~Kathalla

The seventh novel in my FE series is up on my InkBunny account, same username, and it's my best yet in my own opinion, but it involves another six-year-old girl, not a pleasure slave this time. It, and the episode 6.5 novella I've been making great progress on for the last few days, are the first books I've written almost entirely under the influence of Oregon's fine recreational-legal marijuana, which was difficult at first but eventually worked better than ever. A little bowl in the morning, I found, wakes up my imagination; if I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do with my day, inspiration can come in a pipe, and that works just as well for wild story ideas that often left me wondering how I'd fit them into my neatly-planned plot.

Edit: Novella 6.5 is up on IB too now.

I've never been officially called on it, but my Fantasie Eviscerotique series technically violates FA's policies. I recently re-edited everything (badly, in some cases, but I needed to fix that continuity problem between episodes 2 and 4.5 regarding equine genitals) and uploaded the entire series-to-date to InkBunny, with suggested donations though no one's taken me up on the suggestion yet. Episode 6 is nearing completion, though, and I've just decided not to post it to FA.

My IB username is the same as here, so you might want to follow https://inkbunny.net/Kathalla over there.

I came home from church, bumped my computer out of hibernate, and was greeted with a lovely little notice about a critical drive failure on my primary array. The most significant word there, however, is array. My 'main drive' is a pair of 500GB's in RAID-1, basic mirroring, so despite one drive going instantly and completely dead the system booted anyway. I'll be using it a bit less, and my netbook a bit more, until I can replace the failed unit, as I have, personally, had two drives die on me in the space of a week, and I'd rather avoid data-loss if that happens again. This journal's being written from my desktop, with plenty of multitasking in the background, so everything's fine except my safety margin.

I've just uploaded a revised PDF of FE4.5, after rereading it and FE5 and spotting a dozen-plus errors. Wrong words (in/inn), finger slips (if/of), or just continuity glitches (Hallan's Stand is an earldom, not the barony the fence-priest was described as being known throughout). I'll be doing the same with FE5, but it's over twice as long so it'll be a few days.

As for FE6, or maybe FE5.5, I'm considering dragging out the last Sister of Order who hasn't had a major role yet, Berria the Kathallic priestess of Unicorn Vale. I'm not sure just what problem she'll be facing, yet, but given her position it will probably be a fairly bloody story in ways the last two weren't.

Edit: FE5's corrected and re-uploaded, and I've got five or six paragraphs of the prologue of the new one written. I still have little or no idea what the plot would be, my notes-file for the episode containing only the suggestions for two Kathallic sacrifices fairly early on, so hopefully this one will write itself as well as 4.5 did.

Having just posted Fantasie Eviscerotique episode 5 last night, the first book in the series to not contain any graphic sex or any of the perversions the series is known for, I've already got an idea for the next episode, though I'll be stepping back again and calling it episode 4.5. At the beginning of episode 5, the king rattles off a list of founding members of the Sisters of Order. Anyone who paid attention in episode 4 would recognize all of them... except one. The new novella will be sort of the 'origin story' for the Sisters, and will focus on the one stranger, as well as the 'known' member who was only mentioned in passing in episode 4 and had never before appeared 'on-camera,' as well as a large shift in setting, covering a land and a religion that were barely touched upon earlier. It's kinda fun, from my perspective, watching how the crude framework I'd built for episode 1 keeps filling in pieces of itself, as these stories often write themselves once I've seeded them with a few starting ideas.

I still have no idea how a presumably-accurate anatomical chart gave me such an inaccurate idea of where the pancreas is... I still have a tumorous growth, but it ain't pancreatic. At its current rate of growth, I guesstimate one to two years before it hits one of the five vital organs it's immediately adjacent to, but I'll be doing something about it before then. It's close enough to the surface that a biopsy with a one-inch needle would be overkill, so sonic-based imaging techniques will probably be adequate to map it for removal, rather than MRIs or such. We shall see...

I'm dying. So is everyone else in the entire world, of course. Not immediately, but I judge my next birthday, being this very month, to have at least a 50% chance of being the last one I ever get. Last September, I deduced that I have pancreatic cancer. I match ALL of the symptoms on WebMD, including those marked 'less than five percent of patients reported...' though, naturally enough, the most obvious symptom is the tumor itself, presently at roughly the size of a chicken's egg. This diagnosis has not been confirmed by a medical doctor, and never will be. In my entire life, I've paid an estimated $500-1000 in taxes, which does not qualify me for any sort of treatment on a moral basis, no matter what the actual laws and acceptance policies say. Do not send me links to treatment or assistance services. Life is priceless, meaning valueless.

The only impact this condition will have on my FA activities is that only the works I've already started will be continued; I won't start any more. These projects include Fantasie Eviscerotique episode 4, the working-title book Panthress that I've sent the first chapter of to various parties to see if they could figure out the foreshadowed plot, and Catbrother, which this very night I've figured out the next chapter or two of. I'll do my best to finish these three books before I die, but they will be my last submissions to FA, and one or two of them may end up on e-book sites as free downloads, complete with ISBN numbers, via the Smashwords self-publishing service.

I plan to leave a list of sites and services I use, with passwords, so my accounts can be deleted, but I don't think FA will be among them. This account and its gallery will simply go stagnant, perhaps with a nausea-driven journal post for a last goodbye as I endure the later stages of my disease, which at the moment is symptom-free as far as leading a normal life goes, but the timing of that sort of thing is completely random. I'll just have to see.

Save your condolences for people who matter.

I'd have posted this to the forum, but I haven't been there in years and the lost password feature is broken (bad scripting on the capcha part).

'Huge' announcement? Hardly. It's not amazingly newsworthy. It's not even news. It might have warranted a brief mention in the admin shoutbox on the main page, but a dozen pages of forum posts about it are overkill.

So what if FA's admin staff is going to be cooperating with some other site that I've never heard of and will never visit? This won't affect page views, watches, or faves in the slightest. There will be no changes to site design, functionality, or policies. FA will be exactly as it's always been, so all the 'drama' over this merger has been an utter waste of textual breath.

While perusing my favorite private-tracker torrent site, I came across a bit of sci-fi whose first comment was along the lines of 'this is a horrible movie,' so naturally I had to get it. Bad movies, after all, can be enjoyed for their sheer badness. I actually paid to watch Kung Pow in the theaters, for one extreme example; I was the ONLY person there. The movie I just watched wasn't all that bad, though, except for its rather abrupt ending, and it turned out to hit a surprising number of furry fetishes along the way. The movie: Skyline.

There was plenty of non-sexual tentacle action. Macro and micro in several ratios played a part; there were 40-50 foot monster aliens, and the motherships sucked up tiny humans by the thousands. Depending on the size and layout of the alien/machine/whatever, for any given scene, swallowing vore was to be had via two or three different orifices. Even snuff fetishists were in for a treat, when people's heads were being plucked off, their bodies casually discarded. Officially, only the violence and occasional language contributed to the movie's rating; there wasn't so much as a bare nipple to be seen for sexuality, though one or two panty-shots came close. Despite that, a sufficiently kinky imagination could enjoy this movie as something very much other than an end-of-the-world effects flick. >:)

I still need to get past that simple anal sex scene I'm hung up on in FE2.5 (the 'what happened to Verona?' novella), since the slut of the court's teenaged daughter will be showing up soon... but I've got most of the prologue down for Fantasie Eviscerotique episode 4. If anyone read episode 3 (unlikely as that may be), they'd have seen that there was practically no mention of Verona, when she certainly meant a lot to the plots of the first two books. 2.5 is set two years after 2, or seven years before 3, and will NOT be novel-length.

4 is set another nine-year jump (or just a little less; spring setting this time, not summer) after 3. That little vixen who was bought as a six-year-old slave in episode 1 is, at this point, in her mid-twenties and with a child of her own. Much as with episode 3, this was a case of 'one good idea, but no idea where it'll go,' plot-wise. Only episode 2 had any sort of plan (what happened, how it'd happened, and a few notions of how the characters might figure it out), but for at least the beginning of 4, I'll be 'getting back to my roots' with a mass visit of all the scattered main characters back to good ol' Fariach, to attend King Burtak IV's funeral. (He really shouldn't have tried to screw two slavegirls at once at his age...) The way the math works out, Verona'll be fifty years old, so there might just be a bit of 'mature fetish' added to the other kinks the series has touched on so far. We shall see...

(Edit) Hmm... does anyone know of any sites I may not have heard of, where these sorts of novels would be welcome and possibly read? The rather scanty twenty-seven watchers I can boast, or fraction thereof who actually read this journal, isn't really much in terms of readership for a series that's got its fourth large novel in progress... I haven't looked too hard at Inkbunny, as my overall impression was that it was more a marketing site than anything else, some place for real artists/authors to sell prints and the like. The Furry Writers' Guild is out because even my 'PG' story wouldn't meet their posting criteria, and YiffStar or whatever it's called these days prohibits coherent writing. The only other furry services I've heard of were mostly from others' journals and in the context of announcing that they were going away for whatever reason. As crappy as my writings may be, there's still a shortage of furry novels with actual plots out there, so I wouldn't mind finding some way to further distribute my stuff. If nothing else, it'll give me an excuse to remake the earlier PDF files and post versions with typo corrections, added plot detail, and the occasional continuity fix, though I think I'll leave my shit-on-paper illustration out of FE1 this time. :)

Even though I don't qualify for either one, following one of FA's little banner ads resulted in a couple of interesting discoveries... I summarize here for anyone else who might have a use for them; don't let my own little foibles and gotchas keep you from utilizing a perfectly valid resource.

The Furry Writers' Guild promotes quality writing in the furry genre and gives advice on publication, through static information as well as a forum. http://www.furrywritersguild.com/
(I abhor the concept of publication of my own stuff, so I'll never meet their membership requirements.)

ANTHRO is an online, apparently free 'zine that acts as a non-paid publication venue for visual and textual furry artwork, though it's restricted to non-adult subjects. http://www.anthrozine.com/
(Text submissions are required to have at least one illustration, on top of the rating limit; no can do, folks.)

I've just finished writing Fantasie Eviscerotique episode three, weighing in at nineteen chapters, three small interludes, and close enough to ninety-six thousand words that it'll probably be nudged over the line by the requisite one or two re-readings to catch mistakes and add details.

This is, though, the first written work I've completed since building my new computer back in January, which included an upgrade to Windows 7 and the starting-over of my application suite. I really like to index my PDFs, by chapter mainly, but also for any illustrations I may eventually get. Thus I ask, does anyone know of either A) a free PDF editor that could add chapter bookmarks, or B) a way to define those bookmarks prior to using OpenOffice's PDF export? Security options would be good, too, but aren't strictly necessary.

My previous PDF publications were created legitimately enough, but then indexed and secured with a pirated copy of Acrobat 7, which I'm pretty certain is too many versions out of date to work with Windows 7. I've been trying to cut down on the piracy, anyway, so if there's a legit option short of buying a copy of Acrobat priced for people who actually make money with it, I'd love to hear it.

I've pretty much lost all faith in Linden Labs. Over the course of 'Emeraldgate,' they repeatedly violated their own rules, the trust of their users and third-party developers, and overall have shown slightly less maturity than a retarded preschooler, all because of the unthinkable statistic that roughly half of SL's users preferred someone else's viewer to LL's official one. They can harp all they want on Emerald's 'violations,' a rather dishonest claim as they blocked the viewer only after two or three releases of 100%-compliant builds, while at the same time they've added new 'alternative' viewers to the approved-and-compliant list that have known griefers, previously banned by LL, on their development teams.

I'm not about to use LL's crappy official viewer after the bullshit they've pulled, and I can't trust the alternatives as far as my own account safety goes, leaving me in a classic catch-22 where continued access to Second Life is concerned. I'll very much miss AnthroXtasy, the only place on SL where the skills of an above-average MUCKer were greeted with appreciation rather than screams about spam.

Still, all is not entirely lost... On a periodic check of the Modular Systems blog, I saw a post about another, supposedly better virtual world, which the Emerald viewer is now officially associated with. I don't know, yet, how furry-friendly they are, but I'm installing the new VWW Emerald viewer as I type this (12MB main download, and 23MB extra data downloaded by the installer, so it takes a few minutes on my wimpy 1.5Mbit DSL). Either as an edit to this journal or an additional journal, I'll be posting what I find out about furriness in the Virtual World Web once I've had a few hours or days to poke around. Meanwhile, if anyone cares to join me in this exploration, the press release with a viewer download link is at: http://utherverse.net/emerald/

(EDIT) Whoops, mis-counted the digits; the installer-downloaded data is 231MB. o.O Still going...

(EDIT2) Now that's encouraging... In the initial login screen once the viewer was installed, it asked for one's 'orientation.' The options were as follows: Normal, BDSM, AnythingGoes, and Furry.

(FINAL EDIT) After some hunting to figure out how, I've canceled my account, all of an hour or so after finishing the viewer download. There's no population, the human avatars look worse than SL's current gen of noobs, not even the official staff bother to type coherently, and as far as I can tell there is effectively zero furry content.

My interests tend to run in binges... a few weeks of SL, a couple of WoW, etc. Recently, probably due to a newly-introduced bug or vulnerability, I was locked out of my WoW account in the middle of a binge of such, so I turned to writing instead, and have been making good progress. Several chapters have been added to Fantasie Eviscerotique episode 3... Since the main character of the first two books effectively retired at the end of the second, I've jumped forward about nine years and the third focuses on little Ela, the six-year-old pleasure slave vixen, now the eldest child of an earl and granted the title of princess, on her journey of spiritual enlightenment. Also in the works, though, is episode 2.5... This will probably be of novella length (30-50k words), but I had too many energy drinks one day, a serious overdose of B-vitamins, and got the idea for it. Set only two years after episode 2, it answers the question 'What ever became of Verona?' The widowed slut of the court back in the kingdom's capitol is always a fun subject to study...

Though I'll be trying not to get addicted to it, since I had some spare money I decided to give WoW a shot after a few people convinced me that it wasn't as boring as my solo try on a private server had shown me. I'm currently on Darrowmere, as that was suggested by the realm chooser when I first started a trial account, but I'd be willing to move to any other Normal or RP server if someone wants a teammate. I don't do PvP.

My Burning Crusade expansion is still in trial mode, but my Frozen Throne's paid; some asshat bought the Burning Crusade battlechest at Wal-Mart, kept the discs/keys, and returned it, and I didn't check the seal on the box before buying, and they neglected to issue me a receipt. I've got Bliz checking to see if they can track the thief's account by the free trial card keys I did get in the box, plausible enough given their referral perks, but getting my own account to full retail status is going to take just a week or so extra as I didn't have the cash to buy two complete expansion sets.

Energy drinks are funny things... I remember, on the Greyhound trip from Atlanta to Tucson, drinking two or three pints of Sobe No Fear and having to immediately rummage though my luggage for writing supplies, with which I started composing the HTML code for Notepad-written, table-based pseudoframe layouts. No computer, no internet, just a sudden idea and an irresistible need to get it down on paper.

Yesterday, something similar happened. I was at the Family Dollar, picking up snacks and junk food as I occasionally do, and snagged a couple one-dollar, two-ounce bottles of Xtra Energy Shot. According to its label, it has only about as much caffeine as a cup of coffee, but there's also one off-the-charts statistic in the list: vitamin B12, at 8333% of the daily value per bottle. (No, my 3 key didn't get stuck; that's the real number.) In second place is vitamin B6 at 2000%, and everything else is closer to sane.

Now, I'd planned the Fantasie Eviscerotique series as a trilogy of large novels and a few related works, including one spin-off series (Priestess' Pets, the first episode of which is still half-done) of shorter works, but now we seem to have FE2.5 intruding as well. Shortly after dropping one of those energy shots into the cup of flat Pepsi I had left from the previous night, I had another of those ideas that WOULD NOT be denied, and the first (short) chapter of a new story on my screen.

The basic premise of the story, that almost certainly won't be novel-length, is to arrange something of a Happily Ever After for every Drachathian's favorite slutty lioness, Verona. Set two years (and a couple months) after FE2, much like my last journal's mention of Ferrl's effective retirement the plot starts with him, but quickly focuses elsewhere, as a post-bound ambassador's no longer free to run around having fun (not that he's bored there with Ela, Danara, and Ria to keep him warm). We'll just have to see how things turn out; the plot outline I wrote first-thing is somewhere in between FE1 and FE2, planning-wise; I know the basic results I want, but getting there'll be by the seat of my pants more often than I'd care to admit.

I've got a basic premise that'll let me get started on FE3, but not an actual plot, yet. FE1 was written by the seat of my pants; I had no idea what to use for Ferrl's first mission once I'd gotten his training and side-adventures out of the way, and, once I had the idea for the murder mystery, even I had no idea just who'd done it until I actually got to the point of the midnight keep infiltration. I tried to do better on FE2, coming up with the idea of missing unicorns and the basic 'how' of it all before I started, along with a few minor plot-points along the way that I made sure to include.

Without spoiling what little I have of it, I can say that FE3 will be set some eight years or so in the future, and focus on a teenaged Ela, as Ferrl was effectively retired from adventuring at the end of FE2. The premise I'm working with, for now, will only carry the story for a chapter or three, so I'd welcome any suggestions from those of my few watchers who've read the first two episodes. I'm not looking for comprehensive plots, though I'd not turn my nose up at a good one of those... What I'm mainly looking for is smaller ideas, scenes or events that may have occurred to folks as 'hey, this'd be neat to see' moments, that I can work into the structure of a larger plot. Ferrl's retirement, I know, will limit this goal somewhat, as Agent missions won't be an option, but the setting is, or so I hope, rich enough to provide for plenty of other possible ideas.

Also related to the FE series, I'm planning to commission Matthias Blackwolf for an illustration or two, which will tie up all of my extremely limited budget for that sort of thing. If, though, anyone wants to volunteer a work for either of the existing novels, I'd be happy to update the PDFs, with bookmarks to the pictures amongst the chapter index and full credits, along with weblinks if desired, summarized at the end. Voluntary contributions must be pertinent to the stories, but beyond that I make no demands; a gruesome playclub-scene, one of the tamer sex bouts, or even just a portrait of a character (Julara, with her armor and weapons, but from an angle that shows her lack of panties, comes to mind) would all be equally welcome.

I've been working, whenever I could, on a lot of sequels to various stories... but the first to finally be completed was one of the larger works. Once I'd rethought a single point of the plot that had been difficult to write up to, Fantasie Eviscerotique episode 2 started flowing smoothly again, and I finished it in two or three days of steady work, for a total of just under a hundred and ten thousand words. I've removed the sample chapters from my gallery, and will be posting the entire PDF once I've had a chance to rest and give the entire novel a slow, thorough re-read or two, for the sake of minor corrections or additions. There's a room-organizing project planned that may delay things, but it shouldn't be any later than this Wednesday, Thursday at the latest, before I post it here on FA.

(Advance warning to readers who mainly like girls: there's a bit of male-male sodomy in this one, even if little Ela's involved in the same scene, so anyone touchy about that should skip the second half of chapter three.)

(And on the subject of Ela... I still haven't worked out all the details of the plot, myself, but I'm planning for FE3 to leave Ferrl behind and follow Ela, as a young woman rather than in her childhood, on her personal erotic adventures.)

Even though I still have plenty of saved-up chapters I could post, I've decided to skip this week's two-chapter chunk of FE2 due to mild writer's block. I'm taking some time to work on other projects, also sequels to existing works if shorter ones, and I'm hoping that this break will let me get back into the FE setting with a refreshed outlook. Even if my lack of progress continues, however, I'll still post pieces every other week at a minimum.

Looks like I'll have to go update all of my Sapphiverse submissions with a link to the explanatory journal that occupied my front page for so many months... but I finally need that spot to actually report something. After more than one multi-month bout of writer's block, progress is flowing smoothly again on my third novel, Fantasie Eviscerotique episode 2. This is a continuation of 'Teh Anti-Wankfic,' my protest against the net-truism seen on alt.sex.stories and YiffStar that basically states, 'The kinkier the subject matter, the worse the quality of the writing.'

In protest of that concept, the FE series consists of full-length novels (a minimum of ninety thousand words) that combine explicit textual depictions of a large number of the very 'worst' kinks with an actual plot, with their general quality as close to professional-level as I can manage. In one sense, I suppose, this provides the worst of both worlds; those seeking a good story may become annoyed by the fairly-frequent sex, while those simply after a quick wank would be put off by the bulk of plot they'd have to skip through. Still... the series is fun to write, so I don't doubt there'll be a third entry, eventually.

Back to the subject of the second, though, I'm currently working on chapter fourteen with seventy-six thousand words down and the end of the overall plot in sight. I actually planned said plot, this time; when I wrote the first one ( http://www.furaffinity.net/view/283545/ ), it was entirely by the seat of my pants. I had no idea myself what the central plot of the episode would be 'til I reached chapter fifteen, and once that mystery cropped up I had no more advance notice than the characters themselves did as to how it'd turn out. Let's see if planning actually makes things any better, this time...

The main reason I'm writing this journal entry, I suppose, is to ask my small collection of watchers (most of whom probably forgot that they're watching me, it's been so long since I've posted anything) whether I should wait until the entire book is done, or start posting it in segments. If I can maintain the rate of progress I've shown over the last two nights, it'll be done within a week, but to allow for the predictable phenomenon of additional writer's block, I'd been considering posting two-chapter pieces at one-week intervals. If anyone has an opinion as to which route is preferable, let me know and I'll take it into account.

Since so many of the things I write are set there, I thought I'd set down a bit of basic information about Sapphire's world to keep from having to repeat myself in large file-comments. First and foremost, Sapphi doesn't give permission for others to play in her toybox very often, and doing so without approval is... not the wisest idea. She owns the world, and she's the only one who can issue tickets to it. In general, it's a contemporary setting, with roughly-equal science to the US, slightly enhanced by the presence of magic. It's a mostly-furry world; I've never heard of a human showing up in it, though elves and other fae are there, just rather uncommon. Most of the stories, mine and Sapphi's, take place in the City. It's more like a very small nation, as far as I know, ruled by a queen from her castle. Geographically, it bears a resemblance to Atlanta, if only because that's where Sapphire can most easily draw inspiration and references from.

The world as a whole is much more ecologically-minded than ours. Great efforts are made to preserve enormous tracts of untouched wilderness; mountains, plains, forests, clean lakes and oceans... They're considered to be one of the greatest of available treasures. For the sake of these forests, wood construction is rather rare; brick, concrete, and related pseudo-stone goes hand in hand with plastic and limited quantities of metal for construction.

Next would be a few of the conventions of the realm that could confuse those unfamiliar with it. A 'craft refers to a hovercraft, the standard personal vehicle of the world. 'Cloth' is a very fine-threaded substitute for paper, as paper itself kills too many trees. Cloth comes in many weights and types, for handwriting, business cards, computer printers, etc., and it's all avidly recycled.

Finally, there are a few organizations that are frequently referred to...
YIFF, Inc.: The reigning champion of the adult entertainment business, specializing in escorts (prostitutes) of the highest skill and quality, but also producing movies, magazines, and the like, running strip clubs, and anything else that might be considered related to erotica. Their wealth and power makes them... unwise to irritate, but they're firmly on the side of good.
DragonCorps: The dragons serve as guards and protectors of the rich and powerful, among related tasks. They have certain abilities such as shapeshifting and telepathy, and they're even dumber to piss off than YIFF.
The Triad: The generic organized crime figures of the setting. Definitely not the good guys, though they do maintain enough legitimate operations for plausible deniability where their criminal ones are concerned.
FAME: Furries Against Moral Exploration, the fundamentalist right-wingers of the piece. If it's fun, they're against it.
STAR: STop Amoral Reproduction, FAME's militant (and nastier) activism branch.
Furrbound: A general contracting company, taking on projects big and small, magical and mundane. They're probably in third place, behind YIFF and the dragons, on the list of people you don't want mad at you. Unfortunately for anyone who annoys any of the three, YIFF, Furrbound, and DragonCorps are all very good friends.