I spent about twenty years commuting between forty and seventy miles a day. I don’t know if there is any single activity that I’ve done as much as driving.

Think of someone you know who spends seven to ten hours a week on a hobby - maybe they play piano an hour a day, or they spend three days a week painting for three hours a day. After twenty years you’d figure they’d probably be pretty good at it, right?

So, like, I get it when people who don’t drive a lot find driving stressful and exhausting and painful; if you never really have to drive for more than twenty minutes at a time it seems like a LOT of work to drive for three hours because driving is DEMANDING; it requires a lot of attention to a lot of specific things and it requires a very specific set of physical skills that can be exhausting.

I remember the first time I drove on the freeway - my dad taught me how to drive and my dad LOVES driving and is also very good at it and was determined that his kids would be good drivers too, so he had REALLY particular ways of doing things. So the first time I drove on the freeway wasn’t from one exit to another late at night when there was no traffic, it was a 30 mile drive home from school - it was the farthest I had ever driven at one time at that point. And I still remember how sore my forearms were after because I wasn’t used to making the minute adjustments to keep myself in my lane for that much time.

And then that commute became something that I was used to and my arms got used to holding the wheel and I learned how to sit in a car in a way that’s comfortable for me, but that all took a lot of practice.

Driving is legitimately hard and stressful and if you don’t like it that’s okay. But I love driving so much.

See, here's the functional poll for USAmerican/Canadian drivers and folks from other places get to play along too.

When I was twelve my family went on a month-long road trip around the US, we went to 32 states in 30 days. There were some days we didn't drive at all (staying with family for multiple days, a week of seeing museums in DC) but barring those days the *shortest* day of travel was 300 miles (about 4 hours at highway speeds) and the longest was 500 miles (about 7 hours at highway speeds).

At twelve, in the car with my parents and my ten year old sister, seven hours felt like a bit much. The whole trip was about 10k miles and when we went to return the rental van, the lady at the counter looked at the mileage before and after and asked "So where didn't y'all go?"

A few years ago I took a train from San Jose to Los Angeles (about 350 miles, a five-ish hour drive). It was an 11 hour train ride and an hour of that was stopped so that a freight train could pass.

Part of this is "country big" but another part of this is "infrastructure bad."

Just for shits and giggles I looked at the routes we took for our vacation this spring and

this was about three and a half days of driving time for two people (broken up by a week in the middle with only a couple hours driving; large bastard went a hundred miles one day, and we did a sixty mile each way drive with my dad and sister one day; those were very casual not-far drives).

I listened to *so* many hours of the Knowledge Fight podcast while Large Bastard was sleeping through New Mexico twice.

See, here's the functional poll for USAmerican/Canadian drivers and folks from other places get to play along too.

When I was twelve my family went on a month-long road trip around the US, we went to 32 states in 30 days. There were some days we didn’t drive at all (staying with family for multiple days, a week of seeing museums in DC) but barring those days the *shortest* day of travel was 300 miles (about 4 hours at highway speeds) and the longest was 500 miles (about 7 hours at highway speeds).

At twelve, in the car with my parents and my ten year old sister, seven hours felt like a bit much. The whole trip was about 10k miles and when we went to return the rental van, the lady at the counter looked at the mileage before and after and asked “So where didn’t y'all go?”

A few years ago I took a train from San Jose to Los Angeles (about 350 miles, a five-ish hour drive). It was an 11 hour train ride and an hour of that was stopped so that a freight train could pass.

Part of this is “country big” but another part of this is “infrastructure bad.”

See, here’s the functional poll for USAmerican/Canadian drivers and folks from other places get to play along too.

Me, trying desperately to write something approaching a normal romance novel: And after the mob killed her brother, she was put in witness protection and paired up with a hunky fbi agent.

Me, something like a third of the way into the plot: AND THE MOB KILLED HER BROTHER AT THE BEHEST OF BOEING BECAUSE HE WAS A WHISTLEBLOWER AND NOW THE FBI AGENT IS REALIZING THAT THE AGENCY IS IN ON IT AND THEY ARE BOTH BEING SET UP BECAUSE HE TESTIFIED AGAINST HIS SUPERVISOR FOR ABUSING A JUNIOR AGENT I DON'T CARE IF PEOPLE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE KISSING THE FBI IS A CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION ONLY SECOND IN SCUMMINESS TO THE CIA

Me, white-knuckled, trying to write a marketable story in which two or more characters fuck: the small town farmer and the big city lawyer have undeniable chemistry when they meet up at the annual Christmas parade while he's visiting family in the town where he grew up and she's fighting to keep the family farm.

Me, soon after: how did this become a story about Monsanto i swear to can someone just get oral in a meadow by a creek after a wholesome picnic? I don't think there's much market for a righteous threesome with an EPA inspector.

I am trying to write normal horny books to sell on Amazon as an income stream and I'm drawing from memories of Joanna Lindsey and Danielle Steele books that I used to read and I am familiar with the genre but I am having trouble figuring out the parameters of the assignment.

I have also been writing fanfic too long to clearly see the line between romance, erotica, and porn and in trying to figure out exactly where the dividing line is between "hey this is spicy! You can sell this here" and a ToS violation and I'm pretty sure I'm failing.

Which is like totally aside from the fact that most of what I write is darkfic. That prince from the first story is not having a good time for most of the story. (Gotta get hurt before you get the comfort little prince dude).

Bad news, little prince dude.

This thing is going to be like 1/6 action/political bullshit, 1/3 HURT with a capital everything, and ½ recovery + slowburn romance and angsty masturbation followed by angsty and eventually euphoric fucking.

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Me, trying desperately to write something approaching a normal romance novel: And after the mob killed her brother, she was put in witness protection and paired up with a hunky fbi agent.

Me, something like a third of the way into the plot: AND THE MOB KILLED HER BROTHER AT THE BEHEST OF BOEING BECAUSE HE WAS A WHISTLEBLOWER AND NOW THE FBI AGENT IS REALIZING THAT THE AGENCY IS IN ON IT AND THEY ARE BOTH BEING SET UP BECAUSE HE TESTIFIED AGAINST HIS SUPERVISOR FOR ABUSING A JUNIOR AGENT I DON'T CARE IF PEOPLE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE KISSING THE FBI IS A CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION ONLY SECOND IN SCUMMINESS TO THE CIA

Me, white-knuckled, trying to write a marketable story in which two or more characters fuck: the small town farmer and the big city lawyer have undeniable chemistry when they meet up at the annual Christmas parade while he's visiting family in the town where he grew up and she's fighting to keep the family farm.

Me, soon after: how did this become a story about Monsanto i swear to can someone just get oral in a meadow by a creek after a wholesome picnic? I don't think there's much market for a righteous threesome with an EPA inspector.

I am trying to write normal horny books to sell on Amazon as an income stream and I'm drawing from memories of Joanna Lindsey and Danielle Steele books that I used to read and I am familiar with the genre but I am having trouble figuring out the parameters of the assignment.

I have also been writing fanfic too long to clearly see the line between romance, erotica, and porn and in trying to figure out exactly where the dividing line is between "hey this is spicy! You can sell this here" and a ToS violation and I'm pretty sure I'm failing.

Which is like totally aside from the fact that most of what I write is darkfic. That prince from the first story is not having a good time for most of the story. (Gotta get hurt before you get the comfort little prince dude).

I know that I'm biased, but I just have to say that I would read absolutely any of these premises, whether you actually get to the bucolic oral action or just rant about plant patenting instead.

But also, I think if you angled most of these as sci-fi stories, normal people would be completely on board with the premise, too. You could even put a weird dick in it.

*stares into the middle distance*

I've got a WIP of the "kidnapped by space pirates" variety where a character dies because the alien pirates ignore his concerns about a shellfish allergy when vetting customers.

I'm trying real, real hard to be normal because things go real, real bad when I let myself riff with it.

So now is probably when I should tell you that I read a romance involving an alien with two dicks recently where his human situationship is sent into anaphylaxis on a date in a restaurant, with the implication that someone targeted them intentionally for being human. Except that they never find out what caused the reaction, or who did it, or ever mention it again or resolve it any way.

Whatever you think is too out-there and Too Freaky and nobody will read, someone much less literate than you with fewer moral qualms is already doing it SO badly and they are making the Amazon Top 100 Fantasy/Paranormal/Scifi Romance with it because they submitted to an event with #fancy peen.

Okay that is actually tremendously reassuring.

Bigger fools than me have done it!

Me, trying desperately to write something approaching a normal romance novel: And after the mob killed her brother, she was put in witness protection and paired up with a hunky fbi agent.

Me, something like a third of the way into the plot: AND THE MOB KILLED HER BROTHER AT THE BEHEST OF BOEING BECAUSE HE WAS A WHISTLEBLOWER AND NOW THE FBI AGENT IS REALIZING THAT THE AGENCY IS IN ON IT AND THEY ARE BOTH BEING SET UP BECAUSE HE TESTIFIED AGAINST HIS SUPERVISOR FOR ABUSING A JUNIOR AGENT I DON'T CARE IF PEOPLE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE KISSING THE FBI IS A CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION ONLY SECOND IN SCUMMINESS TO THE CIA

Me, white-knuckled, trying to write a marketable story in which two or more characters fuck: the small town farmer and the big city lawyer have undeniable chemistry when they meet up at the annual Christmas parade while he's visiting family in the town where he grew up and she's fighting to keep the family farm.

Me, soon after: how did this become a story about Monsanto i swear to can someone just get oral in a meadow by a creek after a wholesome picnic? I don't think there's much market for a righteous threesome with an EPA inspector.

I am trying to write normal horny books to sell on Amazon as an income stream and I'm drawing from memories of Joanna Lindsey and Danielle Steele books that I used to read and I am familiar with the genre but I am having trouble figuring out the parameters of the assignment.

I have also been writing fanfic too long to clearly see the line between romance, erotica, and porn and in trying to figure out exactly where the dividing line is between "hey this is spicy! You can sell this here" and a ToS violation and I'm pretty sure I'm failing.

Which is like totally aside from the fact that most of what I write is darkfic. That prince from the first story is not having a good time for most of the story. (Gotta get hurt before you get the comfort little prince dude).

I ruled out magic, aliens, and ABO to try to keep myself from stumbling into any oviposition scenes by accident (the downfall of the chad chestworthy series was that when i say monsterfucking i mean monsterfucking and sometimes that gets you horse cock in urban fantasy) but that somehow ended with an screen amputation so I think something is *wildly miscalibrated* in my head.

Chad Chestworthy was supposed to be a loveable frat boy himbo who kept running into supernatural beings on campus and having sex with them (the eventual reveal was going to be that he was himself an incubus and unaware of it) but, like, somewhere between "sucked by the succubus" (oral, sounding, hypnosis) and "pegged by the Pegasus" (straight up just horse dick - human intelligence horse dick, but with all the gaping and belly bulges implied by horse dick) I realized that this was not going to be the light erotica that people were looking for, and even if it was what people were looking for, where in the hell could I post it for sale that it wouldn't immediately get flagged for being the glitter & sparkles equivalent of a werewolf boyfriend pulling out?

So my sad little prince story is my attempt to be less. That. And it turns out that may be the only setting I have other than "yelling about cops."

Even when it’s already weird to start i can’t help getting weirder with it. I’ve got a hucow WiP that was supposed to be “kind rancher rehabs sweet abused hucow” and instead became “secretly-a-hucow FDA inspector uncovers huge conspiracy in hybrid ranching industry while in an assignment and reveals that hybridism is actually a latent virus activated by puberty and if course all these hucows are actually people and this is all cannibalism where people are literally ground up to serve capital also whoops they figured out he was a hucow and the son of a legendary bull time for milking and breeding and mindbreak while he is waiting for his friends to rescue him!”

Just. Write. Something *slightly* less overwrought, brain. Or at least something where the porn and the horror can be slightly separated.