistently work for you?

While I continue working on stories on the side, let me know what you think of them! Positive feedback's a plus, but constructive criticism is welcome too!

PEOPLE OF EARTH AND SPACE, TIME AND MONEY, HEAVEN, HELL, AND ALL THAT PURGATORY IN-BETWEEN!!

I...wrote a thing.

Now YOU do the thing and READ THE THING

That's right, you beautiful person reading this - it's me! FREEEEEEEEEEEEMAN

And I've got some stuff I wanted to update you guys on in general:

1) I made a poll recently asking more specifically how I should upload my stories in the future. Part of the reason I haven't uploaded much in the last year was this uploading process. Let's be honest: DA isn't very story-friendly. Once they made the switch to Eclipse, it made it more difficult to upload stories because there wasn't a convenient spot like st.ash anymore for keeping tabs on stories in-progress, instead having new stories be submitted through a direct submission titling "Literature". And that's got its own set of problems, but it's at least manageable. Last year, as part of some of my uploads, I wanted to try uploading directly as PDFs - keeping the integrity of all my formatting and page length for the files while also giving people an easy downloadable option if they wanted to save the stories for their own reasons. The problem with that though becomes a bit more obvious when you look at the DA traffic through a Core membership: a lot of people access DA from mobile devices, which have difficulties when it comes to PDFs. Usually people would need to download the PDF onto their storage of choice and open it through another app in order to actually read the story, and that's another set of inconvenience that isn't always worth people's time. It's good when you can read the story, but it can be a hassle.

So I asked you guys about how you'd like to see stories uploaded, and...well, there's a lot of folks that don't really care either way, but more importantly there's a good majority that prefer the Literature uploads. It makes sense, since that allows people who access DA through mobile devices (based on viewership stats, that appears to be about 55% of my audience anyway) to actually read the stories I've got without the hassle. I still see other writers able to upload the old-fashioned way, so Literature's probably the way to go for future story uploads so everyone can enjoy the content. Maybe there's a place for PDFs on this page, but there should be more of a reason why the story has to be uploaded as a PDF, something that wouldn't translate well to just a normal copy-paste submission. Whatever that solution is, I'll find a way to make it work. For the folks that prefer PDFs, I don't mind uploading stuff that way, but if I think it'll work just as a straight upload, maybe that will be fine. Who knows? Maybe it's justification for a downloadable PDF or a supportive Patreon in the future (not necessary, but it's a thought).

2) You might have noticed a couple of the titles of my stories changed. It's not likely that people would have noticed if it was a character they weren't following, and there'd be a good reason for that. As you may know, I'd been using the title to refer to a femboy version of Freeman, "Freetrap", for the various stories he's appeared within. And while it is something that people like the character and the stories, some have been more vocal towards the "trap" part of that - it's not really fitting to the character, given the context and the connotations of "trap". I wanted to think of a way to keep writing stories about this character without hindering him by this controversial note. I've gotten opinions on both sides of the matter, and while I agree that the name wasn't thought of originally with any intent of malice, that doesn't really benefit anybody who is offended by that.

I tried to think of alternatives to what I could call "femboy Freeman" by that would be more accurate to the character while also not carrying any of the unnecessary baggage that comes with the old name. "Femman" sounds...odd, "Freeboy" doesn't make sense, and "Femby Freeman" is a fun alliterative title with some rhythm to it, but it also sounds a little hokey. After talking it over with a good buddy on the matter, I've decided to settle on simply "Fre" - pronounced like "Fray". It's simple (which is great for titles), it's feminine, and it's also abbreviated from "Freeman", which all works without any negative connotations, so I've gone ahead and taken the liberty of changing the titles and references to "Freetrap" into "Fre". I hope this change is accepted, and I hope that you guys will be pleased with Fre's future stories as they come too.

3) Expect a few new stories on the way. As it turns out, no, I have not just been sitting around doing nothing in the increasingly limited off-time I have. I do have a lot of stories. I really do. And there's a few I want to be able to post, even if they're different. Whether for the content they contain, or the content they don't, I hope that people will be open-minded to what I put out in the next while. I'll be gradually uploading stuff so that it doesn't feel like I'm having to go off on some wild mythical years-long journey to come up with a handful and then disappear again.

With regards to Aina in particular: I teased a large part of the next chapter already. It was done several months ago. I've had a large portion of it (and the next) written out already. God forbid that the character fades away simply because of neglect. She's the Ying to my...Drifter, I guess. But there's going to be a fair amount of plot in these next two chapters, heavier stuff. But I suppose that it's meant to delve a little deeper into what actually was going on in the first season there, as I pointed out in a previous journal. Still, I do hope people will be interested in what happens to our happy fiancés.

And until the next story, I'll still be around, watching, reading, waiting...

Last week, I put up a Discord link and asked people about joining in a server based entirely around creating a brand-new OC. This character came together based on popular votes and a mixing of what everyone voted on, leading ultimately into Felicia Wishborne, who may even be the first community-made character.

You can read up on the bio here, which highlights a lot of the details that people voted on over in the server there. And yeah, she's a looker, trust me.

So first, I want to take the time to thank everyone who joined in on the server and helped to bring this character to life for the first time. She's definitely one of the most unique characters out there, and it's all thanks to you guys. But as things have come together with this, it seems like the server should just kind of shut down and go offline forever, right? After all, the character is made, the details are fleshed out, there's nothing else to do there.

It's not like we can just do this again, right?

Well buddy, I've got news for you.

Character Creation Central is here to stay.

I don't expect it to be a high-maintenance social server like many of the others, but I think that this doesn't have to be the last time we take the time to make a character together. Every now and again, I'll put up a post to say, "Hey, let's make a character together!" And then people can come and go as they please. If it ends up with a little hangout spot, more power to ya! Just be cool, and we'll get along just fine.

And if you're digging Felicia, feel free to join the server so we can share content of her (and any others) with each other!

https://discord.gg/Sj87JrZu2k EVERYONE, GET IN HERE