Now 2021 is finally here, I wanted to take a minute to let everyone know what I have planned for the blog this year. I’m aware people probably aren’t that invested in some of the finer details of my work, but I always like to communicate what is going on behind the scenes as much as possible so those who are interested can stay up to date.

First on the agenda is a brief hiatus on my blog. If you’ve been reading my work since this time last year you’ll know that in January I took a month away from posting, and I am doing the same this year too. I will still be writing during this break, however it allows me to not have to worry about posting and also lets me prepare future pieces and get bits of admin done on my site that usually I don’t get the time to do.

My readers may also know that I took an unscheduled break halfway through the year in order to shift my content from my original blog to this website. While that was entirely unplanned, and due to the shift far from stress-free at the time, I think it was beneficial for me so I will probably have another break for a month sometime in the middle of the year. I’m thinking maybe June or September, but I’ll obviously confirm that closer to the time. Having these breaks really helps me avoid burnout since I know I have some downtime to look forward too and you can expect them to continue so long as I keep writing. I will still be active on Twitter in this time, liking and retweeting posts as I have been for the last few months, so if you’re looking for hot content you can follow me there to see what naughty tweets I’m enjoying.

For those who are interested, the reason I don’t intend to take August off is because I have another summer series planned set in the same universe as Lake Fantasy. I have been writing it since the end of August and still have a long way to go, but I am really looking forward to putting it out as it is another labour of love and showcases more of my favourite models.

This does lead me to cover changes some of my readers may find a little disappointing.

The main change I want to announce is that things will be a bit different once I return in February – namely, I will no longer be releasing two stories per week. Instead I will be dropping to one story per week. Honestly, I’ve been really nervous about doing this, but I have known it was on the way for a while.

Looking back on my work I find that the short, five-minute read pieces are the ones I am most disappointed with. While I do enjoy them, I feel they don’t reflect the stories I want to tell and feel more like they were written purely to satisfy my schedule rather than to satisfy myself. Increasingly the pieces I am writing are naturally becoming longer, and the stories I have in mind that I really want to write are ones that I can’t just knock out in an hour or so. Longer pieces, of course, take time, and I have been rapidly burning through my backlog recently to satisfy my current schedule while at the same time not adding anything to it.

As it stands, my schedule is putting a lot of strain on me and quite frankly it is unsustainable. Soon I won’t have anything left to post while I work on other projects, not to mention that I am currently so focused on keeping to my schedule I am abandoning other things I want to do outside of my erotic fiction. My schedule has also prevented me posting new content to Twitter, which is something I really want to get back to as well.

To be completely honest, this schedule change is not yet set in stone. It is possible I might drop down to bi-weekly releases, or post on an as and when basis, but right now I’m hoping this will be a suitable balance. I’m not sure just yet what day I will be releasing on, so I guess that will be a surprise once February rolls around, and I should note this doesn’t really apply to themed months; hopefully with the extra time this will free up I can create more content for Halloween and Christmas than I could this year, and other heftier projects I want to work on will become much more plausible too.

On a different note, for me one of the most unexpected changes in 2020 was that my work has increasingly come to rely on still images over animated gifs. When I began this blog I wanted to focus on gifs for many reasons, including the fact I find them more evocative and arousing than stills and also that I found they were used much less than stills by other writers, and I felt I could provide content for people like me who wished there was more gif content.

That being said, I believe that the shift from gifs to stills is only going to continue on my blog, and while I doubt I will ever phase them out completely the chances are gifs will eventually contribute to a minority of my work rather than the majority.

The reasons for this are numerous and primarily practical. The main reason I moved from my old blog in the first place was because I ran out of storage space, and while that has been mostly remedied thanks to my image host Imgbox, all the featured images (the images you see when scrolling down my main page of stories) all have to be stored on this website, and gifs take up far more space than stills. Very few gifs are less than 2MB, while in comparison most of the stills I’ve used max out at about 250KB, often less, meaning I can store eight stills or more for every one gif, and that’s using generous assumptions for the size of both files – on the other end of the spectrum, I could store fifty 100KB stills in place of one 5MB gif. This vast difference in size is why I have started cutting stills from gifs to use as featured images, and that is a practice I intend to continue.

If I was posting on Tumblr as most of the community used to do this wouldn’t really be a problem, but as it is I have to keep in mind the long-term viability and affordability of this blog, and working with stills more than gifs makes a lot of sense in that pursuit.

Another practical note is that stills are invariably of a far higher quality than gifs. Even when I create my own gifs from downloaded scenes, the quality cannot match the stills I have used since scenes are designed to be watched, not analysed like stills. In addition, my image host caps images at 10MB, so HD gifs are simply not an option, while many of them will be low quality no matter where I source them.

For example, in today’s piece ‘New Year, New You’, just take a look at the quality difference between the second image and all the rest; that image was sourced directly from PornHub, created by another user from a scene that cannot be downloaded on their platform. As such, I downloaded the scene from XVideos, which only permitted medium quality downloads and thus the resulting gifs were of a lower quality. To be clear, I am not trying to say studios should not restrict how they allow their content to be downloaded or refuse to allow it at all, they absolutely should, but in the context of my own work I find gifs offer less bang for your buck as it were: they’re lower quality, yet harder to store.

At the same time though, I have slowly come to appreciate the benefits of stills. To me they permit more imagination, the lighting is invariably better, and they offer a sensual snapshot that can really help me when I am writing a scene; I can focus on small details I would not have noticed in gifs that I feel helps really enrich my work.

As I said above, this doesn’t mean I am going to stop using gifs. Some are just too hot to pass up, and I still have plenty of pieces in my backlog that use gifs, along with a huge list of gifs I’ve found and want to caption. It just means they will be far less prominent in my work and I should imagine I will wind up using them mostly on Twitter where I don’t have to worry about quality issues or storage nearly as much as I do here.

Overall, these changes are not just for me, but for my readers too. I am acutely aware how relentless the spectre of burnout is, especially when writing this kind of content, and I really don’t want to deal with that if I can avoid it. As such, I think a schedule change, regular(ish) hiatuses and a focus on the best media to support my work will help me continue to produce the best quality content I can in the long-term.

I know my work is rather different to that of other erotica writers. I know I focus heavily on character and plot and sometimes I experiment when people would probably rather me stick to the naughty stuff. I also know not everyone is looking for long, slow-burn pieces, which I have been putting out quite a bit recently. So that said, I hugely appreciate all my readers, Twitter followers and everyone who supports what I do. I cannot describe what it means to be accepted as a part of this community, and I hope I can continue putting out work you enjoy and pushes your buttons for a long time to come.

If you made it this far, thank you for sticking it out and I look forward to coming back in February with more new fetishes and fantasies. I hope everyone has a fantastic 2021, and I can’t wait to provide you all plenty of naughtiness to keep you going.

See you soon!

J x