Smaller Luke Theory
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Hey Y'all
🕑 Added 2025-05-31 10:22:57 +0000 UTCGonna put the tl;dr up top here cuz I'm a wordy motherfucker and I'm sure plenty of y'all do not care to read the navel gazey non-smutty stuff I put out sometimes: I'm putting Performance Improvement Plan up on a shelf. I mean, my low productivity kinda means I've already done that, but I'm making it official. That story is on indefinite hiatus.
And now I'm gonna ramble on for a while about why!
I've talked a few times now that I'm really frustrated with myself for being a lot less productive in my writing this year than last, and I've been trying to work out why. I like writing size fics, I like how much positive feedback I get on my work, and I mean, not to be crass, but I like making a couple hundred bucks a month by just sharing whatever wank fantasies I'm fixating on at the moment! So what gives? Why can I not seem to find it in me to churn out chapters the way I did in 2024?
One part of it is that I'm a little bit busier this year than last. In addition to working full-time I'm in the home stretch of an online degere program, and the last few classes I need to finish are a little bit more demanding than what I was doing last year. I've also got some other, non-pornographic ongoing creative projects that have been demanding my attention a little bit more than they did last year. This is a contributing factor to be sure, but it's only one piece of the pie, and a pretty thin one at that. Making time to write on here has been slightly trickier in the past six months, but it's certainly been doable.
A much bigger factor is the fact that my brain works... let's say suboptimally. I've got some pretty severe ADHD, which can sometimes make it very hard to focus on certain tasks, and at other times make it very hard to focus on anything but a given task. That was a big part of how I managed to churn out some 200,000 words of size smut last year, size writing morphed into a hyperfixation, something that I focused on to the exclusion of other, sometimes more important tasks. It probably wasn't a sustainable pace of writing! At least, not sustainable for something I do as a hobby and not a full-time gig. I was probably doomed to burn out sooner or later if I kept cranking chapters out at that speed, but also, the whole thing with ADHD is that it's very difficult to keep your attention where you want it focused! Long story short, I've ended up with a completely different hyperfixation in 2025, and it's very difficult to step away from it in order to write, even though I still like writing!
It can be a really frustrating way to live, as I'm sure any of y'all out there with ADHD can attest. When you're in the groove it feels amazing, and then you fall out of it and it feels miserable. For me at least, it often comes with a pretty strong sense of shame. I know I can be more productive, so why aren't I?! It's silly to get that hung up on a fun hobby, but it's hard not to! When you know what you're capable of at the peak of your focus and attention, it's incredibly frustrating to not be able to access that state at will. Even though, again, it's a bit of an illusion. I was hyper-productive in terms of size writing last year and pretty unproductive this year... which means that in aggregate it sort of averages out to a normal amount of productivity. But that doesn't change the fact that I feel a reflexive sense of shame for not working harder, which in turn makes me want to push the thing I'm failing to work at out of my mind, which leads to less work getting done, which leads to more shame, and so on, and so on. Again, if you've got similar brain spiders to me then I'm probably describing something very familiar to you.
Until recently, I would've put the entire blame for the lack of posts on here on my ADHD, and I'd still definitely point to it as a major contributing factor. But a couple weeks ago, something happened: a reader reached out to me for a commission, and I found myself getting eager and excited to write as I read their pitch. I was filling up with all sorts of ideas and I couldn't wait to start getting them on paper. And it made me realize that it's been a little while since size writing has made me feel that way! Which, in turn, has made me reevaluate PIP, and realize that as a creative project, it's contributing to a lot of the mental blocks I'm struggling with.
I haven't been shy about the fact that PIP is a difficult story to write. That wasn't really by design. The initial kernal of the idea was just, hey, let's zig everywhere that Give Yourself to Me zagged. GYtM took place between an established, loving couple, mostly in a domestic environment, so let's move to an office and have an ensemble cast. This is a pretty common style of size fic (and, I assume, erotic fiction in general): A reader surrogate protagonist ping-pongs between a number of different women who all have slightly different takes on how they dominate him. I'll make the main one sort of an "all-rounder" amazonian domme, make one super gentle, make one more muscle-focused, and make one more cruel. Classic set-up, right? And ooh, hey, I can introduce this weird hypnotism thing into it to give the size-changing a different kind of flavor, and use the therapy transcripts as a way to put some spin on the form and style of the writing.
...But it's kind of gotten away from me! Because another place where I zigged instead of zagging was in wanting to make every member of the ensemble a fleshed out character. I wanted to make them feel like people, and that meant giving them rich inner lives, it meant building out their web of relationships in a believable way, it meant doing so much character writing and plot development that it felt like there was barely any room for the size porn, which is supposed to be the point of the story! Every sex scene and size-changing scene in the past few chapters has felt tremendously forced to me, like it's not where the story wants to go, even though it's what the story is meant to be about. Maybe I'm biased as the writer, but I can feel my desperation in just jump-starting the part where Francesca starts hulking out, because that should've started a good ten chapters ago. And when I think about where the story goes next, I'm thinking about well okay I need to start building a relationship between Francesca and Ted, and Laura and Ted, and Laura and Beth, and Jody is rapidly falling out of this story so I better figure out something for her to do, and God, right, what's Joyce's plot in this chapter? Just tracking the plot and the character relationships is overwhelming all on its own, and that's before I even start asking questions about how I make it sexy.
I'm typically not an outliner. I like to sprint forward, write as I go, and if necessary, go back and revise later. I don't think that approach works for a story of this complexity. I think I needed to have an outline to keep it on-track, and without one the result is awkward, unbalanced, not very fun to write, and, I suspect, not as fun to read as I wish it was. I mean, just looking at the stats on it, its view count on sites like Giantess World are far lower than GYtM was at the same point in its lifespan. And that's not the end-all be-all, I've got to write for myself first and foremost... but I'm not too happy with what I've got cooking here either!
This is not to say that the story sucks, or that there's nothing I like about it. To the contrary, I think there's lots of really strong writing here, and there's a handful of scenes that I think are pretty darn hot. But again, it's a question of balance, and this story don't got it.
I don't like dropping creative projects. I've had an inkling that I should maybe step away from PIP for a while now, but that felt like quitter talk, and I convinced myself that if I just kept pushing through, it would all click together in the end. Or maybe it wouldn't, but the exercise of pushing through it would be healthy for me as a writer, and I would learn far more from that experience than I would from just dropping it. Maybe that's still true... but right now, the options are not "cancel the story" or "continue the story." They're "cancel the story" or "continue failing to write." This is above all else something I'm doing for fun, and if I'm not having fun with it, then I need to reassess.
All the same, there is still a big part of me that wants to see the story through! For my own sake, and for the sake of anyone who's enjoying it, or who has stuck through the very slow burn of it in anticipation of where it might end up going eventually; fully chucking it in the dumpster feels a bit like a betrayal of anyone who's been sticking with it. So, Performance Improvement Plan isn't canceled... but it is going up on a shelf in the closet. Maybe after I write a few other pieces to get the juices flowing again, maybe after I've had some time away from it to reassess and attack it with renewed energy, maybe I can come back and do something with it that I'm happy with. But for now, sometimes you have to put an end to a project to avoid putting an end to your projects, and that's what I'm doing.
I don't mean any of this in a self-pitying, "woe-is-me" kinda way. If you're feeling sympathy toward me, that's appreciated, but not necessary. I'm doing just fine. But I like writing, and I'm not getting writing done, and I want to fix that. Presumably, you like reading my stuff, or you wouldn't be here! And you're not getting any stuff to read, and I want to fix that, too. Writers online, in and out of size spaces, cancel projects all the time, so maybe this long rambly post comes off as a little melodramatic or something, but I dunno, this is how I organize my thoughts, and it feels better to share 'em than to just stick 'em in a private Word doc or whatever. Tomorrow should see the next chapter of the new commissioned story (it really needs a better title than what I've got for it right now), and if all goes according to plan, next week I'll be posting the beginning of a new long-form fic, one that will actually let me explore and share the fantasies I've been fixating on recently. Should be a fun time!
Comments
Faris
You should really embrace that most of your stories will be incomplete. That's what it took me to start writing more and with less stress.
littleaggro
Trust me I know how annoying ADHD can be. When it's good...well damn I just learned a new skill that I can use forever...only problem is I now don't want to do anything related to it because now I want to learn a language! Oh this new game came out...time to deep dive and forget about anything else. It's a double edged sword and it sucks. That being said you came into the scene and have such a good unique way of writing that it would be a shame to see it go. Take your time though and let it come naturally. Self-care over fetish writing everyday.
